"I don't need your leash, Crownforged."
The words ripped through the training ring, brutal and final.
Everything stopped.
Brannick's eyes went wide. Maxx didn't bother hiding his smirk. Even Ryla and Torin paused their synchronized dance, glancing over with carefully neutral expressions.
Eryndor's face went rigid. And then—a stutter. Small, involuntary, his hand twitching toward his chest before he corrected himself.
Kaelen's voice echoed in my memory:We know every tell. Every sign that the King's chain is still wrapped around your throat.
Was I watching that chain tighten?
His face went stone cold again.
"Understood." His voice came out flat. Controlled.
He turned, pulled a throwing blade from the rack, and crossed to the targets on the far wall. Each throw landed with the same dead accuracy—mechanical, punishing, aimed at nothing and everything.
I turned back to Brannick. "Again."
He raised his practice blade without question.
My Shadowmark writhed through my skin, restless and hungry. I swallowed it down, forced it into something useful, reached for the fusion Kaelen demanded—the balance Dreadscale insisted was possible.
I lunged. Brannick parried and came back hard, and for a few exchanges it was just steel and sweat and the clean simplicity of a fight that made sense.
Then my blade dragged. Not much—a fraction of a second, like the air around it had thickened. I adjusted my hold and came again.
Brannick's shadow fell wrong. I caught it between exchanges—stretching left when the torchlight said it should stretch right. He didn't notice. I almost didn't.
I pressed harder. He met me, but his feet stuttered on the next pass—a half-step correction that didn't match the strike. His brow creased. "Something feels—"
He didn't finish. A practice dummy behind him rocked on its base. No one had touched it.
I swung harder. Faster. Trying to outrun the thing building in me.
Then it came.
A surge—stark and vast, blooming from my core like black water breaking through a dam. My vision blurred. The cavern walls stretched and warped, angles going wrong.
Beside the training mat, a camp lantern flickered.
I watched, frozen, as the flame coiled in on itself. Shrank. The wick un-burned, wax crawling back up the taper like time had forgotten which direction it was supposed to flow. Then it snapped forward again—a fresh flame, a jarring pop—and started the whole twisted loop over.
Five seconds. Maybe less. A stutter in the fabric of reality, playing out inches from where I stood.
"Ah, the sweet scent of impending doom." Maxx's voice cut through the chaos. He'd dodged back from a practice blade that flickered in and out of existence, his usual smirk stretched thin.
"Reminds me of family dinners."
I couldn't answer. Couldn't move. The Shadow was still surging, still pulling, and I didn't know how to stop it—
Hands clamped around my wrists.
Not gentle. Not the subtle steadying touch from the patrol. This was steel and force and desperation, a body rammed into mine with enough momentum to break my stance. Eryndor. His grip was iron, his chest a wall against my back, containing the wild magic even as my fury exploded.
I bucked against him. Snarled. Shame and rage crashed together. He was trying to bind me. Control me—
