AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Much better!
I got up and stepped on something. I bent down to pick it up.
It was a small child’s toy. A coconut husk—or what passed for coconut husks in this part of the galaxy—had been painted with bright colors. Rain drained much of its vibrancy but I could still make out the front window and wings. A spaceship.
I dusted it off and placed it on a tabletop. Then I picked up some other items dotted in the dirt. Polished stones. They were pretty. And there, a series of silver and gold rings. Two of each. I added them to the tabletop, forming a little heap.
Fragments of a broken life. Whoever these people were, they were self-reliant. They probably hunted in the jungle and farmed some of the better fruits and vegetables too. Not dissimilar from humans long ago.
I glanced at the door. Nighteko had been gone for over an hour. Too long to be out collecting firewood. I stepped from the hut. A stiff breeze whispered over my arms, making the hairs stand on end. I folded them over my chest and rubbed some warmth into them. I was thankful we had a hut to sleep in tonight. It looked like it was going to be chilly.
I saw Nighteko on the other side of the village, crouching at the doorway to a hut similar to the one we would be staying in tonight. He held something in his hands. A stone tablet of some kind. He ran a finger over the inscription.
As I approached, he dropped it and immediately stood up. He didn’t turn to face me.
“Is everything okay?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Everything’s fine. I’ll get the firewood.”
He drifted off again, this time heading for the jungle’s edge. He began collecting scraps of fallen twigs, looking all the world like a lost soul.
I edged to the hut he’d crouched in front of and picked up the stone tablet he’d thumbed. It was etched with some unknown alien language. It took a moment for the translator strip on my neck to turn the language into something I could understand.
It said: HONOR. DUTY. FAMILY. THESE ARE THE TRAITS THAT WE, THE TITANS, HAVE LIVED BY SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME—”
That’s where it snapped off, but it was enough.
Titans? So this was a Titan village.
I gasped and my hand leaped to my mouth.
Mommy… Don’t go…
Father… Don’t leave me…
This wasn’t just any Titan village. It was Nighteko’s home.
He’d learned to fight, he said. And he discovered he possessed his father’s fighting skills. Had he been forced to fight against his will?
He’d been taken. Enslaved.
He wouldn’t trade child slaves because he had been a child slave himself.
He was taken from his parents, from his home.
From here.
I returned to the hut and waited. I would let him have as much time as he needed. It couldn’t have been easy coming face to face with your past.
He returned with an armload of dry wood and dumped them in the middle of the hut. He shifted a stone aside in the floor that twinned the one in the roof where the smoke would go. No sooner had he bent down than the fire was lit. It added a great deal of warmth to the hut and made it feel cozy.
I wanted to talk with him about his past, but how did you broach such a subject? He could only talk with me about it once he was ready. Still, maybe he needed a little prod to get him going first.
It was easier to keep the ball rolling once it was already moving.
“This is a Titan village, isn’t it?” I said tentatively.
He paused in stripping the skin off a pair of lizards he’d found somewhere. It surprised me that the sight of dead animals didn’t cause me to doubletake.
