In the Lair Where Ice Flowers Bloomed
"Mmm... the sun's already gone down."
If I followed my heart, I wanted to turn back into a dragon and fly wherever the whim took me—and, since things had come to this, to head straight for the central square of Kartz and have a look at the market while I was at it. But the moment I considered what it meant to be the Frostflame Dragon, going down into the city in that form started to feel a little too conspicuous.
No one was coming to kill me. The north looked peaceful, and the sunlight had been mild and warm besides, so winter had to be nearly over. The long haul through the cold was ending, and before long the north would fill again with the brisk steps of merchants, the happy sound of people talking, and no end of adventurers.
"Mmm... tomorrow I ought to Polymorph and go into Kartz in human form. First, though, there are things I need to know..."
I was fairly convinced, on nothing more than a strong hunch, that this was sometime before the start of the northern Guardian Knight arc, but I had no idea how long before. For now there were no hallucination-like voices rising inside me, and I certainly had no urge to lose my mind tomorrow and attack a settlement, so there was probably still a gap of time.
"First, go down tomorrow and find out roughly what year and month it is. Second, make certain this place really is Kartz."
Third was more of an afterthought, but I was curious what Aiden looked like right now. A woman's body or not, I had no intention of offering romantic feelings to a man I'd never so much as met, and I was absolutely not going to date one. No matter what happened, I would never give my affection to anyone else. I knew perfectly well these were not the circumstances for it.
"What matters most... is that this world heads toward a happy ending, and that I survive along with it."
Survival was the primary goal, but if I was going to survive, I wanted to add a few conditions to it. I hoped the world would go on peacefully, happily, the way it always had, and that I might live inside it—watching, from an observer's place, a world that didn't hurt and kept turning along just fine.
Curious as I was about Aiden, and about Icaria, who might as well be called this world's protagonist, I had no thought of stepping into their story.
"In the end, their story is theirs... and in every Icarus Chronicle plot that's come out so far, I die at the end of White Snow's Guardian Knight."
I didn't want my ending to be like the ones I'd watched—an evil dragon swallowed by an all-consuming madness, or cut down by the subjugation force with Aiden at its head. I was hoping, simply, that things would not go that way. I wanted to live more than anyone. I wanted to take this chance I'd been given once more and live a life here. And even if I didn't yet know what ending awaited me, I still hoped that mine would be a happy one.
I lay sprawled in the lair, ice hemming me in on every side, and sank quietly into thought.
"...And if I get the chance, it might not be a bad idea to get acquainted with Aiden ahead of time."
If I built some familiarity in advance—or if I met him not as the Frostflame Dragon, but Polymorphed with my identity hidden, and learned his temperament and the sides of his character the game had never shown—that could only help. Every one of those small acts might become a ladder toward some other ending, one I had never known.
"...I'll head down toward Kartz tomorrow, then. It's late now..."
A quiet gurgle rose from the body I'd been lying so still in, and I looked around. I hadn't eaten a thing since waking, and hunger was slowly making itself known. I was only human on the outside, Polymorphed; my true body was still a dragon's. I wondered whether the measure of hunger, and how much I needed to eat, would follow a dragon's as well.
The problem, if there was one, was whether this lair held anything I could use as money. Icarus Chronicle might dress itself in a medieval look, but its society still ran on capital. I supposed I would have to find something worth selling, yet unlike the dragon hoards of most stories, mine held no gold, no silver, no treasure at all.
"I'm hungry... so hungry... if anyone's watching, anything at all..."
Hollow with the feeling, I lay still and stared up at the sky, murmuring the small plea as my thoughts drifted. It was a bed of ice, but it didn't feel cold—only soft and cozy—and lying there, I tried to soothe the hunger with thoughts of food. Hot fish cakes and a cup of broth from a street stall on a day like this. Or a hamburger, fries, and a cold, fizzy drink, simple things that took the edge off an empty stomach just as well. Spicy rice cakes I would never get to eat in this world again, or those fish-shaped pastries crammed full of sweet custard... even chicken feet, fiery and red, with cheese served alongside to gentle the heat. One dish after another kept rising in my mind.
My stomach answered with a long, miserable growl.
"...Th-there really isn't anything to eat...?"
Even jerky frozen hard as stone would have done. Hoping for anything at all, I bit into one of the blue grains lying beside my bed, nursing a small, foolish hope that a dragon's body might be able to live on minerals like these.
My teeth met it with a hard crunch.
"Agh—ow, that hurts... why is there nothing in here but useless lumps of crystal?!"
The instant I bit down, I knew even a dragon couldn't survive on this. I flung the crystal away and shouted. All I could see were the formations that made up the lair's walls—cut as if by hand, and certainly not food—Froze Crystal, and the gem grains scattered here and there...
"...Wait. A-aren't these all gems...?"
Come to think of it, in the game these minerals were the sort of thing you picked up in passing if you weren't feeling lazy and left behind if you were. In the actual world, weren't they incredibly important materials? The item description itself had said Froze Crystal was a gem mined only in the extreme reaches of the north, worked into all kinds of precious jewelry. And even aside from the walls of blue crystal, I had seen quite a variety of gatherable things tucked between the cliffs along the path to the entrance. Sky-blue stalks of Snowghost Herb, for instance—the sort of thing an alchemist would pay handsomely for.
The game had trained players to think of 120 gold as pocket change, purely for convenience, but in the story itself 120 gold was a considerable sum. A bowl of soup cost 3 silver, and 100 silver made 1 gold, so 120 gold would buy... how many bowls...
"...I can't even work it out...?"
Dragon or not, my arithmetic was hardly transcendent. If being born a dragon simply handed you that kind of intellect, everyone would be praying to hatch as one.
"For now... just because the game let you sell one for 120 gold doesn't mean it'll be the same here. I should take five stalks of Snowghost Herb and about three chunks of Froze Crystal."
It was an experiment more than anything, and I didn't need a fortune on the spot. All I wanted was enough for a single meal to quiet this hunger. Turn up with too much money all at once and suspicion was inevitable, and these were hardly common materials. If someone asked where they had all come from, telling the truth would cause problems of its own, and I didn't have the confidence to lie flawlessly to innocent people either. Deceiving someone perfectly meant being meticulous and thorough, and right now I was nothing more than one hungry dragon.
Hunting something to eat was another matter. The last scrap of human dignity left in me dug into my chest like a thorn. I might have become a dragon, but tearing a living animal apart with my teeth was too much for my stomach, and for everything else besides.
"Haa... I'll just take these with me. I don't even know if any shops are still open at this hour..."
Still, trying something had to be better than doing nothing.
"...What if I brought out only the wings? Could I fly that way?"
...Just the wings. Hup.
There was a soft rush of air.
"It—it worked!"
They say the first time is the hard part, and the second isn't. Simply recalling the shape of my wings and picturing a body with them attached was enough; the altered Polymorph took. There was no leisure to savor the success. My body had already spread its wings, ready to fly toward the busy streets of Kartz and put an end to the hunger, and I leapt for the sky. Even a small beat of those wings was more than enough to bear me, and the crystals and clumps of herb clutched against my chest.