ShadowBound: The Need For Power

Chapter 778: An Unseen Siege (2)

The royal court, once difficult but at least functional, began to fracture. Ministers who had worked together for years started questioning one another’s loyalty. Military commanders argued over jurisdiction. Financial officers accused regional governors of concealing resources. Noble representatives whispered that the palace had grown blind.

Reports were delayed, then altered, then denied. Private meetings multiplied. Court sessions became sharper, uglier, more performative. People no longer spoke to persuade. They spoke to position themselves.

Eventually, the distrust shifted toward the throne itself.

At first, no one said it directly in Tharionson’s presence. They were cowards in that way, brave enough to poison rooms but not brave enough to stand in front of a Magna and speak plainly.

The rumors moved through side chambers, garden corridors, estate dinners, and the private balconies where nobles pretended the wind could not carry words. King Tharion Magna had lost his edge, they said. The king who once understood the necessity of strength had begun to soften. The king who had upheld Solara’s ancient laws against dark mages had failed to act decisively when a dark mage revealed himself during the Gaia War on Solarian land.

Not in some distant kingdom. Not across foreign borders. On their land. Under circumstances that should have demanded a royal response.

The accusation spread because it was useful, not because it was simple. There were those who had always believed King Tharion too harsh, and those who now claimed he was not harsh enough. There were those who hated dark mages with old fervor, those who feared Tempest’s influence, those who despised Crescent’s involvement, and those who merely saw weakness as a door to ambition. They did not need to agree on the truth. They only needed to agree that distrust could be aimed upward.

Then the rumors became crueler.

Some began saying Solara should have looked for a new ruler years ago, when Princess Serah Magna had been found guilty of an intimate relationship with a dark mage.

They dragged her name through court whispers as though her death had not been enough for them. They called her foolish, corrupted, weak-hearted, treacherous, bewitched. Some said the stain of her choices had never truly left the royal bloodline.

Some implied that King Tharion’s current hesitation was not softness born from age, but shame born from family failure. Others went further and suggested that Queen Seralyne had indulged too much grief, that her old attachment to her daughter had left the royal household vulnerable to sentiment where severity was required.

That was the part that nearly broke Tharionson’s restraint.

He could endure attacks against himself. He could endure political stupidity, cowardice, and ambition dressed as principle.

But hearing Serah’s name treated like something rotten beneath noble tongues lit a fury in him that did not fade easily. Whatever had happened years ago, whatever judgment had been passed, Serah Magna had been his elder sister. Dead or not, condemned or not, she was still blood. He remembered her laughter from when he was young, remembered her hand resting briefly atop his head when he tried too hard to look serious, remembered the way she could argue with their father without raising her voice and still somehow make the whole room feel smaller.

To hear people who had never loved her, never understood her, and never mourned her speak of her like she had been nothing but a stain made something violent stir behind his ribs.

More than once, he nearly caused a scene. More than once, he had walked into a corridor and watched some court lord stiffen because the man knew, with the coward’s instinct, that his private words had not remained private.

Tharionson wanted to drag those words into the open, to demand they repeat them where everyone could hear, to make them choke on the courage they pretended to have. But his mother had stopped him before that fury could become action.

Queen Seralyne had told him not to give them what they wanted. She had told him that the court was already unstable, that any outburst from him would be used as proof that the royal family could no longer govern itself. She had said it with a calm face, though she too had heard the whispers about herself, and Tharionson had hated the helplessness of obeying because he knew she was right.

Then even court members began dying.

Those deaths were worse in a different way. A noble adviser who had publicly criticized the king was found dead in his carriage with no visible wound, his eyes wide open and blood dried beneath his fingernails. A court archivist who had claimed to possess evidence of forged royal orders vanished for two days before being discovered inside a sealed records chamber no one remembered opening.

A minister aligned against the military branch collapsed during a private dinner, not from poison, according to the healers, but from what appeared to be sudden core failure despite having shown no signs of illness.

Each death seemed to have a pattern when viewed alone, but together they made none. Some victims were against the king. Some were loyal to him. Some had spoken of Serah. Some had defended her memory. Some had ties to the earlier disputes in the zones, while others had never set foot outside Ilis in months. The only consistency was that every death deepened uncertainty.

That was when Tharionson began to truly believe that the kingdom was not merely suffering from unrest. It was being acted upon. Something or someone was pressing against Solara from the inside, touching the right wounds at the right time, turning irritation into hatred, confusion into accusation, and grief into political weaponry.

The sudden change in everyone, from merchants to magistrates to nobles to court officials, made no natural sense. No famine had struck. No new war had begun. No clear external enemy had marched toward their borders. And yet Solara was beginning to behave like a city under siege, except the walls remained untouched and the enemy wore no banner.

Then his mother broke.

At first, Queen Seralyne’s condition appeared as brief attacks, episodes of distress that came and went with little warning. She would pause in the middle of a sentence and look toward an empty corner of the room, her face paling as though someone had whispered something dreadful beside her ear.

At times, she heard footsteps where none existed. At others, she claimed the air had become too cold, or that she could smell smoke, blood, damp stone, or old roses. The healers tried to explain it as strain. The court physicians called it exhaustion and grief aggravated by the current instability. Tharionson wanted to believe them, because the alternative was worse. He wanted to believe that rest, distance, and careful treatment would return her to herself.

But the attacks grew more severe.

The queen began waking from sleep in terror, calling names no one could clearly understand. She became frightened of mirrors, though she would not explain why. She sometimes refused to remain in rooms with polished floors, silver trays, glass panes, or still water. On some days, she clutched at her own sleeves as though trying to keep something from pulling her away.

On others, she whispered apologies to people who were not there. Eventually, the brief episodes joined into something nearly constant, leaving her trapped in a state of horror and fear that no one around her could see or touch. She would stare past her attendants with wide, trembling eyes, mumbling broken phrases that made little sense, and when Tharionson knelt before her and took her hands, she sometimes looked at him as though she recognized him only from very far away.

The healers checked her every day. They examined her core, her mind, her Myst channels, her blood, her sleep, her memories as far as they were permitted, and every ward placed near her chambers. Nothing gave them an answer. No curse showed itself. No poison remained. No external spell could be traced.

Even when she mumbled, even when Tharionson forced himself to listen closely enough that the sound of her fear burrowed into him, the words rarely formed anything whole. A name would surface, then vanish. A plea would break apart halfway through. Sometimes she said Serah’s name. Sometimes she said his father’s. Sometimes she whispered, "Don’t open it," or "He’s watching from the other side," but no one knew what she meant, and every attempt to ask only pushed her deeper into panic.

All of it had left Tharionson in a state where his mind and body worked on overdrive day after day, night after night, until exhaustion became less a feeling and more a constant pressure beneath his skin. He handled military reports, reviewed arrests, met investigators, questioned healers, endured court tension, checked on his mother, watched his father grow harder and quieter with every passing week, and still returned to this office to stare at papers that refused to become answers.

Now, seated beneath the afternoon light, he felt lost in a way he would never have admitted aloud. Not defeated. Not yet. But surrounded by so many wrong pieces that he could no longer see the shape they were supposed to form.

His finger began tapping against the desk, slow at first, then steady, then sharp enough that it became the only clear sound in the room. His eyes remained distant, fixed somewhere beyond the scattered papers, while his lips moved faintly with thoughts only he could follow.

"Aleah dies with no trace," he murmured, his voice low and rough from disuse. "Zone 19 leaves nothing. Then Zone 15, 16, and 17 begin tearing at each other. Forged orders. Dead nobles. Court division. Mother’s attacks. Mirrors. No residue. No witness. No pattern, but too many coincidences to be coincidence."

His finger tapped harder, and his brows drew together as he leaned slightly forward. "Someone is choosing where to press. Not randomly. Not blindly. Whoever this is, they know us. They know the court. They know which names still bleed."

The office remained still around him. Outside the windows, Ilis continued beneath the afternoon sun, beautiful and restless, its towers bright enough to make the kingdom appear healthier than it was. From this height, one could almost pretend Solara remained whole.

One could almost believe the arguments in court were merely politics, the deaths merely crimes, his mother’s terror merely illness, and Zone 19 merely a tragedy that had left no living truth behind. But Tharionson had lived too long inside the kingdom’s machinery to mistake noise for disorder.

This was not ordinary collapse. This was orchestration.

He pressed his fingers to his brow and exhaled through his nose, trying to force his thoughts into shape. "What are you?" he whispered, though no answer came. "A demon? A faction? A foreign hand? Something left behind from the war? Or are you one person sitting somewhere, laughing while we accuse each other?"

The clock on the wall suddenly rang.

Tharionson froze. The sound cut through the office with calm, measured cruelty, each chime pulling him further out of his thoughts until he turned his head and stared at the clock face. For a moment, he did not understand what he was seeing. Then the position of the hands settled into meaning, and his tired eyes widened slightly.

It was two hours past noon.

He stood so abruptly that his chair scraped against the floor behind him. Several papers shifted from the movement, one sliding off the table and drifting down near his boot, but he did not bend to pick it up. His gaze had sharpened, not with clarity, but with urgency, and the exhaustion on his face seemed to fold itself behind duty for a moment.

"I have to check on Mother," he said.

The words were quiet, but they carried the weight of a routine that had become fear disguised as responsibility.

Without waiting for an attendant, without taking the time to straighten the scattered reports or smooth back the strands of hair across his face, Tharionson turned from the desk and crossed the office. He opened the door and stepped out into the palace corridor, leaving behind the papers, the sunlight, the unanswered questions, and the office that had begun to feel less like a place of command and more like the center of a trap slowly closing around him.