Creation

Theron II of Pax was created by Kelly Thompson and Meredith McClaren in Black Cloak 1.

Major Story Arcs

The Taka Conspiracy

Theron II of Pax is a fairy who lives in the Trees section of Kiros. He is married to Kei Pax. His oldest child is Joya. Later he and Kei have Auberon, Zin, Typha, and Sagitta. He often goes by his clan/family name, Pax.

Theron is a Black Cloak, a detective for the Kiros Police Department. He volunteers to be partners with Phaedra Essex, an exiled royal Elf, when no one else wants to work with her, because he believes she is one of the best Black Cloaks.

Pax is a humane person but can be snarky and gruff at times. He hates the Lagoon and everything associated with it due to being freaked out by the Maids (mermaids). He is generally not a fan of the rich and royal classes.

Pax is one of the first on the scene to investigate the death of Freyal III of Sidra, the heir to the throne. While he recognizes him, he tries to use a Soulprint to get an official identification. However, the tech breaks. Phaedra IDs the body when she arrives; she used to be Freyal’s fiancée. Pax has an assistant chase down a paparazzi who takes a capture of the body.

Pax and Phaedra quickly figure out that the murder weapon was a Dracona Dagger, a rare magic dagger created by the Dracona people. They interrogate the bartender below the slum-like room where Freyal was found and discover that he was seeing an Elf, Dace, who lived there.

Soon after, they hear that two more bodies were found in the Lagoon. There, they find Dace, who was bitten by a Maid named Yanha, who then died. From this, they surmise that Dace was poisoned and that poison transferred to Yanha. Pax and Phaedra canvass the people nearby to see if they saw anything. Pax talks to the guard in the entrance to the Lagoon, who saw nothing. Phaedra talks with some local teens who won’t talk.

Phaedra goes to tell the Queen, who she knew before her exile, about Freyal. Pax waits nervously outside since he believes she may be in danger from the Elves; he orders a tank to come when she takes a while. She comes out but was in fact hurt by her angry brother while she was inside. However, she was healed by her friend Valorie.

Pax is angry about the royal’s patronizing and dangerous attitudes but does think the view from the top of the city is great.

They return to the Police Department to interview people who say they know something about the murder when an unknown assailant leaps out of the crowd and stabs Phaedra.

She survives and when she returns they interview the people about Freyal. Most are dead ends but they finally chat with two of the kids that Phaedra talked with when they first found the two bodies in the Lagoon. The kids didn’t want to talk then but now admit they saw a cloaked figure drop off the bodies.

Phaedra and Pax meet later at a noodle shop in the Trees to trade their newest information. They also discuss why they both believe the role of a Black Cloak is important in keeping law and order in the community. Phaedra says the Kiros Three, the most powerful Humans on Kiros, showed up at her apartment and tried to blame the Dracona for the deaths but she doesn’t believe them. She also says that she and Freyal used to have a secret box for notes in the Trees. Pax is intrigued but frustrated that Phaedra isn’t keeping him in the loop all the time. He also think that the lives of the rich are crazy but sometimes forgets that Phaedra came from that world.

They go to the secret location. Freyal left a cryptic message that implied that he considered suicide and that he wants Phaedra to investigate some secret that he had found out about. He didn’t want to tell her directly because he was worried it might make people go after her, but hoped that his death might get her on the trail of the discovery in a more confidential way.

They go to Pax’s house after he notices a cloaked figure following them. Pax has to fly her everywhere in the Trees because Phaedra doesn’t have wings. Phaedra talks with Kei and Joya.

They next go to talk with Renna, a friend of Dace’s. She is a dancer at a strip club. She doesn’t have much to say other than that she has already been visited by people who seemed to be Dracona royals who wanted to intimidate her into not talking.

They decide to visit the Maids, since they are one group that can’t be intimidated into silence. Pax is extremely freaked out by the Maids but swims to meet them alongside Phaedra and their amphibious friend, Sashenka.

The Maids, which are carnivorous and have a hallucinogenic song, surround them. Pax is scared. Sashenka tries to persuade the Maids to be friendly. Their song makes the Black Cloaks bliss out like they’re on a drug trip. Pax eventually figures out how to minimize the effect and tells Phaedra.

The Maids warm up and implant their memories of their sister’s death into their minds. They now know the Queen’s magician, Lysanthir, dropped the bodies into the Lagoon.

Pax and Phaedra leave the Lagoon in good health and discuss the case further. They hear an announcement that the two of them are now wanted by the police. Clearly the Queen or her helpers have put pressure on the police.

They split up, then meet again later. Phaedra takes Pax to the house of her estranged and secret father—Phinneas II of Thane, the most powerful Dracona in Kiros.

Phaedra wants him to help them resist the queen, and to tell them if he knows what she’s been up to. He says he doesn’t know but might know someone who does, and leaves to get him. Pax stares around the house and can’t believe the lives of rich people.

Phinneas comes back with Ividor, the Queen’s top magician. Pax and Phaedra pull their guns on him but he opens his hands to show a Taka, cute fuzzy animals that are thought to be extinct. He says he found it under the Castle along with many mysterious workers. They all make a plan to investigate. They split up.

Pax and Phaedra head to the bowels of the royal castle. As usual, Pax is annoyed with the Elves who wear mech wings, which he sees as cultural appropriation from Fairies.

They break in and steal some clothes for disguises. However, after traveling down for some time they are ambushed by Phaedra’s brother, Hadrian. However, Pax gets the drop on him with his pistol and they tie him up and knock him out.

Continuing on, they find a giant room of locked-up Taka. They hear Lysanthir coming and hide. Then they see what the Queen and Lysanthir have been doing. They have a machine that horribly sucks all the magic out of the Taka.

Pax and Phaedra are shocked that anyone would do this to the defenseless, cute Taka. Lysanthir sneaks up on them and magically captures them. The Queen shows up. She explains what they’ve been doing: the city’s magic has dried up so they’ve been replacing it with the magic from the Taka. Freyal found out about it so she killed him—or at least intended to. While he was dying, he drank some poison to make sure his death was suspicious, and Dace drank some too. Lysanthir had followed the Queen and after they died he hid her body.

The Queen is furious with Lysanthir for interfering and they argue.

Meanwhile, Ividor, Phinneas, his son and Phaedra’s half-brother Devaki, Phaedra’s mother, and Valorie show up to help. They all fight.

Phaedra and Pax argue: she wants to destroy the machine but Pax is worried about the effect of having no magic on their home neighborhood. The Queen kills Phaedra’s mother. Pax pulls his gun on the Queen.

Phaedra plows ahead with her plan despite Pax’s opposition but Lysanthir knocks her off the cliff into the water below. Ividor is killed. Things look bad.

However, the Maids in the water cast a spell that physically transforms Phaedra into her full Dracona heritage. Her wings, which were previously just atavistic, grow to their full span and she flies out. She blasts the machine, destroying it.

Pax looks despairingly at her. He still would not have destroyed the machine because of the damage it will do to the people of the city.

The cavern collapses and Taka run everywhere. Fires and floods run through the city.

The Dragyern Conspiracy

Five years later, Phaedra has left the Black Cloaks and works as a private detective. Pax is still a Cloak and has a new partner, Beeane II of Alden. He is a Bellweather with low level psychic powers. He normally communicates via a language that approximates emojis, which Pax can’t speak. Beeane thus uses a translator device to speak to Pax and others.

The city is doing well. Phinneas has become the Prime Minister. However, there are still issues with low levels of magic and the vulnerable parts of the city are still damaged.

Pax and Alden investigate a murder. The body looks like it was eaten, not killed with a weapon. This is only the most recent body like this—there have been three more. Pax decides he needs help and goes to consult Phaedra, whom he hasn’t seen since the fires.

Their meeting is awkward but cordial. They go back to her office and meet Valorie. He shows her the crime files and she deduces that they are dealing with a serial killer, which is highly unusual or even unique in Kiros.

After some persuasion she agrees to help on the case. She wants to go to the crime scene, which is more involvement than Pax was planning on. They meet up at the scene, which is bloody and chaotic.

They hear a sound—a giant beast appears before them: a Dragyern, a dragon-like creature thought to be mythical or extinct.

Pax and Phaedra freeze, unsure of what to do, but Alden leads it away with a light. It slides away into a hole under the room, deep into the mountain. Based on its actions, they believe it was looking for something, indicating that it has sentience, unlike the standard beliefs about Dragyerns.

Pax goes to police headquarters and persuades Captain Gooden to let Phaedra officially work with them, given the multiple unusual aspects to the case.

Pax and Phaedra talk with Jono, a ramen seller in The Trees, over rumors that he may know something about Dragyern. He doesn’t, but Pax’s younger kids kids show up and Phaedra meets them for the first time, realizing how much she’s missed from Pax’s life. Then she meets Joya, the one child she had met before, and discover that her wings were lost in the fire. The devastation of Kiros after the destruction of the Taka machine isn’t abstract for Pax, it’s personal. Amazingly, he never presses Phaedra on this impact.

Pax and his kids have visited Jono regularly in recent years. Zin loves it and they also like the nearby arcade.

They get a call about another death, which can only be accessed by swimming through Pax’s hated site, the Lagoon. Sashenka meets them there and helps them swim in. As they do, they are chased by another Dragyern. Pax and Alden swim ahead while Sash and Phaedra try to stop it.

They barely manage to slow it down. The detectives all climb into the home from the water but the Dragyern comes right after. They freak out about what to do when Valorie teleports in with a bunch of Taka and a stranger, who uses an unusual spell to knock out the Dragyern. This is more chaos than Pax can handle and he yells out of frustration.

The stranger is named Dagmar. She passes out from the strain of the spell. Valorie doesn’t know much more about her. She explains that the Taka are there because she has discovered that they naturally give off a little magic on their own, which she can use to help cast spells. She says that the Queen could have used this automatic, voluntary magic radiation to help Kiros without totally draining them, but she was too greedy.

They go back to Valorie’s Magick Shoppe for safety. Pax does a Soulprint on Dagmar and discovers that she is the daughter of Aldric II of Solas, one of the Kiros Three who earlier tried to manipulate the aftereffects of Freyal’s murder.

Pax and Phaedra think about what they know about the current murder victims. They believe someone is trying to kill people in order to clean up after some other secret illegal activity.

They receive yet another report of an attack but this time the victim survived—the ex-Queen and Lysanthir. Pax, Alden, and Phaedra rush to investigate. Pax leaves a Black Cloak to protect Valorie, along with Phaedra’s half-brother Devaki. When they arrive at the Queen’s prison, they are caught in an explosion.

They survive and go inside. Pax pushes the prison functionaries to let them see the Queen immediately despite the damage. She says she doesn’t know what’s going on but points out to them that Lysanthir’s body wasn’t found, unlike the other attacks. He has been kidnapped.

They go back to Valorie’s to protect their friends by taking them to Pax’s family. The kids are very excited to see all of Valorie’s Taka. They are also excited to help solve the crime. They are dedicated crime fans as children of a top Black Cloak. Phaedra secretly puts her old mech-wings in Joya’s room so she can use them to fly in the absence of her original natural wings.

Pax has Renna brought to his house as well, both to see if she knows anything and for her protection as a leader of the underground resistance. Pax and Phaedra once again talk about the decision to destroy the Taka machine. Phaedra says everything that came after is her fault and Pax agrees.

Dagmar finally wakes up and they ask what she knows, but her memory has been erased.

They all get together and go to Phinneas’s old house for even more secrecy and protection. The group now includes Pax’s family, Valorie, Devaki, Renna, Dagmar, and Iona. Pax’s kids wonder if, looking at the opulence of the house, they are now rich. Pax, ever class conscious, has to admit that they are not.

Valorie uses her magic to bring back some of Dagmar’s memory. She was kidnapped by Elea Veris, another of the Kiros Three. Dagmar and others with magical ability were themselves mind-controlled into mind-controlling the Dragyern to kill people. They get a clue that “Delphi” is important.

Renna knows that Delphi is located at her old strip club. They go there and find out that it is a machine for determining magic sensitivity while pretending to just be game about your love destiny.

Pax, Phaedra, and Alden go to Elea Veris’s estate. They see signs of Dragyern movement that lead to the Academy for Human Advancement, which Elea runs. They break in and hear Elea talking with Lysanthir. She got him to help with her research into developing a new form of synthetic magic to replace the magic from the Taka. That’s what she’s been trying to cover up with the Dragyern killings.

The Black Cloaks confront Elea, who releases the Dragyern against them. They fight. They disrupt Elea’s control over the monsters, who then kill Elea for controlling them. Valorie and their other friends arrive and help. Apparently the Taka sense something familiar in the Dragyern and want to help them.

Lysanthir is captured. The synthetic magic is given to Phinneas, who uses it to help the city, in particular the parts that were damaged by the fires and floods from the Taka machine’s destruction.

Pax, Phaedra, and their family and friends hang out later in celebration in The Trees. They are glad to see Joya flying with the mech wings.

Powers and Abilities

As a fairy, Pax has wings and can fly.