A few days later, life at the Kyrios clan's estate returned to its old, peaceful tracks. During the night, the snow once again mercifully covered all tracks in the valley, and the frost reinforced the silence that Pollux loved so much. In this silence, the noise of machines could not be heard, only the breath of the mountains.
He stood in the back yard, watching Fenryr clean the heavy wooden sleds with methodical precision. It wasn't any training or preparation for combat; it was ordinary, honest morning work. Pollux silently handed him tallow and pieces of treated leather to grease the runners. His fingers, which a few days ago had gripped a deadly weapon from the old world, now attended to the greasy metal and rough wood with the same attention.
"Are you thinking about that piece of metal in your pocket?" Fenryr noted without looking up from his work. His voice was deep and calm, like the rumbling of a glacier.
"I'm thinking that the number triggers something in me," Pollux admitted quietly. "Every time I touch it, I feel that noise in my head a bit more strongly. As if that 'one' inside me wants to wake up and ask where the others are. Whether other numbers didn't remain somewhere in those Aethel Biotech laboratories."
Fenryr straightened up until his shadow fell over Pollux, and wiped his hands on a greasy rag. "Do you know what I do when the sled is broken and the wood is too hard for me to work it? I don't push it with force. I leave it in the frost. The cold shows where the real cracks are. You are doing the same thing, boy. You are pushing on your memory as if you wanted to smash it with a hammer. Let it be, Pollux. The truth about that number will come to light when your mind is ready for it. For now, be glad you are here. In Skeldar, no one will call you by a number unless you choose it yourself."
Just then, a cheerful, piercing whistle sounded from the main gate. Orion had just jumped off his horse, his face bitten red by the frost, but his eyes shone with a mischievous glow.
"Hey, you two gloomy guardians of order!" he shouted and threw a small leather pouch to Pollux, which gave a muffled clink of tools mid-air. "I got a message from the lower village. Their grain mill is stuck, and the old miller swears it's haunted because it's making noises like a dying bird. Kyrios said you should take a look at it, Pollux. Apparently, you have a better ear for those 'ghosts' in the machines than all of us combined."
Pollux caught the pouch and immediately felt the familiar, comforting weight of wrenches and files in his palms. For a moment, he completely forgot about Aethel, the prototypes, and the cold tags.
"The mill," Pollux repeated, and a gentle, sincere smile appeared on his face. "That sounds like something I can actually fix."
"Then move it, mechanic!" Orion gave him a friendly pat on the back, nearly making Pollux lose his balance. "The miller promised fresh bread and homemade lard if you get it running by evening. And I'm damn hungry today. This frost has eaten a hole in my stomach!"
They walked together toward the main gate. Pollux felt the tag hidden in his pocket, but it no longer burned against his skin so much. Today he had the mill ahead of him—a real thing, with a real problem and an honest reward.
The path to the lower village led through the riverbed, which at this time of year resembled a motionless, frosty snake forged from ice and murky glass. Orion walked ahead, testing the strength of the frozen puddles with his iron-tipped staff. The air here in the valley was more humid and heavier than up in the fortress; it smelled of wet bark, pine needles, and pungent smoke from nearby dwellings.
"That miller, old Hrabko, is a good man, but terribly superstitious," Orion explained as they deftly avoided low-hanging pine branches weighed down by snow. "He claims the mill stopped at the exact moment a raven with a broken wing flew over it. Supposedly, it's a clear sign that an evil mountain spirit has settled in the gears, wishing him no harvest."
Pollux walked behind him, subconsciously playing with a small brass screwdriver in the leather pouch. "Spirits don't usually wear gears, Orion. It's probably just material fatigue, a micro-crack in the shaft, or frozen water that expanded at night where it shouldn't have."
"I know, you're a realist, your head is full of blueprints," Orion looked back and grinned widely until his ears moved under his cap. "But in the village, your reputation is different. They talk about you as that quiet boy from Kyrios who can calm metals with a single touch. When you look at those machines, people feel like you understand them more than they understand themselves. As if you could see their bones and vessels."
The mill stood on the edge of the village, at the point where a fierce mountain stream flowed into a wider, now slowed-down bed. It was a massive stone work whose huge wooden blades now stood motionless, trapped in a relentless icy embrace. Old miller Hrabko was already waiting for them at the entrance, nervously fiddling with a wool cap in his rough hands, his face etched with wrinkles like the bark of an old oak.
"Goddess be praised, you've come," the miller blurted out and hastily led them inside the bowels of the building. "Hear that! The mill is standing, water isn't flowing around it, it's frozen in the flumes, but inside something is still... whispering. I swear on my name that it's not a sound of this world. It's the cry of a trapped soul."
Inside the mill, a thick gloom and a cold reigned that was different from the outside—it was musty, smelling of fine flour dust, old damp wood, and rancid grease. Pollux stopped in the middle of the main room, relaxed his shoulders, and slowly closed his eyes.
The moment he switched off his sight, his mechanical empathy spread through the space like an invisible wave. At that moment, the mill ceased to be just a pile of stone and hewn wood for him. It was a living organism, a system of levers, gears, and accumulated tension. And the miller was right—the mill was indeed "talking." Pollux felt a vibration beneath his feet. It wasn't a spirit; it was a high, rhythmic squeaking of metal against metal, desperately trying to move against the will of something that was braking it with crushing force at the very heart of the transmission.
"Orion, I need you to light the lamp and hold it for me by the main shaft, low to the ground," Pollux said calmly, his voice sounding authoritative in the quiet mill.
He climbed down into the lower part of the mill, where the huge wooden gears, carved from hard ash, met the iron ones. Under a layer of white flour and old, blackened lubricant, he immediately saw the source of the problem. It wasn't a broken wheel or a spell. It was a foreign object—a piece of thick, bent metal, likely part of some old farm machinery that the river's swift current had forced with raw power directly between the teeth of the main drive before the frosts.
"The mountain spirit has quite sharp edges and smells of rust," Pollux noted as Orion shone the lamp on the stuck piece of iron. The yellow light revealed how the metal was wedged deep into the wood.
"That's... that's a piece of my old plow that the high water washed away in the autumn!" gasped the miller above them. "How on earth did it get in there?"
Pollux didn't answer. He placed his bare hand on the main wheel, and a tingling sensation immediately passed through him. He felt an immense, dangerous tension in his palms, trapped in the structure like a compressed spring. His hyper-perception mapped out the lines of stress in the wood; he saw how the ash fibers were bending under the pressure of tons of water and stone. If he were to just pry the metal out by force, the entire weight of the millstone would release at once, the wheels would shatter, and the kinetic energy could crush everything in its path.
"Everyone back, please," Pollux commanded without looking up. "Orion, take the miller up to the granary. I have to release this millimeter by millimeter, or it'll explode in our faces."
When he was left alone in the cellar, Pollux concentrated. He didn't use the brute force of muscles; he used physics. His fingers danced over the surface of the shaft, searching for the nodal point of the tension. He perceived how the energy in the wood shifted with every slight movement. He placed a small steel wedge against the stuck metal and tapped it gently and rhythmically with a small hammer, following the vibration that returned to his palm.
Click.Crack.
The entire mill "exhaled" quietly and deeply in the darkness. The massive tension gave way. Pollux carefully pulled the bent piece of the plow from the grip of the teeth.
"It's going! They're turning, the beauties!" Orion shouted from above when he heard the heavy millstones begin to turn slowly and regularly with a deep rumbling. The water, having found its way through the released sluice, pushed against the blades once again.
Pollux came up the ladder, his face dirty from flour and black grease that had created streaks on his cheeks, but in his hand, he firmly and triumphantly clutched that piece of bent metal.
"The spirit is gone, miller," Pollux said, handing the cold iron to Hrabko. "The mill is fine; the mechanism suffered no serious damage. But you'd better have the channel above the mill thoroughly cleaned before the snow melts completely and brings more surprises here."
Hrabko was beside himself with sincere joy. He brought them fresh wheat bread, still warm from the oven, and a generous piece of smoked lard, whose aroma immediately dominated the entire room. "You've saved us from a hungry winter, boys. Kyrios has a real treasure in you, Pollux. Such a gift is not often seen."
They sat on the wooden porch of the mill, watching the blades turn rhythmically and steadily in the stream of water again, and ate the bread with gusto. It was a clean, simple, and warming moment. A real piece of life that Pollux, after those days full of questions about his identity, essentially needed.
"What are you thinking about so much?" Orion asked with his mouth full, wiping crumbs from his chin.
Pollux looked at his hands, still dirty from work. He felt the fading vibration from the mill in them, but deep beneath it, he also perceived the memory of that other, alien, and cold resonance from the tags. "I'm thinking that the world is more interconnected than we sometimes admit. Even here in isolated Skeldar, we stumble upon fragments of something else that will catch up with us sooner or later."
"The main thing is that the mill is grinding and bellies will be full," Orion patted him heartily on the shoulder. "Today you were Pollux, the mill-fixer. No damn numbers, no laboratories. Just you, your gift, and honest work that makes sense."
Pollux nodded slowly and bit into the bread. It tasted good. It tasted of honest earth and home.
Miller Hrabko kept his word to the letter. The news that the mill was once again "singing" its deep mechanical choral spread through the village faster than the morning mist over the river. By the time Pollux managed to quickly wash off the layers of white flour and old grease in the mill house, the first people began to gather in front of the mill. It was no forced official ceremony of the clan, but the sincere, loud, and unrestrained joy of mountain people, for whom a functioning mill in winter was a matter of survival.
In the largest house in the village—at the reeve's—they lit massive pine logs in the hearth, which crackled loudly and radiated a pleasant heat. The intoxicating scent of roasted mutton, garlic, wild herbs, and freshly brewed beer carried through the air, which the miller proudly brought out from the cold cellar in heavy, dewy ceramic jugs.
"Drink, boys, drink your fill!" Hrabko shouted over the cheerful chatter, slapping Orion on the back so hard that the thick beer foam almost splashed from his glass onto his shirt. "If it weren't for these two and Pollux's miraculous hearing, we'd be eating only dry tree bark and snow for Christmas!"
Orion felt in his element. He sat in the place of honor at the long table, laughing from the bottom of his lungs and, with grand gestures, telling stories of their journey, which he colorfully embellished with each subsequent gulp of beer with non-existent wolves and snowstorms, constantly checking on Pollux to see if he intended to correct his inventions. Pollux sat a bit further away, in a quieter corner by the frozen window, where the gentle chill from outside met the radiant heat of the crowded room. He watched as Orion was in ecstasy and was inwardly grateful for him.
"Why don't you go dance with the others?" a gentle, girlish voice suddenly spoke up.
Pollux raised his gaze from his palms. It was the reeve's daughter, a girl in a thick, hand-knitted woolen sweater with a face healthy red from the heat, dancing, and joy. Her curved horns emphasized her gentle face in this light. With a kind smile, she handed him a bowl of hot leavened buns, from which tempting steam was still rising. "Not today," Pollux smiled apologetically, though the attention warmed him. "My head is dancing enough today even without music. That mill is still ringing in my ears."
The girl laughed quietly and sat down beside him on the bench without asking. "I know what they say about you in the village. That you hear voices in the metal that others don't. But I think you just know how to truly listen to the silence and the small things that the rest of us overlook in the noise. Thanks for that mill, Pollux. Because of you, my mother finally stopped scowling at my father after a week."
Pollux took a bun. It was incredibly soft, sweet, and inside it tasted of wild forest fruit and honey. For a moment, he closed his eyes and let himself be completely carried away by the noise around him. The music—old mountain fiddles and whistles—cut through the air in a wild, uncompromising rhythm. People stomped their iron-shod boots into the wooden floor, laughed with full lungs, and sang songs that had nothing to do with corporations, mercenaries, biotechnologies, or the cold logic of Aethel Biotech.
It was a world without numbers. A world where only the fire in the hearth, good food, and the person sitting next to you were important.
"Look at them," Orion eventually stumbled over to him with a beaming face and sat beside him, his breath smelling of beer and bacon. "These people believe in you, Pollux. Do you see it? To them, you aren't some 'unit' from the south, no inventory item. You're the one who fixed the mill and gave them back their bread. Simple and true."
Pollux looked at Orion. In that soft yellow candlelight, his friend looked a bit older, but there was a deep peace in his eyes. "Maybe you're right, Orion. Maybe this is the only thing that really matters in this broken world."
The celebration lasted long into the night, until the last logs in the hearth burned to ash, but Pollux and Orion slipped away before the beer in the barrels was completely gone. They walked along the quiet snowy road back to the estate; above them arched a deep black sky full of infinite stars, which in that frosty mountain air looked like sharp, cut diamonds scattered on velvet. The frost intensified, and their footsteps grew louder.
They walked without a word. It wasn't that unpleasant silence full of heavy questions and fear, but the silence of two close people who are full, satisfied, and at peace with the world. Pollux had his hands deep in his coat pockets. This time, his fingers did not touch the brass wheel or those cursed dog tags. He only perceived the warmth that remained in him from that noisy village room and the sincere handshakes.
"Do you know what the absolute best thing about today is?" Orion spoke up, watching his own white breath rise toward the stars with interest.
"What?"
"That tomorrow morning, Fenryr will still uncompromisingly wake us before dawn, scold us for smelling like old beer barrels, and mercilessly send us to chop wood in the yard. And we will go. Because we are at home here and this is our order."
Pollux laughed quietly and sincerely for the first time since the duel in the valley. "That sounds like the best plan, Orion."
When they reached the massive gate of the estate, Pollux stopped for a moment and looked back into the dark valley, where the last few lights of the village flickered in the distance.