Chapter 537: Employment

Two weeks later, Victor finally declared Elias medically stable enough to leave the secure center without making everyone around him sign three separate forms accepting responsibility for the consequences.

Mostly.

The word appeared several times in the report.

His body remained human, his pheromonal profile had stabilized into that of an ordinary alpha, and every scan performed since Arion restored him showed no active progression of corruption, no neurological suppression, and no external influence affecting his decisions or behavior. The remnants of infection were still detectable in ways Victor did not entirely understand, particularly around the pheromone glands, but they behaved much more like Arion’s integrated abnormalities than an active disease.

Elias’s eyes remained blue.

His family had been contacted carefully, beginning with his sister, who had cried for almost forty minutes after seeing him through a secure video call and then demanded to know why the government had required two physicians and an imperial representative to tell her that her dead brother was not dead.

Elias had cried too.

Nobody mentioned that afterward.

The larger question remained considerably less emotional.

What did they do with him now?

His military status had been suspended the moment he was declared missing eight years earlier. His old unit no longer existed in the same form; most of the soldiers he had served beside had either transferred, retired, or moved into senior positions, and the world had continued without him long enough that simply handing him a uniform and telling him to resume his life would have been absurd.

So Arion brought him to the palace.

Dean took one look at Elias standing inside Arion’s office and smiled with the satisfaction of a man whose prediction had been proven correct much sooner than expected.

"I told you so."

Arion closed the office door behind them.

"You have been waiting two weeks to say that."

"Yes."

Elias looked between them, clearly uncertain whether he had walked into a private marital argument.

Dean was sitting at the long conference table beside another collection of Dominic’s records, dressed in dark trousers and a soft green sweater with his sleeves pushed to the elbows. His tablet lay open beside a stack of copied archival correspondence, while Boreas occupied the carpet beneath the windows and regarded Elias with the slow, careful attention he reserved for unfamiliar pheromones.

Dean pointed toward Arion.

"He told me the knights were not coming home."

"I said they were not coming into our residence."

"You said no such thing with conviction."

"I did."

"You hesitated."

Elias glanced toward the door.

Arion noticed.

"You can stay."

"That was not what I was considering."

Dean smiled.

"You were wondering whether returning to eight years of infection might be simpler than understanding us."

Elias’s mouth twitched.

"Something like that."

Arion removed his jacket and placed it over the back of his chair before gesturing toward the documents covering most of the table.

"You said the knights carried fragments of memories about Dominic."

"Yes."

"We have spent the last month trying to reconstruct what Dominic actually knew, what he documented, and what later generations buried."

Elias approached slowly.

At first, his expression showed only curiosity.

Then he saw the quantity.

There were six archival boxes along one wall, three additional stacks of copied military records, several old medical files, household correspondence, digital scans occupying both wall displays, and a separate folder Hunter had delivered that morning containing references to Dominic’s northern movements across nearly twenty years.

Elias stopped.

Dean looked up at him.

"Still want your old life back?"

"I was hoping for parts of it."

"Reasonable."

"I was not expecting homework."

Arion pulled out a chair.

"It is not homework."

Elias looked around the room.

"What would you call this?"

"Work."

"That is worse."

Dean laughed.

For the first time since returning to human form, Elias looked almost entirely ordinary standing there in clean civilian clothes, his blond hair trimmed properly and his posture gradually losing the defensive stiffness he had carried through the medical center. He was still leaner than he should have been, and there were moments when unexpected sounds made his attention sharpen too quickly, but nothing about him immediately suggested the creature that had walked out of the forest with claws and black armor across his back.

Boreas rose.

Elias froze.

The enormous dog approached him, sniffed once near his hand, then moved closer to investigate his coat.

Dean watched carefully.

"Boreas knew Arion was wrong before the rest of us did."

"That is not comforting."

"He likes you."

Boreas pressed his nose against Elias’s palm.

Elias slowly scratched beneath his jaw.

The dog accepted this and wandered back toward the carpet.

Dean nodded.

"Approved."

"Does he have official authority?"

"More than several committees."

Arion sat down.

"Unfortunately, that is sometimes true."

Elias finally took the chair opposite them.

Arion opened one of the scanned records on the central display.

"We need you to identify anything that matches what you remember from the forest, even if it feels incomplete or irrational. Names, locations, phrases, patterns, anything connected to Dominic or the older knights."

Elias studied the screen.

"I told you the memories are not organized."

"We know."

"Sometimes I only recognize something after I see it."

"That is still useful."

Dean slid a folder across the table.

"And nobody expects you to solve ninety-nine years of archival incompetence before lunch."

Elias opened the folder.

The first page contained a copied military report from Dominic’s reign describing an unusual withdrawal of infected animals from the northern valley.

His expression changed.

Arion noticed immediately.

"What?"

Elias read farther.

"The valley."

"You recognize it?"

"Not the report."

His fingers moved over a line mentioning an abandoned fortress several kilometers east of the old imperial road.

"That place."

Dean leaned closer.

"What about it?"

"I have been there."

"While infected?"

"Yes."

"When?"

Elias stared at the map for a long moment.

"I don’t know. Years ago, maybe. Time was wrong inside the forest."

Arion enlarged the historical map.

The fortress no longer appeared on modern surveys because the area had been inside the restricted territory for almost a century.

"What was there?"

"Knights."

The room became quieter.

"How many?"

"More than I could count."

Dean exchanged a look with Arion.

Not a handful, then.

Elias leaned back slightly, staring at the map as though something had shifted behind his eyes.

"Are you going to meet them?" He exhaled. "They are waiting for you."