ShadowBound: The Need For Power

Chapter 780: The Severance Decree (1)

The queen’s chamber had once been one of the warmest rooms in the royal wing, designed with Seralyne’s preferences in every detail. It had wide windows overlooking the inner gardens, pale curtains that glowed in the afternoon light, shelves of old poetry and political histories, low tables set with delicate porcelain, and walls decorated with polished silver mirrors framed in carved wood.

Now, everything that could reflect had been covered. The mirrors were draped in thick cloth from top to bottom. The polished trays had been removed. The tall glass cabinet near the writing desk had been veiled. Even the windows had their curtains partly drawn despite the brightness outside, muting the garden view and reducing the chance of reflections in the glass.

Bowls of still water were gone. The silver-backed brushes from her vanity had been hidden away. What remained was a room that looked like it had been stripped of its own memory, beautiful in shape but wounded in spirit.

There were other changes too. Protective talismans had been placed near the corners, though none had shown any true effect. Soft calming incense burned near the far wall, not strong enough to overwhelm the room, but present enough to leave a faint herbal scent beneath the heavier air.

A healer’s chair sat near the bed. Folded blankets lay stacked on a side table. A cup of untouched tea had gone cold near the armrest of a reading chair. Everything carried the careful arrangement of people trying to manage suffering they did not understand.

Seralyne was not in the bed.

She was curled up on the couch in the far corner of the chamber, wrapped in a robe that looked too loose around her frame, rocking herself back and forth with her knees drawn close and her hands gripping the fabric near her arms.

The sight of her struck Tharionson harder than he expected, though he had seen her like this before. Perhaps that was why it hurt worse. The first time had been horror. Now it was recognition. This was no longer an impossible moment. It had become part of their days.

Queen Seralyne Magna, who had once moved through court with quiet grace and a stare that could silence ambitious nobles without a raised voice, now sat folded into herself like a frightened child hiding from something only she could see.

Tharionson swallowed the ache rising in his throat and approached slowly. He did not move like a commander now. He moved like a son trying not to scare his mother.

"Mother," he called softly.

Seralyne did not react. Her lips were moving, but the words were too faint to understand. Her eyes were open, fixed somewhere near the floor, though Tharionson doubted she was seeing the carpet or the table beside her. She rocked again, slowly, her fingers tightening and loosening in the robe. Tharionson stopped a few steps away, careful not to enter her space too quickly.

"It’s me," he said, lowering his voice further. "It’s Tharionson. I came to see you."

Still, she gave no true response. Her mumbling continued beneath her breath, thin and broken, like words dragged through a dream. Tharionson’s chest tightened, but he forced himself to kneel near the couch, keeping enough distance that she would not feel trapped.

For a moment, he simply looked at her, and the office, the reports, the court, and the kingdom all seemed unbearably far away. He remembered being a child and hiding behind her skirts during one of his father’s formal gatherings because the visiting lords had seemed too loud. He remembered her pretending not to notice while quietly shifting her stance so he remained shielded from view.

He remembered her correcting his grip on a ceremonial blade when he was too young to lift a real one properly, smiling as she told him that strength was not in how tightly one held a weapon, but in knowing when not to swing it. He remembered her voice after Serah’s death, gentle and broken in private, composed and untouchable in public.

Now he was kneeling in front of her, unable to do anything but speak.

"I’m sorry," he said, and the words came out before he could decide whether they were wise. He drew a slow breath and continued, because once they had escaped him, holding back the rest felt almost cowardly.

"I know I keep asking them questions. I know I keep making them check you again and again. You probably hate it. You always hated people fussing over you too much." His mouth moved faintly as if he might smile, but the expression never formed fully. "You used to tell Father that healers were worse than ministers because at least ministers stopped talking when dismissed."

Seralyne’s rocking continued, but there was the slightest shift in her breathing. Tharionson noticed it and held onto it like a man gripping a thread above a pit.

"I don’t know what to do," he admitted, the words quieter now, meant only for her, even if she could not truly hear them. "I can command soldiers. I can pressure the court. I can send men across every road in this kingdom. I can make nobles lower their heads and pretend they respect the crown for another day. But this..."

He looked at her hands, at the tremble in her fingers, and his jaw tightened.

"This is you. And I don’t know how to fight what I can’t see. I don’t know how to bring you back by force. I don’t know how to be useful here."

The queen’s lips kept moving.

Tharionson leaned in slightly, careful and slow. "Mother?"

Her whispering became a little clearer, though still uneven. At first, he caught only sounds, then fragments, then something that made him still completely.

"The Severance Decree," Seralyne murmured.

Tharionson’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"The Severance Decree," she repeated, the words barely above breath. Her rocking slowed. "The Severance Decree. The Severance Decree."

A chill moved through him, not because the phrase itself carried meaning he understood, but because she said it with the rhythm of someone reciting something buried deep. It was not like her usual broken mumbling.

It had shape. Repetition. Weight.

Tharionson searched his memory at once, pushing through laws, royal edicts, military commands, old court procedures, wartime rulings, and historical decrees he had read during his training. Solara had countless legal records, some still active, some ceremonial, some buried in archives no one touched unless a scholar or a desperate minister had reason to disturb them. He knew the major ones. He knew every decree connected to military mobilization, noble succession, demon war protocol, border authority, and emergency taxation.

The Severance Decree meant nothing to him.

He shifted closer by a careful inch. "Mother," he said softly, though urgency had begun to enter his voice despite his effort to restrain it. "What decree? What is the Severance Decree?"

Seralyne did not look at him. Her eyes remained fixed near the floor as her lips trembled around the same phrase. "The Severance Decree. The Severance Decree. The Severance Decree."

"Mother, listen to me," Tharionson said, still gentle, though his heart had begun beating harder. "I need you to tell me what that means. Is it Solarian? Is it from Father’s court? Is it connected to Serah? To the old trials? Mother, please."

At that, Seralyne stopped.

The stillness was so sudden that Tharionson froze with her. Her rocking ceased entirely. Her hands loosened around the robe. For the first time since he had entered the chamber, her eyes moved with awareness, slowly lifting from the floor until they found his face.

Tharionson forgot how to breathe for a moment. The terror clouding her expression had not vanished completely, but something else had surfaced through it, something painfully familiar. Her gaze cleared just enough for him to see his mother in it.

Not the queen. Not the broken woman trapped in episodes. His mother.

Her eyes filled with tears, and her face softened in a way that nearly undid him.

"Tharion..." she whispered, but it was not his father’s name in full. It was the old shortened form she had sometimes used for him when he was younger, before court expectations had turned even names into formal things. "My boy..."

The words struck him harder than any accusation from court ever could. His throat tightened, and for one foolish, desperate second, he believed she had returned. He reached toward her, not quickly, but with all the restrained hope he had been denying himself for weeks.

"I’m here," he said. "I’m right here."

Seralyne’s tearful eyes remained on him, and her lips parted as though she wanted to say more. Then her gaze shifted.

It moved past him.

Tharionson felt the change before he understood it. Her pupils widened. The color drained from her face. The softness in her expression collapsed into raw, animal terror as she stared at something over his shoulder, something behind him, something that did not exist in the room he could see.

The air seemed to tighten around them.

Tharionson turned his head instinctively, one hand moving toward the weapon at his side, but there was nothing there. Only the covered mirror along the far wall, the muted curtains, the faint curl of incense smoke, and the stillness of a room too quiet for the horror on his mother’s face.

Seralyne screamed.