Jase’s face was pinched with apprehension. His eyes were wide, dark. He gave his father a slight nod. Took a tiny step back.

Kaldarren turned to Pahl. The boy hadn’t moved or spoken. With exquisite care, Kaldarren opened his mind, just a bit: like cracking a window to let in a whisper of fresh air. He probed the boy’s mind, first touching the surface the way a blind person traces the contours of a stranger’s face. Instantly, Kaldarren felt the presence of the Other. Formless and cold. Dark, as if it dwelled in the deep caverns of the mind.

Kaldarren flinched away even before he knew he had, and then he was orbiting the periphery of the boy’s mind, his own mind safe and unscathed. In the next instant, hot shame flowed through his veins. Stop, don’t let fear control you!He was acutely aware of his son’s intense gaze; of the closeness of the air, thick with these beings; of the stink of his own sweat.

I must.Kaldarren gathered himself. I must.He loosed part of his mental shield, as if shedding a piece of clothing, and then he waded into the black ocean of Pahl’s mind…and there was the Other, in the shallows—a woman, not a woman, and thoughts that twined and writhed like a serpent’s tail.

Jase caught at his hand. “Dad?” He squeezed Kaldarren’s chill fingers. “Dad?”

“Quiet, son,” said Kaldarren, his voice strange, halting. “I have to concentrate, I have to…” He broke off, redirected his focus toward the Other. Who are you?

Dithparu.The word floated, tenuous as the silver strand of a spider’s web. Dithparu.

Night Spirit,Kaldarren translated. Kaldarren always found it easier to imagine his own thoughts as a voice and he thought his voice now. “Do you have a name?”

“Uramtali”—her thought-voice, like a sigh on the wind—“They called me Uramtali.”

“What do you want, Uramtali? Why do you hold this boy?”

The dithparu,like the dry rasp of leaves upon dead branches: “He has a hole in his heart. There is Night in his soul. The other, he is Night but not enough.”

Night.Kaldarren’s mind held the word, examined it. Uramtali said Night,but she—It—meant something different. What?

Uramtali was speaking again. “This one is a boy of Night, like the Night Kings before him. Bred to the purpose.”

Kaldarren didn’t understand. He closed his eyes. He knew vaguely that Jase still held his hand, but Kaldarren’s mind was further from shore now, and he drifted, opening more of the shielded, secret places of his mind. Think it to me.

Instantly, a blizzard of strange images streamed through his consciousness. There were so many, Kaldarren couldn’t put names to any of them and he merely held his mind open, letting the images impress themselves into his brain like red-hot brands upon exposed flesh. The aroma of incense was full in his nostrils; he heard the voices of a people crying out their grief; he saw a glittering processional of mourners, light globes floating in the air above their heads, as they snaked their way through mountain passes—

Uramtali’s thought-voice in his head: the light globes floating in the air above their heads, as they snaked their way through mountain passes to this place, these mountains with their strange magnetic fields, trapping us here.

Then he understood. The dithparus:fantastically old, the remnants of a powerful civilization predating the Vulcans, the Bajorans, even the Organians and the Metrons, and so ancient that they no longer remembered where they had come from, what their true names were, what their own bodies had once looked like, or that they’d even had bodies. They knew only that they were the dithparus,the name given to them by the people on this planet, who worshiped them as gods.

In exile—Uramtali’s thought-voice, so sad— in exile.

Exiled to a parallel dimensional plane. Trapped.

Imprisoned. Brothers, they were our brothers, but they said that we were evil, darkness, the night side of their own souls.

The Brothers of Light: beings that thought it crueler to kill the Night Spirits than to place them here, unable to cross over, to make the transition from one phase to another, unless there was a suitable container. A waiting vessel.

And willing—Uramtali pushed that thought home— we are not all-powerful, the vessel must welcome us, must want our minds.

And so the tradition had built up among the people of this planet: the Night Kings.

The Night Kings, bred for the purpose.

For something very much like a phase change—Kaldarren’s own thoughts went, of their own volition, to a physical analogy— like the phase change that occurs when water goes to steam, or ice. Whatever the form, it’s still water.But the conditions for the transition, whether of water to ice, or a dithparuto a form capable of inhabiting a living being, had to be ideal, or else the phase change wouldn’t occur. The container—no, thought Kaldarren, not the container, the mind—had to be flexible enough to accommodate and adapt to the dithparu’spsionic patterns.

Maybe that’s why the dithparuwas able to use Pahl. The boy was young, his powers still raw and his control not as finely tuned as Kaldarren’s. His mind was malleable; he didn’t have the ability to shield himself the way Kaldarren did. Kaldarren doubted the boy even knew he was a telepath.

Kaldarren knew now that there was no portal, not in the way Chen-Mai or Kaldarren had imagined. The place was more like an incubator.

A prison, they hold us here, but they are gone, long ago, and we are forgotten.

A storage container: the magnetic field designed to keep these dithparustrapped here until they could exchange places with a telepath bred to the purpose, like being granted a parole by an unseen jailer. This explained the elaborate rituals, the texts on the walls that spoke of exchanging the king’s spirit for another, because the Night Kings had been bred, perhaps even genetically modified, to serve as the containers in which a dithparucould live for a span of time outside this place, this prison.

Tend the machines. But we have no knowledge, no science; we can be nothing more than we have been.

Yes, Kaldarren understood it now. When the Night King died, his body was laid to rest in these mountains, and his heir was brought here to serve as a container for another dithparu.It was, Kaldarren thought, a primitive yet effective way of keeping the dithparusin check, letting one out at a time. That one dithparulived out a mortal span, tending to the machines it knew how to access (that power source, probably the last of many),but never expanding further than the accumulated sum of the knowledge of the dithparusthat had come before. They didn’t even know how to set themselves free.

And then something had gone wrong. (Kaldarren felt the dithparusclamoring in his mind: Yes, yes, yes!)Either the line of kings had died out, or there had been war, or some calamity.

All three. They broke the cycle, one named Nartal, a prince, a coward.

Prince Nartal, who left before the transfer could take place, and so a dithparuhad taken what it could find: the boy, Ishep, now dead at his feet. But Ishep didn’t know how to get out of the tomb. Only Nartal had, and the dithparu’s powers were limited. So they had been trapped here for thousands of years, waiting for someone to find and free them while, above, the planet had died because Nartal did not know how to tend the machines, or even that they required this.

The mask, use the mask.

The mask was an amplifier, channeling the flow of psychic energy into the new host. And that was why they needed Pahl.