Stoan

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

THE BRIEF HAD BEEN scant, but for once, Stoan was grateful. He’d been in close proximity to his, no, to the denya for less than a quarter hour. And while his brains and desires had been scrambled, in the two days since that fateful meeting he’d reformed his core and strengthened his essential self.

Reina was not his. He would never take her. But he would have to deal with her.

Stoan could have cursed Nina, though the commander couldn’t know about the extra layer of agony that she had appended to his short existence.

It was the curse of the Detyens, though a poet long ago had called it the Denya gift. It was a way to balance the scales, for mated Detyens were long lived, some reaching two hundred years or more. Unmated Detyens died at thirty. All of them.

At twenty-six, Stoan had time. He had years to search the stars to find out if his hopes, every belief he’d held in his youth, were true.

I’m so sorry, Inrit. Sorrow pierced his breast, clenching his heart and making him gasp. Tears threatened to prick at his eyes, but Stoan remained strong. Grief was a vicious beast and if he fed it with tears it would only grow stronger, all consuming.

He tried to recall her face, but his childhood friend had been gone for too long and the Temple of the Dead eschewed most technology. He didn’t even have a still photograph to remember her by.

They’d been childhood friends, the only two children raised by the priests and priestesses in the Temple of the Dead on Beothea. And he had been certain that once they reached adulthood the denya bond would be triggered and would put an end to the loneliness inside of him and lift their people’s curse. She’d been apprenticed out at thirteen, taken off planet by a fleet of merchants who traveled to all edges of the galaxy. And before her first letter could make it back to him, he’d been sent away to Tarni.

But Stoan had never given up hope. He’d looked for her in every Detyen woman who crossed his path. He’d used his contacts with clandestine operatives across three systems to be on the lookout, and every year, he sent a letter to the Temple ruins and hoped that it somehow made it to her.

The last news he had of her came from six years ago, when she disappeared off the ship she’d been apprenticed to. No one had seen her since, and no one knew why she left. For all he knew, she was long dead and lost to the stars.

A weaker man, or perhaps a smarter man, would have taken Reina—Ms. Draven—as a sign. If she was his denya, then surely there was no hope for the connection blossoming between him and Inrit. In the century since the destruction of Detya, there had been no case of a person finding two compatible mates. And even in the time when their people had flourished, such occasions had been beyond rare.

But Ms. Draven was not his. She was human. That had to be the difference. He may have only been a boy all those years ago, but there had been a bond, infantile and fragile, yet ready to bloom as soon as they were ready.

He could not sacrifice it just because a human triggered some strange, counterfeit connection.

But Tyral was truly mated, his thoughts attacked. Tyral NaRaxos was another Detyen man who Stoan had met only briefly a few weeks before. In assisting Tyral in getting off the planet and away from the forces who wished to hurt them, Stoan had learned of their connection. Tyral and Dorsey had claimed one another, as mated as the oldest pair of denyai in the galaxy.

Stoan had felt hope for his people. If they could truly mate with humans, they were saved, no longer bound to the thousands of lingering Detyens whose numbers grew smaller every year. There were tens of billions of humans. Even if only one percent of them held the key to a denya bond, his people could flourish once more.

One hundred years ago, a mysterious force had destroyed his people’s home planet of Detya. The only survivors were those few who had been able to escape the planet in time and those off-world on vacation or official business. A hundred years later, there may have been a hundred thousand Deteyens left in the entire galaxy.

And in the morning, that number would decrease by one.

Stoan put thoughts of Rei—Ms. Draven and bonding out of his head. He could not bring these thoughts into Hyn’s Final Night.

Stoan knelt at the foot of his bed in his small bedroom where he kept the ceremonial cask. Inside, he retrieved a yellow candle and a small silver flask. These were the ornaments of the Priests of the Dead, and while they no longer comforted those leaving this life, Stoan had dedicated himself to carrying on their work, at least in this one little way. He was no priest, he had taken no vows, but the first lesson he could remember being taught was simple: anyone can offer comfort to those in need.

Except for the ceremonial cask, a small box with ornamental carvings gouged into the old wood, Stoan’s room was barren of decoration. The walls were soothing and yellow, his bed sheets and quilt a deep blue. The small nightstand carried a clock and lamp. There was nothing to distinguish this room as his own, though he’d lived here for more than a year.

The anonymity of the room was not something he’d learned at the Temple of the Dead, but he would not dwell on his habits now. Hyn had no time for Stoan to stall.

The large house in the central quarter of town housed several unmated Detyens and one Detyen family of four. The building had enough rooms for fifty people, but most were unused, reserved for travelers and those who journeyed to Tarni, to Stoan, for their Final Night.

The Final Night had been a solemn, but thankfully rare, tradition in the old days. Now Stoan saw to at least ten a year. Not all Detyens practiced the old ways or believed in the old gods. Too many of them had been forsaken on Detya for faith to endure. But Stoan had been raised to it, and he saw the beauty in the tragedy of their kind.

Stoan left his room and walked silently up the central staircase to the fifth floor, the top story of the house. Once there, he placed the candle and the flask on a small transport bot and programmed it to fly to the penthouse. He pulled the ladder down from the ceiling and climbed up to the roof. An atrium on the roof, glass walls on all sides opening it to the night air and the stars, was lit by small lamps embedded in the floor. It leant an ethereal glow to the place, half on Tarni and half in the world beyond.

The lights cast Hyn in unworldly shadow. He was a man in his prime, tall and proud. Twenty-nine, with gleaming blond hair and skin the rich blue of Beothea’s ocean at dawn. Hyn nodded to Stoan as he approached, retrieving the candle and flask from the buzzing bot. They were not friends. In fact, they had only met when Hyn stepped off the ship at the Nina City Port. But friendship had little to do with this ritual. When Stoan was close enough to hear him, Hyn spoke, but he didn’t look away from his survey of the city.

“How many do you suppose will join me on this journey tonight?” he asked.

Stoan stepped up next to him. Lights across Nina City glittered. It was still early in the evening. Below, people walked back and forth from the Central Market, the largest shopping center in the city. Above them, the stars blazed. The lights of the city obscured the millions of lights they’d see in the desert away from town, but even so, it was beautiful.

“I cannot say, but I will be by your side to the last,” he promised. It was a lonely road and this final comfort was the least that Stoan could give.

Hyn swallowed, his throat working against the fear he was trying so bravely to hide. “How much does it hurt?”

Screams of agony, convulsions, fire burning all around him. Stoan blinked. That was a night long ago and nothing like what Hyn was about to face. “Each Detyen faces a unique fate.”

“Do you have long?” Hyn asked, finally turning to him, his green eyes glistening. “You can’t be young, to be in charge here.”

In charge? It didn’t work like that. They were a loose group of Detyen survivors, not an independent civilization or unit. Though, Stoan supposed, many of their group did come to him when troubles arose. And he was the man to see the Final Night through.

“I have time enough,” he said. He didn’t let himself think of Inrit, and when Reina’s visage appeared in his mind, he shook his head, warding her off. She was unwelcome here. “Please take a seat,” he told Hyn.

Stoan placed the candle on a small table and lit it. This was going to be a long night.