Darayan Read online

  © Cara Violet 2018

  ISBN: 978-0-9953667-2-5

  www.caraviolet.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover by Mitchell Nolte

  THE WORLDS OF THE SILIOU UNIVERSE

  FELRIN GALAXY

  Felrin System

  Felrin – Species: Felrin

  Sheroon – Species: Extinct

  Rawl – DESTROYED

  Roame System

  Waterak – Species: Unknown

  Rivalex – Species: Gorgon, Giliou, Necromancer

  Fewdeter – Species: Jugwugbugy

  Dowaric System

  Janjuc – Species: Sprite

  Valendean – Species: Kinsmen

  Vengard – Species: Mandalayn

  Flaygoren System

  Deposi – Species: Seaq

  Rodoli – Species: Cigard

  Feldara System

  Elzara – Species: Archa

  Felderin – Species: Giliou

  Delrinmino – Species: Chormeda

  Hyravane System

  Hilan – Species: Harpy

  Whidal – Species: Aquamorph

  Tinwala – DESTROYED

  Abergot – DESTROYED

  Croone System

  Croone – species: Daem-Raal

  Havan System

  Deloit – species: Crucibal

  Sari – species: Sarinese

  Namea – Necromancer

  WHIRLEED GALAXY

  Star Systems – Unknown

  HOLOM GALAXY

  Absentee System

  No planets

  MILKY WAY GALAXY

  Solar System

  Mercury – species: N/A

  Venus – species: N/A

  Earth – species: Preform human

  Mars – species: N/A

  Jupiter – species: Sewan

  Saturn – species: N/A

  Uranus – species: N/A

  Neptune – species: N/A

  The Kaianan Trilogy

  Kaianan

  Queen Kaianan

  Darayan (Companion Novel: Kaianan 2.5)

  Kaianan: Anarch

  Coming Soon

  The Prequal Novella

  The Battle of Middle Forsda

  DARAYAN

  Foreword

  Firstly, I’d like to thank you for joining the journey thus far. Darayan is a companion novel, Kaianan 2.5, and is recommended to be read in between Queen Kaianan (Book 2) and Kaianan: Anarch (Book 3) although it is not necessary. The time frame of Darayan runs parallel to the trilogy. PART 1 of Darayan coincides with Kaianan and Queen Kaianan (Book 1 and 2) and PART 2 coincides with the concluding Kaianan: Anarch (Book 3).

  Please enjoy this companion novel as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I look forward to you accompanying me on the next adventure.

  Contents

  The Kaianan Trilogy

  DARAYAN

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  Chapter One: An Argument to Divide

  Chapter Two: The Wrong Ship

  Chapter Three: The Dowaric System

  Chapter Four: Shipwrecked

  Chapter Five: The Patient Warrior, An Impatient Queen

  Chapter Six: Waterworld

  Chapter Seven: Niceties Abashed

  Chapter Eight: Only when I’m Dreaming

  Chapter Nine: An Unsuspecting Camaraderie

  Chapter Ten: The Janjuc Civil War

  Chapter Eleven: The Measure of a Man in Time of Controversy

  Chapter Twelve: Where Dowaric Lies

  Chapter Thirteen: A Broken Man Changed

  Chapter Fourteen: Betrayal

  Chapter Fifteen: Information on the Inside

  Chapter Sixteen: Hollow Explanation

  Chapter Seventeen: Repairing the Injured

  Chapter Eighteen: The Beginning of the End

  PART TWO

  Chapter Nineteen: The Ice City

  Chapter Twenty: An Uncompromising Party

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Game to Distract

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Dinner with Enemies

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Ice City Part Two

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Return of the Camaraderie

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Dawn Break

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Rock Bottom

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Old Friends

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Harpooning the Harpy Capital

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hidden Meanings, Transparent Feelings

  Chapter Thirty: Another Perspective, Same Farewell

  Chapter Thirty-One: A Stale Salute

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The Re-Taking of Janjuc

  Chapter Thirty-Three: One Queen Free from Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four: Losing Siliou, Gaining the Past

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Deepness of the Heart

  Epilogue

  PART ONE

  Prologue

  The crying infant was loud and becoming unbearable. Clenching his fists together, Darayan wished the women looking over his mother’s body would stop talking so much. What was going on? Why didn’t they explain anything to him? His mother, who was laying drowsy in her bed, was cradling her new, unsettled baby—Darayan’s new sibling. But he couldn’t get a good look, the two women servants had turned into six, and now there were several men walking into his mother’s bedroom.

  It had been hours, cooped up in this room of the tiny bluestone house, and besides staring at the wooden Miry chest of drawers, side tables and opaque hanging light as a distraction, Darayan was angry his view of his mother’s double bed had been taken away from him just after he found out he had another sibling. He wanted to see, wanted to find out who it was, what did Mama name them?

  “Mama,” he called out. Nothing. So he called again. No-one was listening to him. One gentleman almost knocked him down to the timber floorboards as he aggressively paced around Mama’s bed. The dark-skinned man snorted in his direction but said nothing. Darayan had never seen anyone so huge; it frightened him. He barely reached the man’s knees; the man was bigger than a preform, and Darayan had heard the whispers and myths about the immortal folk. The robes this man was wearing, they were different too; this wasn’t Gorgon attire, it was similar to the folk that worked in the Felrin Bank, the Felrin tellers. Was this man Felrin? A Felrin warrior even?

  When the man’s blade was exposed under his white robe, Darayan gasped. A hard grimace formed over the warrior’s shadowy face as it turned towards him; then he looked away, uninterested.

  The voices in the room kept getting more obscure. Questions were being asked and his mother was answering them but Darayan couldn’t determine what the words actually were—and it wasn’t because he didn’t understand. It was because he couldn’t get close enough to hear or see what was going on.

  His mother’s bedroom, once warm with thick cream curtains and lots of sparkling ornaments and pictures, suddenly seemed cold.

  “Hold the boy back,” he heard a voice say.

  When solid arms were grasping him, he fought against them. “MAMA!” Darayan screamed. His body was being violently tugged. His mother was now yelling and screaming the same pitch as his younger brother or sister. Darayan had no idea what was happening. He was thrashing now.

  “MAMA!” He kept shouting and pleading to be let go.

  He was moved out and away from his mother’s house, along the asphalt streets in the moonlight to another bluestone house, maybe four doors down. He felt the exhale of the person holding him and their big strides bumping him up and down as he tried to count how far back his house was. They all looked the same; it was hard
to say exactly how many he passed. Darayan was keeping vigilant: he wasn’t stupid. He would find a path back home as soon as he was left alone.

  He jerked his head up and got a good look at his captor. It was the tall, broad man dressed in white robes with the Felrin royal seal who was shoving him inside, kicking and screaming into the arms of a much older woman. She had such a kind face, Darayan almost felt like she was a part of his mother’s family. She seemed so familiar. She had big green eyes like he did. He reached out to touch the soft skin on her face, feeling it wrinkly with age. She brushed her long grey hair back and Darayan tensed. He’d nearly forgotten he needed to get home.

  “Darayan,” the woman whispered. “I need you to calm down, please. There are doctors helping your family. Everything will be okay. We just need to wait.” She kept rubbing his back, then brushing her thin fingers through the unkempt dark brown hair that ran to his neck.

  The exhaustion he had felt from staying up all night waiting for his sibling to arrive, combined with the sheer aggression of his kicking and screaming, had him almost asleep, but when the timber front door screeched open an hour later and the Felrin man, dressed in those pressed white robes re-entered, Darayan was far from sleepy.

  The words that this gentleman spoke, so nonchalantly, to Darayan, these words would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  “I’m sorry, son,” the man failed to meet Darayan’s eyes as he spoke, “your mother,” he went on, with a slight hesitation, “your mother has died in childbirth and your brother, a stillborn.” And with that, the Felrin warrior simply walked out and closed the door behind him.

  Chapter One: An Argument to Divide

  Darayan awoke with a fright. It was pitch black and everything that had fluttered through his mind, he realised, was a nightmare. That night was over. Gone. It was in the past. In this moment, Archibel stirred next to him. Cuddled up under the white sheets, breathing softly, her bronze skin and bright orange locks calmed him. His heartbeat slowed, and after a second composing himself, he lifted the bedsheet off his legs and made his way to the bathroom.

  His fingers tightened against the black basin and his eyes went up to the person staring back at him in the square mirror. With only the moonlight shining through from the small window to his left, Darayan could see a gaunt and shadowy image of his face. That little boy that was embedded deep in his brain, the one who kicked and screamed and begged for his mother, was gone. In its place was an athletic, stubble-growing, confused young man.

  But that day never escaped him. The question was why? When he left Rivalex three years ago, he was promised the nightmares would stop. Jahzara had told him: the days he spent in Layos, those he wished he would forget, she would remove from him—the powerful gatekeeper told him she would take away the burden that had followed him since he was four years old.

  Except it was rubbing off. It had been nearly eighteen years since the day of that memory. And although most of the memories of his past had lessened, they had recently started to come back, piece by piece. It was this recollection, the day he lost his mother, that rocked him to his core.

  “Darayan, are you okay?” he heard Archibel call. He bent down, turned on the cold water and shoved some water on his face, his bushy dark hair sticking to the sides of his neck.

  “Fine,” he replied.

  “Was it another nightmare?”

  Archibel, the girl who worried about him, painstakingly asked a multitude of questions every chance she could get. They were currently living under the guise of a married couple, a pretence so they could live and work on this unruly planet, her old home planet, Sari. He felt obliged to answer her, but opted not to. Ever since Archibel had joined him on his departure of Rivalex, she’d become overly clingy. He couldn’t do anything without the woman on top of him. They were friends … but he couldn’t help but feel she wanted a lot more from him, which was something he wasn’t willing to give. The less information she had about his nightmares, the better.

  “I hate that you give me nothing,” she said at his lack of an answer.

  He walked back into the bedroom and, scanning over the room, from the small grey lounger in the corner, across the coppery curtains letting in tiny bits of moonlight, all the way to her figure laying across their large, white-sheeted bed, he noticed that look of hers. She was angry again.

  Ignoring her, he advanced a few steps and climbed back into bed, silent.

  “Darayan,” she said as he turned his back to her. “Darayan, please …. Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “What’s going on with you?”

  He felt her hand touch his shoulder and he became rigid. “Not now, Arch, please go back to sleep.”

  “I thought Jahzara said the images were gone? Are they the same ones you’re experiencing now?”

  It was like a broken audio reel, instead, it wasn’t like the lullaby his mother used to play him to put him to sleep, it was Archibel’s consistent enquiries, over and over again.

  “It’s nothing,” he finally said “go back to sleep.”

  “I don’t like seeing you like this.” Her voice was hurt and she kept rubbing the skin down his arm.

  He rotated and faced her. “I said it’s nothing.” Her expression changed when she could see how bitter he was.

  “It isn’t nothing. I know you’re lying.”

  He hated how close they were, how intimately she knew him. He’d kept himself so guarded around her, how was she still able to read him?

  He recalled the day he brought her home, to Daley, the woman who looked after him on the night of his mother’s death and from that night onward. Daley was standing in the marble kitchen, baking some ramen rice to go with an Ebel stew.

  “You’re back, young sir, scrub your fingers and hands please—” Daley’s soft voice stopped as she turned around to face him. Her eyes were on Archibel. Her cinnamon skin and flame hair were not something many would see in Layos, or even on Rivalex at all. On top of that, the girl was a harrowing mess. Dirty with mud, and soot all over her. “We have a visitor?” Daley smiled.

  Darayan looked up to Archibel’s face, the girl was unreadable, at first Darayan thought she was scared, at second glance she looked like she was staring Daley down as if wanting to kill her.

  “She’s hungry, mam,” Darayan said into the awkward silence.

  “Of course she is,” Daley agreed, “does the young lass have a name?”

  Archibel didn’t answer.

  Daley put her hand to her chin, her very wrinkled skin saggy between her fingers. “You won’t be treated any differently to Darayan, young lady. I expect you wash up before I serve any stew. Darayan, please assist in the bathroom.” Her eyes went back to Archibel. “And would you like me to cut up your pumpernickel?”

  Archibel froze, clinging to the bread loaves shoved under her arm.

  Darayan, much shorter and younger than Archibel, yanked the loaves from her and handed them both to his grandma. “Here you go, mam.” Then he seized Archibel’s hand and pulled her on, calling out: “I’ll help her wash …”

  Darayan was back in the present. Archibel’s big hazel eyes, as they were the day he met her, were indecipherable as she lay on her side, staring right into him. She exhaled, lifted her arm up and rested it on her voluptuous hip. Curly orange strands fell across her freckly cheeks and plump lips, down to her chest. Her expressions were so elusive; Darayan always found it difficult to read her. Archibel was thoroughly intriguing with the way she thought things through, but Darayan always kept his distance. He knew she was the kind of woman who, once she’d drawn you in with her magnetism, could pry anything out of you. How on Sari was he ever going to stay mad at her?

  “It’s nothing.” His eyes betrayed him.

  “Oh nothing, like the time when you went missing at your barracks and spent the night in the woodlands because you had a hallucination and didn’t know where you were? Do you know how worried I was?” He was beginning to understand; her voi
ce was laced with it. But that night was an accident, he thought he was walking back here, back home after his shift as a trained aura user, a Sarinese Topazi soldier in the Sari army. His brain just told him, home was through the woods, he didn’t know he was walking into a deadly habitation of carnivores. “Or the time you decided to wake me up screaming Kaianan’s name, and I found you in the bathtub covered in blood?”

  And with that name, when she spoke Kaianan’s name, something triggered inside Darayan.

  “Dammit, Arch, we’ve been over this, a hundred times.” He was up and out of bed again. He had night slacks on but went in search of a t-shirt and when he found one, pulled the grey garment over him. “As my friend, there is a line I ask you not to cross. You’re trying to cross it right now.”

  “What have you been through, Darayan? Tell me! Talk to me!” Her hands were through her hair in angst. This woman was a warrior, a Sarinese Topazi too, strong and able—right now she was on the verge of killing him and he thought she give it a red hot go if he didn’t keep his cool.

  “Please, stop prying into my personal life.” He spoke with as much control as he could, and as polite. Her expression did not alter.

  “You think you’re the only one dealing with all of this? We’ve been here for three years, Darayan.” She threw the sheets off and headed for him; Darayan realised she was just beginning her rant. That thin pink silk nightdress barely covered her body as she approached him.

  “How long will we have to keep up this façade as Duke and Polie of Hyravane? We’ve met too many people who we’ve made fake friendships with, what will they think when they find out the truth?”

  “Please, Archibel.” He reached his arm out and ran his fingers down her arm, to her hand. Her chin dropped and he was unsure if he caught a tear running down her face. The only thing he could see was her chest, that bronze complexion heaving up and down shining in the moonlight—then a glint of something shone right in the centre of her bones. A pearly gleaming stone, one that was all too familiar. All too heart-palpitatingly familiar—she was wearing his mother’s necklace.