#137: A Dragon's Tale — The Archmage's Restaurant

There is a dragon.

It is a young dragon, not yet an adult.

The dragon was curled up and sleeping in the lair inherited from its mother.

She is a loner.

The curled-up dragon was thoroughly alone.

She had been alone ever since her mother died.

Being a loner, her specialty was sleeping.

Thus, she spent over 700 years sleeping.

She spent centuries in a lair where no light entered. There was nothing she could do but sleep.

She hated everything.

The dragons that killed her mother, the dragons that trapped her mother, and the clan that didn’t believe in her mother until the end.

Even the elder, who should have believed in her mother the most, didn’t believe in her.

Her mother was killed under mysterious circumstances as a traitor to everyone. Her death was ultimately caused by other dragons and the clan itself.

Whenever she thought about it, she was filled with rage to the brim. But that was all.

All she could do was feel her anger boiling over.

With her own power, she couldn’t truly avenge her mother against the real monster who did that to her, nor against the clan that branded her mother as a shameless traitor.

She had no power.

No matter how much she cried and raged, she couldn’t kill even one other dragon.

Moreover, she couldn’t find the real monster.

Just thinking about it made her grind her teeth until they almost fell out, but there was nothing she could do.

There was no way.

That’s why she hated all living beings, resented them, and hated herself the most for being powerless.

She ground her teeth for hundreds of years, but in the end, all she could do was sleep.

Even easing that anger was hard.

There was nothing to do but sleep.

Darkness.

The endless darkness embraced her whole body.

Yes, just like her mother.

Falling into sleep, into darkness, letting vast amounts of time just pass by was her only solace.

Only when she slept could she forget everything.

She could forget her pitiful and worthless self, her mother, and revenge.

She could just sink into the darkness.

The darkness was so empty that she wished the end of the world would come a thousand times to return everything to nothingness.

Such a boring time.

But even so, she wasn’t even an adult yet.

And she still had thousands of years to live.

The more she lived, the more resentment she accumulated against everyone.

Her heart was withering like rice stalks not harvested in time.

She poured out all her emotions the day her mother died.

Since then, she had never shown any emotion.

That was her life.

Even when her clanmates trampled and insulted her.

She didn’t show any expression. No need to. She truly felt nothing.

Curling up in the dark lair was everything to her.

Her everything.

Emptiness.

Void.

Abyss.

An explosion of darkness.

The time she hated the most.

It was when the elder black dragon, her grandfather, visited.

She had to get up forcefully and listen to unwanted words, the moment she hated the most in the world.

He always said the same thing.

Don’t just sleep, at least play around and blend into the world, he would nag.

Play around, he said.

She already hated dragons, so humans felt like mere insects to her.

Worthless.

She could never understand why she had to be involved with creatures even more worthless than dragons.

And she had no desire to leave this place where her mother unjustly died. It was the only way to honor her mother’s spirit.

If it weren’t for that, she might have already died.

If she had that kind of courage.

“Are you still only thinking about your mother, child…?”

Her mother’s father.

Even he doesn’t think about her mother. He tells her to forget. Just to forget.

So she must protect her mother.

The more the elder said that, the more firm her resolve became.

“Have you found the monster that killed my mother? If not, just leave.”

“Child, how many times must I tell you? Your mother…she stole the Dragon Orb from the Red Dragon Sanctuary, and when she failed…”

“No! No, no, no, no!”

She replied firmly to the elder’s words. Her voice was close to a scream.

Her dead emotions turned into anger whenever her mother was mentioned.

The reason she was so sure about her mother’s death.

Was because she saw the truth.

When her mother held her and showed her the dragon orb, explaining its secrets.

The dragon orb she saw was definitely not red. She was confident that even a half-blind person could tell red from black.

So what her mother had at that time was definitely not a red orb.

The Red Dragon’s relic.

The Dragon Orb kept in the Red Dragon Sanctuary is known for its brilliant red color.

So no.

The dragon orb her mother found by chance was black. Like the depths of night, as if it contained the universe.

She felt as if her whole body was being engulfed by that beautiful darkness. That terrifying yet beautiful dragon orb was definitely not red.

But she was the only one who saw it.

The dragon orb was swapped by someone. That brilliant darkness disappeared.

What her mother found was the lost relic of the Black Dragon.

The black dragon orb left by the progenitor of the Black Dragons.

Her mother, having found it, explained its depths to her daughter and immediately reported it to her father, the elder.

And on the day she took the orb to the Black Dragon Sanctuary.

The orb in the case was red for some reason.

And it matched the relic that had gone missing from the Red Dragon Sanctuary.

Especially since her mother had visited the Red Dragon Sanctuary with the elder, the timing made the situation inescapable.

In other words, it became a story of stealing the Red Dragon’s orb, not finding the Black Dragon’s orb.

Common sense would say that if she had stolen the orb, she wouldn’t report it to the elder, but the fact that she had the orb made any excuses invalid.

In the end, she became a traitor.

Of course, the Black Dragons initially defended her mother, but increasingly incriminating evidence against her kept emerging.

One by one.

Everything was meticulously planned.

So that everyone would believe it.

The evidence.

All the circumstances.

And because it nearly caused another dragon war, the label of a traitor to the clan was stamped on her in an instant.

Even her mother, who tried to clear her name, met a mysterious death.

Diehegma and the other leaders of the Black Dragons at the time dismissed it as a suicide due to a failed plan.

And.

The Black Dragon leadership had to return the stolen relic to the Red Dragons, experiencing great humiliation.

The fact that they bowed their heads to the Red Dragon clan, with whom they had been on bad terms for thousands of years.

It was recorded as an unprecedented humiliation in history.

The dragon that brought unprecedented humiliation to the clan.

That was her mother.

And the price of that humiliation fell not on the elder, the strongest in the clan, but on her, the weakest.

In the moments when she couldn’t be protected by the elder.

All the bullying was directed at her.

But she didn’t care about any of that.

What was important was that her mother wasn’t a criminal.

No.

Absolutely not.

What disappeared was the Black Dragon orb.

She was the only one who knew that.

There was no dragon who believed her. Only she knew the truth.

The elder, who couldn’t know the truth, couldn’t believe her. He wanted to believe her, but it wasn’t evidence that could convince other dragons. On the contrary, the more they investigated, the more all the evidence pointed to his daughter’s crime.

So, his granddaughter’s words were all fantasy.

“Everyone makes mistakes once. If she hadn’t died like that, I could have done something. But she…so child, you need to forget. That’s the only way to move forward…”

“It wasn’t a mistake. My mother never made a mistake!”

She shouted loudly.

Her voice echoed off the ceiling of the lair. After shouting like that, she curled up again.

Thinking it was hopeless, the elder sighed and left the lair, planning to return later.

And bowing his head while returning the stolen relic, that great humiliation.

That wound never healed.

A few hundred years later, it ultimately led to a great battle known as the Dragon War.

The outbreak of the Dragon War.

Before the war broke out, during a time that was still peaceful, she calmly looked up at the lair, satisfied with the darkness and silence that came once the elder left.

And then she buried her head again.

A deep sleep began again, resembling the darkness before her eyes.

There was only one reason she woke up from that darkness: hunger.

At those times, she flew into the sky.

She ate monsters.

Crunch, crunch.

She never tasted anything. She just ate.

She ate because she was hungry. That was the whole story.

Herbivores, which were easier to swallow than monsters, were better, but it didn’t really matter.

There wasn’t much difference anyway.

When she flew, there were monsters and herds of animals everywhere.

That was food.