[She takes a deep breath and the smile fades, her expression turning a little more serious, but she doesn't look upset. The first part is something she finds much less hard to talk about. It still takes her a moment to find the right words, though, and she initially is looking at their joined hands when she speaks.]
...I've told you that the village I grew up in was isolated. That isolation wasn't an accident, or a coincidence. Ever since the fall of the Kingdom of Terises, all of the Ferines have lived in villages hidden by...it's a little like magic, though I never thought of it like that. We were hiding from humans.
[Now she looks up to meet Rei's eyes. She feels slightly awkward admitting some of it, but it doesn't even register on the list of things that are hard to admit. She wonders whether it will even be a surprise, given how nervous she'd been to admit to being Ferines to Rei and how she hides it from anyone she doesn't trust completely (and doesn't even tell some of the people she does).]
When I was a kid, I believed what the adults told me about humans: that they hated us, and that they would attack us if they ever found us. [She gives a wry half-smile.] I eventually learned that most humans in my world didn't even know we existed and thought that stories of us from the Kingdom of Terises were just legends, but, at the time, it made sense to me and it kept me from going past the barrier without permission. And, for the first fifteen years of my life, I never met one.
no subject
...I've told you that the village I grew up in was isolated. That isolation wasn't an accident, or a coincidence. Ever since the fall of the Kingdom of Terises, all of the Ferines have lived in villages hidden by...it's a little like magic, though I never thought of it like that. We were hiding from humans.
[Now she looks up to meet Rei's eyes. She feels slightly awkward admitting some of it, but it doesn't even register on the list of things that are hard to admit. She wonders whether it will even be a surprise, given how nervous she'd been to admit to being Ferines to Rei and how she hides it from anyone she doesn't trust completely (and doesn't even tell some of the people she does).]
When I was a kid, I believed what the adults told me about humans: that they hated us, and that they would attack us if they ever found us. [She gives a wry half-smile.] I eventually learned that most humans in my world didn't even know we existed and thought that stories of us from the Kingdom of Terises were just legends, but, at the time, it made sense to me and it kept me from going past the barrier without permission. And, for the first fifteen years of my life, I never met one.