Volume 1, Episode 1
A snowfield, pure white in every direction.
In the middle of that endless expanse stood an ancient temple, abandoned and lonely amid the drifts.
Inside the desolate shrine, only massive pillars and frost-covered ornaments gleamed in the dim light. Two dragon statues carved from ice loomed beneath them, while blue flames that stole away warmth from the air undulated below, radiating a chill even colder than the ice itself.
In that merciless cold, where no living thing could survive for long, a boy sat curled in on himself.
His crimson hair, stark against skin so pale it was almost white, shone vividly as though it alone had color left in the all-white world.
The boy was the master of the snowfield.
Like the winter kingdoms in a storybook, the snowfield was barren and bleak. A battered ruin of a temple stood in the middle of the blizzard, and no one ever came there.
He was alone.
He had been alone for a very long time.
Boring.
Lying on the frozen floor, the boy, Seherbian, stared blankly at nothing as the thought drifted through his mind.
It was a cold no human could have endured for long.
But he was not human. He was a dragon who ruled Winter.
Seherbian Winter Bell, the Silver Dragon of Winter.
Born of the union between the silver and fire lineages, Seherbian was the silver dragon who had inherited silver scales and a crimson mane.
I wonder how long it’s been since I last heard a prayer.
Seherbian spread a hand over his face to shield his eyes from the blinding sun. Even in a snowfield lashed by freezing winds, the sun rose without fail each day. No visitors ever came, yet dawn arrived on schedule, as if to announce the hour when he was expected to fulfill his duty.
“Annoying……”
He muttered the word and let his arm fall limp into the snow, and then—
Swish.
A shadow fell across his face.
“Well now. Were you here again?”
“Rowan.”
The first thing he noticed was the priest’s long, flowing robe. The old man stood with the sun behind him and gave a soft chuckle, halfway between laughter and a cough.
Lying where he was, Seherbian spoke with a sullen expression.
“You’re late today.”
“Were you waiting for me, perhaps?”
“……No? I wasn’t waiting. I’ve got plenty of other things to do, even without you.”
Even after he said that, Rowan only kept watching him with that lazy, easy expression, and Seherbian, feeling oddly cornered for no reason, added after a pause, “Why would I wait for you?”
“Of course. I’m sure you wouldn’t.”
Seeing Seherbian narrow his eyes, the other man changed the subject.
“Heh…… These days, this old man’s afternoon naps are so deep I hardly wake at all.”
“You haven’t even lived a hundred years and you’re already calling yourself old.”
“Mm. By my standards, that’s plenty old enough.”
Though he was being scolded, the old man, Rowan, merely smiled.
“Humans don’t even live a full hundred years before they’re taken back into the gods’ arms, after all.”
Rowan W. Priest, the dragon priest who remained in the temple at the end of the road.
Seherbian remembered that in only a few more days, Rowan would turn ninety-eight, and blinked slowly.
Unlike the dragon race, who bore the sacred duty of regulating the world, most other races were granted only brief lives.
Even Seherbian, for whom time itself had long since lost its meaning, was sometimes struck by the weight of it all—especially when someone close to him was nearing the end of their allotted years, just as now.
“This is troubling. Once I’m gone, who will take care of Seherbian…… ahem, who will attend to you?”
“Don’t act like I’m a child just because I look this way.”
“Of course not. You’ve looked exactly the same ever since I was the size of a peanut.”
Before the wrinkles gathered at Rowan’s eyes and brow, before those dry, frail fingers replaced the hands once full of heat, Seherbian remembered him vividly.
Revisiting that memory for a moment, Seherbian shook his head.
“Peanuts aren’t as big as you.”
“Heh, yes, yes. A peanut is about the size of my finger, isn’t it?”
“No. Once you peel the shell, they get much smaller than that. They’re too hard when raw, and I heard they taste good roasted.”
Seherbian rattled off the information with great confidence, and Rowan answered with the same ever-present smile.
“That’s knowledge you only know from inheritance, isn’t it?”
“……”
Seherbian fell silent.
He couldn’t help it. He had never once seen a peanut in his life.
When dragons hatch from their eggs, they inherit knowledge from the parent dragon waiting beside them. If his own birth had included the chance to have a parent dragon explain vast stores of knowledge and help him experience the world directly, that would have been lovely—but unfortunately, he had only half succeeded in that transfer.
Seherbian Winter Bell, who had inherited the name Bell as the successor to the former Regulator.
The moment he emerged from his egg, Seherbian awakened to the power of Winter Bell and, by sacred law, grew up alone in the snowfield, separated from his kin. In a place like this, there wasn’t even a blue bean, let alone a peanut.
Rowan, the dragon priest who had left the noble household in his youth to devote himself to the temple, could hardly have failed to know that. And knowing it, he still went out of his way to poke at the sore spot of the dragon he served.
“Seherbian. Isn’t it about time you listened to this old servant’s prayer?”
“……Why would I?”
The voice sounded cold at first glance, but Rowan, who had served him all his life, did not waver.
“You haven’t gone down to the human villages lately. No one comes up to pray anymore either. Thanks to that, the temple’s got cobwebs piled all over the place.”
“Spiders can’t survive in this weather.”
“There are frost spiders living near the caves where the wind is weaker.”
“They don’t make webs.”
“Instead, they coat the walls thickly with thin ice. It’s not a pretty sight, and if it’s left alone, the insulation is poor—ordinary people would freeze to death.”
Seherbian, being a silver dragon, could flop down anywhere he liked—on snow, on ice, even bury himself in drifts and hibernate—but Rowan was different.
For humans, the cold was a black monster that stole life away.
“That’s why I gave you Winter’s blessing. You won’t die from cold like that.”
Even after such a shamelessly self-assured answer, the smile at the corners of the old priest’s mouth did not fade.
“Seherbian. I’m old now.”
“……”
“You know, don’t you? My dragon. People die when they grow old. Once I’m gone, there’ll be no one left to maintain this temple.”
Only then did Seherbian sit up properly.
Rolling over—
There was still snow stuck to his head, but he made no move to brush it away, merely sitting there blankly.
With his pale white priest’s staff hooked over one shoulder, Seherbian looked up at Rowan. The silver dragon had not changed at all from the first time they met, but the old dragon priest was now preparing to see out the end of his life.
“Ah.”
His gaze drifted absentmindedly to the white breath spilling from his lips, and then Seherbian answered at last.
“……Right. This is a ruined temple no one comes to anymore, so I suppose that’s how it’ll be.”
“Will you leave it as it is?”
“There’s no one. No one at all.”
“Not quite.”
The old priest, wearing a bitter smile, lowered his head toward him.
“You’re still here, Seherbian.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Even after I die, you will remain.”
Hearing Rowan’s words, Seherbian imagined the near future for a moment.
Hmm.
His brow creased at once. Then Seherbian let out a breath that sounded almost like a snort.
“That would be even more boring than now.”
“I suppose it would?”
“Yeah. If no one comes to wake me, I might not even get up when the sun rises. And with no one to talk to, my mouth would get bored too. Ah, I know that expression.”
When Rowan played along, Seherbian grew serious, even snapping his fingers as he considered it.
“Webs in my mouth.”
“Heh. You make excellent use of idioms as well.”
He had never seen anyone actually use the expression, but he knew a great many things. The knowledge inherited from his parent dragons was immense—so immense that he still hadn’t fully grasped it all.
Seherbian drew his priest’s staff into his arms again and lifted his chin with regal indifference.
“Fine. I’ll hear it.”
Deep within his sunset-colored eyes, divine power shimmered so intensely that no human could have met his gaze.
“Rowan, what is your prayer?”
“I…….”
In that instant, the old man standing on death’s doorstep smiled in a way that was difficult to read.
“I hope that you come to know more of the world.”
“I already know plenty.”
“No.”
Seeing Rowan shake his head, Seherbian made a face as though he had encountered a strange and unfamiliar creature.
“Knowledge you haven’t experienced is like a portrait. No matter how skilled the painter, they can’t capture an entire person’s life on a single canvas.”
The figure preserved in those brushstrokes is only one face among the countless faces they possess.
“The Seherbian of now is just like this Blanconia snowfield—nothing but one color.”
Except for Seherbian and Rowan, the Blanconia snowfield was buried so completely under snow that it was hard to find any living thing with warmth in it.
“Go out into a world wider than this. See it for yourself, hear it for yourself, and then—”
Rowan clasped his hands at his chest and prayed with all sincerity.
“If you find a place where you can settle, I will be happier than words can say. My dragon, Winter Bell.”
* * *
In the end, before he could complete one hundred years, the old priest closed his eyes peacefully in the temple where the two of them had lived together, just as he had said he would.
It was a good death, simple and old age taking him in its due time. Seherbian, who had known in advance that Rowan would die, gathered the body as planned and placed it in a coffin. Then, after burying the coffin deep within an ice cave, he set fire to dry firewood.
In Blanconia, where the air was filled with cold, gathering dry wood meant breaking snow-covered branches ahead of time and leaving them to dry for two days on a rack. Once those branches had dried, you could burst a summer heat seed infused with the power of Asul Bell, the dragon of summer, and the flames would rise as if a seed had been planted in a pot and suddenly begun to grow.
Crackle, snap!
The fire quickly roared to life in the wood he had carefully dried for a week. Seherbian sat with his hips planted firmly in the snow and stared blankly at the flames. In the eternal frost, the fire made from summer’s power burned brilliantly.
So, Seherbian. Please.
Even at the brink of death, Rowan’s repeated plea seemed to hover at the edge of his ears.
Then, through the bright red flames, black, stale smoke began to rise in a hazy cloud. The smoke was so foul that just looking at it for a moment made his eyes sting.
So much that tears nearly gathered there.
I hope you find a place where you can settle.
“The place I belong is here.”
Seherbian murmured as he watched the fire burn.
“Nothing changes. I can live just as I did before you came.”
Crackle, crackle.
Only the sound of fire consuming wood answered him. Seherbian sat like that for a long time before finally burying his face in his knees.
“……But, Rowan.”
Wooooo—
A blizzard laden with ice crystals danced around him like a swarm of fairies.
“If I said I regretted even meeting you…….”
Was this stubbornness too?
Only a lonely question, with no one left to answer it, scattered away on the harsh wind.
It was, as always, another day of heavy snowfall.