Change
As the sun dipped westward and painted the sky with sunset,
Ruri set the spirits to work and began clearing up after the tea party. Water spirits washed the dishes; wind spirits dried them. Every dessert Ferda and Baldrova had left untouched vanished promptly into Ruri’s mouth.
A perfect division of labor—except that Ferda still had not risen from his seat.
“Why did you say something so unnecessary?” he asked.
Had there been no feeling in the question, it would have been a lie. Ruri regarded him with a thoroughly professional expression.
“Playboy.”
Ferda’s face tightened.
“That was not flirting.”
“I only stated the facts as I saw them. That you held hands with that damned woman.”
“So you were trying to sabotage me?”
“Sabotage? Shouldn’t you be thanking me?”
“What?”
That sounded like pure nonsense to him.
“If I hadn’t said that, would you have held her hand at all?”
“Her hand?”
“Yes, her hand. The one that was savoring my master’s hand. Whose doing do you think that was?”
He almost dismissed it as more nonsense—until he replayed the day. He had come to the tea party determined not to hurt Baldrova. He had never intended to take her hand today.
If I hadn’t spoken about Olivia…
he would never have taken her hand.
If I hadn’t told her I didn’t go hunting today…
she would have suffered tonight.
Everything had begun because Ruri said something open to misunderstanding.
“You’re saying that was all calculated?”
“Isn’t that obvious?”
Ruri gave a scornful little snort.
“Master is a greedy man. Give him the slightest push and he takes a step. I knew that if I mentioned that woman, you would move.”
For a brief moment, he had forgotten. No one had managed this castle longer than she had; no one had watched over Baldrova more closely. Of course she understood her better than anyone.
Ferda could not quite suppress his surprise. Had she ever gone this far for him before? As a maid she had offered help any number of times—but always indirectly, always for Baldrova’s sake. Direct intervention like this was a first.
Perhaps that was why she seemed different from usual.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Ruri asked under his steady gaze.
“You just look a little different from usual.”
“Different how?”
“I’m not sure. Should I call it… cute?”
She froze.
“Cute…?”
“If I had to define it, a cute little mongrel, I suppose.”
“……”
Ruri’s expression twisted sharply. Ferda knew that look well—the same revulsion from their first meeting. No, stronger than then.
“If you’re going to talk nonsense, leave at once. You’re in the way of the cleaning.”
“Very well.”
With that irritable tone, he had no desire to catch stray sparks. He started to go.
“Lord Ferda.”
Ruri called him back. In the slanting light of the sunset, standing with her back to him, she was not the crisp maid but the child Ruri.
“Don’t worry.”
He spoke before she could. She said nothing more—only gave a small nod.
Baldrova’s lair.
Save for the thick iron doors, the interior was a vast raw cave. Into it walked a dragon knight whose head was that of a red dragon—the Lord of Fire and Strength, Baldrova herself, just returned from the tea party.
She stood in the center of the cave and tipped her head slightly upward. Only then did she truly feel that she was alone.
She pressed the jewel set into her chest.
Srrrk—
The dragon knight’s armor opened and expelled its contents: a woman a little over five feet tall.
“Haaah….”
Baldrova gasped as if she had just escaped a brutal battlefield. For her, an actual battlefield would have been easier. Even when she had spent six straight hours cutting down waves of monsters, she had not been this exhausted.
Barely two hours. Sitting in place and talking with Ferda—that was all. And every moment of it had been almost more than she could bear, even inside this massive armor.
She looked up at the empty shell and murmured,
“I couldn’t take it off today either….”
The armor had been crafted by a bronze dragon for Baldrova’s polymorphed form—large, imposing, and capable of producing a voice as threatening as a fearsome red dragon’s. Its intent had been to project the dignity of a dragon and a ruler.
In practice, it was the opposite: a refuge. Like a snail’s shell.
“What would Uncle say if he saw me…?”
She gave a hollow little laugh and glanced at her reflection in the mirror beside her. Two pairs of horns, golden catlike eyes, and red hair that shimmered as if spun from ruby thread.
Very few people had ever seen this face. Ruri and the other dragons remembered it; that was nearly all. So judgments of her polymorphed form were scarce. Ruri had called it a balanced beauty that hid outward strength behind softness. The other dragons had simply said “softie.”
And Ferda, the human….
“Hnnnh….”
She did not want to think about it. The moment she recalled his expression, her mind went blank white. Her body felt weightless, as if a hundred hands were tickling her all over. She could not master that sense of no longer being herself.
“I want to hear it….”
She wanted to be told she was pretty. She wanted to be told she was beautiful. She wanted him to say it while looking at her true self, not the armor.
That was why, even inside the armor, she always wore a lovely dress. Did Ferda know? That beneath the shell he saw, there was a woman in a gown—and that she hid inside the armor every time because she still lacked the courage to show him?
“And yet….”
Her voice was thick with shame. Ruri’s words before the tea party rose again in her mind.
—He held hands with Olivia Arken and toured the White House.
Baldrova understood. A man of Ferda’s caliber might well hold hands with a beautiful woman, mightn’t he?
Yes. That could happen.
“Could it…?”
She had been jealous. Of course she had. Her fiancé holding another woman’s hand. The person she was meant to walk with for a hundred years of vow, holding hands with someone else.
Jealousy—and at the same time, she found herself ridiculous.
“I’m the one who always runs away….”
Ferda had always been waiting. She was the one who hid because she lacked the courage to show herself. And yet she had the nerve to be jealous.
“Idiot.”
Self-reproach.
“Stupid idiot.”
And still, at the end of it, a smile.
“Still… I did well at the end.”
She had never imagined the words “take my hand” would leave her own mouth. It had been impulsive—but without that impulse, she would never have dared say them at all.
“……”
Baldrova stared blankly at her right hand—the hand Ferda had held. His warmth still lingered in it.
“It was warm….”
She had felt it clearly: how warm a heart he carried, how completely he could put others first.
That’s why this castle is growing lively, too.
One year since he had entered these walls. The castle above was livelier than before, and word of the territory’s development kept arriving. Things she had never done—things she had never been able to do—he was accomplishing. What she felt at the sight of it was admiration.
So I have to change as well.
And motivation. Baldrova repeated it to herself. That would be the greatest reward she could give the man who had come as her fiancé.
“I’m sleepy….”
Her eyelids grew heavy; her body went soft. On days when her blood ran hot she could not sleep a wink, yet now she felt she could sink into deep rest the moment she closed her eyes.
She ought to return to dragon form to sleep—but she could not bring herself to. She wanted to treasure a little longer the warmth he had left, the trace of him.
She lay down where she was. Curling onto her side as if coiling, she cradled the warmth in her right hand close.
She thought of tomorrow. Her tomorrows had always been a chain of pain. She had not wanted to think of them; when the thought came she had fled into sleep.
Today was different. The tomorrow taking shape in her mind made her feel alive.
What should she do? How should she do it—so that Lord Ferda would be pleased?
Tracing that endless, unresolved line, she fell asleep.
In the central region of the Serdes Continent stood a building that seemed to pierce the sky—the tallest structure on the continent, a magic tower. Built by the Blue Dragon Iorga, it was home to every Blue Dragon Spawn. Its name was Blue Eye.
Eyes exist to see. True to its name, Blue Eye was a surveillance network raised to watch everything beneath the heavens.
Rank was determined by floor. The very summit was the nest of the dragon Iorga. Immediately below sat Erika Iorgas, representative of the Dragon Spawns—and she,
“Humans seem to be catching on little by little.”
“Not openly, but people are beginning to point out gaps in Blue Eye’s surveillance magic.”
felt herself aging more than ever. Surrounded by the elders, she was clearing agendas and documents.
“How large an estimate have the humans managed to calculate?”
“They don’t appear to have precise data, but at present they estimate a thirty percent reduction.”
Thirty percent. A figure that could not be ignored.
“At this rate they may notice Lady Iorga’s absence….”
The Blue Dragon Iorga—Lord of Magic, a mage of near-absolute power who alone accounted for half the tower’s mana. Yet even she was being eroded by Godwin’s darkness. Simply remaining in seclusion without showing herself already carried too great a risk. That was why Iorga had made the unilateral decision to crystallize her own body.
“What will you do?”
The aged elder mages trailed off and waited for Erika’s answer. As head of the Blue Dragon Spawns, she was calmer than anyone. She reviewed the papers to the last page, then tossed them onto the desk.
“It is still within normal parameters.”
The elders started.
“How is thirty percent within normal parameters?”
“In reality, our tower’s mana loss is fifty percent—half.”
There was nowhere near enough mana to feed Blue Eye’s surveillance net. Spread it as wide as before and it lacked depth; concentrate on depth and the range shrank.
“If humans are estimating thirty percent, it means the substitutes are already covering twenty percent of the shortfall.”
So they had abandoned the old methods and were seeking flexible alternatives—concentrating the net on high-risk zones and covering the rest with manpower through the Adventurers’ Guild.
“We need further analysis and better substitutes.”
“We cannot rely on adventurers forever. Without treating the root, none of this means anything.”
“Isn’t that exactly why we’re going through all this hardship—to treat the root?”
Erika’s eyes cut sharply to the elder who had spoken.
“If you can produce an immediate countermeasure, I will close my mouth. Offer one.”
“That is… not the case.”
The elder muttered and bowed his head. Erika exhaled through her nose and soothed them more gently.
“I know how anxious you all are. I feel the same. Our tower, Blue Eye, faces a crisis without precedent. To preserve our reputation as the eye that watches over the continent, even every scrap of mana would not be enough.”
But that was impossible.
“If we did that, crafting Lady Iorga’s cure would become impossible. She sensed her own decline and entered dormancy of her own will; the time left to us is short.”
They lacked everything: mana, time, and people.
“And yet we must appear to handle it with composure. Without conviction, this carefully built tower will collapse in an instant.”
Blue Eye ruled magic and kept watch. They had to make it unmistakable that, in magic, they still held the reins.
“Understood.”
“We have no choice but to trust the Master.”
The elders withdrew. When the last of them was gone and the door closed,
“Hoooooo!!”
Erika, who had worn the face of a steel-hard leader, blew out a sigh like steam from a pressure cooker.
“Shit….”
Profanity spilled out. They said a crown had weight. The one Erika wore felt ready to snap her neck someday.
I can’t just wipe them all out, either.
Contempt for other races was baked into Dragon Spawns. Any other lineage might have threatened or struck a human for talking back—but Iorga’s children would never dare. Magic was a tool for the rational. Losing one’s temper was irrational, a signal that one’s magic itself was unstable. Their greatest weapon was composure: looking no different from usual, projecting the certainty that they could weather anything.
And so their master, Erika, only accumulated unspoken illness.
“Haa….”
She rose from her seat. Sitting still any longer would make her explode; she meant to cool her head by looking out over the view.
Early autumn’s rich colors dotted the landscape. The scenery changed year by year, but her thoughts stayed much the same.
The great northern mountains—
Where the ice-brained fools live.
The western plains—
Nest of pretentious zealots.
The southern desert—
Playground for self-destructive extremists.
The black lands of the east—
…Ferda Valdrova.
No—that was a little different from usual. Once she would have thought, “the slowly rotting tomb of the greedy.” Since the Grand Council, a human’s name had overwritten it.
—And in the end, what will you do?
His words still circled in her mind. The end of the secret Godwin had made.
“The end, is it….”
She turned the word over again and again. No answer came. Neither an optimistic future nor a pessimistic one was something she could accept. No one knew the future. One might predict it; fully seeing through it was impossible.
“Arrogant bastard….”
Iorga’s children lived in the present in order to prepare for the future. Erika Iorgas was the same. Neither despair nor optimism—that was the reason Iorga sought. And yet whenever she thought of Ferda, the words buzzed in her ears like a mosquito.
What will you do? What then? What are you going to do? What can you even do?
“Haa….”
Sensing she had reached her limit, Erika raised a finger. In that instant a tiny droplet of water condensed at its tip, spread into a curtain, and sealed her completely in a moment.
“Huu.”
She drew a deep breath. And then—
“So what?!”
She shouted.
“What’s so great about you, anyway?!”
She stamped the floor and flung her arms about.
“I went and crushed that proposal for you and stopped those damned ice idiots, and you strut around alone like you’re special—what’s so great about youuu?! A mere human! A mere human!! Who do you think you are, youuu!”
When she could not calm down, she vented.
“I don’t care! I’m done! I quit! Why do I have to do this!? What’s the point!? Everyone dumps everything on me!! When they can’t even do it themselves!”
For several minutes she shrieked and emptied what was inside her.
Knock-knock—
“Excuse me, Lady Erika?”
Her secretary had come looking for her and opened the door. Erika, who had been screaming like a fit, moved in a flash. She dismissed the water curtain and sat. In an instant she was once more the unshakable master.
“What is it?”
The secretary, never imagining the woman before her had just been rolling about in a hysterics, began her report.
“I’ve come regarding the investigation records on the Rosnova family you requested. Is this a good time?”
The timing was exquisite. Erika felt an irrational prickle of guilt.
“Go ahead.”
“First, the Rosnova family itself has no major issues. One of the Empire’s knight houses—a common enough line that has achieved near-human feats and is barely maintaining its name.”
“You’re saying there is nothing wrong with Regent Ferda’s household?”
“At least as far as the Rosnova family is concerned, yes.”
She turned the next page.
“The problem is the woman who is Regent Ferda’s birth mother, Anna Rosnova.”
“What about her?”
“There is not a single scrap of information on the birth mother.”
“Not a single scrap? You mean she was an ordinary commoner or something of the sort?”
“No. Not that category. I don’t know if we need to dig deeper, but it feels as if….”
The woman hesitated, wondering whether she ought to say it.
“As if we’re chasing a ghost that never existed in the first place.”
“A ghost?”
Among things an investigator might say, it was the most irresponsible—yet Erika did not dismiss it. These people were Iorga’s children and knew Erika well. For them to speak that way meant they had dug deep and not turned up so much as a speck of dust.
Erika murmured,
“An egg exists because there is a hen.”
Where there was a result, there was a cause. Where there was a son, there was a mother. Even the dragons they called gods had a creator.
They dug for any scrap of information on Ferda and received only an unknown question in return.
Just what kind of man is he?
The thought had barely formed when a crashing racket rose from the stairs. A man came pelting up in a panic utterly at odds with Iorga’s emphasis on reason.
“I-it’s an emergency!”
“Why the fuss?”
“Th-this! L-look at this!”
What he thrust at her was an image burned in with mana: several Dragon Spawns recovering bodies in a snowfield.
“Silver Dragon Spawns… are dead?”
“Yes.”
That alone was grave. Every Dragon Spawn remembered the deaths of those who shared their blood. Silverwind, famed for the strongest of bonds, would not leave an enemy be. Had that been all he brought, she would have assumed a storm of blood somewhere. She sensed at once that the urgency meant something else.
“And the next image…!!”
The Silverwind pack in flight across the sky. At their center, a Dragon Spawn with vast wings.
“The ice-idiot captain himself…?”
Goz Silverwind moving in person was no ordinary matter. It was not the intent to finish one individual, but to smash everything that person possessed.
Why? Why would he move himself?
Erika thought. One figure rose at once.
Surely not…
Impossible. That man was not so stupid. He knew perfectly well how things stood with Silverwind; he would never do something so insane.
But she had to be certain, so she forced out the question.
“Who laid hands on Silverwind’s descendants?”
He answered, and her fear became fact.
“Regent Ferda Valdrova!”
The fuse was lit.