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They learned about their dark world, about the luminous things that were food or prey. They learned which regions to avoid and where to locate the well-trodden paths. In between these practical lessons, there were constant reminders from the Clan Leader and his representatives: “We are shadows,” groaned the old drake, at the start of each and every lecture. Kaasni’s first memory of him was also the most haunting: He had been gaunt even then, heavily swaddled in all-concealing drapes of cloth. It didn’t look as though he’d ever changed them, for many of them now hung in tattered folds. They swayed mesmerizingly as he rocked from side to side. Eeriest of all were his eyes: Kaasni had no idea what dragon he was; so thickly draped in cloaks was he. But from deep inside his hood shone his eyes: pale and luminous, as feebly lit as fungus-light glancing off a glass shard.

“We are shadows, and so we belong to the Darkness. It embraces us, provides us with everything we need. It shields us from the Sun!”

“The Sun!” howled the old leader’s attendants. Their words thundered like the crack of doom.

“If not for the roof of the Darkness, the greedy Sun would find and devour us. Its fire would shrivel the flesh from our bones, reduce all we love to ash!” The clan leader seemed about to lurch forward as he gestured. His claws twitched spasmodically. Then slowly, they became still, and when he spoke again, his voice was almost a croon: “Let us remain beneath the cool mantle of the Darkness. Here, we are safe from the dreadful Sun.”

That was the picture the clan painted for Kaasni: shadows huddled in fear beneath a great roof of darkness, always hiding from the Sun. It was a great beast roaming freely across the planet. Its claws of light ferreted hapless dragons from their hiding places, and they were then devoured by great jaws of fire.

Kaasni believed this for a long time. She was not even particularly afraid of it, for the idea of a great, mysterious beast stalking everywhere was irresistible to an adventurous child. It was only years later that the picture was irrevocably destroyed by the Stranger.

Null did not reply. Such reticence was to be expected from a new-hatched child, especially one who was probably a little slow in the head....The clan decided that this was so. Yes, he probably had not developed right, which was why he’d been so slow to hatch. It was a convenient explanation....

But there were so many holes in it. “I didn’t make a mistake.” The healer was genuinely baffled. “I listened so carefully; there was no heartbeat....How could he have lived?”

And now some dragons remembered.... “Why did you scream?” they asked the gravekeeper. He was a stolid drake who did not get rattled easily; it was why he had stayed so long at his post. What had frightened him then, on the day Null had come to the clan?

He bent close as if afraid someone would hear, and he described the anomaly he’d seen: that blobby white mass, writhing and pulsing in mid-air, not just colors but shapes all bleeding into one another. “It looked at me,” he whispered. “Those eyes, so blank...There was intelligence, but...no emotions, no soul. It should have been dead. I don’t understand how...!”

People love a good ghost story, but not when it seems they’re living in it — because then it seems possible that they might become ghosts, too. Null was still fed and cared for; but unlike orphaned hatchlings who quickly bonded to one family, he bounced from den to den, hastily fed and watered and then practically shoved out the door. Had he been more expressive, perhaps the dragons might have shown more sympathy, but all they could think of were the gravekeeper’s words: “It should’ve been dead....No emotions, and no soul in those eyes. No soul at all.”