"...and traditionally the higher in social status the dragon is the lower in the gelatin plains it lives." I stood at my usual place behind the kitchen counter, working hard to mix the thick bread dough while trying to maintain an even tone through the exertion.

Despite the cajoling it took me to take on the role of teacher and the hard work I put myself through to justify my time teaching, I had fully embraced the role. Even though I had explained to Jeb that I wasn't a teacher, now that I was doing it I found myself idly planning lessons as my mind wandered during particularly boring chores. Despite how much they wanted to know about all the different species we had encountered, I tried to included some information on Souls in each lesson. I hoped that having some knowledge of the Soul society would enable them to better pass as Souls should they ever get caught when they're out on supply runs. It was a small thing but it was the best one Soul that wasn't allowed outside could do to protect her human family.

"It is actually easier to live in the higher plains where the atmosphere is thinner. It makes it practically effortless to move around and you can make yourself look bigger, as the lower pressure means you can expand to a larger size. This comes in handy when you're trying to scare off a flock of frilled jelly vipers! The lower plains however, are more nutrient rich, making it easier to feed and the higher pressure makes the dragons neural networks more efficient so anydrake who lives there actually gets smarter. The smarter the dragon, the easier they found the social manoeuvring required to stay in these favourable areas which is how they came to be associated with the higher class drakes. There is a saying 'Drakes that descend past the Nosuuera Ghuena plateau stay past the Nosuuera Ghuena plateau.'" I finished while chuckling. My audience looked interested, but bemused at my little jibe at the social mores of the alien species they had never met.

"Ahem. I-If you knew the area that'd be pretty funny." I chewed my lip as I took a break to catch my breath and take some water. Failed joke aside the lesson had gone very well but I hadn't managed to get any information on the Soul society into this lesson so far. Could I think of something to lever in at the last minute?

Fortunately, Jamie, seeing the lull in the conversation seized the opportunity.

"Uh Wanda? I...I was wondering something about Souls?" He asked while restraining himself from looking at me directly. He seemed to not be able to decide where to look as his eyes roamed everywhere except me.

I was surprised both because he normally loved hearing about the dragons and wouldn't let anyone interrupt and he was speaking in quite a hesitant tone. Normally Jamie was the most confident around me, it was bizarre to see him so nervous. He was switching his gaze from the counter, to his feet, and the ceiling as he frowned nervously.

The rest of the class had noticed his strange behaviour too, but their perplexed expressions and shrugs indicated they were just as in the dark as I was.

I tried to keep my voice as gentle as possible to calm him. "That's great Jamie. What's your question?" His eyes twitched around the room; to the counter, his feet, the ceiling.

"Um, well I-I don't want you to think that I think that you..." Counter. Feet. Ceiling. "I mean, when I ask this I don't want you to think I mean you, well, not you now anyway,"

"That's OK Jamie, my feelings won't be hurt. Go ahead."

Oh boy, Mel thought. This is gonna be an awkward one.

"Well I've been thinking about it f-for a while now and I can't figure it out. When me, Mel and dad first went on the run I thought Souls were the scariest thing ever. We didn't go anywhere near cities and stayed out of even the suburbs unless absolutely necessary." His voice grew slowly stronger as he started his, clearly carefully rehearsed, speech.

"When me and Jared found this place I was so relieved to be somewhere so well hidden, so safe from being found," he continued while rubbing the back of his neck, subconciously signalling the fear he was reliving of getting a faint pink scar just like Melanies. "Then you turned up. When I came to see you, down in the storage corridor, I didn't know what I was going to do. I-I thought I might yell at you. Or ask you if you knew where dad was or...say the most horrible things I could think of, I don't know. But when I saw you, you looked so scared and sad, I just...I couldn't make myself stay mad at you." He seemed to have settled his gaze on the ceiling a little right of my head, where the light of the oven flickered over the stones and relaxed a little as he continued.

"When we started talking I wasn't sure what to expect, I had never talked to an alien before. I was half expecting you to try and get me to show you the way out, or say 'resistance is futile' or something corny like that at least." He smiled thinly as he remembered. "I wasn't expecting you to be nice. Or afraid. Or so shy." My hands had long since stilled in the dough, my vision trained on him like no-one else was present.

"The more I talked to you, the more I got to know you, the more I saw how nice you were. The way you talk about your friends on the other worlds, the way you would do just about anything to help them. And you're really super nice to us too! You always work so hard and do the jobs no-one wants and you always look out for me too." The small smile that had grown on his face faltered as he continued. "Which only makes it more confusing. I don't know how the nice Souls from your stories fit with the Souls that took our world from us, the Souls from your stories are too nice to have done this."

I felt as if a knife was being stabbed in my heart. I knew this day would come. I knew that one day they would be comfortable enough with me to ask why we had done this. It was a logical question, an important one. Knowing that it was coming, however, didn't make it hurt any less to see the pain and confusion in his eyes, and to know that I had put it there. I tried to hold back the moisture in my eyes and focus on Jamie.

"I couldn't figure out why you were so nice to us when the other Souls treat us like animals. Something to be ridden around like a horse, not someone to talk with and get to know. It doesn't make sense how a species that's so loving to each other could also be so heartless to us. I thought maybe we did something that made Souls think that they couldn't relate to us as equals. Or perhaps its something we don't do. Were we not smart enough? Were we too violent? If we could change whatever it is about ourselves that Souls don't like maybe they would treat us nice, like you do. So, what I wanted to know is, why do other Souls treat us this way?"

This was so much worse than I had ever imagined it would be. The fact that Jamie, sweet, innocent Jamie, had seen the damage my people had wrought and decided it must have been some fault of his own species wrenched at my heart. I tried to blink my suddenly misty eyes clear as I stared down at my hands, shaking in the dough. I could bake bread and scrub clothes and make soap for a million years and not come close to making up for the damage we've done to them.

How can I explain this? What can I say to explain millions of years of accepted justification being loaded into the mind of each child as we remember the lives of our mothers, and explain that in a way that doesn't sound like an excuse? How can I show them what its like, these creatures that figure everything out as they go along, to have your opinions practically handed to you at birth? How to make them see that to question the knowledge that all Souls are born with is to go against the very nature of my kind?

Sympathy and anguish welled up in Melanies mind along with a maelstrom of other confused emotions. She more than any other human knew both sides of this painful coin. She had experienced the horrors my kind had inflicted on her world, the terror of the chase, the anticipation of oblivion. She also understood to a degree how I had found my way in life. She had peered into many of mine and my ancestors memories, she knew how natural it felt when given this knowledge, to accept it as fact. She knew how forging my own path in direct opposition of this felt like forgoing solid ground in favour of flinging myself off a cliff into an abyss. Knowing this didn't seem to help her however, as she seemed to be nearly tearing herself in two, trying to reconcile these perspectives in silence.

I raised my eyes to Jamie, searching for a way to answer him. He wrung his hands anxiously. He seemed worried. Why in the All Mothers name would he be worried? I'm the one who should... Ah, of course, he still thinks this is all the humans fault somehow.

I pulled my hands free and walked around the counter towards Jamie. He squeaked in alarm, clearly not expecting this and stiffened in his chair. I knelt in front of Jamie and grasped his clean hands with my dirty ones. "Listen to me Jamie. You and the other humans did nothing, nothing whatsoever to deserve what we did to you. It wasn't that you weren't smart enough; the Spiders were smarter than we were after all and we still took them over. It wasn't that you were too violent; the flowers were the most pacifist species I've ever known and it didn't make any difference." A fresh wave of self loathing washed over me as I remembered how terrified the Flowers had been once they realised what was happening. "There was no password you could have given, no secret handshake that would have stopped us. This isn't your fault. It is ours, the Souls."

Jamie looked in equal parts relieved and despondent at my declaration. I was glad I was able to at least dispel his misplaced guilt. Getting him to understand the rest wouldn't be nearly as easy.

"B-but then, why?" he tremulously asked.

I shifted my position on the floor so that I was seated. This was going to take a while to explain, I wanted to get comfortable. Besides, sitting this way my head was a little lower than Jamie's as he sat in his chair. It felt fitting, sitting in penitence with my judge looking down on me. I had no illusions that they would accept my explanation or my remorse, but they had asked so I had to answer.

"I-I'm not going to try to excuse what we did, but I'll do my best to explain." I cleared my throat nervously. "For as long as we have known ourselves we have been unable to live our lives without other species. I remember all the way back to our very first mother, the mother we all share; our All Mother. The one memory that we share from her is that of terror. She had lost her host somehow and had no idea where a new one could be. She knew her death was imminent as, even on the Origin, our home planet, she couldn't survive for long outside a host. She sacrificed herself and managed to pass a simple fearful memory to her children: You must run! We listened to her and scattered far and wide as fast as we could. Almost all of them died, but the small number of them that managed to find hosts were the beginnings of our race. The very first lesson binds all Souls together was that you must listen to your mother or die.

Life was peaceful. Until the Vultures found us. They were vicious creatures, they would hunt us down and torture us, they believed our terror made us taste better. They were like parasites themselves in a way, in that they moved from planet to planet using up the resources they found. The inhabitants they didn't consume they tortured, enslaved and took with them to serve as their advance forces to enslave the next world, leaving the last world to wither and die. They were cowards you see. They enjoyed causing destruction and pain but would send their slaves ahead to ensure there was no actual danger to themselves.

When they realised that there was another species inside our hosts that controlled them they saw an opportunity. They were planning on killing our hosts and when the Soul emerged from the corpse they had hibernation chambers to store us while they travelled to their next conquest. They were going to put us into the planet's natives to take over a portion of their population in order to help them subjugate the rest. Instant slaves, with no cumbersome need to feed or care for them on route." Throughout my retelling of our origin I kept my hands grasping Jamies. I was scared he when I got to the next part of the story, that he would take his hands from mine in disgust. How could he not? Souls role in this story was about to turn from the persecuted to the persecutor.

"Needless to say when we discovered what they were planning we knew we had to fight back. We couldn't bring ourselves to fight them to save ourselves but we couldn't allow them to make us slay and torture innocents. So we turned their strategy against them, we r...we k-killed our hosts and took over the Vultures themselves."

I flushed at the awkward last minute change to my story, but an upward glance confirmed Jamie hadn't noticed. He was too enraptured with the story and Melanie still too distracted by the dissonance of her emotions to notice the sudden change in mine. I hurriedly continued on.

"We travelled to the worlds they had already colonised, they were beautiful but clearly only faint echoes of how beautiful they once were. So we set about repairing the damage they had done. We used their technology and bodies to make their old colonies havens of peace and beauty. We decided to travel widely, to experience all the diversity the galaxy had to offer and preserve it from being destroyed by war and callousness. Every planet we found, we justified our expansion by judging the inhabitants of insufficiently caring for their world or each other. We took it upon ourselves to ci-civilize every world and every species we found. 'Civilizing' meant taking it over of course," I added bitterly.

"We found justification after justification to take over worlds, until it got to the point that we were no longer seeking justification. We simply took worlds with the assumption that we could make it better. In all our memories we had never met a species that we felt met our standards so after a while, simply not being a Soul was reason enough for us to move in. We passed the memories of our 'good work'. Each generation learning from the last and passing on their own memories of spreading peace and harmony, each generation less and less likely to question the doctrine. After all, if questioning ones mother is to risk death, then surely to defy all the mothers that had gone before could only result in the annihilation of all soulkind and the peace we'd worked so hard to build!"

I sighed and felt my shoulders droop. Now that I had told them everything it all seemed so...pathetic. Committing genocide because your mother had told you to do it? It must sound pretty anti-climactic. "So that's how this happened. Good intentions and half baked justifications multiplied by the dogma of multiple generations." I sniffled as I gazed down at Jamie's hands in mine, I couldn't bring myself to look him in the eye. "I...I won't apoligise, because what we did couldn't be atoned for with a measly apology. I don't expect you to forgive us. I d-don't expect to be able to work off the debt making soap or baking bread." Tears openly flowing down my cheeks now, I didn't wipe them away, I couldn't let go of Jamie's hands. "Quite frankly I'm surprised you even let me into your community." I chuckled wetly at how accepting they had been of me, considering everything we had done to them. "All I ask...all I ask is that you let me help you be s-survive and be happy in any w-way that I can." I was openly sobbing at this point, soaking his limp fingers and my clenched ones with my tears. "I'll do anything. A-anything you want." At that point I nearly gave away my deepest secret, unsolicited, to him. The barrier I had built in my head felt as substantial as a soap bubble, ready and willing to pop. "Anythu-thing at all. Please. Please."

Jamie withdrew his hands from mine, my tears making it easy to remove them despite my desperate grasping. "N-no, please..." It felt like the knife that had been lodged in my heart through the whole conversation had carved it in two. My eyes were wide with horror, staring at my empty twitching fingers. The inevitable had happened, Jamie hated me. Getting to know me had only delayed it. He hated me.

Suddenly I felt warmth around me. Jamie's hair was against my face. I could feel his hands rubbing my back. I was confused. This was an odd way to show hatred.

What's happening? I managed to think to Mel.

He's hugging you, you ninny, Melanie informed me.

He's hugging me? He doesn't hate me?

How could he possibly hate you? She gleefully replied. You're far to soggy and sweet to hate.

Jamie confirmed this as he spoke up beside my ear. "It's alright Wanda. People you trusted gave you bad information and you made a mistake. We all make mistakes. I know you're not a bad person, not really."

I couldn't hold back anymore after that. I wrapped my shaking arms around his small frame, buried my face in his messy hair and sobbed loudly in relief. I felt another set of arms encircle me and Ian's head rested on my back, between my shoulder-blades.

"Jamies right Wanda, the way you were raised, I'm amazed you broke out of it at all. I can't speak for the rest of the human race, but I forgive you." I only wailed louder at this, my heart that belonged to another managing a throb at his words. Jamie, Ian and the rest of my group of friends murmured comforting words as my sobs died down. My friends. I felt those words ring truer now than before. If only we had been willing to see when we came, the potential these humans had, the friends we could have had. After my sounds had died down to a sniffle an awkward silence settled over the room.

A soggy trumpeting broke the silence as Jeb noisily blew his nose. There was a beat of silence then the group burst out laughing. I'm sure Jeb did that on purpose.