Chapter 33 Solomon
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Solomon
The painting hung above the mantle in our estate, where it had been since before I was born.
My mother sat in a chair with her dark hair unbound, silver eyes turned toward the artist. My father stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other at his side. Farmon Theron, Beta to King Altun. The most respected lycan in Veyndral outside of the royal bloodline.
He looked younger in the painting. His jaw was set the same way mine set when I was thinking, and his eyes carried the same stillness I saw in my own reflection.
The resemblance had always been uncomfortable.
A reminder that I was built from the blueprint of a man who’d walked through a portal twenty-four years ago and never walked back.
I turned from the painting and sat at his desk.
The study was exactly as he’d left it. Maps pinned to the walls, journals stacked in date order.
His handwriting on the labels, the same penmanship I’d unconsciously adopted.
Beside his things, my own files had accumulated over two decades.
Folders, timelines, contact reports. Years of work spread across his desk and into filing cabinets I’d hauled in myself.
This room had become my war room the day he vanished.
I pulled open the top drawer. Inside sat a leather journal and beneath it, a sealed letter with my name in his handwriting.
The letter I’d found in his quarters after he left.
The one written in the measured hand of a man who’d considered the possibility that he might not come back but refused to say it directly.
‘Solomon. If things don’t turn out the way I planned, the Theron name falls to you. Not just the legacy but the duty that comes with it. Protect the kingdom. Serve your king the way I served mine. And don’t let grief make you smaller than you are.’
I’d read it a thousand times. The words never changed. Neither did what he’d left unsaid beneath them.
An unstable portal had appeared in our territory without warning.
They do that sometimes. Tears in the fabric between realms, unpredictable, temporary. The Long Watch had documented three in the past centuries, two of which sealed themselves within weeks.
The first had been sent two hundred years prior, through a different portal in a different territory. King Altun’s final order before abdicating in favor of Lucian. That team never returned. The portal was destroyed from the other side, and with it, any explanation of what had happened.
My father volunteered to lead the second. No one argued. He was the most qualified lycan alive for the mission. A diplomat who thought six moves ahead.
If the human realm swallowed him, there would have been a trace.
A scent trail. Disturbed ground. A body. Anything. My father wouldn’t just vanish.
But there was nothing.
The Long Watch declared Lord Farmon Theron deceased three months after his departure. Standard protocol. No intelligence, no contact, no remains. Case closed.
I remembered standing in Lucian’s study the morning the declaration came. His eyes were steady.
“Solomon.” He said my name the way he always did. Direct, no softening. “The Watch has ruled. The expedition is classified as lost.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Possibly. But without evidence, I can’t reopen the inquiry.”
“Then give me resources to find it.”
He observed me for a long moment. Not the king assessing a request. The man I’d trained beside since we were children, reading the grief I refused to show on my face.
“What do you need?”
He gave me everything I asked for. Access to classified expedition records, border contacts. And one thing I hadn’t asked for but he offered anyway, standing at the window with his back to me so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes while he said it.
“The portal is still open. Unstable, but open. The Watch monitors it. I can arrange for that monitoring to have... gaps.”
“Lucian.”
“Don’t.” He turned. “Don’t tell me it’s too dangerous or that we’d be violating six different territorial laws. I know what we’d be doing. I also know what it’s doing to you.”
We couldn’t go through ourselves given our high positions. It will raise questions and cause conflict. We had to keep it a secret.
So we sent Voss.
The shadow hound had been bonded to me since my adolescence. Bred from the deep-forest lines, built for tracking across impossible distances, capable of carrying scent memory between realms. Voss could cross through the portal, follow my father’s trail, and return with whatever he found.
Only Lucian and I knew. Not the council or the Watch. Not even Percival.
Leaving Percy out was deliberate. He would have insisted on helping, and if the mission leaked, everyone involved faced banishment.
Lucian and I had centuries of political capital to survive that kind of fallout.
Percy had none. He was young, barely into his second century, and both of us had spent most of his life keeping him out of the kind of trouble that carried permanent consequences.
The irony of that wasn’t lost on me.
Voss returned eleven days after crossing. Thinner, agitated, carrying the smell of stone and chemical compounds I couldn’t identify. Strapped to his harness were two items.
The first: my father’s belt clasp. Forged with the Theron crest, scratched to hell and covered in dried blood but unmistakable. I’d watched my father fasten it every morning of my childhood.
The second: a fragment of a blade. Short, broken at the hilt, the metal corroded but clearly forged for combat. The balance was wrong, the alloy unfamiliar, the craftsmanship built for human hands. Far older than my father’s expedition.
But it had been found alongside my father’s clasp. In the same location. Which meant either my father had been carrying it, or someone had placed both items together.
I brought the clasp to Lucian on a winter evening. He looked at the belt clasp for a long time.
“I’m sorry, Solomon.”
“The evidence confirms he reached the human realm.”
“That’s not what I said.” His gray eyes lifted to mine. “I said I’m sorry.”
I nodded. Took the clasp and left his study.
The blade fragment, I kept to myself.
Because the clasp proved my father had been in the human realm long enough to lose his belongings. But the blade fragment raised a different question. One I couldn’t answer and couldn’t ask without sounding deranged.
Both expeditions had vanished in the same geographic corridor. Different routes, different teams, same result. The probability of natural causes eliminating both groups in the same region was negligible. Which meant the cause wasn’t natural.
A human weapon found at a portal site and a blade forged for killing, and the craftsmanship suggested it wasn’t made by amateurs. Someone with training and resources had been at that portal. Someone who fought there.
My father had served in the Long Watch for decades.
Our bloodline, Lucian’s, and the bloodlines of every lycan who’d survived the Burning Years had been raised on stories of the Order of the Silver Dawn.
My father had studied their methods, their tactics, their recorded history.
He knew more about the hunters than any lycan alive.
The Order had vanished from the record after the Burning Years. No attacks, sightings, or intelligence. Every lycan alive assumed they’d disbanded, died out, or lost the ability to organize.
But a human combat weapon at a portal site told a different story. Humans didn’t stumble onto portals by accident.
The Order wasn’t dead. They’d simply stopped making noise.
The theory settled into me. I was aware that I was grasping at straws and trying to connect things that could’ve been coincidental but I just couldn’t accept that my father was dead for no reason.
I began a second investigation on my own.
No conversations with Lucian that might force him, as king, to act before we were ready. The blade fragment went into a locked drawer. The theory went into my chest, where I carried it alone for over twenty years because sharing it prematurely would start a war.
Then we came to the human realm.
And Mira happened.
My world shattered the moment we found out the Order’s mark.
It made all my assumptions true but it didn’t give me satisfaction.
I just lost more than what I found.
I closed the drawer, pressing my palms flat against the desk. The muted bond pulsed once, distant, reduced to background noise. Mira’s frequency was getting fainter.
A knock interrupted the silence.
“My lord.” The house servant stood in the doorway, expression careful. “You have a visitor.”
***
I found Percival in the living room.
He stood at the window with his back to me, looking out over the Glowwood. His pack was on the floor beside the door. Not the casual rucksack he used for overnight stays. The expedition pack. Full, buckled, weighted for travel.
“Your jaw looks worse,” I said.
He turned. The bruise had deepened to a mottled violet. He hadn’t regenerated it. Percival had never been one to sit with discomfort longer than necessary. The fact that he’d let this one heal at a human pace was deliberate. A choice I understood too well.
He caught me looking. “Thought I’d try a new look.” His fingers gestured vaguely at his own jaw, then at my scar. “Figured it works for you.”
“It doesn’t work for me. People just stopped mentioning it centuries ago.”
“So you’re saying give it time.”
“I’m saying you look terrible.”
The humor left his face. What remained was the soldier I’d spent two hundred years watching become.
“I’m going back,” he said.
I’d known before he arrived here with his pack. I’d known since the corridor, since my fist connected with his jaw and the look in his eyes hadn’t been anger but certainty.
“The council convenes tomorrow,” I said.
“Which is why it has to be tonight.”
“They’ll declare you rogue.”
“I know.”
“Banishment. Stripped of the life you’ve built here.”
“My life is not in this dimension. Not anymore.”
My chest tightened.
He’d been impossible as a child, reckless as a teenager, infuriating as a young adult. Both Lucian and I had spent most of those centuries telling him to grow up. To think before acting. To stop leading with his heart and start leading with his head.
And now he was standing in my living room, fully grown, making the bravest decision I’d witnessed in centuries, and the weight of it pressed against my ribs in a way I hadn’t prepared for.
He was leaving. The way my father left. Through a portal, toward danger, with no guarantee he’d come back.
The difference was that Percy knew exactly what waited on the other side. And he was going anyway.
“She needs someone,” Percy said. His voice was quiet. “And right now, Thiago is the only one at her door. That can’t stand.”
“You can’t protect her alone against the entire Order.”
“I don’t need to protect her against the entire Order. I just need to be there. That’s the part we got wrong, Sol.” He held my gaze. “We thought protecting her meant standing between her and the threat. But the real danger was leaving her with no one to stand beside.”
For two hundred years, Percival had followed. Lucian led, I strategized, and Percival fell in step behind us because that was the shape we’d given his life. We’d trained him, guided him, sheltered him.
He wasn’t following now.
“You and Lucian.” Percy paused, choosing words with a care I wasn’t used to hearing from him. “I respect what you decided. In that study, with the council pushing for her elimination and the kingdom on the line. I understand why you thought the rejection was the only move.”
I let him finish.
“But I don’t agree. I didn’t agree then. I don’t agree now. And sitting in Veyndral just feeling her pain isn’t a thing I can do, regardless of what the crown or you think is strategically sound.”
He’s a man who’d weighed his loyalty to us against his loyalty to her and found them both pulling in the same direction.
I crossed the room and stood in front of him. The bruise I’d put on his jaw was a stain against his skin, and the sight of it sat in my chest beside two decades of silence and every decision I’d made for people who hadn’t asked me to.
My hand found his shoulder. The same gesture my father had given me before leaving.
“Don’t get caught,” I said.
Percival’s eyes went bright. He blinked once, hard, and then the grin cracked across his face. Dimples and all.
“Since when do I get caught?”
“Since always, Percival. You get caught constantly. It’s your most consistent talent.”
He put his hand over mine on his shoulder and squeezed once. Then he picked up the expedition pack, slung it over his shoulder, and walked toward the door.
I followed him to the entrance of the estate. The Glowwood stretched beyond the path, bioluminescence painting the trees in pale blue.
Percival stepped onto the path. Turned back once.
“I’ll take care of her, Sol.”
“I know.”
He walked. I watched his back until the Glowwood swallowed him, the blue light closing around his shoulders the way it had closed around my father’s twenty-four years ago.
For two centuries, Percival had been the one who followed. The one Lucian and I protected without asking whether he wanted protecting. The one who grinned through every reprimand and showed up the next morning ready to do it all over again.
And now he’d just done what neither Lucian nor I had managed with all our centuries of strategy and restraint and careful calculation.
He’d simply decided. And gone.
Percival has become a better man than either of us.