Page 25 of Dark Destiny: A New Thread in the Tapestry

Alena laughed. "You are devious."

"I'm just being a good cousin and nephew. The family should be kept in the loop. What about Toven? Did you call him?"

"No, but I should. I'll do it right now."

"After you call Kalugal and Lokan."

She chuckled. "Right. After I call them. Bye, Kian."

He put the phone down on his desk and swiveled the chair to look out the window again.

Khiann was awake, and his mind was functioning, at least as far as understanding spoken language. Everything else was workable, and his mother would take on the rehabilitation with gusto. She could handle this. What she couldn't have handled was Khiann's body waking up but not his mind. That would have devastated her.

Hopefully, that was behind them, and Khiann would not deteriorate. The question was what would happen once he was released from the clinic and joined the clan as their mother's official mate.

Would she ask them to call Khiann 'Father?'

She had told them more than once that she had chosen the human males to father her children based on how much they reminded her of her lost mate.

Kian had assumed she'd meant temperament, intelligence, leadership ability, and so on, but when he'd looked upon the one he had been named after, he'd realized she had meant it literally as well as in spirit.

Still, there was no way Kian was going to call Khiann 'Father.'

He would've liked to be a better son and give his mother this gift, but he couldn't, and he hoped she would not ask it of him.

Hell, Khiann had entered stasis as a twenty-year-old. A boy, as gods and immortals went. That alone would make it impossible for Kian to call him Father even if Khiann decided to adopt all of Annani's children.

The other problem was that Kian could hardly speak to the male. His command of the old tongue would get him through a greeting, a farewell, and an apology for having such poor command of the vernacular.

It was astounding that immortals could soak up languages with ease and yet struggle with the very one their ancestors had spoken, probably because it was a dead language.

Thank the Fates for technology.

He picked up the phone again and called William.

"If you are calling about the earpieces, they are not ready yet." A chair creaked. "It's going slowly, and the bottleneck isn't the hardware. It's Toven. He gave me two hours yesterday and forty minutes this morning, but he spent half of them explaining the foreign influences on the old tongue."

Kian rubbed his eyes. "How many words do you need?"

"More than he's given me. A lot more."

"You have plenty of others to use. Esag and his buddies, the harem ladies, and even Aru, Dagor, and Negal. None of them is overly busy."

There was a pause.

"Toven is the best because he speaks the purest and most elevated version of it. The Anumati gods speak a different dialect because the language underwent a semantic drift over time. Even the Clan Mother has trouble understanding some of it. The gods probably speak the purest version of it, but on our side, words from other languages have replaced many of the original ones. The same is true for the harem ladies, Esag, Davuh, and Roven."

"Does Toven have the time to spare?"

"No."

"Then use whoever speaks any version of the old tongue." Kian pulled his tablet closer. "Toven for whatever he'll give you, and don't let him tell you it has to be perfect. It only has to be good enough for Khiann to understand what is being said to him, and vice versa. We will fill in the missing parts and replace the wrong ones later."

"I don't know if it will be good enough even for that," William said. "The output will be strange."

"Khiann has been asleep for five thousand years. Everything is going to be strange to him. Get me something rough and quick, and then make it better afterward."

"I'll talk to Negal tonight. Of the three, he's the easiest to work with."