Things He Wanted to Ask
Leon could only stare at Lakia for a long moment, unable to speak.
Until just a short while ago, he had not truly grasped that he was conversing with the Dragon's Witch—an existence who had lived only in history and legend for centuries.
The Lakia before him was nothing like the figure he had imagined.
She cradled Ugalu in her arms and patted his back. She flushed at the mention of her own rumors. She even raised her voice when the embarrassment became too much to bear.
She seemed far closer to an ordinary mother fretting over her child than to the calamity recorded in history books or the monster of legend.
And yet Lakia had spoken the words clearly with her own mouth only moments earlier.
"That's right. I'm the Dragon's Witch."
That single short sentence stitched together every record and every unanswered question Leon had gathered over the past decade and more.
A brief silence settled over the room.
Lakia no longer joked. She set aside the flustered air of a moment ago and simply waited for Leon's reaction.
Leon drew a slow breath.
Surprise and bewilderment flickered in his eyes, but a stronger emotion soon rose to the surface of his face.
It was the thrill of finding, right before him, the truth he had pursued his entire life.
He opened his mouth with the calm of a man finally speaking words he had prepared long ago.
"If you are the Dragon's Witch, then the things I wish to ask pile up like a mountain."
Lakia stared at him blankly for a second, then let out a short laugh.
"It can't be that much of a mountain."
Leon shook his head, utterly serious.
"No. It truly is a mountain."
He pulled the worn leather satchel from his back and set it in front of him.
The thick leather had cracked and roughened from years of sun and rain; every tear bore the careful stitches of repeated mending. The metal buckle had long since lost its original shine, polished smooth only where hands had touched it most often.
Ugalu, curiosity piqued, padded closer with a swishing tail.
"Kkyu?"
Leon did not let even that soft cry steal his focus. He unfastened the buckle.
Click.
The satchel opened. From inside he drew a thick leather-bound notebook.
Thud.
A notebook roughly the size of two stacked palms landed on the floor with a solid sound.
A second notebook followed.
Thud.
A third.
A fourth.
A fifth.
Thud.
Thud.
Thud.
Leon's hands showed no sign of stopping.
At first Lakia watched without much thought. But once the notebooks passed six and began to form a small pile, her expression gradually hardened.
"...Wait."
Leon produced yet another notebook.
Thud.
"Hold on. What is all that?"
Only then did Leon set down the final notebook and push the empty satchel aside.
"Records concerning the Dragon's Witch."
Instead of answering, Lakia looked first at the stack on the floor.
There were far too many to call them "a couple of volumes."
On the frayed covers, titles written in what was clearly Leon's own hand had been affixed:
Northern Kingdom Investigation.
Eastern Frontier Oral Traditions.
Royal Archives.
Survivor Testimonies.
Monastery Copies.
Discarded Military Documents.
Dragon Subjugation Campaigns.
Comparison of Folk Tales.
Chronology of the Dragon's Witch Appearances.
Lakia read the titles one by one, then slowly lifted her gaze to Leon.
"Don't tell me you've been carrying all of these around."
"Yes."
"By yourself?"
"Yes."
"For more than ten years?"
"That is correct."
The answers were so matter-of-fact that Lakia found herself at a loss for words.
That he had crammed this many notebooks into a single satchel was astonishing enough; that he had wandered the continent with that weight on his back was almost unbelievable.
"Wasn't it heavy?"
"It was heavy."
"Then why carry every last one?"
Leon picked up the most battered notebook of the lot.
He smoothed the worn cover with his fingertips, then carefully opened it. Dense handwriting, scraps of maps, and leaves pressed and dried long ago came into view.
"Because they are records that can never be obtained again if lost."
He continued while gazing at the aged pages.
"Official histories can be replaced. But a copy found in a nameless monastery was the only one of its kind in the world. The story told by an old man on the brink of death can never be heard twice. The same is true of the diary pulled from a burned village and the military records I copied just before they were discarded."
His fingers pressed gently along the edge of the paper.
"That is why I could not let even a single volume leave my person."
Lakia looked back and forth between the notebooks and Leon without speaking.
When they first met in the forest she had taken him for a swordsman.
The Leon before her now handled paper with far greater care than any blade.
He looked every bit the scholar who had spent a lifetime roaming the continent in pursuit of a single truth.
"You are a swordsman, right?"
Leon glanced briefly in the direction of the sword that had been taken from his waist, then answered with complete seriousness.
"I am. However, over the past decade and more, the number of times I have held a pen far exceeds the number of times I have drawn a sword."
The sincerity of the reply finally drew a small laugh from Lakia.
Their conversation continued until the sunset slipped away beneath the canyon.
At first Leon asked his questions carefully.
The ecology and growth stages of dragons.
Dragon Speech that humans had never recorded.
The reason Liberia had been founded.
The period when Gargantua began guarding the canyon.
Even the reason human entry had been barred for centuries.
Each time a question ended, Leon opened a notebook.
The moment Lakia spoke, he lowered his head and set his pen moving at once.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
The sound of the nib scraping paper soon became the most familiar noise in the room.
Lakia answered diligently at first, recounting whatever she remembered. Where her memory was hazy she admitted she did not know; where human records differed she corrected them on the spot.
With every answer Leon produced a new question.
"There is a record that the northern kingdom first targeted a single dragon egg. Is that true?"
"No. There were five."
Scratch.
"Were there any surviving hatchlings?"
"None."
Leon's pen paused for a moment.
He finished writing the sentence in silence.
Scratch.
Shortly afterward another notebook was opened.
"From when did dragons understand human speech?"
"From the beginning."
"Then why did they never converse with humans?"
"Because there was no need."
"When was the name Liberia given?"
"Not long after Gargantua began guarding the canyon entrance."
"Was the first race you accepted the Orcs?"
"Yeah. Tualuktal's Gulhaltio was the first."
Scratch.
Scratch.
Scratch.
Every time one doubt was resolved, two or three new questions sprang up in its place.
Lakia, who had begun sitting upright, gradually let her posture slacken as time wore on. She leaned against the backrest, propped her chin on her hand, and sometimes let out a long sigh before answering at all.
"...Again?"
"Yes."
"You're asking more questions?"
"Yes."
"You really do have a lot of questions."
"I apologize."
"If you're going to apologize, stop asking."
"That would be difficult."
Lakia stared at him with an incredulous face.
Leon already had the next page open, the next question written and waiting.
In the end Lakia looked away first.
"...Fine. Ask."
Ugalu stayed glued to Leon's side for a while, watching the notebooks and the moving pen tip. But as the same pattern of question and answer stretched on, his eyelids began to droop.
"Kkyuu..."
He nodded off a few times, then clambered up onto Lakia's lap. Curling his plump body into a ball and resting his chin on her thigh, he soon settled into the steady rhythm of sleep.
Lakia continued answering while slowly stroking Ugalu's back.
Outside the window, night settled over the canyon.
The wingbeats of young dragons returning to their nests gradually quieted; from afar the low calls of adult dragons drifted on the wind. One by one, stars appeared in the deep blue sky. What began as a handful of points of light soon filled the canyon's night sky completely.
Cold night air slipped through the open entrance and into the room.
Lakia covered a yawn with her hand.
"...I'm starting to get tired of this."
Only then did Leon stop writing.
He finished the final sentence and waited a moment so the ink would not smear. He closed the open notebook carefully, pressing the cover so that the notes and map scraps tucked inside would not fall out.
The worn notebooks returned to the satchel in the same order they had left it. Leon checked the numbers written on each cover one by one, then fastened the buckle after the last volume was inside.
Click.
The small sound rang out in the night's stillness.
Leon took his hands from the satchel and sat quietly for a time.
On his face rested both the lightness of a man who had finally found answers after years of searching, and the complicated weight of watching the records he had trusted crumble.
He looked at Lakia slowly and bowed his head.
"Thank you. Thanks to you, a great many questions that had gone unanswered for years have finally been resolved."
Lakia shrugged with a weary face.
"Well... you can't correct every rumor about me that's spread across the continent by yourself, but I was only explaining. No need to thank me."
Leon regarded her in silence.
Lakia wore no expression that demanded recognition of her grievances. There was no pride in having revealed some great truth. She simply looked like someone who had recounted the things she had lived through, nothing more.
That very attitude made Leon's heart heavier still.
He turned his gaze to the window.
Countless stars glittered in the night sky.
The dragons' canyon—feared by humans for centuries as a land of calamity—was astonishingly peaceful. Young dragons slept in their nests; the lights of the Orc Village were going out one by one.
Leon thought of the records he had collected.
A witch laughing amid flames.
A calamity who commanded dragons to topple nations.
A monster who drank human blood and gained eternal youth.
Almost none of those stories matched the truth he had heard today.
History had been passed down after losing far too much. Some had added lies out of fear; others had altered the records to hide their own wrongdoing. Over the years those lies had hardened into something that looked like truth.
Only today had Leon finally faced the missing pieces himself.
He gazed at the star-filled night sky with a complicated expression.
Lakia's quiet voice continued.
"The Orc Village isn't suitable for a human to sleep in. The heating is set for Orcs, so if you stay there you'll freeze to death by morning."
"Is that so."
"Yeah. So sleep farther inside the canyon."
Leon's gaze slowly returned to her.
Lakia was stroking the back of the sleeping Ugalu on her lap as if nothing were amiss.
"I don't mean sleep in my house. There's an empty room nearby—use that. Don't wander around at night, and don't go near the dragons' nests."
"I recall you saying I was to remain only until tonight."
"That's right."
Lakia answered shortly, then looked away.
"It's still night, isn't it."
Leon watched her for a moment.
Whether Ugalu had heard their conversation or not, his short tail twitched once in his sleep.
Thump.
Lakia's hand resumed its slow stroking of his back.
"Thank you."
"There you go saying thank you again."
"You have given me a place where I will not freeze to death."
"If you freeze to death here, Ugalu will cry again. That's the only reason."
Leon looked down at Ugalu.
The little dragon slept peacefully on Lakia's lap, mouth slightly open.
"I see."
Lakia's eyes narrowed.
"Why are you smiling?"
"I am not smiling."
"The corners of your mouth went up."
Leon made no particular effort to hide the faint smile that lingered at his lips.
Lakia regarded that face with mild displeasure, then carefully rose so as not to wake Ugalu.
"Follow me. I'll take you to the room."
Leon slung the satchel onto his back and followed her.
The bag containing dozens of volumes of records was still heavy.
Yet under the canyon's starlight, each step he took felt lighter than when he had first entered this place.