As Pietro had not year earned the Blackwood name, coming to the estate was not something he'd done often. In fact it had only been one time before. It had been a significant moment on that day and so to be invited back again was making him feel anxious. What was this about? He arrived at the estate with an escort who could get him there and immediately went to search for his siblings.

He found Calanthe Beckett and took her softly by the wrist, leaning in to whisper to her. "Do you know what's going on?"

Evander didn’t feel things like others did. Cyrus’s absence was about the most troubling thing that could happen to the Blackwood. After all, he’d been his brother’s faithful servant all these years. He’d built his life around it, and to have him unaccounted for was a development of cataclysmic proportion. But when Evander arrived, he looked unruffled. Only the slightest traces of feeling showed on his face, like a breeze gently disturbing the surface of a placid pond. Cyrus would return, he told himself. He just had to be patient.

Evander walked towards Keion. Saying nothing, in an uncharacteristic gesture, he rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder and squeezed. Evander didn’t need to say anything. It was no secret amongst the siblings that Evander depended on Cyrus for direction. Without him, Evander was adrift. Lost.

After a wordless moment, Evander would take the seat to the right of where Cyrus would have been. The chair was conspicuously empty: the right-hand man seated without a master to guide him.

Diogenes had gotten the summons mid-lecture, to no one's surprise. He did, however, not give an excuse as to why he had to stop telling somebody else what to do; upon seeing the messenger's expression Diogenes had merely surmised it was of great import. To someone, at least, in the family.

So whence he arrived to see all of his closest relatives present, sans one, he made the natural assumption that this concerned Cyrus, and why Cyrus was absent. Instead of the usual blustering on about how he had been busy or immediately interrupting--though there was nothing to interrupt but a very uncomfortable silence--he folded his arms and inclined his head at the room at large, looking towards Keion.

"Are we expecting anyone else?" he asked, after a pause. The answer alone would inform the rest of the discussion. Though judging by Evander's face, Diogenes felt the question was more one of politesse than necessity.

With his family gathered around him, Keion had forced himself to stop pacing and now stood stoically next to the table at the front of the room. He had attempted a small smile for Evander, though he know it did not reach his eyes. It seemed his brother had already guessed at what this meeting would be about. Even Calliope entered and took a seat quietly. It did not help his foreboding mood.

At Dio's question, Keion's gaze shifted to Pietro and Calanthe. He remembered the day they received the news that his father had gone missing and how it had felt. He hated that he was the one tasked with delivering the same devastating news to his brother's children. Swallowing hard, he looked back to Dio and slowly shook his head. "No, this is all that will be joining us."

Taking a breath, he glanced down at the paper on the table and reached out to it, tapping one finger against it a couple times. "I received a message not too long ago that was quite troubling. I thought, surely it had been sent in error and waited for another message saying as much. But it never arrived."

Glancing at Calliope and Evander, he continued on, "I'm unsure of the extent each of us knew of what Cyrus had been up to recently. I'm sure there are things that not even I knew about. For those that were unaware, Cyrus had recently taken a trip to Nevermere for some... business matters." He was stalling. He really didn't have to go over all these details, but he was dreading saying the actual problem out loud.

"Cyrus had some people in Nevermere meant to watch and relay information, especially since the marriage of Prince Akagi and Princess Althea. The message I received was from one of them and it says that they have lost contact with everyone, including Cyrus." He clenched his jaw, fresh waves of emotion rolling over him. After a moment of collecting himself, he looked up and met the gaze of each of his family members in turn. "That is why Cyrus has been gone for so long. Something has happened to him in Nevermere... As well as to all of the people he had stationed there." He let his words hang in the air, allowing the implications of them to sink into his family.

Evander knew. Maybe not the specifics, but he knew something had gone wrong. But the reality was worse than he could have feared. Gone. Just gone. Without a trace. Not a man capable of complex, deep emotion, instead of anxiety and upset, Evander just felt…cold. He let the cold overtake him for a moment, then he neatly packed it away. Cyrus was gone, leaving a hole in his place. Though Evander did not abandon hope that Cyrus would be found, in the meantime, someone had to patch it.

“The continued stability of the Blackwood family must be our first priority," Evander started, his tone flat as it always was, "We cannot let Cryus’s absence be the catalyst for chaos. Order must be maintained.” And maintaining order was Evander’s specialty. He looked at his siblings as if they were the only two people in the room whose opinions mattered.

Children were children, no matter how old, it seemed. Or Cicero probably would have said. He was a fine father, Diogenes would admit. Maybe he would only admit because it was one of the few things they did not ever have to compete about, but still.

Cyrus was missing in action, then.

"I see," observed the old man, folding his arms. "I believe Evander is correct, given that Cyrus would have said the same thing and here are his siblings echoing the statement," he said.

"And while I'm hardly involved in the day to day affairs of the Blackwood Family's more ambitious matters, I agree with both of you," he said to Evander and Calliope. "Doubtless that everyone in this room would want Cyrus' well formed plans to continue, I can say that it would be a good plan to act as if this doesn't affect us in the least."

Wouldn't do much good for Cyrus' whole Blackwood supremacy plan to fall apart because his siblings and children couldn't handle something going wrong. So, Diogenes supposed, he would play the part of the responsible uncle for once. The burden of maturity. Cicero was laughing, somewhere.

"So currently we have two thirds of the heads of the family still around," he said. Chloe Blackwood would probably hate this development, especially since it was at least halfway Diogenes' fault she was in her position.

"My advice would be to treat this as if it were planned," he said. "If nothing else, Cyrus is a Blackwood. We are nothing if not resourceful and clever, else we wouldn't earn the name. There's a chance that whatever he was up to in Nevermere is very secret, at the moment. Concerning ourselves about what it is will do us no good, because presently we can do nothing about it. We should focus on the here and now. Would Cyrus want all this careful planning and strategy to be tied to merely him? Or would he prefer the great Blackwood monolith to be stronger than any one branch, any root, of the tree?"

He listened to each of his family member's in turn, working to keep his face carefully neutral, an attempt at strength. If they were any other family, he knew the easy answer would be to find Cyrus or at the very least figure out what had happened. And he desperately wanted to do that. But much like when his father had disappeared, he knew they wouldn't be able to act out publicly. The Blackwoods would always be held to purposes beyond themselves, no matter the cost.

His gaze rested on Calanthe, sadness overtaking his features. The youngest among them, she had yet to understand how the family operated behind the scenes. Even Pietro had only had a glimpse of the truth behind their name. He worried that, without that understanding, she would see them as simply abandoning Cyrus and grow resentful.

He tore his gaze away from her, nodding slightly. "I agree, order must be maintained among the family. Not just visibly, but in actuality. We have all been busy since the last family gathering, doing our parts to carry out what was voted on. I fear that the reason Cyrus and all of our people went missing in Nevermere is because someone of note somehow discovered those plans. If we send search parties into Nevermere, it would give them more reason to act against the Blackwoods and everything we've worked towards would fall apart."

He looked to Calliope and Evander again, "As Diogenes has said, we may have to act as if this was planned. We have to be smarter than them or we risk putting the entire family more at risk than we already are. We will need to come up with a reason for Cyrus's absence and act as if it is the truth. Perhaps even call the entire family for a meeting to push that 'truth' and elect a new head of the family."

He looked to Calanthe and Pietro again, "I know this may be hard to understand, but please know that we all would want nothing more than to search for Cyrus. We just cannot put the entire family and our plans at risk for one member, even someone as important as Cyrus. It was the same when my father, your grandfather, went missing."

Evander rarely formed interpersonal connections. Cyrus had been the exception, with his siblings being somewhere in the middle ground. But in that moment, he realized that he and Calanthe Beckett were connected by their grief. Evander’s was different of course, more conceptual than emotional, but it was present nonetheless. He looked at Calanthe for a long moment, before offering.

“I will go with you.” Evander’s tone was flat, clinical, and seemingly indifferent. But it was as close to comfort as he could ever come. He looked back to his siblings, first Calliope Blackwood , then finally resting his eyes on Keion Blackwood . “No one will know I’m there. I’ll be a ghost.” His lip twitched, almost as if he wanted to smile.

A ghost. That’s what Evander had always been.