The silence in the bowels of the ancient prison had never seemed so oppressive. Not a cry, not an alarm, not even a hum of human voices - only the dull, rhythmic echo of the pickaxe against limestone, Mordred’s steady breathing condensing in the tunnel’s icy air, and that subtle tension gleaming in his eyes like a blade at rest, ready to slit the throat of the first danger.
Days had passed since he had injected his blood into Adrien’s frail body. Seven days exactly. He was counting. He always counted.
The child was well. Better than well, even. Every hesitant step he took in the damp corridors, every word he spoke with that still-fragile adolescent voice, every sigh he breathed while sleeping resonated in Mordred’s consciousness like a whisper caught in a distant echo. A pulsation, an almost imperceptible but constant frequency that he perceived whether during nights in this prison converted into a refuge or during the endless days in the slave camps where dragons penned them like cattle.
And the more he grew accustomed to it, the more this invisible surveillance seemed natural to him. Almost essential. Like breathing.
He stopped in his construction gallery, nearly fifty meters underground, and wiped the salty sweat beading on his forehead marked by years of war. The metal of his pickaxe was reddened with traces of blood - his own, voluntary. A fine cut at the tip of his left middle finger, maintained daily, still let an scarlet drop pearl that he wiped against the sleeve of an old faded military t-shirt.
His muscles, sculpted by his SS-rank hunter statistics, did not tremble despite the hours spent digging. His magic, that raw force flowing in his veins like a swollen river, stabilized each blow, multiplied each effort. He could dig for days without weakening. He had done it before.
- "Adrien is safe... No dragon seems to be making contact with him. Could I have been wrong?"
But the voice in his head, that dark part of himself that had kept him alive during the invasion, immediately responded with that implacable logic he had learned to respect:
- "What if the others weren’t? What if one of them was a spy? What if one of them was already compromised?"
He remained motionless for a long moment, breathing slow and controlled, his gaze lost in the tunnel’s darkness that stretched before him like a promise of escape. Or like a tomb.
Thirty-two had joined him now. Thirty-two survivors. Thirty-two fragments of broken humanity, pieced back together as best they could by hope and fear. They lived, ate, slept under the same damp vault as him, shared the same nightmares populated with scales and fire. And yet, he knew nothing. Nothing of what they really thought when they believed themselves alone. Nothing of what they whispered in the shadows when he turned his back. Nothing of their true loyalties.
And this ignorance... now seemed unacceptable to him. Dangerous. Deadly.
- "What I did for Adrien... I must do for all the others."
Not out of paranoia. Not out of cruelty. But out of pure and simple necessity. In this world where dragons had reduced humanity to slavery, where collaborators swarmed like rats, where death could come from a friendly smile, knowing was surviving. And surviving was all that mattered.
It all began with a series of simple, daily, invisible gestures. Gestures he had perfected during his years as a hunter, when he had to infiltrate enemy bases, when he had to gather information without arousing suspicion.
Mordred showed himself more present in moments of mutual aid. He mended a torn sleeve with an artisan’s patience, he placed a bandage on a cut with a surgeon’s precision, he offered a bowl of hot soup with a father’s benevolence... always with a fleeting contact. A caress on the forearm, a friendly pat on the shoulder, a reassuring hand on a feverish child’s forehead. Sufficient for a tiny needle of mana to pierce the skin like a pin through silk.
And in that needle, a single drop of his blood. Dormant.
The blood didn’t fuse like an offensive spell, nor even like a healing blessing. It insinuated itself. It remained there. Silent. Inert. But ready to vibrate like a harp string if something went wrong. It was a technique he had developed during the war, a diverted application of his SS hunter magic. A tenuous but indelible link.
He began with the adults closest to him. Former civilians, for the most part. Flayed alive by defeat. Wary as wild animals. Men and women who had seen their families burn, their cities collapse, their hopes extinguished in the roar of dragons.
It took him days to find opportunities. Always with calm. Never abrupt. Never hasty.
- "Is your leg better?" he asked one evening to Pierre, a former carpenter with calloused hands and haunted eyes.
- "I still have trouble putting weight on it, but it’s okay. Those bastards broke my tibia with their claws."
Mordred knelt on the damp stone floor, unrolled a bandage soaked in warm water that he had heated with his magic.
- "I read somewhere that heat helps healing. And it warms the spirits too."
A hint of humor. A reassuring attitude. The perfect mask of the benevolent protector.
He wrapped the wounded leg, gently pressed the swollen flesh. And in this gesture, imperceptible, the fine mana needle slipped into the calf, barely deeper than a plucked hair. The blood entered. The information registered in Mordred like a score in a musician’s mind.
Pierre. Stable heart. Normal breathing. No suspicious vibration. No lie detected.
He repeated the process. Each night, each day. A secret, methodical, almost ritual routine. Children were the easiest. They weren’t suspicious. They sought help, comfort, a reassuring arm in this world turned hostile. Mordred smiled at them, told them stories from before the invasion while he applied ointment to a wound, while he rubbed a bump or treated a scraped knee.
And beneath this calculated gentleness... the bite of the needle.
- "Thank you, Mordred," said Elina, eight years old, one evening after he had treated a cut she had made while playing with a metal shard.
He placed a hand on her blonde head, like a benevolent big brother, and felt the softness of her fine hair under his fingers.
- "Sleep well, little star."
Her too. Marked. Watched. Protected.
A week passed. Seven days during which Mordred dug by day and watched by night, juggling between his two identities: the liberator and the spy, the protector and the jailer.
And the mental map gradually drew itself in his head like an invisible constellation.
Blurred silhouettes, relative positions. Heartbeats, voice pulsations. He knew who slept peacefully, who woke with a start haunted by nightmares, who stirred in the shadows prey to nocturnal anxieties. He knew when Adrien isolated himself to meditate, seeking in solitude a peace he could not find. When Ilwan, the former officer, spoke too quietly in a secluded corner with other former military men. When Serrah, the young woman who had lost her child in the invasion, wept silently in her cell.
- "I have become their shadow. Their guardian angel. Or their jailer."
There was no longer any distinction. No more room for naivety. No more room for blind trust.
There was no more room for error.
Every heartbeat that accelerated without reason, every breath that became labored, every suspicious movement in the darkness was immediately reported to his consciousness. It was exhausting. It was necessary.
One evening, as he was putting his tools back in their place in an old surveillance locker converted into a shed, Livia entered discreetly. She always moved , like a cat, her years of resistance having accustomed her to discretion. But Mordred had heard her coming from the corridor - his SS hunter senses were too sharp for her to surprise him.
- "You’ve been here for two hours... you’ve almost dug to Orly."
He answered without turning around, continuing to methodically clean his tools.
- "The pillars need reinforcing. Otherwise the gallery will collapse at the next water infiltration."
She stared at him for a moment, in silence. In the darkness, her eyes shone with a worry she was trying to hide.
- "Do you sleep one day, or have you decided to die standing up?"
He slowly turned his head, stared at her. His gaze was neither hostile nor annoyed. Just... tired. Infinitely tired.
He slowly shrugged his shoulders, a gesture that seemed to carry the weight of the world.
She said nothing. But her gaze lingered a little longer than usual, as if she were trying to pierce the secrets that were accumulating behind his eyes.
That evening, alone in his spartan cell, he sat in total darkness, crossed his arms over his knees and closed his eyes. Immediately, his mind connected to the invisible network he had woven.
The voices reached him, one by one, like whispers carried on the wind.
A regular breath - Pierre sleeping deeply, exhausted by his day of work in the dragon mines.
An inaudible murmur - Serrah still reciting her dead child’s name again and again, like a prayer or a curse.
A child turning in his sleep - little Marcus still dreaming he was running in the fields before the invasion.
And thanks to his blood now flowing in their veins, thanks to this invisible surveillance he had woven like a spider’s web, he would find them all.
For in this world where humanity was dying under the claws of dragons, where each day could be the last, where each smile could hide a blade, Mordred had learned a terrible but necessary truth:
To protect those he loved, he sometimes had to become what he fought.
And that night, in the cold bowels of their refuge, he fully accepted this truth.
The hunter had become the shadow.
The shadow had become the guardian.
And the guardian never slept.