Chapter 188

It was a pain unlike the sharp spasms she’d felt when Cherry moved. This one went deeper, more primal. Elise froze, terrified that true labor might begin, that her body might give in before she was ready. The physician’s warning echoed in her head—if her water broke, it could be disastrous.

“The Founder’s…” Her breath hitched. “Haa—his relics, they’re in his coffin. Hurry… open it and take them.”

But despite her urging, Sameshita hesitated. The dragon’s golden eyes darted toward her, flickering, uncertain.

Impatience drove Elise to move. She pushed herself up, one trembling hand gripping the wall as she climbed the stone steps. Each tread sent another shiver of pain through her abdomen. At the top, before the gravestone, she stopped and read the inscription carved into its pale face.

Year One of the Argan Empire.
Gallian Iar.
Revered as the great hero of Grandel, yet the one who could protect nothing he loved.
Remain here and wait.

As Elise stepped closer to the coffin, something shifted in the air. The dragon crossed the distance in an instant, ripping through space as a glowing magic circle flared beneath his feet.

And then Andrei appeared—cold, severe, his face a mask carved of stone.

He struck Elise’s hand away with a sharp motion.

“I’ll do it,” he snapped.

His words were harsh, but his eyes betrayed him—they trembled. No, he wasn’t calm. He was holding himself together under immense strain.

Ignoring his agitation, Elise pointed toward the tombstone.

“It’s said the Founder carved that inscription himself.”

Sameshita glanced at it, his expression twisting, muscles tightening along his jaw.

“So he died in the first year of the Empire?” he said bitterly.

The Argan calendar began at year zero—the year of the Empire’s founding. That meant Gallian had died young. He’d met Sameshita at seventeen, shared twenty years with him, and parted at thirty-seven. After that, he had established Argan, built the capital, and sealed Sameshita away the following year.

He hadn’t survived that winter. Ignashio had recorded that much. Gallian had been thirty-eight when he died—not from illness or accident.

The hero had erected this very monument in his own honor, then taken his own life.

“I’ve seen this gravestone since I was a child,” Elise murmured, “but I never understood that last line. Remain here and wait. He could have written Rest peacefully, or Sleep eternally, or Be at peace. Why did he choose to say wait?”

“Perhaps he was waiting for his lover’s spirit,” the dragon sneered.

His voice was a hiss of mockery. “I killed his first lover, you know. Every trace of that woman’s life, even the child she carried. Yet by the time he sealed me, there was another. Another human woman who heard the same sweet lies whispered in her ear. His love—how fickle, how cheap.”

Elise’s eyes flashed. “Would you still say that after seeing what’s inside his coffin and his relic box?”

As she reached toward the coffin, the dragon lashed out, slapping her hand away.

Snarling, Sameshita seized the lid and wrenched it open with violent force. White dust scattered through the air like falling snow.

Inside, the coffin was nearly empty.

The remains of the Founder were little more than a handful of pale sand. Beneath it, a few fragments of bone lay scattered, unrecognizable.

For a long moment, the dragon only stared. The fury that had driven him vanished, replaced by something hollow. His hands, capable of destruction, trembled but did not move to touch what was left of his pupil.

Meanwhile, Elise lifted the box lying beside the tombstone. It was large but surprisingly light. When she opened it, she found three thick leather-bound journals within. Preservation magic had kept them untouched by time.

The covers bore heavy, deliberate handwriting—Gallian’s own. The inscription continued from the tombstone:

When that distant day arrives—
To my master, whom I hate and hate again,
and yet pity and love still.

The word master sent a violent tremor through the dragon’s eyes.

Elise pressed the journals against his chest. “He must have known the seal he cast on you wasn’t perfect. It was his own design—he’d have felt the flaw. So he expected this. That someday, his sleeping master would awaken and come searching for him.”

“You’re saying… he knew I’d come?”

“Yes. Why else write it that way? So you wouldn’t lose your way when you returned.”

The dragon laughed—sharp, unhinged laughter that grew louder until it filled the chamber. “That’s rich. A message for a version of me who wouldn’t remember? You make it sound as though he actually worried about me!”

His laughter broke off abruptly. He glared down at her, eyes burning with feral light.

“So his descendants hid this grave in secret and spread their lies to the world? They claimed they were blessed by the gods for slaying the Light Dragon? Be careful, Elizabeth. Your theory implies that the Argan royal line has concealed what was rightfully mine—Gallian’s will and his relics—for centuries.”

His roar thundered through the crypt. And the worst part was—he wasn’t wrong.

After Gallian’s death, Ignashio, Hugo, and the others had purged every trace of the truth. To build a holy empire, they could not let the world know that its founding hero had loved a dragon, or that his death had been born of guilt and longing.

For seven hundred years, the truth had slept only here, in this underground tomb.

Sameshita turned on her, voice dripping venom. “Do you think I’ll weep with gratitude now that you’ve given me these? That I’ll accept these scraps of memory and quietly vanish, comforted by the thought that he ‘waited’ for me?”

“Don’t twist this,” Elise said, forcing the words through clenched teeth. “I’m telling you to face what you refused to see back then—ugh—”

Pain bit deep. Cherry’s body twisted violently inside her, reacting to the dragon’s surge of magic. Elise gripped her abdomen, breath coming in short gasps.

“I’m only… fulfilling my end of the bargain.”

She could feel her mana draining, pulled away by his presence. The circuits stabilizing her magic core kept her from collapsing into seizures, but the ache in her belly grew sharper, raw, as though something inside were clawing its way out.

“I don’t know every reason our ancestors chose what they did,” she continued, her voice faint but steady. “But I know one thing—the words Ignashio left on that wall.”

She pointed weakly across the chamber. On the opposite side, etched in age-darkened stone, were Ignashio’s own records—his final conversation with Gallian.

Only when our master chose to surrender himself to sleep did the light of the gods return to Grandel, and peace was restored.

Around that time, the Emperor came to me in secret and confessed:

“Ignashio, I wish to pay for the sins I have committed.”

I tried to dissuade him, but his resolve was unshakable.

“What are you saying? You’re still young—and Argan has just been born. We need your strength!”

“Everyone needs me. That’s why I tried to leave behind an heir. I’ve done enough of what I never wished to do. I have no regrets, but no attachments either.”

“Then your mind is made up. You decided the moment you sealed your master, didn’t you?”

“The moment I turned away from the sealing circle. So, Ignashio—erase everything else if you must, but pass on this one truth: all of it was my choice. My master will return for me one day, and these words will both enrage him and be the only thing that can soothe him.”

“It wasn’t all your fault, Gallian. Have you forgotten how he treated you? He never saw you as human.”

“I know. That’s why I want to forget everything. We never understood each other in life. Perhaps, in death, without hatred or pain or grief, I can finally stay by his side.”

“That’s surrender, Gallian. Wake up!”

“No. Only in death can I be with him. For years I searched for another way, Ignashio. There is none.”

“Pathetic,” the dragon spat, laughter spilling from him again, hollow and bitter. “He dressed his weakness in pretty words. And now he’s dust.”

He sneered, but it rang false, forced.

Sameshita didn’t even glance at the inscriptions, as though refusing to acknowledge truths he hadn’t known. His denial looked less like pride and more like desperation—the flailing of someone afraid of what he might feel if he believed it.

“You’ll never be forgiven that way,” Elise said softly. “You’ll never be saved—”

“Because the dead can’t do anything!” he roared. “They can’t answer, they can’t speak, they can’t even hate me back!”

The shout shook the crypt. Elise’s body reacted instinctively—she staggered back a few steps, heart pounding. Her heel met empty air. The stairway leading down to the altar yawned behind her.

The dragon tossed the journals back into the coffin with a careless flick, the thud echoing through the chamber. Then he started toward her—slowly, deliberately, each step radiating danger.

“I want the living,” he said.

His voice dropped to a low growl, vibrating in her bones. “Not ashes. Not memory. The living.”

Elise couldn’t move. Pain and fear rooted her in place, breath caught in her throat. Behind her, the light from the magic sigils flickered and dimmed, as if even the spells feared what was coming.

And in that suffocating silence, the dragon smiled—a small, terrible thing, filled with the hunger of seven hundred years.

“I want you.”