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chapter 22: Helplessness
publish date:
2026-07-25 07:13:03
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The crown system: four kings bound to me chapter 32: found
She woke up slowly, which was somehow worse than waking up all at once. Her head throbbed in a dull, steady rhythm, and for a long moment she couldn't remember why she was lying on something cold and hard instead of her own bed. Then it came back in pieces. The ruin. The lanterns. The cloth pressed over her mouth. She forced her eyes open. The room was small, stone walls on every side, no windows that she could see. A single lantern burned somewhere out of her direct line of sight, throwing enough light to make out shapes but not enough to see clearly. She tried to sit up and immediately discovered her wrists were bound in front of her, wrapped in something that hummed faintly against her skin, cold in a way normal rope never was. Mana-suppressing cuffs. She'd read about them once, in passing, during a lecture she'd barely paid attention to. She hadn't expected to ever actually wear a pair. "You're awake." The voice came from a corner of the room she hadn't looked at yet, and s
The crown system: four kings bound to me Chapter 31: A Trap
The first clue was the smell, Lucian noticed it almost as soon as the chaos in the courtyard started to thin out, once the last of the hellhounds had either been cut down or driven back through the breach. Underneath the smoke and the burnt mana, there was something else clinging to the scorched patch of dirt where Auriel had last been standing. Something faintly sweet, almost floral, completely out of place against the sulfur stink of everything else. He knelt beside the mark for a long moment, close enough that some of the healers glanced over at him with concern, and forced himself to actually think instead of just reacting. He'd smelled that exact scent once before, years ago, in a lecture hall during a unit on tracking magic he'd barely paid attention to at the time. A binding agent used to stabilize short range portals. Rare. Expensive. Not something a wild creature carried on it naturally. Somebody had built that barghest a door, and set it loose specifically to walk through
The crown system: four kings bound to me Chapter 30: Missing
The infirmary was packed by the time the sun came up. Cots lined every open space along the walls, most of them filled, healers moving between them so fast their robes barely settled before they were off to the next patient. The air smelled like burnt mana and crushed herbs, sharp enough that it stung the back of the throat. Somewhere near the entrance, a first year was crying, more from shock than pain, while an older student tried to calm her down with a hand on her shoulder and no real words that helped.Kael sat on the edge of one of the cots, letting a healer wrap a bandage around his forearm, his jaw tight in a way that had nothing to do with the pain."You're lucky," the healer muttered, tying off the bandage. "Another inch and that would've hit the tendon.""Yeah," Kael said. "Lucky."He didn't sound like he believed it.Across the room, Orion stood near the doorway with his arms crossed, watching the chaos with the same still, calculating expression he wore whenever something
The crown system: four kings bound to me Chapter 29: the battle
The ward cracked open with a sound like ice breaking under too much weight, and then everything happened at once. They came through the gap in a pack of hellhounds, unmistakably, though nothing like the storybook version Auriel had grown up hearing about. These were bigger, leaner, their black hides steaming faintly in the cold night air, eyes burning a dull orange where a normal dog's would catch the light. She'd read about them in passing during one of Professor Aldren's lectures — creatures bound to old battlefields, drawn to concentrations of mana and blood. She'd never expected to actually see one, let alone a dozen crossing the training field at once. "Stay close," Lucian said, already moving, positioning himself half a step ahead of her as the first wave broke past the collapsing barrier line. She stayed close. For a while, it actually worked. They fought back to back through the first stretch of chaos, and there was something almost steadying about it. his blade catching
The crown system: four kings bound to me chapter 28: An Attack
Light swallowed everything. For a single heartbeat, the world vanished beneath a blinding white brilliance, and Auriel threw an arm over her face on instinct, squeezing her eyes shut against the searing glare. When the light finally began to recede—bleeding from pure white into a deep, pulsing gold—she slowly lowered her arm to find the courtyard had descended into chaos.Professors shouted commands over one another. Students stumbled backward behind hastily erected barriers of shimmering blue mana, their frightened whispers swallowed by the growing uproar. At the center of it all, the towering doors of the Hall of Arms stood wide open, pouring streams of golden radiance across the stone steps like liquid sunlight."Stay behind me." Lucian was already moving, placing himself between her and the hall, one hand outstretched slightly, as though he intended to physically stop her if she tried to go any farther."What's happening?" Auriel asked, barely able to hear her own voice over the n
The crown system: four kings bound to me Chapter 27: The Anomaly
For a moment, neither of them moved.Orion's expression had already smoothed itself back into something composed, something almost convincingly normal, but Auriel had seen it—that flicker of raw emotion before he'd caught himself, dark and sharp enough to leave an impression even after it vanished. Whatever had been in that letter, it wasn't nothing."Sorry," she said carefully, still standing in the doorway. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I just saw the light on.""You're not interrupting," Orion said, his voice even, though his hand drifted briefly to his pocket, as if to confirm the letter was still safely out of sight. "I was just finishing up some correspondence."She wanted to ask. The question sat right there at the front of her mind—*what was that letter, and why did it make you look like that*—but something about the careful blankness he'd wrapped around himself told her pushing wouldn't get her anywhere. Not tonight, at least."Long day," she offered instead, stepping back fro
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