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The first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to.
And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night.
Pollux inhales deeply and runs his hands through his hair, tightening fingers and tugging hard once he’s got a grip. Okay. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The Mirrored God lets himself fall to his knees in the sand dunes. Hands untangle from his hair and go instead to wrapping around his chest. Fingernails dig into the flesh of their opposing forearms. It hurts. He bites his lip. The pain grounds him. Everything that has ever been done to or for him was a lie.
Immediately, Castor is at his side. Castor’s hands go to his shoulders and pry Pollux’s fingernails out of his own flesh. Pollux is staring at the sand and barely seeing it, but he can see the sudden shade as Castor’s wings arc protectively over him. An impenetrable shield, the strange not-quite-smell of dissolution still heavily saturating the feathers. Castor is protecting him again.
That’s one thing to jot down. Castor is his brother. A second thing. Castor sacrificed himself for Pollux, and Pollux nearly killed him for it. Pollux committed the ultimate sin: forgetting. Letting his brother flounder and suffer without company or sympathy. Letting him die. For Pollux’s sin. That Juliette crafted and let him enact, his ‘mother’ who was prepared to let him tear himself and his brother asunder, because he was no god at all.
Pollux’s stomach heaves and he retches up nothing into the sand. His hands shake. There is nothing, there is only the dunes stretching on after he killed the only people he had ever known and fled. Castor’s silver core is with him, though. If he’s going to die in the desert, at least he dies with his memories and his brother. The memories are back, too, of the first time he fled. When he had his wings and dragged Castor through the aqueduct and into the woods, that chase where they tasted freedom until days later hunters shot him down. Castor sheltered him and tried his best. But his best couldn’t last forever, and it was the last Pollux flew.
He swore he would protect his brother and ensure Castor never suffered like that again. Until a few days later, when Pollux forgot about him. He retches again. Stomach acid this time. Castor’s hands tug him against Castor’s chest, holding Pollux still. There is a heartbeat, despite Castor ostensibly being dead. Pollux’s sacred heart trembles and beats erratically. What’s he supposed to do, possibly, the most useless of the two. He isn’t brave like Castor, he isn’t as strong as him, he’s just the spoiled false-prince who has the light of God and naught else. Now he has to be Castor’s dead weight here.
“It’s alright,” Castor says. His voice is water, smooth and cold against Pollux’s psyche. “We’re going to be okay. Thais gave us a blessing.”
Pollux’s eyes dart up. “Thais?” He says.
“The goddess here.”
Pollux scoffs, looking down again. “And trusting in the power of gods got us so far.” He spits the word derisively. If Juliette can be a liar, if there never was any God to lead them to utopia, if it was only blood and erosion, then what good could a new, strange goddess be? How could he even believe she, a stranger, isn’t also a liar?
Castor’s face is set, and he gently tugs Pollux up to stand. “I know. But she saved me. And she’s kind. She doesn’t want anyone to die, so– I made a deal with her.” Castor releases Pollux to place a hand over his heart, the silver core that now sits there in place of a human organ. “This life is from her. There’s a seed here. We won’t die, we just have to trust and keep walking. The desert itself will let us go with her blessing in hand.”
Pollux allows Castor to let him, but his steels himself. He can walk, yes. But he cannot trust this goddess. Not again. He will have to be the strong one, he will have to do what Castor cannot, which is lie. Castor has always (if his memory, so clearly proved mutable, is worth trusting) had his heart on his sleeve.
If this goddess Thais too is a liar, just like Juliette, if they walk from one trap into another, then Pollux will have to be the one who protects Castor this time. Someone will have to have their guard up. Surely Castor can see how Pollux’s acceptance doesn’t reach his eyes. Surely Castor is intelligent enough to notice how Pollux forces himself to nod.
But he doesn’t say anything. Pollux wills himself steel. He will make for himself walls – the sacred heart will be the only interior he reveals. Castor can be the one who accepts and reaches out for help, but Pollux sees his path now.
He can be as strong as Castor, who can keep walking towards a future no matter what. While he walks, Pollux will be the one who ensures nothing can take advantage of him. Pollux will be the one who ensures Castor will never fall into hands that would drown him in dissolution again. He will make himself a defense.
Castor’s hand fell down to Pollux’s and laced their fingers together. He does not release his grip until the land changes from desert to plains, and even then rarely. They meet Aramites and wanderers, denizens of the desert that Pollux treats with practiced coolness. He did play the role of God on High for years, and cold distance is an easy mask to wear. Each interaction is more practice, each can form the defenses that Pollux rationalizes will keep him and Castor safe, as Castor when left alone will pour out his gentle kindness to strangers and in return reap trust.
It’s just that Pollux cannot assume that what is reaped will always be safe. He may one day gather up poison. Dissolution, the gaze of god, drips from Castor’s feathers as a constant reminder, and Pollux was who put it there.
Castor is taken from Pollux again one year later. They had a perfectly fine house in the middle of nowhere, as far from people who might report to the Lightbearers as they could find. They had moved twice then, as civilization seemed to encroach. Always northward they flew, and this was meant to be safe. Thais visited as well, teaching them their new life and how to interact, bringing them supplies. Pollux reluctantly admitted she was probably fine, but never really let his guard down.
Their mutual contentment with the situation was supposed to be eternal. A life with his brother on their own terms, free to figure out their existence. Castor flew.
Until the day he didn’t. He stood in their yard, and looked at Pollux with slight confusion. “My heart feels strange,” he had said, with his hand on his chest where his heart wasn’t. And then dissolution rose from the ground, blooming and billowing out of his shadow, to claim him.
Pollux screamed. Castor didn’t have time to. The slime surrounded him in a way that Pollux imagined the pool at the Lightbearer church must have been like and took him, falling back to the ground and leaving nothing behind but a few feathers. Pollux tore his fingernails raw trying to unearth the ground as if that was what had taken his brother, never finding whatever well the dissolution came out of.
Castor’s feathers were marred with Pollux’s blood when he gathered them that night. For a second time, Pollux kneels on the ground and tries not to claw his skin off or throw up.
His careful preparation, the determination to protect his brother, did nothing. Castor was taken from him a second time. Thais had promised them safety, and she clearly had lied. Pollux’s paranoia paid off, he supposes, just not enough to help him. He packs a bag with hands shaking badly.
The things he brings with him as he leaves the house are almost random. He remembers food and water, though his need for them is limited thanks to the sacred heart. He remembers a compass, a thing they had forgotten in their childhood escape. He remembers Castor’s feathers, tied with ribbon and placed in a jar that nothing can damage them.
And Pollux sets off. He doesn’t know where he’s going. Just that he needs to find his brother, or find Thais and see what she knows. The sacred heart beats in his chest, and their connection is just enough that he can tell that Castor still lives.
Somewhere there is a second heartbeat mirroring his own.
When Pollux finds Thais, she tells him of the Black Pools. In some places of the world, a rift of dissolution will grow to a lake. And somewhere, there is the progenitor of them all. There must be; for all things in the world there is a ‘first’ of those. And that first Black Pool, which all silver cores are connected to, can reach out and grasp.
She has passed by it, felt its pull, but her connection to the Mother Tree was stronger than it. It couldn’t pull her through while she still has the Mother Tree.
“How do you know it wasn’t the Black Pool in the Church?” Pollux asked, eyes red-rimmed and his teeth bared in a near snarl.
How does he know that Castor wasn’t taken back? How can he find him, how can Thais prove she doesn’t need to have the earth scorched around her in Pollux’s divine fury? He would take her as collateral damage for resurrecting Castor with a silver core in place if it meant she had even inadvertently delivered him back to the Church.
Pollux doesn’t kill her. But she can’t help him, either, just reassures that the church has gone somewhere else. No rituals have been enacted on her land, though there is a taste in the wind that Thais dislikes.
So he leaves, with his meagre pack of possession in tow, Castor’s feathers atop the pile as the only piece he has. His brother shielded him in this very desert, and Pollux could only secure them freedom for a year. These feathers can save him from nothing.
Pollux does not find Castor for months. Maybe years. Maybe longer, as he searches until the sacred heart within his chest grinds to a silver-hungry stutter.
Eventually, one day, the tide takes him too. Black muck rises and chokes him and he emerges, coughing and scared, from his third birth. Yet another baptism in dissolution. His wings try to fluff defensively, but only manage the prickle of scarred-over bone fragments and scattered feathers like an afterthought.
A woman stands before him, who reminds him of Thias in her mass of whitish hair and the faint scent of blood, and reminds him of Juliette in her straight-backed air and the oppressive atmosphere of something loosely divine. But Pollux only has a moment to process this strange summoner before a cry of his name in familiar voice blooms out.
His brother runs through the dissolution and captures him into a hug. Pollux can’t move for a moment, too bewildered– this cannot be Castor, Castor was lost. But it’s Castor’s scent, Castor’s wings, Castor’s hands, these things he’s intimately familiar with and swore to etch in his mind forever. This is, must be, Castor.
His heart beats stronger than it ever has, silver well fed within him. It pounds against Pollux’s chest. Slowly, Pollux raises his hands to hug his brother back, and his fingers lace the soft feathers at the base of Castor’s wings.
Castor tells him this place is called Mythag. Castor also tells him that the woman is Leonora, and she is an incarnation of God. A different God, the one Juliette thought she knew, but real this time. That Mythag is safe, and he’s been here since he disappeared and just couldn’t get back, because– time flows different in the Black Pool.
To Castor, he was only gone for perhaps three weeks. For Pollux, an eternity. Time stretches fluid and fake. Castor says all this, and Pollux believes him in part.
He believes Castor didn’t know how much time passed for Pollux. Because Castor would never just forget him. He does not believe anything else.
Mythag is a facility with a pool of dissolution beneath it, the same as the Church of the Lantern. The Lantern drowned its dissidents, why should Mythag be different? Leonora is a woman whose motives are unknown. As much as Castor reassures him that both Leonora and her brother Sylvester who holds Castor's link are safe, they’re real, they’re kind and trustworthy and Castor loves them, Pollux does not trust his brother's revaluation. Castor wears his heart on his sleeve.
Pollux turns polite, fake smiles to the Keepers and other residents of Mythag. He feels Leonora’s gaze on him sometimes, in ways that make him bristle subconsciously. It might not be her fault, might just be what happens when she stares. But it may also be leftovers from the lessons Juliette taught him. There may well come a time when her hand passes him a knife and tells him to make a sacrifice, and when that happens he will slit her throat and let her blood turn the Black Pool red.
Then he and Castor will quit this place, find somewhere even further to live. As much as Castor claims that this college is freedom, they can leave, Castor just really, truly trusts the twins he claims are also gods. He trusts they will be able to save this earth. (Privately, Pollux doesn’t tell Castor that there’s very little on Earth that Pollux thinks is worth saving, only the idyll where he and Castor live forever unbothered. He rationalizes they will rebuild again one day, and resigns himself to keeping company with Mythag.) His brother makes friends that Pollux will not.
Castor agrees to search for the lost twin. Sylvester hangs in the doorway between worlds, his body empty of soul. Apparently, Castor knew him well. Or well enough, since Pollux doesn’t know how much one can know someone in only a month before this twin ‘died’. Leonora doesn’t elaborate much as to why she wasn’t taken, just a quiet ‘I was placed here differently’, and looks toward the silhouette in the door.
Castor doesn’t tell any clearer a story, honestly. But he says he still trusts Mythag, despite Pollux’s late-night whispered reminders of how many times their trusts have been betrayed. He just wants to help Leonora and Ramona (who looks like Pollux imagines he had looked when Castor vanished) find their friend between worlds.
Pollux agrees, because Castor asked. He also agrees because of the way Ramona’s face is forced into stillness with a wretched exhaustion behind her eyes, though he doesn’t tell anyone that and barely admits it to himself. His own reflection held that once, in Thias’s tent alone, caught from the corner of his eye in a mirror.
Fine. If it’s that important. If it finally manages to make Pollux’s sympathy twinge, something he had tried to smother out of himself, he’ll help. Castor smiles at him when he agrees and gives him a relieved look.
Somehow, Pollux is a little jealous that Castor cares so much about others still. He himself loves Castor enough to do this favour for him. He lets Doll and Winkle study his open chest and the heart within.
He lets them link him to Ramona and the void between dimensions. It affects Ramona the worst, really. His heart resonates with the nearby Leonora and a far-off someone else that he must presume is Sylvester. A little wavering pulse eons away over a gulf of nothing and the ghosts that lurk between realities. Pollux isn’t afraid of them, and neither is Castor, who comes with him to keep everyone stable and provide a firmer link to Sylvester that Pollux’s heart can track. With the Twin Devi working for something, Pollux genuinely doesn’t have the sort of concern that Ramona might.
If her heart gives out, they’ll just bring her back.
What Pollux doesn’t expect is for Ramona’s willpower being what forms a stable ground beneath them. A link to ‘stability’ and ‘reality’ in that formless void. Without her, Pollux and Castor would be in the between-space without being able to distinguish direction and barely able to see that wavering pinprick that she and Castor are sure is Sylvester.
When her body starts to give out beneath her, the stability of the journey goes with it. Castor’s grip tightens around Pollux’s hand as suddenly Ramona gasps and seems to keel over. The entire reality shudders.
Suddenly, Pollux becomes sharply aware that this space is filled with jealous ghosts and things that hunt. This space does not welcome the corporeal at all, and the spiritual only reluctantly. Things that are not quite eyes turn to them.
His vision flickers, in and out overlaid with Mythag. He’s aware that Doll’s never-raised voice is ringing out, calling emergency directions to get Ramona to safety. The machine that is hooked up to Pollux’s physical body is being adjusted and starts yanking on him. “Castor–” he gasps out.
Castor’s grip wavers. It becomes incorporeal in Pollux’s grip, and the last thing he sees is Castor looking at him in abject terror before they both disappear.
Ramona falls prone out of the machine she’s linked to, not waking up even as she starts sinking into the Black Pool.
Pollux returns to his own body screaming, and when he doesn’t see Castor next to him it takes five technicians and Leonora to restrain him from hurting himself or others. He gives up only when he's out of strength and tranquilizer runs through his veins. Throat horse, he lets himself fall to his knees. His arms wrap around himself and he retches, coughing out ineffective threats. They won't let him go back in to find Castor. They don't know where Castor is. He doesn't know where Castor is. Once again, his brother is gone.
When he finally stands, he and Ramona have the same fixated stare again. He's just so much better at hiding it behind a smile than she is. He'll play calm as they tell him when next he can re-enter the dimensional rift without his heart falling to pieces. They want their Keeper back, well. If Pollux happens to run into him while fetching Castor, then so be it. But he will take Castor, and hear no arguments otherwise when he drags Castor somewhere that people can no longer make requests of them. Somewhere to live selfishly and disappear selfishly, together. Only then he'll be free.