Chapter 38: Confession
Alan made a caramel apple cake for Little Green.
Of course, the dragon vine hadn’t been particularly well-behaved today, but when it came to dealing with it, Alan felt he’d been a bit too rough himself—the child only wanted to protect him, after all (even if the method had been somewhat excessive).
A caramel apple cake was Alan’s subtle way of apologizing.
He diced half an apple, then simmered it with butter and sugar into caramelized apple cubes. Next, he folded the apples into a batter made from flour, cinnamon, and honey. There wasn’t much batter, so Alan used a small, wide-mouthed copper cup as a makeshift baking mold, filling it just to the brim. After that, he sliced the remaining half of the apple thinly and, together with some coarsely crushed nuts rolled under a pin, arranged them over the top before sliding the cup into the oven. Once it was baked, Alan was lavish with the finishing touch, brushing the cake generously with Little Green’s favorite honey.
The finished apple cake had a lightly browned, crisp crust, decorated with honey’s glistening sugar sheen. When cut open, the cake itself revealed a lovely orange-gold color, studded here and there with caramelized apple cubes baked to a translucent gloss.
The apples were sweet-tart, the honey rich and fragrant, the cinnamon warm and aromatic; the texture was dense yet moist.
It was the sort of food perfectly suited to soothing the heart.
Alan had originally planned to wait for the cake to cool before serving it to Little Green—after all, moist pastries fresh from the oven were hot enough to rival molten lava—
but the very next moment, he watched Little Green plunge its face—its flower disk, rather—straight into the copper cup.
A teeth-aching crunching sound immediately followed. Bits of nuts and cake crumbs occasionally burst out through the gaps at the rim of the cup, and before Alan could wipe them away, thin, faintly glowing green tendrils suddenly shot out from the centers of several other flowers, sweeping the crumbs clean in an instant.
Alan: “……”
He decided not to think about what he had just seen.
But a moment later, Alan still couldn’t help letting out a sigh.
He reached out and gently scratched that short length of vine behind Little Green’s flower disk.
“No need to rush,” he reminded it softly. “If you want more, I can always make another. There’s plenty of honey and apples left.”
Little Green’s response was a violent shudder.
It abruptly lifted all of its flower disks (with a few cake crumbs still clinging to its mouthparts), stared blankly at Alan for a moment, then raised its leaves and tightly wrapped them around Alan’s fingers, urging him to do it again.
In the process, it even forgot to lick clean the last tiny bit of syrup left in the copper cup.
Seeing the dragon vine like this, a faint, private expectation inevitably stirred in Alan’s heart.
Earlier, he hadn’t managed to get much information about Veles from Lart, but Lart had said that dragon vine was Veles’s companion magical creature, closely bound to him.
If Little Green could be so lively and cheerful, then perhaps it also meant that the man Alan worried about so deeply was still safe and well?
“Mr. Veles…”
Alan murmured the name unconsciously. When he recalled the certainty with which Lart had spoken earlier, asserting that Veles would inevitably fall and become a demon dragon, a sudden surge of indescribable sorrow and tenderness rose in his chest.
Lart was Veles’s brother—a brother by blood—yet in Lart’s mouth, Veles sounded more like a monster than kin. And when Alan thought back to Veles’s stiff, awkward manner when he had first arrived in Green River Village, his inability to hide his clumsiness around people, that tenderness instantly transformed into a powerful ache of concern and longing.
The young mage gazed at the dragon vine on the table, missing Veles more keenly than ever before.
And then, that night, Alan dreamed of him once again.
At first, Alan didn’t realize that he was dreaming.
Because Veles was simply standing there in his shabby, threadbare mage’s cottage, looking exactly as tall, powerful, and dizzyingly handsome as he had been the last time they parted.
“Mr. Veles!”
The instant he saw him, Alan cried out in delight. He leapt from the bed and rushed toward Veles—never once realizing that a gentleman like Veles would never silently slip into someone else’s home while the host lay fast asleep in thin linen nightclothes.
He noticed that Veles had cast aside the plainness he’d worn in Green River Village. His shoulders and chest were now covered in gleaming armor, meticulously adorned with vine-like floral patterns. The longsword at his waist was far longer than one made for an ordinary man, its ornate hilt set with a cat’s-eye gemstone glowing gold and green. Draped over him was a pure black velvet cloak; the costly fabric was embroidered with delicate, intricate gold thread and the hidden royal insignia of Alfied…
This was the sort of attire Alan had only ever seen on the most overbearing high nobles of the capital. Even for those with blue blood in their veins, dressing like this would make them look like peacocks in the midst of courtship—dazzling, but also undeniably ostentatious.
Yet on this taciturn, solitary man, always as silent as midwinter, such brilliance suited him unexpectedly well.
At least, it did to Alan. Looking at Veles like this, he felt his heart flutter wildly in his chest, like a little bird beating its wings.
Those sumptuous adornments did nothing to diminish Veles’s presence. On the contrary, they made his shoulders seem broader, his legs longer. His loose silver hair and pale eyes glimmered faintly in the shadows, as though they were the true jewels of this humanoid form.
“You’re finally back—”
The young mage’s steps slowed of their own accord.
Only a few paces away from Veles, he found himself staring uncontrollably at him, his cheeks burning red.
He wanted to ask if Veles was all right—how he had endured the Blood Moon, whether the curse had made things unbearable, to tell him that the honey wine in his cellar was almost ready, that this time he had even specially asked the fair folk to bless that bottle and it was sure to taste wonderful…
He had a thousand things he wanted to say, yet every single one of them was crushed into fragments by the thunderous pounding of his heart.
“Mr. Veles.”
In the end, he could only gaze at Veles foolishly and call his name once more.
“Alan.”
Veles looked back at him and answered softly.
Up until this moment, the atmosphere was still warm and pleasant. If Alan were to wake up right then, this would probably have been a beautiful dream he would savor for a long time…
And then, in the very next second, Veles suddenly reached out and pulled Alan roughly into his arms.
“I’m better than Lart.”
The hoarse, low, rasping voice—so rough it was almost unfamiliar—echoed by Alan’s ear. The “hand” wrapped around his waist was abnormally large; even through the linen nightshirt, Alan could clearly feel the coarse scales covering each finger and the dagger-sharp, slightly curved claws at their tips.
“I like you more than he does.”
In the silver eyes, the man’s pupils narrowed into thin slits like those of a true cold-blooded creature, and the greed and madness flickering within looked, at a glance, no different from the evil dragons of legend.
“Mr. Veles, what’s wrong with you—”
Alan realized something was wrong, but before he could finish speaking, Veles clamped a hand over his mouth as if startled.
“Don’t agree to him.”
Veles murmured, his tone pained and frantic.
“You said you’d stay with me… you promised…”
The man’s figure began to change within the room. Before Alan’s very eyes, Veles gradually transformed from a handsome human into a massive, ferocious creature of myth. At the same time, the mage’s little cottage warped and distorted, crumbling apart until it finally dissolved into puffs of silvery dust that scattered on the wind.
“W–wait a second?!”
Alan suddenly realized that at some unknown point, he had ended up atop a mountain of treasure piled high with gold coins, gemstones, and every sort of priceless-looking hoard. The scene was spectacular—comparable to the fantasy epics about dragons, dwarves, and elves he’d watched before his transmigration.
No—if anything, the treasure beneath him was even more exaggerated than anything those films had shown.
Within the dark, pitch-black cavern, the gemstones alone—many of them glowing of their own accord—lit the space like a resplendent river of stars.
“I offer all of this to you,” the dragon’s low rumble set the cavern humming with reverberations. “I will seize for you every precious thing in this world.”
“You will become the king of all kings.”
“You will hold supreme and unrivaled authority.”
…
“I can do better than Lart.”
“Don’t agree to him…”
“And don’t… don’t reject me either…”
‘If it were the future demon dragon—my elder brother Veles—expressing his affection for you, would you reject him the same way?’
Alan lost his balance amid pearls and gold. Before he could reply, he toppled backward uncontrollably—
but he did not fall into that sea of gold.
Something far hotter, far softer, caught him instead.
In his dragon form, Veles carefully held Alan in his mouth. Then, with solemn gentleness, he set him down within a small space formed by the curve of his dragon claws. At some point, a large goose-feather cushion had appeared there; when Alan fell onto it, it was so soft and fluffy that even turning over was difficult.
So, the black-haired mage could only helplessly remain in an utterly awkward position—lying on his back, soaked and disheveled—shouting up at the dragon in his dream.
“Hey, wait, wai—wait, Mr. Veles!”
As a half-trained mage, Alan had already sensed that something was wrong.
Even though he was in a dream (and one that was clearly not his own), the emotions of the other protagonist in the dream flowed relentlessly toward him.
He could feel that the massive, ferocious-looking dragon in front of him was actually drowning in a bitter brew of anxiety, fear, and rage.
“You’re already better than Lart—no, I mean—you don’t even need to compare yourself to him!”
“In my heart, Mr. Veles, you are the best, no matter what.”
Alan, cheeks burning red, stared at the dragon, which had suddenly gone still. Struggling, he climbed out of the cushion, rose onto his tiptoes, and lifted his hands to cup Veles’s hard, black snout.
“I—I like you very much, Mr. Veles.”
Summoning all his courage, Alan spoke to the dragon before him.
“The moment I first saw you, I liked you… very, very much.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Author’s Note:
In the story’s setting, the treasure Veles showed Alan actually exists…
After all, most of the other dragons on the continent are long gone, so all the inheritance of treasure ended up with him.
