I let him walk out. That was my permission. The absence of a no.
Percival was in the human realm now.
Solomon was here, and he was worse.
He’d retreated into his father’s study and hadn’t come out except for meals he barely touched and council sessions where he sat in silence. His intelligence networks were still active, reports coming in and data moving on autopilot. But the man behind the operation had gone somewhere I couldn’t follow.
I’d lost two more people. One to the human realm and one to a grief he wouldn’t name.
***
The knock came at midnight.
Solomon stood in the corridor holding a scroll. His face was unreadable, but his hands weren’t. They gripped the parchment with a tension that told me everything his expression refused to.
“This arrived through the Ashborne relay.” He stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. “The channel’s been dormant for six years.”
“Who sent it?”
“No signature or seal. The handwriting doesn’t match anyone in our records.” He set the scroll on the desk. “It’s not Percy’s. The script is too disciplined. And the content is too detailed for someone who just returned to the human realm.”
I unrolled it.
The parchment was old but the ink was fresh. Written in our script and formal Lytopian dialect, the kind rarely used outside of official correspondence. Whoever wrote this had been educated in Veyndral.
‘To the throne of Veyndral.
The Order of the Silver Dawn operates a fortified compound in the eastern mountain range of the human realm. Within the compound’s lower levels, they maintain a device referred to internally as the Purifier. Its function: the forced reversion of lycan physiology to feral state. Irreversible.
Thirty-seven lycans are held captive in the facility’s sublevel. Your mate is inside. Security has increased following the escape of a captured wolf.
The portal remains stable. Act accordingly.’
I read it twice. Then a third time, slower, parsing every word for embedded meaning.
“Your mate is inside,” I repeated.
“Whoever wrote this knows about the bond.” Solomon’s voice was flat. “That means they have eyes on the compound, or they have intelligence sources inside it.”
“Could it be the Order itself? A trap?”
“The Order doesn’t know our script. And they wouldn’t reveal whatever that Purifier was. Especially if it was their secret weapon against us.”
“Then who?”
Solomon was quiet for a long moment. I could see him working through the possibilities, with the systematic precision that had made him the most effective intelligence operative in Veyndral.
“I don’t know,” he said.
We stood over the scroll in silence. My quarters felt smaller than they had five minutes ago, the walls drawing in around the weight of what lay on the desk between us.
A weapon that could turn our people feral. Thirty-seven prisoners. Mira, inside.
The tremor in my hands stilled.
“We’re going back.”
Solomon didn’t blink and caught on what I was thinking. “For the Purifier.”
