“Like real sister? Sister sister?” Kre asked, his mouth moving faster than his brain, “Or is it something like a sister in spirit because you’re both dragons?”
“I can not even…” Kitalia muttered, throwing her hands up. “Where did you say our packs were? I will go ahead and get something going food-wise.”
Bel motioned behind her to one of the doors, but kept her eyes focused on Kre. “You ask for a reason,” she murmured, studying his face. “Tell me.”
Kitalia started to make her way to the indicated door, but another rush of the terrible wind outside against the walls caused her to backpedal and move closer to the other two. “On second thought,” she said, clearing her throat, “I kind of want to hear this out.”
Kre put a hand on Kitalia’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze of reassurance. Then he turned to Bel and shrugged, “I dunno. I guess I just didn’t get the same vibe from her as I do from you. She just seems… I don’t know… very different. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
Bel nodded and seemed satisfied by the response. “I do use the term sister loosely,” she explained, “as many of my kind tend to. In truth, even in spirit I should not use such a term with her. She and I are as different as can be. She is the cause of many of my misfortunes in recent years, and yet… yet I still cannot bring myself to hate her as much as she hates me.
“On the topic of hate,” Kitalia said, sliding easily in the conversational lull, “what exactly are the things outside?”
Bel closed her eyes and sighed. “That is… harder to explain,” she said slowly, raising a hand to forestall the coming objection from her audience, “but I will try.”
“Imagine, if you can, what you would be if you felt nothing. If you had no emotion… no conscience to tell you right from wrong or good from evil. You would feel no pain, no joy, no hunger. Imagine if you had no fear of death itself because you have no concept of living and the only sense of anything you have is a deep sense of loss. Loss for things that you don’t even remember having in the first place.
“Now imagine that, though you feel or experience none of those things, you have a keen sense of them. You can sense strong emotions as if they were an odor, a scent that tugs at a hint of a long-lost memory that there is something more out there, something that causes that sense of loss to flare up and ache with longing for something that you can never again have.”
Bel held her arms out and gestured around her. “That is what awaits us outside these walls. Spirits… shades… things that know only loss and would stop at nothing to try and fill that void with what they can rip from their prey, but never to any avail.”
“Do they have a name?” Kre asked, completely enthralled in Bel’s storytelling.
“Yeah,” Kitalia answered, rubbing her upper arms as if taken by a sudden chill. “They are the Ancients.”