Chapter 221

“Oh dear, it seems our time is up. It was a pleasure to converse with an intelligent being for a change.”

The dragon stopped speaking completely and smiled faintly. Darkness approached from the distance.

Flicker, flicker.

The magical lights blinked.

“What exactly do you mean, ‘our time is up’?”

“It is as I said. I came out through a Seal that wavered for a brief moment. That must be how the gap that allowed you into my Lair was created.”

“Then will this place be cut off from the outside again?”

“It is possible to enter by physical means, but everything in this Lair is maintained by magic, so it will all decay once the wavering Seal is mended. Hurry and leave, children. Let us meet again someday.”

“Someday?”

“Yes, when you defeat the Children of Bistor and release the Power of Pheros, I too will be able to live as I once did.”

Defeat the imperial family and release the Power of Pheros. That was exactly what Nerys had been thinking until just a moment ago. However, she hadn’t considered that if she did so, the evil dragon from 600 years ago would be unleashed upon the world again.

The dragon was dangerous. The one before her now seemed incredibly pleasant and rational, but no one knew what problems would arise if her true body were to awaken. If she were weak, one might say, ‘Let’s just wake her up and see what happens,’ but could they really afford to do that?

It would be great if her awakened body would quietly take revenge only on Bistor’s descendants, but the world was never so convenient. If she decided to take revenge on all of humanity, who could stop her?

In this era, there wasn’t a single hero, let alone the three perfect heroes from the stories.

Seeing the conflict on her face, the dragon smiled.

“Child of Elandria, I cherish peace. I also cherish mortals. That is why I remained in this world instead of following my own kind. I simply cherished the non-human races just as much.”

The dragon would naturally want to be freed from the Seal, so Nerys didn’t trust these words either. But… the memory of the dragon’s smile from the vision surfaced in Nerys’s mind.

And the gentle voice that had called out to Elandria.

With a complicated feeling, she asked.

“You said you thought the Seal had been undone once. When Bistor’s child failed to achieve his goal… could there have been side effects?”

“There must have been. Countless streams of time must have unraveled like a skein of yarn and then been wound back up. In a severe case, the time of the entire world could have reverted to the past. But who can say?”

Nerys could not say anything more.

Cledwyn gently patted Nerys’s shoulder. Then, in place of his agitated wife, he spoke calmly.

“There are many questions in what you say, but it seems difficult to ask them all now. What happens if we don’t comply with your demand?”

“Oh, dear.”

The dragon sighed with the same bitter smile.

“This is not my demand. You must do so if you wish to live as well.”

“Why is that?”

“If you release the sealed Power of Pheros from Bistor, I will awaken on my own. And if you do not release it, Bistor will be left with a fine tool to use against you. The Children of Bistor, who have a past they wish to hide, will not let you go. Is my assumption incorrect?”

It was too accurate. Unsettlingly so. For a being who had slept for 600 years, she shouldn’t have known anything about the outside world.

Was this the insight that a race living close to eternity possessed?

“They are already drilling a hole from the outside into the Lair. Nothing is holding you here. Hurry and go back.”

Hurry and go back… It sounded as if she was certain Nerys would have no choice but to listen to her.

Cledwyn recalled what the ‘Eye of Pheros’ he had seen in the Imperial Palace had said. The ‘she’ he had spoken of must have been the dragon. It seemed Pheros was confident that the dragon would be of help to them when she awoke.

It was then. The arch that had separated the dragon’s resting place from this corridor turned back into a wall.

In an instant, the dragon’s form began to waver like a flickering flame. The surrounding light did the same.

Rumble.

The ceiling shook. Flicker… The world went dark for a moment, then barely lit up again. And then it immediately went dark again.

The magic was gone.

“Nerys!”

Cledwyn pulled Nerys into his arms to protect her in case anything fell from above. Then he looked up.

The Magic Spheres, with a series of flickers, went out one by one, starting from the farthest one. The same happened to the gargoyles that had been flapping their wings. In an instant, they returned to their original stone statue forms.

The last thing Cledwyn saw before the world went completely dark was the dragon’s profound eyes, which vanished from their spot with a mysterious smile.

❖ ❖ ❖

“Damn it, we’ve been left high and dry. I still had so much to ask.”

The vibrations stopped sooner than expected. Trapped in an instant in a darkness without a single point of light, Cledwyn grumbled lightly once the surroundings stabilized.

Nerys sighed.

“We could have spent a whole week just on questions and answers. We would have learned so much.”

“Feeling a scholarly curiosity?”

“It’s a bit of a shame. If we wrote a book with just the stories we heard now, scholars would come running from the ends of the continent.”

Not that they would believe it in the first place. That the evil dragon, long believed to be dead, was actually alive and sealed away, and that the Seal was the result of betrayal and a bloody battle between the three heroes.

Even Nerys herself would have found it too dramatic if she had seen a play with such a plot.

‘However.’

The expression ‘dramatic’ also meant there was a high probability of piquing an audience’s interest. A complex plan began to form and unravel in Nerys’s mind, taking shape on its own.

Cledwyn used the ignition device on his sword’s pommel to create a small flame. Then, with practiced ease, he used several tools from his belt to turn the flame into a stable lantern.

Nerys looked around. Holding up a single small lantern in the massive corridor didn’t help much in grasping the surroundings, but it was, of course, better than nothing.

Her eyes fell on a pillar. A sigh escaped her small lips.

“It’s changed.”

The decorative pillar, which had been carved with delicate details like living vines coiling around it, had worn down into a crude block of stone, just like the ruins on the surface. Without that ‘magic,’ it seemed this place took on the appearance an ownerless building would have after 600 years had passed.

“Let’s get out of here first. They said they’re drilling a hole, but can they even drill this far?”

The two of them naturally assumed that the people the guardian had mentioned ‘drilling a hole’ were Talfrin and Aidan. How frantic must they have been when their two masters disappeared?

But both of them felt pessimistic about whether they could actually get in here. It seemed they had been able to enter before because the dragon had called Nerys, but what was the actual distance from the surface to this point?

“It would be nice if we could find the exit before that.”

The two held hands and walked in the opposite direction of where the dragon slept. After walking for a while, Cledwyn spoke with a thoughtful expression.

“There are no monster corpses.”

“My hairpins, either. No matter how dark it is, some should be visible since they’re gold.”

Nerys pointed out, lightly touching her wavy hair.

Cledwyn remembered that he had picked up a few of her hairpins and used them as throwing weapons. But she was right. He certainly hadn’t been able to pick up every pin she had dropped.

They were just retracing the path they had walked, but it felt as if they were walking through a completely different space.

“Did all of that get included in the Seal?”

“Perhaps. It means it wasn’t a dream.”

“I didn’t think it was a dream, either.”

Cledwyn vividly remembered the gray jewel he had seen in the secret room of the Imperial Palace. He was furious with Camille for plotting to do the same to his wife. So furious he didn’t even know what to do.

Compared to that, the fact that he had nearly died several times, or that he was supposed to have been born with Ja’an but couldn’t because his power was sealed, was of no consequence. It wasn’t as if he was suddenly interested in a power he had never had.

He bared his teeth without realizing it and asked.

“What do you think? Releasing the Power of Pheros ultimately means confronting the imperial family head-on. It’s a matter related to the legitimacy of their rule, so they’ll move to silence us even if we try to negotiate.”

“Ever since you entered that secret room and I woke up afterward, Camille has probably been agonizing every day over what excuse she can use to kill us. Not that she wasn’t thinking about it before, though.”

Finishing her words with a bit of a joke, Nerys realized Cledwyn couldn’t have said what he did without knowing that fact.

Perhaps he was asking a question in his own way. So that she.

Could be the first to speak.

Nerys suddenly stopped walking. Cledwyn also stopped at the exact same moment, as if he knew she would.

She looked up into her husband’s eyes and asked in a whisper.

“The question I asked the dragon earlier, wasn’t it strange?”

“You mean about the side effects of a failed Seal?”

As she thought, he knew.

Nerys hesitated. How much should she say, and how should she say it? She had been agonizing over it ever since she decided to tell him, but there was still no clear, good answer.

She loved this man. To the point where she was newly surprised each time she realized just how much she loved him, how much more fiercely she fell in love with him even in this moment of looking into his face.

So she always wanted to look good for him. It was already too late to pretend to be a perfect person.

At the very least, she didn’t want to be disillusioned by him.

She didn’t want to tell him that she had died after being thoroughly used, foolishly craving the affection of those who didn’t even love her.

Ah, but it was strange. In the past, just thinking of that version of herself would have made her hate herself, and a fiery rage would have surged within her.

Now, that time just felt a little painful. And.

Over that painful wound, soft new skin was slowly growing, unnoticed.

As if all the time she had spent with him, everything had been getting better without her knowing. As if the same wound would never deepen again.

As if a day would come when she would truly be okay, and eventually, she wouldn’t even need to think about that time at all.

Nerys’s voice trembled.

“Did you know? When it was first decided that I would go to the academy, I didn’t know that Violet Eyes were so important. I just thought my mom had a rich relative, and that relative was kindly helping our family.”

A time when she was just a little scared of being separated from her mother.

“I learned that purple eyes had a special meaning in noble society after I enrolled and met Megara Lykandros. She was so pretty, poised, and perfect. I was only interested in books, so I didn’t know, but apparently, our entire year fell for her on the first day.”

If she had acted just a little differently back then, could her first school years have been something other than hell?

“On the other hand, all the kids hated me. Because Megara hated me. And because I didn’t understand their internal rules.”

A vortex of hatred she couldn’t comprehend.

“I really hated school. Every time I went home for vacation, it was an ordeal to stop myself from telling my mom that the school she had worked so hard to send me to, borrowing tuition from her relative, was hell for me.”

The long school years without Dianne or Cledwyn.

“I barely endured, just wishing for graduation day to come quickly. But two years before graduation, my Ja’an blossomed.”

The strange and frightening change of that time.

“Even back then, there were no records of a violet Ja’an, so everyone was flustered. Not long after, my mother died, and the Elandria ducal family extended a hand, offering to adopt me. Honestly, I was grateful. I thought there were no people as good as them.”

Hypocrisy. Sin. The foolish girl who had simply believed, knowing nothing of it.

A story completely different from the school years Cledwyn knew.

Nerys began to tell the past. (T/N : Finally! She started telling her story! I cant imagine how furious Cledwyn will be upon learning everything. )