Who is Theron in Investigating the Wicked?

Theron is the eldest living Investigator of the Wicked, the legendary survivor of an order that has been hunted to near extinction over two centuries. He is roughly in his sixties, though his bloodline lengthens his life. He is the master of shadow magic, the only living practitioner of the forbidden technique called Mind Walking, and the mentor Kavel meets at the end of Book 1's middle act. He is also one of only eleven Investigators in recorded history who was not born to the bloodline. He was made one through a blood transfer that almost killed him at fourteen.

What is Mind Walking and why is it forbidden?

Mind Walking is the technique of entering another person's consciousness and reading or extracting memories directly. The order banned it generations before Theron because of what it costs the subject. Sustained Mind Walking leaves the subject hollowed, sometimes permanently. Theron uses it anyway, on captured Conclave operatives, when conventional interrogation will not produce intelligence fast enough. The book treats this as a real ethical compromise rather than a heroic ability. Kavel does not love that Theron does this. Theron does not love it either.

Where does Theron first appear in the saga?

Theron meets Kavel at the end of Arc 6 of Book 1, called The Reckoning, which is also the arc where the Conclave of the Dying Light is first directly confirmed as the enemy. He becomes Kavel's mentor across Arc 7 (The Founding Place training arc), then partner across Arcs 8 to 10 of Book 1. Across Book 2 they operate as equals through the seven-arc campaign that takes the war public. The full reading order, including where the free novella The First Hunt fits, is laid out in the reading order guide.

Was Theron always an Investigator?

No. He was a street orphan in a city that no longer exists. He could see shadows that moved wrong, darkness with weight, which the order calls latent potential. At fourteen he was found by Elara Cross, a renowned Investigator who had been quietly researching whether the bloodline could be transferred to the rare children with that potential. She gave him her blood. The process kills most subjects. He survived. He is one of eleven Investigators in the order's recorded history who was made rather than born.

What is the Conclave of the Dying Light?

The Conclave of the Dying Light is the antagonist organization in Investigating the Wicked. A coalition of wealthy families, dark mages, and old bloodlines who remember the Dark Period as a kind of golden age, when the strong ruled and the weak served. They have spent over two hundred years quietly killing Investigators. The full reveal happens at the end of Book 1. The shape of their inner circle is mapped further in Book 2.

Where can I read the Theron arcs?

Theron first appears at the end of Arc 6 of Investigating the Wicked Book 1, then continues through the rest of Book 1 and all of Book 2. Both are on Amazon Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. The free prequel novella The First Hunt does not feature Theron, it features Kavel's father Marrek, but it sets up the order Theron has spent his life surviving.

Theron Investigators Mentor Profile

The mentor archetype in fantasy has a problem. The mentor is almost always a corpse on a delay timer. You meet him in act one. He teaches the chosen one a few things. He dies before the climax so the chosen one can step up. The genre has been doing this since Obi-Wan, and most writers running the play do not even think about it anymore. The mentor is a tutorial level wearing a robe. I wanted Theron to be something else. He is the elder Investigator in my dark fantasy saga Investigating the Wicked. He is the oldest living member of an order that has been hunted to near extinction across two centuries. He is also the only living practitioner of a technique the order itself banned, and the only Investigator currently breathing who was not born into the bloodline. This post is a profile of him as a character, what he does in the story, what magic he carries, and what archetypal shape he is built to invert. There are no Book 1 finale spoilers below. Book 2 is referenced but not spoiled. If you want to read his arcs first, Book 1 and Book 2 are on Kindle Unlimited.

The Function He Serves In The Saga

Theron arrives late in Book 1. He is not the inciting mentor who launches Kavel's journey. Kavel's father Marrek did that, years before Book 1 begins, and Marrek is dead by the time we meet his son. The order at the start of the saga has roughly a dozen surviving members across a continent that once supported hundreds. Kavel works alone for most of Book 1, picking through cases that look like local hauntings and turn out to be coordinated. Theron enters at the moment Kavel can no longer deny that someone is hunting his kind in a coordinated way. Specifically, he arrives at the end of the arc called The Reckoning, after a battle that shifts what Kavel thinks the saga is. From that point forward, Theron is in every arc of the rest of Book 1 and all of Book 2. The standard mentor function is to die so the apprentice can grow. Theron's function is the opposite. He survives so Kavel can stop being alone. This matters for the saga's mood. The order is dying. Kavel watching one more elder die would be tonally on-key but emotionally extractive. Putting an elder beside him for the back half of Book 1 and all of Book 2 lets the books explore something rarer in fantasy, which is what it looks like for two professionals at different career stages to actually work cases together. The arcs after Theron arrives read differently. There is dialogue. There is teaching. There is the specific exhausted humor of a man who has done this for forty years working with a man who has done it for fifteen.

The mentor who lives is harder to write than the mentor who dies. The mentor who dies offers the apprentice a debt. The mentor who lives offers him a partnership, which is much messier and much truer to the work itself.

The Made Not Born Problem

Most fantasy magic systems treat power as inheritance. Bloodline. Birthright. The chosen one who was always going to be the chosen one because the prophecy said so. This makes the magic feel inevitable. It also makes it feel cheap. Theron breaks the rule. The Investigators of the Wicked have always understood themselves as a bloodline order. The silver light of Kavel's manifestations runs in his family. His father had it. His grandfather had it. The light responds to emotional state and intent because it is part of who the bearer is, not a tool the bearer picked up. Almost every Investigator in recorded history was born to a parent who carried the line. Theron was a street orphan. He had no parent. He had something the order calls latent potential, the rare ability to see shadows that move wrong, darkness with weight, the negative space where a creature would be standing if a creature were standing there. The trait shows up in maybe one child in a generation. Most never know it is anything. Most live and die in cities that have no use for the gift. He was found at fourteen by Elara Cross, a renowned Investigator who had spent two decades quietly researching whether the bloodline could be transferred to children with that latent potential. The order would have stopped her if it had known. The transfer process is brutal. It involves the donor giving a substantial volume of blood while in close physical proximity to the recipient. Most subjects die. The eleven recorded survivors across the order's history all describe the experience as something they would not have agreed to if they had understood what it was. Theron survived. Elara raised him. She also taught him the early stages of shadow magic, which the order does not teach formally but which a few Investigators across history have developed independently. She was the only family he had. She was killed by what we would later understand as a Conclave operation, poisoned with wine that took three days to do its work. He held her hand the whole time. He was twenty-six. After her death, the order accepted him quietly. They did not love that he had been made. They tolerated him because he was a good Investigator and because the order was already shrinking and could not afford to be precious. He trained seven students of his own across the next thirty years. All seven died. Some in ambushes that look in retrospect like coordinated targeting. Some for asking the wrong questions in the wrong cities. After the seventh, named Chen, Theron stopped taking students for twenty years. Then Kavel's father died, and Theron started watching Kavel.

What Shadow Magic Actually Does

The order does not formally teach shadow magic. A handful of Investigators across the centuries have developed it. Theron is the most accomplished living practitioner. The basic move. Shadow magic treats darkness as a substance the user can shape. Not light's absence, which is a passive thing. Active darkness, which has weight and edge and behavior. A trained shadow mage can pull shadow out of corners and walls and the hollows under furniture. The shadow can sheathe a body, which functions as concealment, and it can be hardened along an edge, which functions as a blade. Theron uses both, but his real specialty is shadow stepping. He can collapse a region of shadow and reappear in another region of shadow within a few hundred feet, instantly. The technique is taxing. He cannot do it more than three or four times in a fight without bleeding from the nose. He uses it sparingly and almost always at the moment a fight is decided. The contrast with Kavel's silver light is the engine of how their partnership reads on the page. Kavel destroys things. Theron disappears things. Kavel walks into a room and finishes the fight in three minutes by being the loudest, brightest object present. Theron resolves the fight by being nowhere the enemy expects him to be, until the enemy is bleeding without quite understanding when the cut happened. This is mechanical and thematic at the same time. The series is about hunters who are being hunted. The two living masters of light and shadow on the same side, working as a pair, is the saga finally giving Kavel the one tool he has been missing his entire career, which is a partner who occupies the part of the battle space he cannot. For more on the silver light side of this and the larger magic system, the magic system deep dive goes into the rules, the costs, and the limits.

Mind Walking And The Ethics Of It

This is the technique that gets Theron in trouble within his own order, and the technique that makes him the most morally compromised mentor I have written. Mind Walking is the ability to enter another person's consciousness and read memories directly. The technique was banned by the order generations before Theron because of what it does to the subject. A short walk leaves the subject confused for a few hours. A long walk leaves the subject hollowed for weeks. A walk past a certain duration leaves the subject hollowed permanently, with selfhood damaged in ways the order's healers cannot repair. Theron uses it. He uses it on captured Conclave operatives. He uses it when conventional interrogation will not produce intelligence in the time window the situation demands. He uses it in moments when a coordinated attack is incoming and the only person who knows the attack vector is a man who will not talk willingly. He does not enjoy it. The book makes this clear. After he Mind Walks a Conclave operative captured in the Wallace Kingdom, he sits alone in a room for a long time. Kavel notices. Kavel is uncomfortable with the technique. The book is uncomfortable with the technique. The technique stays useful anyway, which is the whole point. This is the move I wanted from the mentor archetype. Most fantasy mentors offer the apprentice a clean moral compass. Theron offers Kavel a compass that points in the right direction roughly eighty percent of the time and that has, in the other twenty percent, hollowed out human beings to do its work. Kavel has to decide what he thinks of that. The reader has to decide too. Neither answer is supposed to feel comfortable.

If your favorite fantasy beat is the moment the mentor turns out to be doing something the apprentice cannot fully forgive, Theron is built for that beat.

Why The Mentor Archetype Needs Inversions

The mentor that dies in act one teaches the apprentice a lesson, but it is a single lesson. Take up the burden. Honor the dead. The mentor as teaching device, not as a person. The mentor that lives across multiple books does something harder. He shows the apprentice what the work looks like over time. Theron is what Kavel will be in thirty years if Kavel survives that long, which is not a guarantee. Theron's exhaustion. Theron's willingness to compromise a banned technique. Theron's grief for the seven students he buried before he stopped taking new ones. All of these are previews of what Kavel is walking toward. The mentor as preview is rarer than the mentor as catalyst. It is also more honest about the cost of the work the apprentice is signing up for. There are a few writers in current fantasy doing this well. Glen Cook does it with the Captain across The Black Company. Joe Abercrombie does it with Bayaz across the First Law trilogy, although Bayaz is the mentor as betrayal rather than the mentor as preview. Mark Lawrence does it with the Builder figures across his various series. Robin Hobb does it with Chade in the Farseer books, which is probably the closest comp for what I wanted Theron to be. If you came to this saga from any of those, Theron should sit in a familiar register. If you came from the Witcher books and want the mentor archetype handled with the same patience Sapkowski uses for Geralt's relationships, the Witcher comp post covers the wider monster-hunter shape, and Theron is the version of Vesemir who refuses to die when the script tells him to.

Where To Start

If you want the lowest friction, start with the free prequel novella The First Hunt. Theron is not in it, but Kavel's father Marrek is, and the novella sets up the order Theron has spent his entire life trying to keep alive. It is around fifteen thousand words across five chapters, hosted on the author site, no signup required. Investigating the Wicked Book 1 is on Amazon Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. Theron arrives at the end of the saga's middle act. Book 2 is the campaign where Theron and Kavel operate as equals across seven arcs and take the war against the Conclave public. The series hub lives at Investigating the Wicked, A Dark Fantasy Saga. The wider conspiracy hunting them is mapped in the primer on dark fantasy where the hunter is hunted. For the comp shelf, the Witcher comp post is the right next read.

I'm Kevin Gabeci. Software engineer by day, writer the rest of the time. Eleven books published on Amazon Kindle across dark fantasy, thriller, and literary fiction. Long-time writer on Medium. I spend a strange amount of time thinking about mentors who survive the books they were supposed to die in. The full catalog lives at books.kevingabeci.com.

Theron Of The Investigators, A Character Profile Of The Mentor Who Was Made Not Born