ShadowBound: The Need For Power

By the final night of the weekend, Dark Knight Academy had grown quiet in the way it only did when most students had finally surrendered to exhaustion.

It was a few hours before midnight, and the second-year dormitory building had settled into a low, muffled stillness. Though there were still sounds here and there. Outside, the late-autumn wind moved against the windows in steady pushes, dragging dead leaves across the stone paths below with a dry, scraping sound that came and went like a whisper.

Inside Liam’s room, the air was warmer than the corridor, though not because of the heating stones built into the dormitory walls. Liam had made a habit of keeping the space comfortable through quiet use of his own fire-aligned Myst, not enough to waste reserves, but enough to make the room far less miserable than the world beyond the glass. His desk was covered with open books, half-filled notes, a Core Myst reference volume, the Tactical Espionage assignment notebook, and several loose sheets arranged in an order that would have seemed too strict to anyone else.

Near the desk, his bag had been placed neatly beside the chair. His coat hung over the back of it, dried and warmed after the day’s chill. The document case from Tactical Espionage rested close to the edge of the desk, sealed properly this time.

The washroom door opened, and Liam stepped out wearing only a pair of dark pants, a towel in one hand as he dried his damp hair.

His upper body was marked with bruises.

They were not severe, but they were visible enough to tell a story. Faint purple and red blotches rested along his ribs, one shoulder, and the side of his torso. Another darker bruise stretched near his lower abdomen, just above the waistband of his pants. There was a narrow line of swelling across his upper arm where a sheathed blade had struck him with too much precision to be accidental.

If not for the fact that Mabel had trained with her sword kept inside its sheath, several of those marks would have been cuts instead.

Mabel Arkwright sat atop Liam’s wardrobe like it was a perfectly normal seat.

Over the past few weeks, that place had somehow become one of her favorites in the room. She perched there with the casual balance of someone who could have sat on the edge of a roof during a storm and called it relaxing. Her Royal Corps uniform was immaculate as always, the dark material fitted neatly to her body, and her half-mask covered the lower portion of her face.

Tonight, she held a different book from the one she had been reading days earlier, something small and leather-bound with worn edges. One leg was folded lightly over the other, and her posture made the top of the wardrobe look less like furniture and more like a chosen lookout point.

When Liam stepped out, Mabel’s eyes lifted from the page immediately.

Her hazel-brown gaze traced over him with calm attention, moving across his damp hair, bare shoulders, chest, ribs, and the marks she had left behind during their earlier training. A small smirk touched her mouth, completely hidden by her mask.

It was not cruel exactly, but it was certainly amused.

She was enjoying herself a little too much.

Mabel knew that.

She could admit it inwardly, at least. Watching Liam try, fail, adjust, and fail again while attempting to draw something from her swordsmanship had become strangely entertaining. He was not weak. That was not the reason. If anything, it was amusing because Liam was so rarely made to look visibly unsuccessful at something he pursued with that much focus.

His body carried bruises from the training session because she had not gone easy on him, and because he had refused to stop pushing toward movement that still would not belong to him no matter how many times he reached for it.

’I may be enjoying this too much,’ Mabel thought, her smirk lingering as Liam continued drying his hair. ’But I cannot exactly help myself.’

She lowered her gaze back to the book before he could catch too much of her expression.

Liam did not bother commenting. He had noticed the direction of her eyes, the satisfaction she was pretending not to show, and the quiet humor wrapped around her silence. It was not worth acknowledging. Doing so would only give her more reason to be entertained, and Mabel already had enough of those.

He walked to his study desk, still rubbing the towel through his hair, and sat down. The chair gave a faint sound beneath him. He placed the towel around his neck once his hair was dry enough, then reached toward the documents on the desk. His attention drifted across the Core Myst notes first, then the Fire Magic material, before settling on the report he had been writing for the past few days.

Marren Voss.

The report was still incomplete, but the structure had begun to form. Her routes. Her repeated duties. Her role among the aides. Her interactions with Professor Vale and other staff members. The small habits Nyxie had noticed and Liam had judged worth recording. It was not dramatic, which made it useful. Seraphina had not asked them to invent intrigue. She had asked for observation. If Liam wrote the report correctly, the absence of obvious danger would not weaken it. It would prove he had been paying attention to what most students ignored.

His fingers rested near the edge of the page.

Then his eyes narrowed faintly.

Nyxie had not linked senses with him at all today.

Not once.

For most of the assignment, the small shadow dragon had been far too eager to share what she saw, sometimes at terrible moments and with a shameless lack of understanding regarding privacy. After Liam sharpened his instructions, the reports became less intrusive, but the link still came at least once or twice a day when she found something worth showing.

Today, however, there had been nothing. No vision. No sound. No strange scent pulled through the bond. Nothing but the distant sense that Nyxie remained somewhere within range, alive, active, and connected.

’She hasn’t linked once,’ Liam thought, staring at the report. ’Did she get negligent, or did she decide the assignment was beneath her?’

That possibility was not absurd. Nyxie had enough personality to develop preferences, and if she decided something was boring, she could become irritatingly dramatic about it. Still, failing to do the one task he had assigned her for an entire day would be more than annoying. It would mean her reliability had limits he needed to address.

Before Liam could sink deeper into that line of thought, a dark flash tore out of his shadow.

It moved like a piece of night had been startled loose from beneath his chair.

The shape shot across the room and landed on his bed with a soft but theatrical thud. Liam turned his head toward it and found Nyxie sprawled across the blankets in her smaller dragon form, wings limp, tail hanging over the edge, and head turned dramatically to one side as though she had just survived some apocalyptic trial no creature should have been forced to endure.

Her dark scales absorbed the warm lamplight, their edges carrying a faint glossy sheen, while the small ridges along her spine lifted and fell with exaggerated little breaths. Her claws flexed weakly against the blanket, and a low, miserable sound came from her throat.

It was somewhere between a groan, a whine, and the wounded cry of royalty denied proper tribute.

Liam stared at her.

Nyxie made the sound again, louder this time, and rolled partly onto her back, one wing folding over her face as if the sight of the room itself was too much.

Liam’s expression did not move. "Stop the false act."

Nyxie froze.

Only one eye opened beneath the edge of her wing.

It slid toward him with a deeply irritated side-eye.

The expression was so deliberate, so full of offended dignity, that even without speech, her meaning came through clearly. She was not acting. She had suffered. She had been abandoned, overworked, underappreciated, and now insulted in her moment of collapse.

Liam did not believe a second of it.

Nyxie stared at him a moment longer, then slowly lifted her head and looked around the room. Her slit pupils swept over the desk, the floor, the chair, the bedpost, and finally the wardrobe.

She saw Mabel.

The change was instant.

The dying, miserable creature on the bed became a winged blur of needy excitement. Nyxie launched herself off the blanket with a sharp little chirrup, wings beating once before she flew straight toward the top of the wardrobe.

Mabel reacted without surprise, dismissing her book into a small spatial fold with a smooth flick of her fingers just in time to open her arms.

Nyxie crashed into her with complete confidence.

Mabel caught her easily, arms closing around the small dragon as Nyxie immediately began squirming in place, pressing her head under Mabel’s chin with demanding little trills. Her tail curled around Mabel’s forearm, and her claws hooked gently into the fabric of the uniform without damaging it. She made another sound, this one far softer, like a pleased rumble trying to become a purr.

Mabel laughed.

It was quiet at first, then warmer as Nyxie pushed her snout against the underside of the half-mask and made an impatient huffing sound. Mabel adjusted her hold and began stroking the side of Nyxie’s neck with two fingers, tracing along the small ridges there. Nyxie’s eyes half-closed at once, her wings relaxing in a way that suggested she had achieved exactly what she had come for.

Attention.

The correct kind of attention.

Mabel’s fingers moved in slow, practiced motions, scratching lightly beneath Nyxie’s jaw. "There, there. What a terribly neglected little creature you are."

Nyxie gave a soft, agreeable chirp.

Liam watched them with flat skepticism. "She was on the bed pretending to be near death five seconds ago."

Mabel looked down at Nyxie. "Were you?"

Nyxie immediately pressed herself deeper against Mabel, made a tiny tragic sound, and closed her eyes as though remembering horrors beyond language.

Mabel giggled.

Liam stared.

Nyxie clearly felt comfortable in Mabel’s arms. More than comfortable. She seemed to believe the position was owed to her by natural law. Every small movement she made carried dramatic expectation: the twitch of her tail when Mabel’s hand slowed, the offended click in her throat when Liam spoke too dryly, the little smug lift of her chin once Mabel resumed petting her properly.

She had the air of a creature convinced of her own importance and relieved that at least one person in the room understood the appropriate level of reverence.

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