Chapter 20
V’dim
The twin suns bled copper across the horizon, against the indigo twilight falling upon them.
V’dim stood at the railing of the villa’s observation deck and watched them sink, his tentacles curled in loose spirals around the stone balustrade.
Not from cold. The evening air on Destima was soft, faintly salt-tinged from the inlet below, the temperature still holding the warmth of the afternoon.
The curling was reflex. A tell he’d never quite mastered hiding.
Z’fir knew. Z’fir always knew.
He’d asked his bondbrother to relay the request himself—could Selena come to him here, when the evening light turned gold? He hadn’t given a reason. Z’fir hadn’t asked for one. They’d been bonded too long for that particular courtesy. One look, and Z’fir had nodded, and gone.
The constellation was about to scatter.
V’dim exhaled and loosened his tentacles from the railing, spreading them wide against the warm stone.
A habit from childhood—his mother had called it grounding, pressing against something solid when the world felt like water underfoot.
The Ulax court had not been a place that forgave visible feeling.
He’d learned early to manage the shape anxiety took.
The posture of it. The tightly wound coil of a Circuli prince who felt too much and had been told, in a hundred different ways, that too much was weakness.
He hadn’t believed it then. Didn’t believe it now.
But standing here, with forty-seven hours left before he and Z’fir boarded their ship and left Destima behind—left Selena behind—the old tension crept back regardless.
Below the deck, the villa grounds stretched quiet in the fading light.
He could feel the household through the edges of his clanbrothers’ bonds, their amusement echoing to him: the cubs’ bright, combustible presence a few rooms away, Neazzos still vibrating from the guardian mission he’d been assigned earlier, Nocrez wound tight in a different way, clinging to anyone warm whenever he could find them.
Meti was simply still. She had been still all day, in the particular way she went still when she was paying attention to things no one else could perceive.
And Xylo and Odelm—there. The soft twin threads of his nestbrothers, present but muted, dulled by healing and by the weight of Destima’s Circuli mental web pressing against Selena’s shields.
V’dim felt the edge of it even now—even protected by her barriers, even standing up here in the salt-aired evening—like pressure behind his eyes.
The collective hum of an entire population’s unease, filtering through her psychic buffers.
Not quite touching him. But close enough to feel the shape of it.
Thousands of Circuli living on this moon. Thousands of minds feeling what he felt.
War coming.
He rolled his shoulders and stretched his tentacles again, slow and deliberate. Counted them, the way he’d learned to do when the pressure built. One. Two. Three. Four. Still attached. Still his.
He’d been managing it all day—the low, insistent hum of Destima’s population pushing against Selena’s mental shields, her buffers holding but not eliminating it entirely.
Not for him. Not for Circuli who were wired to feel their nestqueen’s network as an extension of themselves.
The fear that moved through those hundreds of minds was not abstract.
It arrived with texture. With memory. He’d felt it this way once before, eight years of it, and he knew exactly where it led if nothing changed the current.
He rolled his shoulders and stretched his tentacles again, slow and deliberate. Counted them, the way he’d learned to do when the pressure built.
The door behind him opened.
She stepped through it backlit by the villa’s warm interior, the sunset catching her silver hair and turning it briefly, impossibly, to gold.
V’dim didn’t speak. Didn’t need to.
Selena crossed the deck without hesitation—no pause in her step, no question in her expression. She walked to him the way she always had, from almost the very beginning: like the distance between them was an inconvenience she intended to correct as quickly as possible.
He opened his arms. She stepped into them.
Two tentacles curved around her back, slow and careful. A third settled across her shoulders, broad and warm. She tipped her head back to look at him—just once, a quick upward glance, something checking his face the way she always did—and then she leaned her cheek against his chest and exhaled.
The bond settled.
That was the only way V’dim had ever found to describe it: settled.
Like a cord pulled taut across too great a distance finally given slack.
Like a frequency that had been slightly off resolving into something true.
In the Yarrkins War, when the fleet had been scattered across contested space and Z’fir was the only Circuli within range, he’d learned what the absence of that settling felt like.
He hadn’t known it had a name until Selena.
They stood like that while the suns finished their descent.
The copper light stretched long, then thinned, then went amber, and then the first thin thread of violet crept across the lower sky.
Lunkai’s bulk caught the dying light from the far horizon—massive and marbled, its purple-black surface shot through with silver, hovering enormous in Destima’s sky.
Not distant. Never distant. Orbiting close enough to make you feel the weight of it, as if it would crush into them with its brilliance.
Home. The Aldawi origin point. The place they were riding out to defend.
V’dim pressed his lips briefly to the top of Selena’s head.
She made no sound. Neither did he.
For a little while, it was enough.
Then she tilted her head and looked up at him again, and he felt it—through the bond, before she even spoke—her awareness of the tension he’d been carrying all day, like a stone beneath still water.
“Tell me,” she said.
V’dim exhaled. One tentacle slid from her shoulder to curl loosely at his side—not pulling away, just needing somewhere to go while he found the words.
“I’ve been carrying something all day,” he said. “I’d rather you hear it from me than feel it come through early in the morning.”
Selena turned in his arms to face him fully, her back to the darkening horizon now, watching him with those clear, patient eyes. She’d gotten better at this—at waiting him out, at not filling his pauses with reassurances before he’d finished. He appreciated it more than he’d ever told her.
He’d tell her now.
“You know what I am,” he said. “What we are. What the Circuli feel.”
“Empaths.”
“Yes.” His tentacles shifted, an unconscious ripple.
“We feel what our people feel. Our clan—you, the cubs, our nestbrothers and sometimes his clanbrothers through their shared nestqueen—that’s intimate.
Filtered. I’ve had years to learn the texture of each bond and what it means when something changes.
But Destima’s web—” He paused. “Selena, you carry an entire moon’s worth of Circuli in your psychic field.
Hundreds of them. And even behind your shields, even this high up, even standing here with you—I can feel the shape of what they’re feeling. ”
She didn’t look away. “What shape is it?”
“Fear.” No use softening it. “They trust you. They trust the clan and the Beacon. But they remember the Yarrkins War the same way we do. They remember what eight years of conflict cost—the cohorts it hollowed out, the families that never reconvened, the ones who came back wrong. And they can feel that something like it is coming again, and their Queen is about to leave, and the two Circuli who have held this world’s mental web together for years are about to leave too. ”
Her expression shifted. Something complicated moved through it—grief, and the particular resolve she wore when something hurt and she was determined not to let it stop her.
“You and Z’fir aren’t leaving them unprotected,” she said quietly. “Xylo and Odelm hold the web—”
“I know.” Gentle, not dismissive. “And so do they, on some rational level. But feelings aren’t rational, Selena. That’s rather the point.”
She absorbed that. Gave him the silence instead of filling it.
V’dim moved to the railing. His tentacles spread wide across the stone—grounding again, pressing against something solid.
The Yarrkins War. He’d been freshly matured and out of the academy when it started.
A bonded Ulax prince reporting to Prince Zirene for his first active duty posting, with his bondbrother Z’fir at his side, young enough to think he understood what war meant.
He hadn’t. No one did before it. You learned the shape of it only from inside, and by then it was too late to be afraid of it properly.
They’d held the mental web for their entire ship crew.
Felt every mission as it unfolded—every injury, every death that thinned another thread from the fabric until it frayed and had to be rewoven with whoever remained.
They’d fought. Made themselves dangerous in ways the most underestimate, because the Circuli’s predator reputation did not precede them the way an Aldawi’s did.
The venom in V’dim’s tentacle tips had saved Z’fir’s life three times before the first year of the war was finished. He’d stopped counting after that.
That had been an advantage, once. The enemy underestimating them.
He and Z’fir were warriors. Veterans. That was not in question.
The question was what they’d learned about time.