“Because you keep needing to hear it.”
I turned away to leave but his last words rendered me frozen and crashed my world.
“Lycans killed your mother.”
33
— • —
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?”
