The King's Guard

Chapter 18

Kael adjusted the collar of his training tunic and lingered near the east wing archery range, where the morning sun had yet to breach the frost-laced flagstones. Pale light filtered through the high, arched windows, catching faintly on the racks of longbows, each one unstrung and aligned with military precision. The air still carried the night’s chill.

He was early, though not unreasonably so. Reyna rarely kept him waiting. He cast a glance towards the slate-grey sky, then turned back towards the quiet stillness of the range.

She appeared minutes later, brisk steps cutting softly across the stone. Her hair was damp, sticking slightly to her neck, and a fine sheen of sweat lined the collar of her tunic. She ran a hand through her hair, pushing it back from her face with a familiar gesture.

“Sorry. Sparring drills with the twins overran. They’ve started copying each other mid-cast now, takes twice as long to correct.” Her tone was flat, bordering on dry, but not insincere.

Kael didn’t answer, just nodded once, and they moved into place with any further ado.

Their routine required no instruction. Practice formations first: step and pivot, breath held, then released. Rune alignments next, slow and deliberate, each tracing pattern refined through repetition. Timing drills followed, requiring near-silent coordination, neither of them speaking more than necessary. There was a comfort in it—an ease born of trust.

They moved well together, the way you did when you stopped thinking about it. Kael matched her tempo almost instinctively now, his deflections fitting between her strikes, his focus complementing her precision. When she dropped low into a sweep, he adjusted without needing to see it. When he shifted balance for a mirrored feint, she was already rotating.

Refinement—small pauses in tempo to measure footwork, brief trials of layered resistance in a ward weave, subtle changes in pressure mid-cast. Reyna always preferred subtlety. Kael had learnt to value the same.

When the drills ended, they packed their equipment in efficient silence. Gloves pulled off, straps retightened, sigil chalks returned to their cases.

Reyna nudged his shoulder with hers, light and deliberate. “You’ve stopped flinching when I cast beside you.”

“I didn’t flinch,” Kael said flatly, though a corner of his mouth twitched. After a breath, he added, “Not anymore.”

Reyna gave a half-smile, the kind that didn’t quite reach her eyes but meant more because of it. She tugged her gloves on tighter, leather creaking. “You’ll make it through.”

Kael’s gaze slid to the side. “We’ll see.”

Later, he was alone again, sitting on the worn edge of the mess hall steps, elbows resting on his knees. The sky had grown heavier, a low smothering grey pressing down over the training courts.

Kyna approached without announcement, arms folded, stance rigid but not confrontational. She didn’t sit. She just stood, eyes narrowed, scanning him like she was weighing a decision.

“Hey, Kyna. What's up with the sudden attitude, buddy?”

“You do realise House Varion doesn’t forget slights,” she said at last.

Kael blinked, frowning. “What are you on about?”

“You really haven’t noticed?” Kyna gave a short exhale, something like disbelief. “Instructors marking you without reason, your training schedule constantly shuffled, squads avoiding you like you’ve got blood magic leaking from your boots?”

Kael didn’t reply immediately. He had noticed small oddities, and adjustments that made little sense. A duelling partner switched last-minute. A missing rune crystal. Brief hesitations in instructors’ tones when reading his results.

He’d chalked it up to the usual mess of the Academy’s inner politics.

“I thought it was disorganisation,” he said slowly.

“It’s not,” Kyna replied. “And thinking it is won’t save you from what’s coming.”

“I’m not about to start accusing people of sabotage.”

“No,” she said, her gaze sharpening. “But you’d better stop pretending they’re not trying.”

She turned and walked away without another word, leaving Kael staring at the empty step beside him.

Surface routine remained unchanged. Kael filed reports, completed drills, attended lectures. To the casual observer, he was fine. But beneath it, things were shifting.

During a shield timing exercise, a fire crystal detonated half a second too early. The flare missed its mark and nearly singed the left sleeve off a first-year. The supervising officer blamed faulty calibration. Kael had been the one to trigger it.

During a strategy assessment, half of Kael’s response pages vanished. Instructor Maelen shrugged without concern. “Must’ve misfiled them in the archives.”

The next morning, Kael’s practice sword was not his own. It was the same length, same material, but heavier. The weight was just enough to unsettle his footwork, and it had cost him form points during group rotation.

None of it was provable. None of it traced back to Jared. But Kael wasn’t naive enough to dismiss it any longer.

Reyna started lingering after drills, staying late even when she didn’t need to. They didn’t talk much, sometimes not at all. But she walked beside him through the courtyards, sat across from him in the quieter wings of the library, moved with him through the noise like a shadow he hadn’t asked for but quietly relied on.

One evening, as they crossed through the long corridor beneath the north archives, Reyna slowed, her fingers trailing the wall’s etched stonework.

“I think someone’s testing you,” she said quietly.

Kael glanced at her. “Testing what, exactly?”

“Not your strength,” she replied. “Your threshold. How much they can throw before you bend, not break, but enough to see if you flinch.”

“I’m not going to,” he said, perhaps too quickly.

She didn’t look at him. “Don’t be proud. Be smart.”

The next formal evaluation was the Field Relic Retrieval: standardised mock missions run every term. Pairs were dispatched into the Academy’s surrounding woods, issued a rune compass, a limited supply pack, and coordinates for a hidden relic usually flagged with tracking glyphs. The task: locate, retrieve, return. Time, coordination, and composure were assessed.

Kael was paired with Reyna.

They were among the last to be dispatched, the late-afternoon light already dimming by the time they crossed the perimeter checkpoint. Reyna adjusted her gloves once more, then took the lead without comment. Kael followed, watching the shadows stretch beneath the trees.

The forest was quiet. No actual danger, only illusion-based constructs, harmless simulations of low-tier threats triggered by proximity. They moved steadily, the rune compass flickering now and then, but mostly holding.

About half an hour in, the device began to falter: first a soft clicking sound, then a slow oscillation of the centre glyph.

Kael turned it in his palm. “It’s not responding properly.”

Reyna crouched near a tree, examining a rune carved just beneath the bark. “Could be jamming or layered misdirection spells.”

But her voice was tight. She didn’t believe it either.

They tried a new heading. Then another. On the third attempt, the compass flared once, then died completely—its central light fading to a dull, unresponsive grey.

Kael exhaled through his nose. “That’s not standard.”

“No,” Reyna agreed, her brow furrowed. “It isn’t.”

They backtracked cautiously, scanning for the torch markers that denoted boundary trails. But the ones they found seemed off: placed too far apart, too faint in hue, as if someone had tampered with their charge.

Kael dropped to one knee beside a tangle of roots. His voice was low. “I think we’re being herded.”

Reyna kept her eyes forward. “Herded where?”

He didn’t answer. The forest gave no clues.

When the first attack came, it made no sound. A flicker of movement, then a blur—a crude animus shade, poorly formed but fast. It lunged, bypassing Kael’s reactive barrier by sheer velocity. His ward flared, held just long enough to stagger it.

Reyna was already in motion, calling a short, sharp current of windlight that cut through the projection, scattering it like mist.

Another followed. Then a third.

They were unrefined constructs. Glitches in their sigil framework made their outlines flicker, but there were too many, too persistent, for a normal trial.

“This isn’t part of the evaluation,” Reyna muttered, driving a spark glyph into the dirt. The light it released was too bright for a simulation.

Kael raised a defensive glyph, grounding it beneath their feet. “Someone’s changed the parameters.”

“Not just that,” she said. Her expression had sharpened. “This isn’t just a test.”

Kael met her eyes. “It’s a message.”

She nodded, just once. “Someone’s watching to see what you’ll do next.”

Eventually, they reached the relic site. But it had been moved. The pedestal still bore old scorch marks.

Kael crouched, running his fingers along the stone. The surface was rougher than it should’ve been: scoured, as though someone had tried to erase more than just dust.

“Do you hear that?” Reyna asked suddenly.

He tilted his head, frowning. At first, there was nothing but the faint whistle of wind threading through the pines. Then a soft, unnatural click. Metallic. Precise.

Kael turned sharply.

The ground lurched beneath them. With barely enough time to shout, the floor gave way. The illusion shattered like glass.

They both dropped—only a short fall, perhaps two metres, into a dry chamber masked by runes. The impact jolted his knees, but not dangerously so.

He blinked up at the hole above them. “That wasn’t in the map brief.”

“Not standard,” Reyna muttered, brushing dust from her trousers. Her tone was clipped, irritated, but not surprised.

Kael glanced around. The space was narrow, walls lined with faint sigils that pulsed once, then faded.

Reyna’s mouth thinned. “We need to report this.”

“We’ll have to find the exit first.”