ShadowBound: The Need For Power

After speaking with Sheila the previous evening, Liam had first considered handling the matter in the most direct way available.

Sheila’s concern about Chris had not sounded foolish. That alone made it worth more attention than Liam wanted to give it. If she had been anxious over nothing, he could have dismissed it, given some practical statement, and gone back to avoiding the entire leadership problem.

But Sheila had not been worried because of pride or insecurity alone. She had been thinking ahead. She understood that the second-years’ surface unity could break under pressure, and she understood that Chris still had enough influence among certain students to become useful or troublesome depending on how the practical exam unfolded.

At first, Liam had thought he might need to identify the students who still rooted for Chris, the ones who wanted nothing to do with Sheila’s leadership, and whatever quiet loyalties remained hidden beneath the polite obedience of the last two months. He had also considered finding out what Chris himself had been doing lately. Whether he had been meeting with anyone, speaking to certain students, gathering support, or simply waiting for the right moment to become irritating again.

Then Liam decided that was too much work.

Not impossible. Merely not worth the time it would take if done that way.

Tracking multiple students, sorting their loyalties, observing their interactions, and identifying the shape of Chris’s remaining influence would have required patience, time, and a willingness to involve himself deeper in second-year politics than he cared to. Even with Nyxie, it would have been inconvenient.

The practical exams were already approaching, his own training remained a priority, theory exams waited in two weeks, Seraphina was now far too interested in his report, and he still had his own matters to handle. Spending days untangling Chris’s little circle sounded like stepping into a swamp to confirm it was wet.

So he had taken time to think of the easiest way to get what he wanted.

Eventually, he found it.

Lucian Kellor.

Lucian had been near Chris often enough to matter, but he had never felt the same as Logan. Logan, Chris’s other lackey, was simple in a way Liam found tedious. He liked proximity to power, liked being seen near it, and liked borrowing arrogance from someone higher than himself because he had none worth respecting on his own. Lucian was different. He still stood beside Chris, still followed him, still acted within that circle, but something about him had never settled into the shape of true loyalty.

Liam had noticed it long before he cared to use it.

Observation, after all, had become a habit. Liam watched people even when they were not important. Not always consciously, not with any special intensity, but enough to store patterns. Lucian’s posture around Chris had never matched Logan’s eager submission. He listened more than he spoke. He reacted a fraction later than someone fully invested would. He laughed when expected, not when amused.

He sometimes looked as though he were measuring the room rather than enjoying the position he occupied in it. None of that proved anything by itself, but taken together, it suggested that Lucian was not exactly where he wanted to be.

Liam had first considered using that.

A pressure point built on dissatisfaction. A suggestion that Lucian had no real attachment to Chris. A quiet push to make him speak because a person already half-detached was easier to pull loose than someone fully rooted.

But that was too vague.

Lucian could deny it. He could retreat behind pride. He could act offended. He could pretend loyalty where none existed because pretending had likely become part of his survival. Without something sharper, Liam would only be pressing against a door without a key, and Lucian would have too much room to waste his time.

Liam had no intention of wasting time.

That was when he remembered Vlardia.

Back then, Lucian had been different when he was not close to Chris. Not entirely different, but enough. During the assessment, when survival mattered more than social positioning, Liam had seen a version of Lucian with clearer instincts, less borrowed arrogance, and a steadier sense of himself. More importantly, he had seen how Lucian and Edith interacted.

The familiarity had been subtle, but not invisible. They spoke with the rhythm of people who knew each other before the academy, not simply students forced into the same group by circumstance. At the time, Liam had not cared. He had neither the patience nor tolerance for social histories, old friendships, and whatever emotional threads people dragged behind them.

Now, apparently, he had developed a sense of... whatever this was.

He still did not have a proper word for it.

Concern would have been too dramatic. Responsibility too annoying. Strategy fit, but not completely. He had no desire to lead the second-years, yet here he was, following a line of trouble because Sheila had asked for help and because ignoring the problem would likely allow it to grow into something more irritating later.

’This is exactly why leadership is repulsive,’ Liam had thought earlier. ’One problem speaks, then six more crawl out behind it.’

So he had approached Edith.

Edith had given him enough. Not everything, and not without resistance, but enough. She had told him what Lucian had been like before the academy: quieter, more stable, not as attached to status as he had begun appearing after enrollment. She had said he changed a few months before they all entered Dark Knight Academy, and that the change had not only been in him. His family had changed too, especially his father.

Edith had not understood the reason clearly. Her own family knew the Kellors distantly, not intimately, and the details had never been presented to her as fact. But she remembered her father mentioning that the Kellor family had been going through financial difficulty. Debt, perhaps. Serious enough to change their behavior, though Edith had not known how deep it went.

That uncertainty was all Liam needed.

He had used it.

He had taken the half-shaped information Edith gave him, added a few logical pieces around it, sharpened the presentation, and pressed it against Lucian as if he knew everything. It could have failed. Lucian could have held firm, denied it, and forced Liam to seek another method. But Liam had judged the reaction correctly. The pressure point had been real, and luck, or simply accuracy, had carried the rest.

Lucian had broken just enough.

And from that, Liam had gotten what he wanted.

Unfortunately, what he got was worse than he wanted.

Sheila’s worry was not only necessary; it was accurate. Chris was not inactive. He was preparing something, or at least moving toward something, and someone close enough to Sheila was feeding him information. Whether that person was doing it knowingly or being used without understanding the full destination of their words remained unclear.

Either possibility made the matter more difficult. If the person was intentionally helping Chris, then Sheila had a leak near her. If the person was unknowingly helping, then Chris had found a way to gather information through someone careless, trusting, or manipulated.

Both were annoying.

Both required attention.

And all of it had become a complete inconvenience that had no reason to exist to begin with.

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