Bel considered Kitalia’s attempt to progress the explanation and thought hard about how to explain the nigh-unexplainable. “Bear with me a moment or three. This is not an easy concept to work through, especially considering our level of exhaustion.”
She waved a hand around them, “I touched already on the idea of our powers being related to perceptions of this world. At its simplest, we dragons perceive the things in this world, this physical world that you know so well, in very much the same manner as you do. However, there are other aspects to this world that you cannot perceive. I cannot explain the why of that. It is far beyond my ability to do so though as I’ve never been the best at understanding it myself. My talents lie elsewhere, but that is outside the focus of the here and now.”
There was a pause as tea was sipped and the fire was fed. “Imagine, if you will, that there is a box with holes cut into every side. Some beings can only look through one opening and perceive of its contents, but if you were able to move around the box and peer into the other openings, you might be able to see things about the contents that you could never looking only through the one window. My people are simply able to move around the box, whereas yours and the Tehynshins cannot.”
“That,” Kitalia replied slowly, “is not the terrible explanation that you worried it might be. It leaves me curious about a great many things, but as you said, those are outside the focus of the here and now.” Foremost on her mind, however, was whether one could train themselves to move about the metaphorical box and whether the Ylveryan and the Tehynshins were looking through the same window or opposing ones. The latter would explain so much about why they saw the world so differently and were acting against each other in almost every aspect of life, but she didn’t know how to pose that to Bel without getting into a deeply philosophical discussion that she simply didn’t have the mental capacity for now.
Nodding, Bel continued, feeling more encouraged that she wasn’t losing Kitalia with her explanation. “That’s essentially the crux of how dragon powers work. We can perceive and even interact with this world through these other windows. Moving in the manner that you call a stride is just one example of how we can do so. It was through one of those other windows that I could see the trap.”
“But since I was with you, would I not have been able to see what you could see?” Kitalia asked, though she was confident that she already knew the answer but wanting Bel to confirm it for her. Truth be told, the entire conversation was giving her a splitting headache, but she’d be damned if she’d ever let on that she couldn’t keep up mentally.