Page 108 of Dark Destiny: A New Thread in the Tapestry

"He-am."

Annani let it go, because it did not matter how he knew. What mattered was how well this visit had gone.

"I am proud of you, my love," she said. "Thank you for accepting my family the way they accept you."

He looked at her, and whatever she saw in his eyes was too big to express in the few words he had. She chose to think of it as love, because she wanted it to be, and because below memory, below language, she believed it had never died. Their love endured.

41

KHIANN

Khiann awoke to a cold room and an empty chair, and for a moment he panicked.

Where was she?

Then he remembered. She was having a morning meal with her family in her son's house. The daughter who had traveled across the world to see her was there.

He was proud he had told her to go, and glad she had listened. He needed her, but his need should not swallow her whole. She had a family who needed her, and she needed them. He had seen the love and devotion in her children's eyes.

It was beautiful.

Besides, he was no longer alone without her. He was not isolated. All he had to do to understand what the medical staff was saying was to touch the translating device in his ear, but he did not.

He needed to think, because something was bothering him, a realization that had been niggling at him since Kian's visit, but his mind was still not clear enough to grasp it. He let it wander.

The images were there, waiting just under the surface, so he did not have to reach far. He only had to be still and wait.

They rose.

The wedding came first, because it was the best of them. A square full of light. A bride so bright that looking at her hurt, her hair like a banked fire, her face turned up. And the groom beside her, tall in fine clothes, luckier than any man had a right to be.

This wedding had happened.

Somewhere behind the fog lay a life, and this was a piece of it surfacing. One day there would be enough pieces to make it whole.

His mind drifted to what Annani's son had told him about towers, mines, and ships. He thought about Kian sitting in the chair next to his mother, as he was now, a male over two thousand years old, and then the picture shifted to Kian as a boy. Then it shifted again to a woman with golden hair and a soft, knowing smile. A little girl with her father's fierce eyes, or perhaps it was her grandmother's, because Annani had been a fierce little thing, quick to laugh and stubborn, always getting her way.

He welcomed the memories. It felt like healing, but something about the pieces was not right. They did not match.

He could not have remembered Kian as a young boy because Kian had been born thousands of years after the earth had swallowed him and he entered the long sleep. He also could not remember Kian's wife or daughter because he had never met them.

Where had those pictures come from? They were not memories. They could not be.

So, where had the picture of the young Kian come from?

He retreated into the wedding, his happy place. But for the first time, he did not look at the bride or the lucky groom, but at himself, at where he was standing.

He was in the crowd.

He was at the edge of the square, among the guests, looking at the two figures in the light. He saw the groom's back and the turn of the bride's face, the whole bright picture only as someone across the square could see it.

But he was the groom.

He was the tall man in fine clothes.

That had been his wedding.

But then why had he been watching his own wedding from among the guests?