Chapter 10 #2
Draven's hazel eyes met mine. A flicker of acknowledgment. Then he gestured—my turn.
I let Shadow Fire build in my palms and pushed it toward him. His cognitive shield rose to meet it.
We cycled through it. Attack, shield, reset. Attack, shield, reset. Each round I sharpened my strikes; each round his shields grew steadier.
We fell into a rhythm that felt natural.
Across the grounds, I caught flashes of Raze and Lunessa.
He was all energy and movement, throwing bursts of electrical charge that she deflected with precise, economical wards.
Her defensive magic was beautiful, actually.
Precise in a way that made my own shields look like finger painting.
But unlike her assessment, she was in it now—grinning when a ward landed clean, trash-talking Raze between volleys.
"That the best you've got, Ulrich? My tattoos hit harder than that."
Raze barked a laugh and threw a charge twice the size of his last one. Lunessa's ward caught it an inch from her face, split it in half, and sent both halves sizzling into the dirt on either side of her boots. She didn't flinch.
"Noted," Raze said, still grinning.
I almost laughed. Almost.
"Switch," Theron called from somewhere behind us.
Draven and I reversed—my turn to strike, his turn to shield.
The dynamic shifted.
When I pushed magic toward him, when I let Shadow Fire build in my palms and directed it at his position, his psychic awareness opened up in response. Heat intensified. An incubus learning to wield psychic magic, the combination amplifying his natural presence.
Pressure against my focus. Heat against skin.
I felt his attention. The careful, controlled way he tracked every shift in my stance, every breath, every micro-expression.
My magic stuttered.
My concentration fractured for half a second. The Shadow Fire I'd been building flickered, and I felt the energy scatter sideways instead of forward.
"Little one," Thalon's voice. "You know what he is. Center yourself. Find the thread between us."
I did know. I pulled my focus back to my core, to the bond, to the steady golden thread that connected me to my dragon. The magic re-stabilized.
Draven's shield solidified a heartbeat later. I saw the effort it cost him. He was learning this magic in real time, the same way I'd learned mine.
My Shadow Fire hit his shield clean, and he exhaled.
The slip had already happened.
And Theron was already there.
He materialized at my side like he'd been watching from three feet away the entire time—which, knowing him, he probably had. His hand closed around my wrist, adjusting my stance, and the contact sent a completely different kind of charge through me. The calluses on his palm against my pulse point.
"Your anchor point dropped," he said. "When you channel offensive magic, your center of gravity needs to stay here—" He pressed two fingers against my solar plexus, and my breath caught anyway.
"—not here." He tapped my collarbone. "You're pulling the energy up into your chest instead of directing it outward. It disperses. Try again."
He was close enough that I could smell leather and cedar. His emerald eyes finally met mine, and for one fraction of a second, the clinical mask slipped.
Recognition moved behind it.
Then it was gone. He stepped back. Moved on. Already calling something to Raze about his footwork.
I reset. Drew the magic up again—from my solar plexus this time, grounding it low, directing it forward. The Shadow Fire bloomed and hit Draven's hastily raised shield with a satisfying crack.
His hazel eyes held mine for a beat. He'd seen Theron's hands on me. He'd felt the shift in my emotional state through his psychic sensitivity.
And he'd filed it away with the same quiet precision he applied to everything.
"You are worth having, little one," Thalon said. "Let them work to earn you, not the reverse."
"Enough for you, maybe. I've got a higher bar to clear."
"Only because you insist on setting it there. Stubborn creature."
The session ran another forty minutes. By the end, my arms ached, my magic felt stretched thin, and I'd successfully landed three clean Shadow Fire strikes and held a Golden Shield against Draven's strongest psychic press without wavering.
Small victories. Real ones.
Lunessa's wards had grown faster. I'd watched her deflect one of Raze's electrical bursts so precisely it ricocheted back and singed his boot. He'd laughed. She'd laughed too, a quick bright sound that broke through the training-ground tension.
She'd dropped the wisecracks, though the warmth underneath them was more visible now—exertion stripped the performance layer off people.
Theron stood at the front of our loose formation, emerald eyes moving over each of us with the same assessing weight as before. But this time, he didn't dismiss us immediately.
"You're bonded Riders now. That's not a title—it's a target.
" His gaze swept the line, and I felt the weight of it settle on me, on Draven, on each of us in turn.
"Every faction on these grounds has an opinion about this cohort.
The Council is watching. The Lord Protector is watching.
People who want you to fail are watching. "
He paused. Let that sink in.
"So when I say adequate, understand—adequate keeps you alive for exactly one mission. I need better than adequate. I need it fast."
Silence.
For the others, adequate was a challenge. A bar to clear.
For me—the human, the first, the one who'd already spent a lifetime being told she was barely tolerated—adequate had always meant not enough.
I felt the resolve sharpen in my chest. And beneath it, the fear I couldn't quite silence, that I was the weak link Valen had been sent here to expose.
"Tomorrow morning, Threat Assessment with the full cohort. Afternoon, back here with me. Dismissed."
Raze clapped Lunessa on the shoulder—she elbowed him in the ribs without breaking stride, and he wheezed a laugh.
And Valen—
I caught it because I was looking for it. Because I knew.
He stood slightly apart, rolling his shoulders like he was working out a kink from training. But his red eyes weren't on us.
They were on the dragons.
His gaze moved with clinical precision—tracking Talven's storm-silver wings as static crackled along the edges, lingering on the seismic hum that radiated from Kaelthar's smoke-grey form, pausing on Thalon's scales where obsidian shifted to gold.
He was cataloguing bond-magic signatures. Elemental affinities. Power outputs.
The riders.
And the dragons.
What is he looking for?
His gaze finally shifted. Found mine. He smiled.
I turned away, toward Anya, toward the path back to the Guild. But the cold had already settled in my chest.
I didn't know what he'd found. Only that he'd found something.
And that whatever it was—he wanted me to know he'd seen it.