They Aren't Human Anymore

There is a temptation, when something looks human, to expect it to think like one.

That can be a dangerous assumption in The Kalos Chronicles.

The Kalos have lived beside humanity for thousands of years. They understand us remarkably well, perhaps better than we understand them, but understanding another species and sharing its values are very different things.

The Kalos have had to survive under circumstances humans have never experienced. They depend upon us for something they cannot provide for themselves. Most of humanity cannot know they exist. A small part of humanity knows far more than the Kalos would prefer.

Thousands of years spent living within those circumstances have left their mark.

The Kalos have Houses, traditions, rules, hierarchies and expectations of their own. They understand loyalty, pleasure, affection, possession, obligation and power, but those things don't always mean quite what a human expects them to mean.

Sex is one example.

For the Kalos, sexual contact with humans is intimately connected to feeding. That single biological reality creates differences between the way humans and Kalos understand intimacy that I'm going to leave for the books to explore.

It is enough to know that the same act can mean very different things depending upon which species is experiencing it.

The same is true of affection.

A Kalos can enjoy a human's company, protect them, provide for them and become genuinely fond of them. None of those feelings require the Kalos to see the relationship the way the human does.

That distinction matters in Grey House: The Feeding.

So does control.

If there is one thing the Kalos understand after thousands of years of survival, it is the value of control. They have needed it for too long to regard it casually, and it appears in places a human may not immediately recognize.

Sometimes control looks exactly like what you'd expect.

Sometimes it looks remarkably like kindness.

I could explain why.

I'm not going to.

One of the pleasures of Grey House: The Feeding is discovering the Kalos from the inside, where things that initially appear familiar begin to look slightly different the longer you stay with them.

That is why I don't think of the Kalos as humans with a few unusual biological traits. Whatever connection they have to humanity, they have lived differently for far too long to remain unchanged by it.

They aren't human anymore.

And the world they've built has existed under certain conditions for a very long time.

Those conditions are about to change.

Whether that's good news depends very much on which species you belong to.

— Antonia Portage

Grey House: The Feeding, Book One of The Kalos Chronicles, is coming January 6, 2027.