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“I did bite another alpha,” I say. “And… we leave behind fang marks, not teeth marks. It’s different.”

“Yes, your teeth don’t seem like wolf teeth,” she says. “They seem almost… snake-like.”

I nod. “We’ve thought that.”

“There is another story,” she says. “Another origin story, in fact. You’re right, the one that is commonly told is the one similar to your Snow White story, Bella and the Six Hunters.

In this story, a woman wishes to be the king’s only wife, and she sends one hunter after the other to go and kill her rival, the beautiful Bella, or whatever she is called in the stories, and each of them end up being unable to kill her and pledging to protect her instead.

There are different versions of this story.

Stories like this are often obsessed with cannibalism.

It’s present in a lot of early stories. Anyway, the wicked wife is often serving her husband organs she thinks belong to Bella, but it turns out the hunter will have just killed some animal and brought back its liver or heart or lungs or whatever. You’ve heard stories like that before?”

I admit I have.

“Anyway, in that origin story, Bella is the first omega and the hunters become the first alphas. It’s different than the wolf origin story, wherein the alphas turn the omegas.

In this case, the omega turns the alphas.

It’s the one that is most commonly used in our religious traditions.

Bella is considered a type of the Goddess herself, in other words, she is not the goddess, but she is a representative of the goddess in that story, a sort of Goddess stand-in.

You’re aware we worship a goddess, aren’t you? ”

“I am,” I say.

“And you? You worship a God?”

“I…” I lift my shoulders. “Not real religious, really.”

“Yes, a secular alpha,” she says with a laugh. “We see all of your culture as lacking divinity.”

She’s not exactly wrong, I guess. But I don’t know if that’s really a weakness? Maybe in some ways, it is. I don’t think their way of being is superior, however. I don’t want to move in here with the Polloi permanently, I have to admit.

“But the origin story I’m thinking of, it’s perhaps a variant of Bella and the Six Hunters,” she says.

“There are similarities, anyway. In this story, there is a step-parent, not a rival wife. The wicked stepmother casts the girl out because she is a competitor with the girl’s father for his affections.

The girl goes out into the desert where she passes three days and three nights in prayer to the Goddess, begging for safety.

The Goddess takes pity on the girl and sends to her protectors in the form of cobras, who fight off the predators that come to hurt the girl.

But then, the cobras see the girl herself and they come for her. ”

“They bite her?” I say.

“They do. The girl does not try to protect herself but instead prays to the Goddess for protection and surrenders to the cobras as they descend upon her. And the Goddess rewards the girl by changing the cobras into men, her lovers, even as their fangs are stuck inside her skin. Then, together with her cobra men, the girl creates an oasis in the desert where she rules along with the Goddess’s favor and she is rewarded with riches in harvests and many children and all of those sorts of things.

According to this tradition, the Polloi are all descended from her. ”

“Right,” I say. “So, which of these is the real story?”

“They are all the real story,” says Kyvelki.

I raise my eyebrows, but I don’t argue. I don’t know what to say to something so preposterous. Obviously, though, all of those stories are made up. None of them actually happened.

“If you mean, of course, which of them is a piece of historical fact, the answer is none of them,” says Kyvelki.

I swallow, confused.

She laughs. “Let me ask you, something, secular alpha. Why do we tell stories like this?”

“I…” I shake my head.

She sits back in her chair, though, and waits.

It’s quiet, and the silence stretches on, and it becomes clear I’m going to have to answer this question.

So, eventually, I say, “Uh, to know what happened.”

“To know what happened,” she says. “But why do we care what happened?”

“It’s good to know,” I say. “I guess because…” I’m struggling here. “Well, if something similar happens, we’ll know, or if there’s something about what happened that gives us more information about what we know now, or that kind of thing, maybe?”

“So, we are interested in the past only to the extent that it affects the present,” she says.

“I mean… I guess.” But not only , right?

“So, these stories, they are about the present, not the past.”

“Uh, okay,” I say.

“We can learn things from stories,” she says. “We interpret them to mean what we wish to know about ourselves.”

I don’t say anything.

“You disagree?” she says.

“I just… I think, when we’re trying to find things out, what we really want is not an interpretation, but the truth.”

She laughs again. “Well, what is truth, though? Truth is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?”

“No,” I say. “No, truth is truth.”

“These stories, about the first alphas and omegas, we tell them amongst our people to affirm our story over and over again. It is always thus with us. We are persecuted. Someone, usually a jealous someone, wishes to hurt us, to hurt our people, and we must run and take shelter. We are saved by the Goddess herself, who has given us the gifts we need to triumph through our own designations. This is our truth, you see, and this is what our stories tell us.”

I see what she’s saying, but… it’s not very scientific, is it?

“You, secular alpha, what story did you want to hear? One in which you and your pack were different than every other pack because of your sharp, fang teeth? Perhaps you thought there would be a story about some chosen pack, one that was here to free us all from some oppressive scourge, and the fang-like teeth would be the sign that you were here to save us all. Were you thinking that?”

I wasn’t thinking that, not at all. But I understand why she says it, because what else could it have meant?

The idea that we’re a scent match, that our teeth are different, all of that, it seems to denote us as some kind of pack of superheroes.

I guess maybe I did wonder if there was some prophecy we were supposed to fulfill.

I would have scoffed at it. Not very scientific, after all.

But maybe I did think…

I give her a sheepish look. “So, uh, nothing like that, huh?”

“Of course there’s something like that,” she says. “Why would I have mentioned it otherwise?”

I sit up straight.

“Yes, at the end of the story with the cobra-men, sometimes, there’s a coda to it.

It says that once all alphas had snake-teeth, but that it was slowly bred out of us, and that if it is activated again, it is a sign that a new age of purity has begun and the Goddess will lead us all to crush our enemies under our heels. ”

I furrow my brow.

“But,” she says with a shrug, “there are all sorts of vague promises about how the Polloi are going to rise up and crush our enemies under our heels. However, you see, all our stories are about being under the yoke of oppression. So, I wouldn’t take it to mean anything, not really.

We have these vague promises in order to keep us together, so that we won’t give up hope, and so that we’ll have the will to persevere.

But our lot in life, as members of the Polloi, is to be under constant oppression. ”

“What?” I say. “You think it’s inevitable?”

“I don’t know,” she says, shifting in her seat. “I suppose it’s not inevitable. You could, I suppose, leave, become secular, as you have. But if I wish to be Polloi, there is no way to be Polloi and to be anything other than oppressed. That’s part of the definition of what we are.”

I swallow.

“And,” she says, “if one leaves, one must stop being Polloi to achieve freedom from oppression. Perhaps it is inevitable.”

“Well…” I clear my throat. “Just because your people have always been treated really badly by every major country and all mainstream governments doesn’t mean… you know… that it’ll always be that way.”

She laughs.

“I mean, I know how that sounds, but—”

“You’re correct,” she says.

“I also don’t think you’re going to crush your enemies under your heels,” I say. “I mean, some kind of insurrection, it just wouldn’t work.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” she says. “That’s why our options are to exist under tyranny or to erase ourselves.”

I shift uncomfortably in my chair.

“Was this helpful, secular alpha? Why did you come? What story did you want to hear?”

“I wanted to know…” I think about it. “If we’re all right.

If we’re going to hurt her. Our omega, I mean.

If we have a way out, where we can be together and be happy.

And, um, I guess I was hoping you wouldn’t tell us that we were something different.

I was hoping you’d tell us that we were normal. ”

“Ah,” she says, nodding. “Well, here’s what I have for you, then. Listen closely and look right here, secular alpha.” She gestures for me to look in her eyes.

I obey. It feels right to obey her, I have to admit.

“Once, there was an omega who lived many, many years ago in a country by the seaside. When she was a small girl, she visited an oracle, who told her that she would be killed by her alphas, if and when she ever bonded them. The omega vowed she would never bond any alphas at all, but time passed, and she went into heat, and she could not help but beg for the relief she could find in an alpha’s caress.

She wished for an alpha’s knot, for an alpha’s bite.

She could not stop herself, then. She submitted to not one but two alphas, and in the course of the heat, out of her mind, she begged for their bites.

“Now, she was bound to alphas,” continued Kyvelki, “though she had sworn she would never allow such a thing to happen. She was determined that she would not allow these alphas to kill her, however, so she locked them up in a dungeon, and she only let these alphas out when her heat came upon her. At first, the alphas begged those who tended them in the dungeon to intercede on their behalf with their omega, to ask her to be merciful and release them. But the guards came back with word that the omega would not be moved to let them free. It became clear that the only way these alphas would ever be free of the dungeon was to escape. And because they were bonded to the omega, the only way they could get free of her would be to break that bond. And because the bond was a life bond…” Kyvelki shrugs.

“I suppose you can guess how that turned out.”

I can, but I don’t know what to say.

Is that supposed to mean something?

How does it answer any of the questions I asked?

“Off with you, secular alpha,” says Kyvelki. “I’m tired after so much talk.” She gets up from the table and walks out of the room.

The other alphas, the ones who I realize have finished washing the dishes quite some time ago, follow her out without even looking at me.

Theodorus shrugs at me. “You better go,” he says.

I get up from the table. “Right. I’ll go.”

Well, that was a big, fat waste of time.