Chapter 22: Uneven Clock

Dragon Era, Year 24

It was on a drizzly autumn day.

On a low hill dotted with small trees.

「O thou, strong one, wise one, brave one」

Together we raised our voices and slowly chanted the spell.

「Thou wert at times stern, at times gentle, and always valiant」

A few dozen had gathered. Standing at their head, I offered a prayer.

「Pray, rest in peace」

—For Gai-san’s repose.

His body lay in a pit dug atop the hill.
Inside, it was packed with flowers the villagers—reluctant to part—had thrown in.
It wasn’t something I had instructed them to do.
It was a custom the villagers had begun on their own, out of their simple, earnest sensibilities.

「…Sensei」
「…Yes」

Ai, eyes swollen from crying, called to me; I nodded.

Then I drew a deep breath—and exhaled toward Gai-san.

Even without any incantation, a dragon’s flame is hot enough to blast an armored bear away.
When you dig a pit and breathe on it like this, scarcely even the bones remain.

「O earth, enfold this one」

When Nina intoned her spell with solemn gravity, the ashes were taken straight into the earth.

「And become new sprouting life」

When we scattered seeds, they sprouted at once and tiny, tiny shoots popped out. In time they would grow like the surrounding trees.

Cremating the dead as an infection-control measure is something we began after I arrived, yet, unexpectedly, people had largely accepted it. I imagine that’s thanks not only to their trust in my flame but also to Nina’s magic here.
Because by coming here, they can meet them anytime.

「Sensei」

Watching the tiny sprout, Ai quietly asked me:

「Is there really… such a thing as an afterlife?」

Perhaps I ought to answer: there isn’t.

Jack Frost took on substance, I suspect, because I lied to Ai that it really existed. Day after day she called out to Jack Frost, and her feelings piled up until they became a mass of meaning…a spirit.

An afterlife, too, might be brought into being that way—by being imagined.

「Yes. It exists.」

And so that is how I answered.

「There truly is an afterlife. So I’m sure Gai-san is living peacefully there.」

With the dead, in any form will do—I wanted to see them once more.

…Because that’s what I found myself wishing for.





Just a few minutes’ flight north from the village where we live.
A few minutes by dragon wings is twenty or thirty kilometers, but that was where my family home lay. Enter the cave by the crater and go in a while, and, for the first time in years, there it was—my old home.

And though it’s called a cave, it is clearly not natural.
There are no traces of stalactites or stalagmites at all; the straight passage is a neat circle, and its walls are smooth as a mirror. I used to wonder how such a cave was made.

Now I know: it was melted open by focused dragon’s breath.
Just like when I accidentally blew a wind hole through a mountain.

Beyond that passage lay a large hall. Magma bubbled along right beside it, and the hall itself was probably at a temperature humans couldn’t endure. I couldn’t even bring Ai here to report our marriage… Well, saying I married a human would get my sanity questioned anyway, so I wouldn’t be telling them regardless.

「Oh my, welcome back.」
「I have returned, Mother.」

The thing in that hall that at first glance looked like a huge red wall was my mother in this life.
When she flared her wings, a single membrane was bigger than my entire body.

「I was just having a bite. Want some?」

Mother plunged the foreleg of some huge creature into the magma, stirred it around, and popped it into her mouth. Like dipping a French fry in ketchup.

「Ah, then I’ll have some.」

I did the same—dip the meat in magma and eat. Right after I was born, when I lived here, I always ate meat like this.

「Mm, tasty.」

I figured this was a flavor only a fire dragon could possibly agree was good.
I’ve heard that what we call spiciness is simply the tongue perceiving heat and pain.

I don’t know if dragons are the same, but putting magma on your tongue would surely feel at least a little hot and painful even to a fire dragon. A prickling sting came through.
To a dragon, magma is “spicy.”

However—
As we sat side by side chewing our meat, I thought again:
Even though it’s been years since I last came home, she’s acting completely natural about it.
I couldn’t tell whether dragons are simply patient by nature, or if Mother was just especially laid-back.

「Mother, there’s something I’d like to ask.」
「What is it?」

Mother tilted her neck—longer than from the tip of my nose to the end of my tail—slightly to the side.

「Mother, how old are you?」
「Twenty-six.」

At Mother’s breezy claim to youth, I nearly spat out what was in my mouth.

「That can’t be right. I’m about twenty myself.」
「Twenty? …Ah. You’ve been counting by the turn of the seasons.」

Mother pursed her lips, then breathed a thin, long flame and scorched the ground. Hard rock melted with ease, sketching out a delicate figure. Her heat and precision were on a different level from mine.

「This is the sun that shines in the sky. And this is the star we live on.」

It was a drawing of a planet in an elliptical orbit around the sun.

「After 412 cycles of day and night, this star returns roughly to where it was. But the orbit isn’t a perfect circle, and the ellipse itself shifts little by little.」

Like petals, the ellipse shifts as it makes its circuit around the sun.

「And after ninety-eight of those cycles, it returns to roughly the original orbit. That is a year.」

I was so astonished my jaw hung open.

It shocked me not only that she understood not just heliocentrism but the very concept of planetary orbits as a matter of course, but also that she was nearly 2,600 years old. No—in fact, since the orbital period here is longer than Earth’s, dividing by 365 makes her over 2,800.

It was an unfathomable span of time.

From her perspective, humans—without language, with only primitive stone tools, frail and weak—must look like ants. Once again I was stunned by the gulf between humans and dragons.

「…Of the dragons you know, what is the oldest…how old were they?」
「Let me see… I believe Grandfather lived past two hundred.」

Two hundred, times ninety-eight.
That’s 19,600 in our calendar. At that point it’s no different from being immortal.

「…You had me fairly young, then, Mother.」

I managed to answer only that much.





「Welcome back, Sensei!」

When I returned to the village, she must have spotted me at once and come running.
Ai had come to meet me at the village edge and was waving, so I touched down.

「I’m home. Sorry to have left you lonely.」
「Not at all.」

Ai pattered up, hugged my arm tight, and beamed.
Live on for thousands, tens of thousands of years after losing her?

Impossible. There’s no way I could do that.
And yet I also knew I didn’t have the courage to end my life along with hers.

In that case, there’s only one path.


Immortality.

A dream humanity sought yet never reached—I would have to realize it in this world.