The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 4: Chapter 3 — What Answered

Read chapter 4 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Chapter 3 — What Answered The sound came closer, a rasp of metal on stone, slow and deliberate. Yara pressed herself flatter against the cracked wall, every breath shallow. The noise wasn't boots or patrol armor. It was heavier, the drag of weight across uneven stone, something that didn't care if she heard it coming. Then the brute turned the corner. He filled the alley mouth completely, a mass of iron and steam that left no way around. Once he might have been a man, but the thing that stood there now was built from the scraps of a dozen dead soldiers: plates of mismatched iron wired together with chain and stripped leather. Steam leaked from the seams. His helm sat crooked, shadowing half a face that still breathed. Behind the visor slit, eyes glinted wetly, too bright. An axe hung from his hand, the edge nicked and dark with old oil, dragging sparks every time it struck the cobbles. He saw her. He lifted the axe. That was the whole conversation. The alley offered nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. If he hits once, she wouldn't move again. Yara's back scraped brick as she edged sideways. "Wait—don't—" she began, voice small and cracked. The axe rose. Muscles bunched. "Help," she whispered—reflex, the last useless habit left over from prayers that never worked. "Please, somebody—help me—" The air collapsed around her. Cold poured through her spine, sharp and absolute, the stillness before thunder breaks. Okay. The word wasn't heard. It happened. The axe fell. Yara moved without choosing to. Her hand came up, and the world bent outward. A pulse of green light erupted from her palm and hit the brute full in the chest. The blow folded his armor inward with a sound like a bell breaking. Steam burst from his seams, metal screeching against itself. He staggered, caught his balance, and looked at her with those too-bright yellow-green eyes, more surprised than hurt. Something inside her stuttered. The cold she'd felt a heartbeat ago hadn't left; it was coiling through her ribs, shaping itself, asking to be used. Again. Her body obeyed before thought caught up. The second blast struck lower and sharper, denting the armor until it split. The brute stumbled back, dropped the axe, and fell forward hard enough to shake the ground. The echo rolled through her bones. Silence. Then the hiss of cooling metal. She stayed crouched until her lungs remembered how to breathe. When she moved, her legs were steady. Too steady. The tremor that should have followed wasn't there. Adrenaline burned it out, along with the ache in her ankle. She stood, still braced for him to move, and that was when she saw it: a faint shimmer across her forearm, the green glow felt like protection. It didn't feel like magic; it felt like instinct. A barrier answered the same voice. Answering the question she hadn't meant to ask. The shimmer pulsed once and faded, but the pressure stayed a shell wrapped close under her skin, humming with quiet approval. Yara exhaled slowly, throat raw. "Do the work, get paid," she muttered. Her voice sounded wrong, hollow. She crouched beside the body. The armor was caved in, slick with steam and soot. The exposed skin along the neck had taken on a strange pallor, not quite grey, not quite white. Almost chalky. She'd seen plenty of fresh corpses in the slums. They didn't look like this. Not this fast. She forced herself to check the pockets anyway: a buckle, three coins, a strip of dried meat, nothing worth dying over. Her fingers shook, but didn't stop. Motion meant control. When she finally stood, the air felt thick and wrong. The silence wasn't empty; it was waiting. Somewhere farther down the street, someone screamed a single, sharp note that ended too fast. She turned toward it. Fire licked at the far end of the lane, washing the stones in orange. Shadows moved between the flames, small, quick, jerky. For a heartbeat, she thought they were children. Then one looked up. Its eyes burned dull yellow, beady and too close together. The