The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 110: Volume 4: Chapter 102 – The Lions

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Volume 4: Chapter 102 – The Lions The mountain lions did not like being approached. They had followed Meredith this far on habit and scent and the residue of Theodric’s conditioning. Their ears twitched; their tails lashed. The three mountain lions paced the courtyard perimeter, muscles bunching wrong under corrupted flesh. Yara reached out with the Sapphire, not bothering to suppress it this time. The futures were brief: One collapsing mid-patrol in two days, heart finally giving out. The other tearing its own tendons during a charge tomorrow. The final one's spine buckles under the weight of misplaced armor, paralyzing the beast. All three ended with Theodric's shoddy work consuming them from the inside. She looked at the dead guards' armor on the sledge, then at Harry. "Do you think we can use their memories?" she asked. "Make the armor teach the lions how to hold together?" Harry's gaze slid to the nearest cat. His shard bristled in recognition, the same pattern, badly executed. "Only one way to know." Yara took one step toward them and felt her Gem stiffen again, offended. Harry moved instead. The nearest lion turned its head as he approached. Its nostrils flared. It smelled the shard in him. Both of them. Its hackles rose automatically, then slowly eased, like some deep, half-formed part of its brain recognized kin and could not decide whether to fight or curl up. Harry extended one hand. The lion’s lips peeled back from its teeth, but it did not retreat. It settled, slightly, shoulders dropping a fraction. “Easy,” Harry said, voice pitched lower, rumbling in his chest. “A butcher made you. Let us see if we can make you less likely to fall apart.” Daryl stood a safe distance away. “If it eats you, I get your room,” he muttered. Shadow ignored him. Yara knelt by the door-sledge and pulled one set of armor free. It was the captain’s. Breastplate engraved with Eldania’s crest, helm with a distinctive plume socket, pauldrons scraped and dented in the pattern of someone who had stood between their ruler and a lot of bad decisions. The blood had been wiped off in haste. Daryl’s doing, probably. The metal was still warm to the touch. Yara lifted the breastplate. “Hold it against his chest,” she told Harry. He did. The armor was not shaped for a lion, but that stopped mattering as soon as the shard-laced power flared. Harry reached inward, not to his own muscles this time, but to the threads that connected him to Cedric, Alys, and Borin now. He felt how Theodric’s residue had twisted them and how his shard had straightened that twist. He reached for the same wrongness in the lion. It was everywhere. Muscles thickened in the wrong places. Nerves looped back on themselves like someone had knotted them for fun. Bones were overgrown in some spots and thinned in others, making each step a gamble. He growled low. Yara laid her hand over his, fingers pressing into the metal. “Use the armor,” she said softly. “The memory in it. The shape. It knows how to protect. Let it teach this body how to be something more than a weapon that will break.” Her Gem opened, just a little, sending a thread of pattern down through Harry’s hand. He felt it. The impression of years of drill in the yard. Of nights spent at attention by a door. Of the moment, this armor’s last wearer had turned and taken an arrow that had been meant for a queen. Harry’s shard drank that in. Then he pushed. Green-gold light exploded where the breastplate touched fur. The lion roared, a sound that tore the morning in half. Fur burned away around the point of contact, leaving raw flesh that glowed from the inside. The breastplate softened, edges running like wax. The crest melted, then re-formed in a different configuration, lines sharper, deeper. The metal sank. It did not sit on top of the lion. It went in. Flesh parted around it like water around a plunging stone, then sealed over the edges. Ribs flared, then popped as the armor slid between them, fusing to bone. The lion’s b