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.
