ShadowBound: The Need For Power

Above them, Kara Cale was still trying to steady her breathing.

Her fingers had not fully stopped trembling.

She remained crouched on the wall with her bow across her knees, the string loose but ready, her eyes scanning both the courtyard behind her and the southern road beyond the gate. The Alpha’s death had not left her body as quickly as it had left the field. Her arms still remembered the pull of the bow. Her hands still remembered the moment the Mauler climbed toward her, its jaw open, its claws biting into the wall, and the sickening weight of knowing that if she missed, no one below could reach her in time.

She had not frozen. She had shot. She had killed it. And later, when her arrows had shattered uselessly against the Alpha’s armor, she had not kept firing out of panic. She had listened, changed roles, finished wounded Maulers, watched the gate, and waited for the moment her ice could matter.

That pride was small, but real.

She was not the main fighter. She was not pretending otherwise. Liam and Asher had been the true center of that fight, and watching them had changed something in her understanding of the difference between capable and high-ranked. Everyone knew the upper students were strong, but seeing it from above was different. Asher had fought like pressure given a body, loud and aggressive, but not as reckless as she had expected. He had used blue flames to move, turn, and force the Alpha into worse angles, and when the battlefield demanded restraint, he had not burned the entire place down just because he could.

Liam had been colder. Quieter. Almost unnerving in how little he wasted. He seemed to notice openings before they fully existed, cutting where armor thinned, stepping away before stone broke, sending fire into cracks instead of flooding the field with it.

They had not fought like students trying to look impressive.

They had fought like people trying to solve a problem.

And Liam, difficult as he was, had not treated her as useless once she listened. He had told her exactly where to shoot. He had trusted her to hold the wall. He had corrected her targets without dressing the words in cruelty for enjoyment. When she adapted, he used her. When she held, he acknowledged it. That was not warmth. It was not kindness in the gentle way Sheila might offer it. But it was also not the mindless coldness most whispers around the academy attached to him.

Maybe the dark-mage label did not explain him as fully as people wanted it to.

That did not make him secretly sweet. Kara was not foolish enough to decide that after one fight.

But perhaps he was more than the cold image he allowed everyone to see.

Raised voices dragged her from the thought.

Kara shifted closer to the wall’s outer edge and looked down. Chris Rature stood below with a large group gathered behind him, his posture controlled but his expression sharp enough to carry irritation even from above. The four students Asher had rescued were tense, especially Ilyen, who looked deeply relieved when she saw Kara leaning over the parapet.

Kara called down, "Ilyen. What is the problem?"

Ilyen looked up immediately, relief plain on her face. "Chris’s group arrived. They want to enter, but we told them to wait until Hawthorne and Hunter give the all-clear."

Chris’s gaze lifted to Kara.

Even from the wall, she felt the weight of it.

She adjusted her grip on the bow and forced herself to speak clearly. "Prince Chris."

At least that part she gave him. Respect cost nothing if it helped the situation hold.

"The immediate southern section of Veyrhold was infested with Gravebound Maulers," Kara said. "Sir Hawthorne and Hunter have taken care of most of the threat. The largest one is dead. They are still confirming the entry route and nearby structures are not hiding additional threats. Until they give the signal, no group should enter in bulk."

Chris’s eyes sharpened at the way she referred to them.

Sir Hawthorne. Hunter. The ones who had handled the situation. The ones who were confirming the route.

It irritated him more than her words alone should have.

"So the answer is yes," Chris said. "You are blocking entry on the authority of two students who are neither commander nor vice commander."

Kara kept her voice steady. "I am blocking nothing. I am relaying the current state of the gate. Entering with twenty or more students before the inner route is confirmed could cause panic if anything remains inside."

"Or," Chris said, "it could allow the largest organized group currently at Veyrhold to secure the settlement properly."

Mela’s brows drew together behind him, but she did not speak.

Kara swallowed once. "The southern entry has already been partially secured."

"By them."

"Yes."

"Without command authority."

The words were controlled, but anger moved beneath them now, closer to the surface.

Before Kara could answer, a voice came from inside the gate, sharp, rude, and completely uninterested in rank.

"Which idiot is disturbing my hearing after I just dealt with a screaming orc?"

A second voice followed, calm and flat. "It was a Mauler."

"Same ugly family."

"No."

"Do not correct me right now, gloom rat."

The tension at the gate shifted violently.

Chris’s face hardened.

The gate opened wider from within, and Asher Hawthorne walked out first with his longsword still in hand, the blade lowered but wet with dark Mauler blood. Faint traces of blue heat clung to the edge before dying into the air. His uniform was scuffed and marked with soot, one sleeve smeared with black fluid, and a shallow cut ran across his cheek. He looked tired enough that the fight had cost him something, but not weakened enough for it to matter. If anything, he looked more irritatingly alive.

Liam followed a step behind and slightly to the side, quieter by contrast. One blade rested in his hand, dark blood staining his glove and the edge of his sleeve. His breathing was steady, his expression unreadable, and his tied hair had loosened only slightly from the fight. He looked neither proud nor eager to explain himself.

Behind them, through the opened gate, Chris’s group glimpsed the aftermath inside Veyrhold: cracked courtyard stones, narrow scorch marks, patches of frost, broken but still standing walls, dead Gravebound Maulers sprawled across the southern quarter, and deeper in the courtyard, the massive corpse of something far larger than the rest.

The Alpha Mauler.

The sight struck Chris harder than he allowed his face to show.

He understood immediately.

Liam and Asher had reached Veyrhold first. They had entered first. They had fought inside first. They had killed the worst immediate threat and made the southern entry usable before his group could claim it. Worse, they had done it in a way that made refusal difficult. He could not reasonably condemn them for clearing a den that might have torn through his tired formation. He could not pretend the dead creatures were imaginary. He could not march through the gate and declare authority when the evidence of their usefulness lay bleeding across the stones behind them.

And that made him hate it more.

Sheila annoyed him because she stood in a position he believed should have been his. She represented stolen legitimacy, misplaced trust, a command title handed through rank and sentiment. But Liam and Asher were worse in a way that dug beneath politics. Neither of them had ever given him even the smallest respect. They had humiliated him publicly more than once, dismissed him in front of his own supporters, spoken to him as if his title did not exist, and now they stood at the first gate of Veyrhold with blood on their weapons and an Alpha corpse behind them as though his arrival was an inconvenience.

Asher looked at Chris’s group, then at Chris, and his mouth twisted.

"Oh," he said. "It is you."

Chris stepped forward. "Who gave you the right to seal the gate?"

Asher blinked once, then looked at Liam. "Did we seal it?"

"No."

Asher looked back at Chris. "Apparently no one. Try a better accusation."

Chris’s jaw tightened. "You gave orders preventing students from entering."

"I gave orders preventing frightened weaklings from walking into Mauler jaws."

"You are not commander."

"And you are not early," Asher shot back.