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.
