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Unbound: Beyond Dominion

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Synopsis
In a world ruled by twelve Warlords who hoard the Creator’s shattered power, a scarred young drifter with a curse he can’t control becomes the Iron Wolf’s last, dangerous hope to break the Dominion... if his power doesn’t kill everyone first.
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Chapter 1 - Unbound — Chapter 1: The Iron Wolf

The Dominion wanted you to see it before you felt it. Banners snapped on the city walls, sunbursts and serpent coils bright against clean stone. The weight lived outside those walls. Scrap shacks leaned together, cookfires burned in shallow pits, and lanes went empty the instant gold armor showed up.

Estaron took the dirt road like a careful man. Hood low. Hands visible. Eyes mapping ladders, dips in the ground, and how far a shout would travel before the wind swallowed it.

Half a lane in, he stopped.

A boy drilled with a wooden sword. Bare feet. Bruised knuckles. Bad guard, good spine.

A hooded traveler was already there, crouched to the boy's height without crowding him. A slim black sword hung at his hip, its runes faint as breath.

"That guard will get you hurt," the traveler said. His voice was rough, the edges gentle. "Turn your lead foot in a little. Keep the blade across your chest, not above your head. Elbow loose. Chin down."

Two fingers tapped each correction. Exact. Steady.

The boy tried again. The cut came clean, with a small hiss that felt like an answer. He grinned. "Like that?"

"Exactly," the traveler said. "Remember this. A good defense keeps you alive when strength does not."

Estaron tucked the line away. It was what he would have told the kid.

The traveler moved on. Estaron waited until full dark, then slipped back to check on the boy. There was no family door to knock. Only a lean to behind a dead kiln, a pallet of rags, and a clay jug with yesterday's water. The kid looked up and tried not to look ashamed.

"Patrols are walking this side tonight," Estaron said. He set down a heel of bread and a strip of dried meat. "Sleep here, not in the road. If boots stop, you do not breathe loud enough to count."

A hard nod. "I will."

Estaron sat on the crumbled lip of the kiln and kept watch until the clatter of armor passed and faded. Then he stood. "Guard first," he said, and left the boy to the kind of sleep orphans learn.

Trouble came the next day on the outer road, where scrub burned silver in the heat.

Four soldiers and one Exalted in bright plate wandered up at an easy pace, their seams humming with shard light. The tall one from the tavern walked at the center. Polished. Bored with his own cruelty. The slum had emptied at the sight of gold. That was the lesson they wanted taught. Empty streets mean no one will step in.

The same boy stood there anyway. Wooden sword in both fists. Knees shaking, locked all the same.

"Leave us alone," he said. His voice did not crack.

The Exalted crouched to eye level, his gold cheek plate throwing back the sky. "Allow me to relieve you of the burden of life."

Estaron shifted his weight on the roofline.

Someone else reached the road first. The traveler stepped out of the shade of a broken wall like he had been there the whole time. Hood low. Black blade angled just right. No talk.

"Who are you," the Exalted asked, smiling.

The traveler did not answer. He adjusted his grip.

The first clash snapped like a coin off stone. The traveler's sword work was all economy. A quarter turn of the wrist erased a heavy swing. His feet slid on invisible rails. He met each strike and bled the force into the dirt. The boy behind him did not even rock back.

The smile thinned on the Exalted's face. Shard light crept over his plates like frost. He stepped harder, and the road dimpled. "Not bad," he said. "Now see how you look when I try."

Now it turned heavy.

Blocks rang. The traveler gave ground in even steps. The Exalted talked while he hit, which was tactic and cruelty in one. "Pretty guard. When it breaks, you will."

The traveler's hood slipped a little. A small silver ring on a cord slid out, tapped his sternum, and swung back. He flinched like it burned straight through leather and skin.

Hook inside the guard. A twist. The black sword skittered into the grass. In the same breath the Exalted slashed across the traveler's chest. Cloth split. A long red line opened. The traveler, Reyik, dropped to his knees and pulled a breath that did not land.

That was when everyone felt it.

The air pinched, then heated, as if a forge door had swung wide. Pressure climbed in the ears. Teeth ached. The fine hairs on arms stood up. Heat rolled off Reyik in slow bands. Thin cracks spread under his palm where the road could not hold the weight of him. The grass at his boots smoked at the tips.

Shard power feels warm and proud. This was not that. This was razor clean and furnace hot, pure energy with anger running through it like iron filings in milk.

The Exalted drew breath to jeer and never finished.

Reyik surged from his knees as if a spring had been released. He drove a shoulder into the man's middle and slammed him flat. He climbed on, knees trapping arms, hands fisting the helm. Then he started to punch.

Each strike crushed metal, then what lay under it. The visor caved. The cheek plate split. Teeth and blood spattered the stones. A strip of face plate snapped free and skipped across the road, which left skin and bone to meet the rock. Reyik's knuckles came up red and were red again on the next hit as the road ground the Exalted's features flat. Cartilage gave with a soft, awful crunch. One eye went dark under a smear. A loose tooth spun away like grit.

Every blow sent a shockwave through the ground. Heat pulsed with each impact. Cloth near him began to smoke. The four common soldiers stared at the ruin happening at their feet, at the air boiling off Reyik's shoulders. They ran. No order. No pride. A spear dropped. One tripped the other. They only wanted distance from whatever this was.

The boy took a half step forward on instinct, some mix of thanks and relief. A fresh wave rolled off Reyik in that instant.

Estaron dropped from the roof.

He hit the dirt, hauled the child in, and turned his own body into a wall. Heat clawed his cloak. The shock hammered his boots deeper into the road.

When the air settled, Estaron looked down. He had already shaped the words that tell a kid to breathe.

The boy's eyes were open. His chest did not move.

A thin, clean burn traced one cheek. Another mark blotched under his collarbone where the main force had struck. No breath. No sound to call back.

Estaron set him down as gently as a blade on cloth. He did not close the eyes, not yet. He turned to the road.

Reyik was still punching when the Exalted stopped being anything at all. The final blow pinned the head into shattered stone with a wet, final crack. Silence fell.

Reyik staggered to his feet, chest heaving. Heat still rolled off him, and the air wobbled. He turned toward the boy. His hands opened, palms up, as if he could give something back.

He saw the stillness. He understood what it meant.

One tear cut a clean line through the dust on his cheek. The white drained from his eyes. His knees failed. He sat hard, then slumped, then dropped. The small silver ring thumped against his chest as sleep took him.

Estaron stood over both of them for one heartbeat too long. He knelt, checked Reyik's pulse, strong and messy, then went to the boy one last time, a habit already too late. He closed the eyes now. He said nothing.

He lifted Reyik, settled the weight over his shoulders, and moved.

He left the outskirts by ways that do not look like ways. A broken fence line. A dry ditch that turns into a path if you know where to look. A seam in the wall that opens if you press the right stone. The banners on the city kept snapping. The wind did not care.

The Wolf's Den waited in the hills behind a line of black pines, an old ruin that Estaron had hammered into a home. A sentry saw the cloak and the weight he carried and opened without asking questions that did not matter.

Estaron carried Reyik past the fire and the voices and into a quiet room with a scarred oak table and a chest of bandages. He laid him out and started the work.

Cuts. Bruises. A deep slash across the chest where steel had kissed bone. Heat rash along the forearms where his own power had blown back. While Estaron watched, the new damage began to fix itself. Edges drew together. Swelling eased. It was not flashy. It was steady. The body knew its job.

Then he lifted the shirt farther to check ribs, and the lamplight found the old work.

Rope marks around the throat, white and deep. Raised lines across chest and ribs, as if someone had written pain into him. Small round burn scars along the side. Those did not change. They did not even twitch. The body hurried to mend what was new and left the old alone, as if some part of him refused to let them go.

"Anchors," Estaron said, very quietly. The word was not for Reyik. He slept the kind of sleep that comes after a storm. It was for the truth of what he was seeing.

Estaron cleaned the chest wound and bound it anyway. Habit. Respect. He left the ring where it lay, warm against bone. He stood there for a moment longer than a commander should and saw too much. A brutal past. A gift that could end wars or start worse ones. A man who might be the answer if he learned to hold himself together.

"You are trouble," Estaron said, voice steady, a little warmth leaking through the steel. "Maybe the end of it."

He turned the lamp down to a soft glow, told the guard, "No one wakes him unless the walls are coming down," and stepped into the hall where soup, questions, and the next fight were already waiting.