Archive of Our Own ^beta

Kohane is grateful that, at the very least, the weather is good for travelling today. 

It’s one of the less important things she likes to pay attention to. In the end, whether the sun shines for long or not won’t affect her errands for the day, but the subtle warmth is appreciated regardless. Then again, she guesses that she can’t classify her task at hand as a simple errand either, not when she’s been anticipating it for years.

Not when she’s going to be risking her life for the kingdom, and not when her future as a royal knight hinges on the course of the next month.

She really shouldn’t worry over hypotheticals that haven’t crossed her path yet. She busies herself with looking in the mirror and dusting the dirt off of her clothes, smoothing over folds and creases in her buttoned shirt. The straps of her suspenders fit over her shoulders comfortably, and her cloak sits heavy over her body even in its patched condition.

A belt over her waist, with a leather bag secured to it and pockets for potions. A dagger held tightly to the side of her thigh. Her protection amulet around her neck, glowing in a faint pink tint.

Kohane inhales deeply. She leaves soon- too soon, maybe.

But this is the only chance she has to prove herself, to her family and her friends and most importantly, the kingdom advisors. There’s only a small window in the year where the option to go to the mountains opens, and an even smaller window where the conditions are tolerable for someone without casting magic like her. 

Dragon nests can be found only at the top of the highest mountains, past the bottomless ravines that sweep past the landscapes in clawed scars, beyond the swarms of forests that shift in position every minute. The dragons themselves are creatures of inconceivable danger. She’s never seen one in real life, and in stories, she’s only ever seen destruction follow their paths.

Elemental magic beyond comprehension. Fires that spread through entire nations. Large, scaled wings that can block the sun for cities and cities. And Kohane, with nothing but her greatsword and a fleeting wish to become a knight.

Still, she’ll try. All she’s known is trying.

She takes her sword from where it’s leaning against the wall, still covered in its sheath, and hooks it onto her belt. Her bedroom feels empty now that she’s taken everything she needs from it. Turning on her heel, she chews at her lip and leaves. She doesn’t look back.

The cottage is almost as empty. Her parents had quietly left in the morning, likely to contest with the kingdom representatives again. For a moment, Kohane feels a pang of guilt leaving so suddenly, but there was no other way: they’d try to stop her if they were there.

The plants that sit by the windowsill are growing well. Count Pearl is curled around her favourite branches, basking lazily in the sunlight. Kohane walks towards her, wary of any noises from outside, and kneels down to look at her eye-to-eye.

Count Pearl, with her tail wrapped tightly onto the plant, moves to brush her head against the back of Kohane’s hand. Kohane smiles and gently pets her body. “I’ll be back soon,” she murmurs. She hopes she’s right. 

She stands up, and as Count Pearl blinks at her in confusion, she reaches for her boots by the entrance. “Take care of the plants for me, okay?” she says, waving goodbye. “Don’t tell Dad.” Count Pearl tilts her head.

Her boots are on. Kohane buckles their fronts. She opens the door and closes her eyes as she steps forward and shuts it behind her.

The path to Touya’s workshop is so familiar that she ends up standing outside its door without realising it.

Although it belongs only to Touya (he lives on the second floor of the cottage, surrounded by his colourful drinks and mixes) it still has the Aoyagi crest engraved on its sign. That’s to be expected from a family so well-known in every market of fine crafts, even if Touya himself has already abandoned that history.

The crest is the only foreign element of its appearance. The rest of it is remarkably comfortable, from the overgrown vines that hang along the roof and writhe in the sun to the small buds of sourberry peeking out from the crevices in the stone path. Maybe it’s because she’s known Touya for a long time, since they were children, but the workshop is safe.

The sound of the door’s creaking hinges is the same as it’s always been, too. Kohane pokes her head into the room and looks from one corner to another- Touya stands near the back, half-blocked by a shelf of labelled glass jars.

He turns his head at the sound and catches her eyes with little surprise. “Azusawa,” he says, unmoving from his position. “You can come in.”

So she does. The door snaps shut, flicking past the small bell that hangs by its frame. Touya’s familiar meows in annoyance at the disturbance and then returns to its lazing by the windowsill, where the sun reaches past shadows of thickly-gathered leaves. The workshop smells distinctly of fresh mintworth plant and tangy iron, as it usually does when Touya is at work.

It’s reasons like those, however, that the small cottage has become something of a second home to Kohane. The looming stacks of papers spilling from every surface, the staggering shelves of mixed potions and unmixed elixirs, the warmth that wraps her in a blanket of clouds and dreams- it floods her senses without suffocating her. Takes her hand and leads her forward.

The front half of the cottage is the shop, and the back half is Touya’s personal workbench and mixing station. Kohane steps past the scrolls decorated in brown ink, the pouch of coins sitting idly on the bench. “Sorry for the intrusion,” she says to him. “How has business been?”

He doesn’t turn around, but his gaze flickers to her from the corner of his eye. “Okay,” he replies. Nothing more than okay.

While Touya isn’t necessarily expressive, he also isn’t usually as absent- lost in thought, she means- as he is now. It’s been like this for a while. Since a few weeks ago, when it was Akito who had left for his knighting quest. Into the mountains, to another part of the country, far from the kingdom, and far from the village.

Knighting quests take a long time to complete, primarily because of how the royal knights differ from regular ones. Every candidate applies to the advisor panel and receives a specific quest tailored down to the time period, proving its exclusivity. They know all of this, but it doesn’t keep Touya from worrying. His eyes appear as though they’re permanently distant, always imagining anything but the potions in front of him.

He mixes anyways. Kohane watches as he secures a vial of clear substance into its holder and prepares a glass tube above it, connected to a serum full of gleaming liquid. With one tap of his finger, a small fire lights below the vial, the very tips of its flames touching the bottom of the glass. He uses his other hand to turn a knob at the end of the tube- the serum drips into the vial’s contents slowly.

She doesn’t know what he’s making. She never does. She knows only that she can trust his potions more than anybody else’s in the kingdom, and that with gifted potions as precisely made as his, he should know that Akito will be fine. One more thing she doesn’t know is how to tell him that.

With each drop of the serum, the vial changes colour. It reaches a rosy pink before he waves the fire away and closes the knob. He takes it from the holder and plugs it with a rubber stopper before, finally, looking at her with full attention. “You’re leaving today, aren’t you?” he asks.

He must already know the answer. Cautious of her sword’s handle, she clasps her hands together in front of her and nods. “Three hours before sunset.”

Muted hums. Crashing silence. Touya wears an apron over his collared shirt. He takes the glass vial in his hands and brings it to another side of his workspace, where he opens a shelf and takes a pinch of crushed sunroot petals into his hand (they carry rejuvenating features, as hard as it is to believe once you see them). “The kingdom acquired a new poison recently,” he says. “Don’t let yourself be mistaken as anything else.” He puts the petals into a small cloth bag, tied twice in frayed twine.

Finally, he hands both items to Kohane. “Take them together in the case of an emergency,” he tells her. “The rest of the potions for you are on the front table.”

Kohane accepts them carefully. “Thank you,” she mumbles. 

The sound of glass knocking against itself comes from just her leather bag, already packed full with miscellaneous objects. Touya, apparently, still isn’t finished. He hands her a small rock cut into two pieces, each one embedded with solidified powder. “They’ve been enchanted,” he explains, slotting them into a separate bag with a loop. “It’s best to carry them around your sword.”

Briefly, Kohane wonders if he’d done this much for Akito, too. It seems like a question with an answer too obvious to ask. “I’ll be back soon,” she promises, smiling. “I’ll bring you two some flowers from the mountains.”

Not rare plants. Not medicinal roots. Regular flowers, pretty and meaningless and rather nice to look at in a tall vase. At her words, Touya smiles in return, and he waves her off.

He doesn’t say more. That’s for the better, perhaps, since Kohane herself can’t think of anything to reply with. She leaves the workshop, passes by the cat-familiar, the familiar cat, walks away from the fading Aoyagi crest with a bag full of liquid enchantment. 

Sourberry grows particularly well in hot seasons like these. They almost wrap around her ankle as she walks, overly conscious, saturated in desire.

Even when Kohane is expecting it, the temperature changes faster than she can keep up.

Half of it is attributed to the fact that she’s managed to travel farther up than originally planned. Her original goal was to at least make it out of the border of the city and consequently out of the kingdom’s jurisdiction- with the narrow tunnel path hidden within the thousands of trees lining the village, it was easy enough. That way, even if someone were to try and find her, they would have to abandon the city’s protection magic, a circumstance that most regular citizens would never want to face. 

With the charms that Touya had given her, though, Kohane is safe from those threats. The only problem is that she doesn’t know for how long.

She’d considered spending the night somewhere within the forests by the base of the mountain, given the fact that the creatures living on the actual mountain would be too much to handle at night. But as it turns out, Touya’s protection amulet also had an additional warding spell cast onto it, successfully keeping a large majority of her journey stress-free so far. That isn’t to say she isn’t worrying about food and shelter, but the clear lack of dangerous mobs is reassuring. 

So before she could realise it, she was clearing the mountain faster than was safe, around where the thick forest trees diffuse into sparse patches of woodland. From here onwards, the paths only become more and more dangerous, but she’ll leave those for the next day.

The fabric of her tent is thin due to its compact nature, but the row of trees that line half of its perimeter give it structure, and more importantly, block it from the wind currents. Her fire takes four strikes to light. The sparks from each flame float upwards and crackle once they disappear, melting into the fog that lurks by the ground.

It helps only a little. Kohane is using all that she can: she’s sitting by the fire with a thick blanket over her shoulders, drinking her container of tea that’s more lukewarm than hot, but the cold still pricks at her skin. Rather than being a suffocating kind of condition, it washes over her as if she’s nothing more than an obstruction in the mountain, past every curve of her face and exposed skin on her arms. If she were a mage, or if she had any sort of casting magic, she likely wouldn’t be as weak as she feels now.

The reason knights are sent on such journeys is because they rarely have casting magic, ultimately. They’re meant to be challenging, but not impossible: as long as she has her sword, she’ll be okay.

Once the fire grows to a constant heat, she takes some of her provisions from her bag and slots them onto a thin metal skewer. She hadn’t packed meat in fear of contamination or unwanted rot; thankfully, the plants she has instead are a good enough substitute for protein once cooked, courtesy of Minori’s hunts. It turns from green to a concerning shade of purple as soon as it touches the fire.

Kohane closes her eyes to avoid looking at it when she bites it. It crumbles in her mouth and tastes faintly of tree bark. She chews regardless.

The chill doesn’t let up. Even as she feeds the fire more material, it only seems to grow colder and colder, until the blanket itself feels like a sheet of ice against her skin. The chatter of her teeth echoes inside her head. She draws her legs up and hugs them, huddling closer towards the fire until the sparks can almost reach her shoes.

“The mountains are different,” Akito had told her once. Before he’d left, when all they knew about the world outside the kingdom was what their great, great, great ancestors had told them. “It’s like they’re alive.”

The whistling of the wind in her ears sounds like a thousand fragments of ghostly laughter. Maybe this is the trick it plays on her today: to make her so cold that she has no choice but to bring herself closer to the fire, closer and closer yet. If it isn’t the creatures she’s only barely fending off that will kill her, it’s the switch between too hot and too cold that she’s submerged herself in.

Her stomach growls, unaccepting of the bland plants that are all she has to eat for the next few days. When she looks down at her palms and stretches her fingers out, she sees the skin around her nails starting to turn a creeping blue tint.

The wind continues to blow, but with it is a sense of something else. Something heavy, cloying in its bitter smell, filling the gaps in her vision with hazy puffs of fog. Her legs shake and lose strength. She curls into herself- it’s about time for her to sleep as much as she can, in the flimsy tent behind her.

But she can’t move. The weakness in her legs doesn’t make them feel light. Instead, they become heavier and heavier, so much so that she feels as if they’ve separated themselves from her and press her down against the grass. Her blanket’s thickness becomes a slab of sharp lead angling into her shoulders. Her breaths quicken. Faster, in a hurry, shallow and airless.

Kohane coughs as she falls sideways. The fire is a meter away from her, eating at the chips of wood beneath it. The numb feeling in her legs washes upwards in her blood, reaching her waist, her shoulders, her arms. She can't move. She can’t think.

She can barely open her mouth. “No,” she murmurs. “Wait.” 

Nobody can hear her. There’s no point in wasting her energy to talk- but it can’t end here. She’s barely left the kingdom, barely made it any distance closer to the top of the mountain. If it’s here, she’ll disappear within a week, from the cold or the fire or whatever is beyond the horizon. It can’t be here.

Desperately, she grabs at the dirt. Her breathing becomes faster again. The wind picks up piercingly, the fire shoots upwards, the tent rustles by the leaves that surround it. 

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Inhale.

As her vision blurs, she sees a sudden glint of light at the very end of the path. And then all she sees is black, dotted with squirming lines of transparent clouds, until even those disappear.

It’s warm.

And it smells sweet. Like berry jam, or something better, if anything better than berry jam even exists. The bitter taste in Kohane’s mouth is replaced by that sticky sugary scent, heavy but not cloying in its concentration.

The air is still, with only an occasional breeze reaching Kohane’s cheek. Even then, it’s infrequent and gentle, enough so that she feels comfortable enough to go back to sleep.

To go back to sleep. 

Kohane’s eyes fly open as her body jerks forward.

The blanket that had been draped over her falls to the side, onto a rug that disappears under the bed frame. It’s not the mountain. It’s not her tent, and it isn’t her fireplace. She frantically brings her hands in front of her- on the back of both is a patch taped to her skin. The wind blows onto her right cheek once more. 

She looks to the side. The window, with piles of dried plants and flowers lined along its edge, overlooks the height of the mountain in its entirety. A flock of wingless waterfowls connect one end of the frame to the other with the feathers that fall in excess. Being so high up is a new experience- and when she looks to the farthest peak of the horizon, she can see the glowing tip of the kingdom’s clocktower.

Far away. Comfortable in how its presence has diminished from a looming shadow cast on half of Kohane’s face to another star in the starless sky. Right now, it’s the afternoon.

Even though Kohane can’t remember how she ended up here, she can’t find it in herself to worry. 

It must be the sweetness that wafts in the air, or the calm breeze that seeps in from the opening in the window. Sitting up further, she digs into the sheets beneath her, mismatched and worn at the edges but softer than anything she’s felt in her life. Turning away from the window and to her left, she looks over the rest of the room.

As small as it is, it’s cluttered with small trinkets scattered everywhere (like an alternate state of Touya’s workshop). The wooden table in the corner of the room is covered in ornaments of varying sizes, and below them are sheets of paper that stack so tall they fall onto the floor in folded piles. By the entrance is a narrow bookshelf filled with books and dust and unlit candles. Most eye-catching is the cloak that hangs over the creaking chair- well worn but clearly well kept.

Covering herself in the blanket, Kohane curls up into the corner as a bundle. Think, Kohane. Think. What’s the last thing you remember?

She was outside. Alone, and cold, and fire-hungry. The light in the distance. The dark of her eyelids.

The most likely explanation is that she’s been saved by another explorer roaming the mountains. Considering the quality of the objects she sees around the room, there’s a chance it could have been a mage from the neighbouring kingdom, who are notorious for their riches and their anonymity. But that doesn’t explain the location of where she is- mages gravitate towards minerals, and consequently more to the underground than the opposite.

Not a mage then. Or a very eccentric mage. There’s another faint possibility: an exiled caster, abandoned to live in the mountains. If that’s the case, she’ll likely be killed as soon as they find out about her association with the royal knights, even if she’s only on her knighting quest.

She inhales sharply. The kingdom crest on her sword. 

Hastily, she scrambles to find her sword in the room. It’s nowhere near her, completely absent from the walls that trap her in curving angles. It wouldn’t have been left behind in the forest. Greatswords themselves can be sold for a good amount on the market, with or without a crest, and are too valuable even for royalty to abandon. So where did-

The door clicks. Kohane twists her body to face the sound and watches with wide eyes as the door swings open, little by little, more and more. The hinges squeak. Kohane sees the silhouette of a figure holding something. She sees the gleam of horns. The swinging of a scaled tail. And-

It opens.

Peeking in is a girl. A girl with long blue hair that dips past her shoulders. A girl with glimmering, gold eyes, as if they’re where every afternoon star gathers to escape the burning heat.

A girl who’s unfairly pretty, and unfairly charming when she smiles at Kohane, and unfairly bright in every sense of the word.

But following her is the same curled tail, and as Kohane pays more attention around her, she sees that a pair of glinting horns protrude from the top of the girl’s head. As she looks in from behind the door, her tail holds it open, digging into the doorknob with its sharp end. And barely visible from behind her clothes are the edges of wings. Small dragon wings. A dragon horn. Dragon tail. The strange feeling of this room that Kohane couldn’t put her finger on before is a result of it being a dragon den- this girl is a dragon, living up on the mountain, separated from the forests far below her cavern.

This is the dragon Kohane was sent to kill.

“You’re awake!” she says. Stepping into the room, the door closes behind her and her shifting wings. “Thank goodness. I thought that the ward would have-”

Kohane reaches behind herself to grab her sword- it isn’t there. Of course it isn’t. She’s been rid of her cloak and belt, left in only her shirt and shorts and a silk outer layer she doesn’t recognize. Instead, she grips onto the blankets and pushes herself as close to the wall as she can. “No, wait,” she rushes out with heavy breaths. “Not yet. Not yet-”

Her vision blurs, and a feverish fire fills her senses. She collapses forward onto the bed in a fit of dry coughs as the heat makes her hands jitter. She can barely keep her eyes open to protect herself. The dragon girl drops her tray onto the table and runs to her side.

‘Don’t kill me,’ Kohane thinks. She squeezes her eyes shut and curls into the sheets weakly. Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.

There’s a soft touch to her cheek that floods the fever out of her body and replaces it with a calming numbness. Kohane’s eyelids fall open, and sideways, she sees the girl with her hand pressed to her cheek. 

“Don’t move,” the girl says. Her eyebrows are furrowed in concern. “Damn it. The ward was pretty bad after all. Wait for a sec, ‘kay?”

As frozen in time as Kohane feels, and as vulnerable as she is with nothing but a dragon’s blanket to protect her, there’s still something about the girl’s voice that soothes her. It’s light and charming, reminiscent of the travelling merchants that sell eccentric gifts and otherworldly stories. Kohane melts into her voice, lets herself drown in its deep waves for a lingering moment, and then the girl’s palm begins to glow beside her face.

Blue light fills her vision. The numbing disappears into a quelling warmth. She looks drowsily at the girl, who looks back at her with eyes that turn from gold to red to purple. “Feeling better?” she says, smiling. 

Kohane nods without realising it. The girl removes her hand and walks towards the desk for the tray, bringing it over and setting it on the ground beside her. On it, she takes a handful of wild herbs and burns them with the tip of her finger, collecting the ashes in a transparent fluid. It becomes a shade of gentle green.

“It might taste gross,” the girl tells her, “but it’s a definite cure. I can only do temporary healing, so this is our only choice. I won’t make you do anything else.”

She lifts the glass to Kohane’s lips, and weakly, Kohane leans her head backwards and drinks. The bitter taste is sharp and concentrated as it covers her tongue- she winces at the feeling, but drinks it down regardless. 

It works. Once she’s finished, the rasp in her throat is gone, as are the chills that had pricked up on her skin. “Thank you,” she says quietly.

“Don’t mention it,” the girl replies. Her wings stretch outwards before folding back in.

The sight of those very dragon-like wings moving might have (would have) bothered Kohane before, if her thoughts were any less hazy than they are now and if she’d still been on the mountain, hot and cold and both and neither. But she doesn’t mind now. She minds only half as much as before. 

The weather outside is mild if the window has anything to say about it. The blankets are warm, and the girl by the bed is sighing in relief as she takes the glass and puts it back onto the tray. In replacement, she holds a small bowl full of berries in one hand and picks one of them into her other. “Eat this,” she says.

Kohane accepts it. The sweet flavour overpowers the bitter aftertaste of the medicine with ease. She swallows and looks at the girl with heavy eyelids. “I’m sorry,” she says with an empty voice.

“For what?” the girl asks. She offers her another berry.

Kohane refuses to eat it. “I think,” she begins, “I was sent for you.”

“Huh.” The girl’s hand pauses midair. 

She’s done it now, maybe. Probably. Even without saying the word, she knows that the dragon-girl is too smart to not understand what she’s implying. At this point, though, it might be better to admit it and apologise as much as she can before she’s killed. If she’s killed. It could be the dizzying headache that’s influencing her. It could simply be her own emotions pooling at the bottom of her stomach.

The girl, grinning, eats the berry herself instead. “I’m glad they sent a cute one,” she laughs. 

The colours of the room blur together. “Are you going to kill me?” Kohane asks.

“Nah,” the girl says. She licks her fingers and rests her chin on her palm, tilting her head in piqued curiosity. “I’m Shiraishi An. And you, clearly, should sleep more.”

As soon as she- Shiraishi An- says it, Kohane falls back into the bed. The pillows around her mimic the shapes of clouds. From outside, a thin streak of sunlight leaks into the room and onto the blankets. 

Shiraishi An stands up. Her wings flap once. She smiles and waves, and for the second time, Kohane loses consciousness.

She can’t find Shiraishi An.

In her defense, the circumstances of her current situation are that she barely has the strength to even step out of the room. Shiraishi An had washed and folded her old clothes, left by the bed and ready for her to wear, along with a fleece robe as an additional option. Kohane had decided to wear most of them save for her cloak and belt- even if she were to attack, she has a feeling she’d be the one at a loss.

Kohane leans against the wall as she opens the door. It creaks open to reveal a hallway that leads down to an open room, lined on both sides with more doors. She uses the doorknobs as a crutch to balance herself, shuffling against the hardwood floor in her socks and slippers she’d taken from the corner.

The structure itself, even with how high up on the mountain it’s situated, resembles more of a cottage than a dragon’s den. Then again, Kohane had never seen a dragon’s den beyond brief drawings on them in children’s tales (additionally, she’d never seen a real dragon until… yesterday? Today?). It isn’t so different from the houses back in the village, or even the more rural cities.

The hallway ends where the front of the cottage begins. To the right is a kitchen space, cabinets left open and filled with plants, and to the right are cushions arranged to look like couches. The rug in the middle of the place is clearly handmade. Hanging along the walls are more writhing vines, curled around every possible surface. 

Kohane looks down and notices that her amulet still sits around her neck, untouched and as vibrant as it had been when she first received it. In the absence of her sword, it’s a comforting thought.

She manages to reach the front door by walking twice as slow as usual. It’s been left ajar, so all it needs is one push of her hand to swing open. The first thing she sees is the light of the sun.

And the second thing she sees is the empty space of the sky.

It was beautiful from beyond the window. It’s even more beautiful now, unobstructed and open freely, a landscape full of cotton-candy clouds that kiss the peaks of the endless bundles of mountains. The sky is deep blue, a shade of afternoon-blue that sometimes becomes orange when she closes her eyes, a shade of wonderful-blue that reminds her of the kingdom hills and the colour of her garden plants. The wind has no temperature as it blows past her fingertips. 

She breathes in. Breathes out. Lets herself relax, for the first time in days, or weeks. Months. Her entire life.

There’s a rustling sound to the side. “Morning, Kohane!”

Kohane turns her head and sees the dragon-girl, Shiraishi An, sitting on the stones of the flower planter below one of the cottage windows. Shiraishi An waves at her, and Kohane waves back instinctively. “Good morning,” she says. The sun hangs above them. “Is it the morning…?”

“Technically, it’s the afternoon,” Shiraishi An replies. 

When Kohane looks closer at her, she sees that she’s wearing leather gloves, scuffed by the palm and stained with dirt and mud. She’s carrying a half-finished sandwich with a scrap of parchment paper to keep it clean in her hand. Instead of the clothes she’d been wearing before, she’s now in a loose shirt and overall pants that drape over her boots. 

She’s undoubtedly a dragon, and Kohane wonders why she finds her so pretty. Dragon wings, protruding as they are, and everything else about her. 

“Did I wake up today?” Kohane rubs her eyes. “Or was it yesterd- huh?”

“Hm?” Shiraishi An raises an eyebrow and bites her sandwich.

Kohane holds onto the door and closes it with her entire weight. “How do you know my name?” she asks. 

She isn’t scared. It’s beyond time to be scared, especially since if the dragon-girl wanted to kill her, she would have done so already. It’s more confusing than anything else, especially with how… how she’d been treated. How gentle the dragon-girl had been. Why Kohane might want to stay here, in this cottage that touches the stars, with a girl who keeps those stars in her hair and her eyes.

“Oh!” Shiraishi An’s eyes light up and she puts her sandwich down. Getting up off of the stone, she dusts her pants and rolls her shoulders, bending down to pick something up off of the ground. “It was on this.”

She stands up again holding Kohane’s greatsword, still sheathed in its casing. “Right here,” she says, pointing at the embossed letters on the case. “Azusawa Kohane, isn’t it? And since you’re here, just Kohane is okay. You can call me An, too.”

Knowing that her sword is there, safe in An’s arms, is enough to make Kohane feel a dozen times lighter. She sighs in relief and stumbles forward to hold onto the porch’s railing. “You kept it?” she says. “My sword. It’s… it’s okay?”

“As perfect as it was when I found you,” An replies. She unsheathes it partially so that the metal of it gleams in the sun before covering it once more. “But, uh, I’ll keep it until you recover. If you used it now, it would probably do you more harm than good.”

It’s true. The only reason Kohane can use the sword in the first place is because she’s grown up with it, but in her present condition, the strain on her muscles could be enough to be dangerous. Greatswords in their nature are inherently easy to use once you’ve become used to it, but difficult to learn in the beginning.

Interestingly, An knows that. Kohane considers descending from the porch but is decidedly convinced otherwise by a sharp pain in her leg. “Thank you,” she ends up saying.

“It’s the least I can do,” An replies happily.

Now that she thinks about it, it’s strange. Everything is strange. An knows that Kohane was sent for her but is still this nice, this uncaring about a potential threat in her own home. More surprisingly, An isn’t anything close to what she’s heard about dragons. 

Curiosity gets the best of her. “Shiraishi-san,” she says. “Why are you helping me?”

“Hm,” An hums. She puts the sword down and stretches her arms in front of her, waving her tail in slow rhythms. “I’ll tell you if you call me An.”

She’s really not like a dragon at all. “Ah, An-chan-” is all Kohane manages to say before flushing red. Isn’t that too friendly for someone she barely knows? And for someone she’d once meant to kill?

But An doesn’t mind at all. In fact, she grins at her prettily and walks across the garden path to make her way to the front of the porch, climbing up the stairs in strides of two steps at once. “Let’s go inside first!” she says.

An is the kind of person who’s too charming to disagree with.

Kohane is led back into the kitchen with an arm to support her waist and the edges of An’s wings pressing against her back.

She didn’t have much time to take a closer look at it before, but now that she’s sitting by the table with nothing else to do, she tries to take in as much as she can. Aside from the abundance of plants that are all around the room, whether potted or growing from the floors and walls. Below the cabinets are lines of mismatched glass jars that store mushrooms and berries and whatever other strange things can be used in potions.

Although she has a basic stove, An’s method of cooking is more eccentric (but fitting for a dragon, Kohane can say). She tears a piece off of a large chunk of bread and toasts it with a fire from the tip of her finger. Using her tail, she cuts a section of fresh sugarvine from where it grows by the window and sets it on top of the toast. It’s finished with a strange orange-tinted glaze, stored in its own unshapely glass.

She still has plates and the like, though Kohane has a small inkling that they’re more of a mix-and-match collection than one single set. An seems to like mismatched things.

The dish looks foreign to Kohane at first, but once An places it on her side of the table, the smell wafts upwards and fills the room with a pleasant savoury aroma. “Let me know how that is,” An says to her, sitting on the chair diagonal to her. “It’s a new recipe.”

“T-Thank you for the meal,” Kohane says. She lifts the toast up carefully and bites into the corner. 

Even after being cooked with little more than a direct flame, the toast isn’t too soft or too rigid. The crumbs that escape her lips fall onto the plate. In addition to the sugarvine, which gives a tinge of sweetness in what would otherwise be more buttery, it tastes like something she would find at a kingdom diner. Her eyes widen and she looks up at An. “It’s really good,” she says, half-muffled by the bread. “It’s… not like anything I’ve had before.”

An smiles at her cheekily. “I’ll make it for you a ton then!” she says. “Or, well, as long as you need to recover.”

Looking down again, Kohane swallows and wipes her mouth. “I couldn’t bother you that much,” she mumbles.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.” An leans backwards. “You’re cute when you eat, so it’s fine.”

There it is again: that word. Cute. It’s far from something Kohane would expect to hear in a situation like this, where she’s stranded in a nest belonging to the dragon she probably might have been assigned to hunt. She’s a to-be knight, and An is a dragon, and there should only be one outcome now that she’s defenseless.

But maybe there isn’t. An isn’t like a dragon at all- or, she’s proof that dragons aren’t how Kohane thinks they are. Her eyes shine in the sunlight and change colours from pale yellow to deep gold, always dotted with specks of purple and blue. Like her hair that pools over her shoulders. Like her clothes that are adorned with unpatterned gemstones and accessories.

The more Kohane looks at her, the more she thinks she could be a princess. Strangely, the thought of being a knight for An makes her heart swell.

That’s not the problem at hand, though. Kohane allows herself another bite before breathing in evenly and looking at An. “Is it okay if I ask you things?” she says softly.

An, who’s been staring at her with her cheek resting on her hand, nods with a fold of her wings. “I don’t have a problem with that,” she says. “But for every question you ask, I get one too, okay?”

“That’s okay,” Kohane replies. She clears her throat and sits up as straight as she can with the little strength she has. “I guess I should ask something.”

“I guess you should,” An says.

Now that she’s gotten here, she doesn’t know where to begin. Starting off simple might be the best. “Are you a dragon?” she mumbles, glancing down at her lap.

An flaps her wings on purpose and brushes at her horns. “Well, basically,” she says. “Since you’re from the kingdom, you wouldn’t know, but we have two forms. This one, and the one you’re used to.”

By that, Kohane assumes she means dragons in their entire non-human form. So what she knows now is that An has the chance to transform into a full dragon: she happens to prefer not to. Kohane chews at her bottom lip. “How could you tell I’m from the kingdom?”

“I’ll ask my question first.” An smiles and pats her on the head- her nails, although sharp, are comfortable when they comb through her hair. “Just to clarify, you came to kill me, right?”

Kohane was expecting to have to hear it eventually, but she still shrinks at the words. It’s not something she’s proud of- especially not when she has the farthest intention from it now. But An deserves the truth. “Originally,” she says. “Not anymore.”

“That’s all I need to hear,” An says. She twirls a strand of Kohane’s bangs around her finger. “And to answer you, I recognized your equipment. Next. What’s your favourite colour?”

The sudden change in atmosphere is a bit jarring, but An’s comforting gaze and soft hands make it more bearable. Besides, being given a simple question is like giving her another opportunity to ask one for free. She should be thankful to answer one like this. “My favourite is-”

She pauses. What is it? 

It’s weird. No matter how relaxing the dim glow of the kitchen table is as it's bathed in sunlight. No matter how An’s pretty pink lips curl up to the side. It’s weird, weird, weird. It’s nothing more than her favourite colour, but she can’t find an answer.

“I’ve never thought about it before,” she finally says.

“Hm,” An says again. She squints and traces her finger along the side of Kohane’s face. “I thought you’d like pink! Your cloak is pink, kinda.”

It is. Kohane hadn’t realised so. It’s pink, like the colour of An’s cheeks and the petals abandoned on the kitchen counter. She shakes her head to collect her thoughts. 

“Before, when you found me,” she says. “What happened?”

At that, An blows her bangs out of her face and retracts her hand. “You got caught in a ward,” she answers. “Areas set as traps by magic casters. I don’t know why it was there, but you might have gotten unlucky.”

“I have a protection charm, though,” she murmurs.

“Some wards are beyond the threshold of charms.” An sighs and crosses her arms. “It’s good that you weren’t hurt, but I really don’t know why there was a ward there. These areas are largely left alone because they don’t yield much valuable loot anyways- nothing you can sell on the market.”

Kohane grips at the edge of her shorts. “What were you doing there?”

“It’s kind of like a habit for me to go there for some plants I like. I’ve done it since I was little.” She looks at Kohane and stifles a laugh. “Hey, isn’t it my turn to ask?”

“S-Sorry.”

All of a sudden, An stands up, pushing the chair backwards with her legs. She plants her hands on the table and leans forward against them, until her nose almost touches Kohane’s, and until their faces are so close that Kohane can feel An’s breath on her lips.

An stares and opens her mouth. Kohane traces the line of her fangs. “Have you ever wanted to fly before?”

Kohane blinks. “Sorry?”

“Nothing.” An sits back down and rolls her neck from left to right. With a gesture of her hand, she urges Kohane to continue. “Don’t mind it! You can ask now.”

“... Okay.” She fiddles with her thumbs. “Do you always help people who get lost?”

An takes some time to listen, and then some more time to think. Her tail curls into itself, her wings freeze completely, and she stares down at the table in careful consideration. “The long answer is that people rarely do get lost here,” she concludes. “So technically, no.”

“What’s the short answer?” Kohane asks

In response, An rests her arm on the table and buries half of her face in it. She turns her head to look up at Kohane, cheeks covered by the messy knots in her hair, and she grins. 

“Only if they’re as cute as you,” she says.

There are a couple of other things that Kohane has learned about An.

One: Although she technically lives alone, she has family spread out across the mountains. 

There’s her dad, who she insists is a “really nice guy, you should go meet him” regardless of the fact that he’s likely the one who wandering travellers see and make faulty reports of. She had left home a bit over a year ago to try living on her own, in a smaller nest right here, having built most of it on her own.

Kohane blinks and looks around the backyard, which is actually an overhanging edge of the mountain. It’s fenced off with refined scraps of wood, but even then, the threat of the stooping height is apparent. She turns around from where she sits on the stones to see the back of the cottage. “You built all of this?” she asks in awe.

Dropping her shovel to the ground, An wipes her forehead. “Basically,” she says breathily. “My dad helped for some of it.”

Her voice sounds exhausted, but that’s a given considering she’s trying to essentially dig up a tree. Kohane had followed her out here despite her insistence that she should stay inside and rest- partially because Kohane is used to going outside every day, and partially because she wants to talk to An more.

“That’s amazing,” Kohane says under her breath. The architecture of the cottage itself really is impressive, especially considering the fact that it’s clearly been able to withstand the fluctuating weather at such a high point. “Did it take a long time to build?”

“Uh, maybe a year? It was before I officially left,” she replies nonchalantly, digging through the dirt with nothing but her gloved claws. “Basically no time.”

She’s not sure how an entire year equals no time, but she remembers that in comparison to humans, dragons tend to live far longer. There hasn’t been a specific reason documented in her books as to why, which is even more strange now that she knows dragons can have more or less the same physical makeup as humans. Something itches at the back of her head, but she ignores it.

Even if her experience consists of watching An curse at a tree and try to harvest its roots for replanting, Kohane doesn’t mind. She’s having more fun than she thought she would. 

Two: Her dream is to explore the world. 

According to her dad, all dragons are meant to travel from kingdom to kingdom and find the dragonspark. The only problem is that he’d never clarified what a dragonspark was: and if An’s aunt and uncle are right, it’s something you can only identify once you’ve found it. 

“I don’t even know what you’re supposed to do with it,” An complains. She takes Kohane’s left arm and removes the bandages, careful with how she handles the remaining marks of the seasonal ward. “I don’t even know what it is!”

It reminds Kohane of her own knighting journey, except it’s far from the same, and somehow a bit more interesting. More fun. That part explains the constant dragon sightings, at least. “Have you spoken to other people about it?” she asks. 

When An gestures for her to lift her arm up, she does, and An bites at a roll of bandages to unroll it. She takes a coin sized glob of cooling jelly on her finger and spreads it across the marks- at first, the feeling is burning hot, but it’s quickly replaced by the familiar chill.

As she works to rub it into Kohane’s arm, An chews at her bottom lip. “Aunt Nagi kinda told me hers was metal or whatever,” she mumbles. “She wears it around her neck, and in dragon form, it becomes part of her scales. Isn’t that weird? But it’s not like that for everyone.”

Once the jelly has almost been completely used up, An rips the bandage off of the roll and wraps it around Kohane’s arm. They’re tight to her skin but don’t restrict any of her movements- it’s almost like magic, although Kohane isn’t sure what kind. The marks have been fading well, and Kohane has been gaining her strength back. She still can’t wield her greatsword, but she’s okay with walks around the premises. “What else do you know about them?” she says.

“Hm.” An pats Kohane’s arm before reaching down to close the jar of jelly. “After you find it, it stays with you for a long, long time. Like, forever. And then your life changes or something? I don’t know.” She goes uncharacteristically silent for a moment before leaning in close to Kohane’s ear. “And don’t tell anyone this, but…”

Kohane can’t think of anyone she would have to tell about… dragon secrets. But it’s another thing that makes An cute to her.

A pang in the back of her mind. A drop in her heartbeat.

She’s pulled out of her thoughts by An’s whispering voice. “I’m pretty sure my dad stole a record player from your king,” she says. “And that’s his dragonspark.”

It’s absurd. It’s so ridiculously absurd that Kohane can’t help but laugh out loud. As if echoing her, An begins to laugh too, hiding her face in her arms and shaking uncontrollably. They don’t share any more words, too busy with smiling wide and laughing into the open air and being with each other, sitting side-by-side.

Three: She isn’t as proficient in casting magic as she seems. 

She can make potions well enough, and she’s able to perform regular dragonkin magic pretty close to perfectly, but casting magic is a different thing entirely. She can set things on fire that are a mile away, but she can’t even get a grasp of enough wind to close the curtains. 

Then again, even when it’s potions, she isn’t exactly a professional. Maybe it’s because Kohane grew up with Touya, who deals with alchemy like potions run through his blood. Watching An brew anything is nerve-wracking (it somehow always turns out fine, but she worries for the sake of worrying).

“The next ingredient is, uh-” Kohane pauses as she squints at An’s handwritten recipe, which is frankly impossible to read. “Two… pinches of… grass?”

“I probably wrote garlic fern,” An replies evenly. 

Kohane doesn’t even know how garlic fern can be written to look like grass. She doesn’t even know what garlic fern is, and she doesn’t really want to after seeing An take what looks like clumps of mud and sticks from a jar and throw them into the pot. “An-chan,” Kohane says carefully. “I don’t think that’s two pinches.”

It very much isn’t, because she knows what two pinches look like, and she also knows that what An is doing looks closer to a giant handful. An puts it in regardless, and the liquid starts to bubble up in a way that doesn’t seem right, but then she blows on it and it settles back down. “Don’t worry,” An says. She says that a lot. “I’ve done this enough to fix any problems that might happen.”

The point is that problems shouldn’t happen in the first place, Kohane thinks, but if it works for An then it works. “Did you learn to brew potions on your own?” she asks, rocking back and forth in the swinging chair. The woven straw is lined with vines.

An slowly mixes the liquid with a spoon that’s beyond worn out. “Technically yes, but also no,” she says. “It was a hobby when I was a kid. I learned it with a friend.”

Kohane tilts her head. She knows of An’s family by now, but she hasn’t had a chance to hear about her friends before. “With who?” she asks.

“A kid from around the neighbourhood,” she says. Lost in thought, she ends up mixing too fast, and the pot almost tips over. “Except by kid I mean spirit, and by neighbourhood I mean the mountains.”

That much, at least, Kohane is more familiar with. She’s heard of nature spirits, even seen a brief sighting of one, although it was likely a river spirit instead of a mountain one. Nature spirits are known for their abilities in casting magic as Touya had said once, and are also assigned to one of the four seasons in terms of specialization. 

An reaches a hand out. Without hesitating, Kohane gives her the small jar of powder by her right. “Do you still meet them?”

“Hm,” An sighs. “It’s complicated. Not now, because spirits tend to always leave at some point, but we made a promise to meet again in the future. I’m just waiting for a sign.”

A sign. A spirit with curious magic and curious abilities. Kohane furrows her brows and chews at her index finger.

There’s not much more time to think about meaningless things, because the next step in the recipe is already here. Kohane reads it out the best she can (horribly), and An stifles her laugh as best she can too (also horribly).

Later that day, when it’s actually less of a day and more of a night, Kohane asks An to take a look at her library.

An responds by insisting that Kohane should treat the cottage like it’s her own. She helps Kohane to the room beside the bedroom, which is structured similarly to the studies she’s seen back in the city. Aside from the table, which is about as cluttered as the one in the bedroom, there are shelves that stretch from the floor to the very ceiling of the room, filled to the brim with books of all colours.

Afterwards, An leaves to clean up for the day. Kohane takes a few books, feels worn leather against her fingertips as she carries them back to the bedroom, and tucks herself into the thick blankets. An had given her three more, made of “cloth that’s better than whatever they sell in your city, you know!” They make for a nice comfort in the absence of An herself.

She starts with the book wedged right in the middle, which in all honesty, is the only one she really has any interest in. The Collective History of Dragonkin , it reads on the cover, embellished in faded gold paint and cursive letters. 

Briefly, she flips through the book. The pages are worn on the edges, and there are transparent bookmark tabs sticking out every few chapters. When An had said she didn’t know very much about dragonsparks, could she have been lying?

No. Kohane knows she wasn’t. It’s more likely that An didn’t see the need to tell Kohane much about them- which is exactly why Kohane wants to learn about them more herself. She finds the sixth chapter, which is coincidentally missing its chapter cover page, and begins to read.

Her eyes trace over the words slowly. ‘At some point in any dragonkin’s life, including fullblood dragons and non-fullblood dragons, there will be a need to search for what is now called a dragonspark. The dragonspark is not a physical object, but rather the culmination of a connection between the individual and the magic that is passed down from one generation to the next.

‘The dragonspark, however, may exist in multiple forms. It is possible for the dragonspark to present itself within a physical object. What is most important to note is that the dragonspark can not be identified until a sufficient connection is created between the individual and the form. In other words, the journey to find the dragonspark is not so much a journey to locate a specific item, but rather a process to create a connection.

‘Throughout history, there have been instances of dragonspark existing in the form of jewelry; in this case, the individual must wear the jewelry for a certain amount of time to build a connection sufficient enough for the jewelry to be acknowledged as the dragonspark.

‘As a result of the connection formed, the dragonspark grants the individual prosperity, and lives along with the individual. The relationship between the two is that of equals, and prior to becoming a dragonspark, the connection must be wholly genuine in its nature.’

Kohane rubs her eyes. She understands the words individually well enough, but altogether, it’s a concept that she’s still unused to. What she’s managed to keep is that there’s something out there her An is looking for, and that one day, she’ll have to leave the mountains to find it.

What would suit An? If it was a record player for her father and a necklace for her aunt, the dragonspark may end up being an object after all. She closes her eyes and imagines An’s expression in her head. Her bright eyes, and her sweet smile, and her starry hair.

A globe, Kohane wonders. Or an astrology map, or pretty gemstones that are found only at the depths and the heights of the world. Something that will suit An perfectly- something that will complement her and her cheerfulness, and her confidence, and her shining composure.

The door to the bedroom creaks. Kohane’s eyes open in surprise, and she’s met with An walking in through the door, with her shirt sleeves rolled up to her elbows and without her cloak on her back. “Kohane, look at these!” she says, sitting down beside the bed and holding out her hands.

In her grasp, she has a collection of flowers separated from their stems, similar to rootless waterlilies. An moves her hand so that the moonlight from the window shines onto her palm and the petals turn from white to translucent, dotted with glowing veins that resemble constellations. 

It’s beautiful. It really is, with how it sparkles in An’s hands. Kohane’s eyes drift from the petals to the curves of An’s sharp nails. “What is it?” Kohane mumbles, closing the book with her pinky as a marker.

“No idea,” An replies. “I found it by a lake. I’ve never seen it before, but I could have just been looking, uh, not carefully enough.”

An’s dragonspark could be a flower. A flower as pretty as this one. Kohane looks up at her smile and her expectant eyes, as if waiting for Kohane to talk to her. To say something. “Then you should give it a name.”

“How about the Kohane-flower?” An suggests.

Kohane scrunches her nose. “An-chan.”

“I’m joking.” An laughs and picks one flower up between her fingers, twirling it around. “I’m sure we’ll come up with a name for it eventually.”

“Not now?”

“Nah.” An brings the flower to Kohane’s hand, and offers it to her. She takes it. “In the future, we’ll have all the time in the world to name flowers.”

In the future. Kohane’s head is full of cotton, but it doesn’t hurt. Her heart throbs in its dull ocean. “Okay,” she agrees. If she’s ever to leave the mountains, or if An is ever to leave them first, they’ll name a flower before they separate. 

An puts the rest of the flowers in a glass plate on one of the shelves. When she returns, Kohane beckons her forward, until her face is close enough that she can put the flower in An’s hair. Gentle, snugly tucked behind her ear. An mouths the words thank you.

Then, she notices Kohane’s book, and she sits closer to the bed frame. “What were you reading?” she says, pointing at the book.

Kohane shows her the cover. “I figured you might know a lot about humans,” she says softly, “so I wanted to learn more about dragons.”

It’s only part of her explanation, but it’s enough to make An rest her arms on the blankets and her chin on her arms. “Which part were you at?” she asks.

Kohane flips a few chapters forward, to The Visuals of Dragonkin in Progress. “Do you want me to read to you?” she says.

Quickly, An nods, and settles herself with a few pillows on her lap. The light of the moon outside is more than enough to illuminate the room. “Like a lullaby,” An mentions absentmindedly.

She begins with the first few lines. When An doesn’t protest, she reads more, until she’s finished the first paragraph and is moving onto the second. An listens as she reads, even though Kohane is sure that she’s already read through all of this if the scratches on the page mean anything.

If An will listen, then Kohane will read. She goes through a few pages. An’s eyelids are fluttering, and her wings are folding neatly behind her. She reads more, further into the chapter. An’s eyes close in small increments. 

Her breathing evens out, and before Kohane knows it, An is leaning against the side of the bed fast asleep. It can’t be comfortable, but An looks like she’s floating on a cloud, happy to be exactly where she is. Kohane envies her for a second until she thinks about it, and- maybe Kohane is happy to be right here, too.

The chapter continues. ‘Fullblood dragons are known to have hair colours in human form that reflect their scales in dragon form. Decorative scales often change structure in human form.’

In her mind is a dragon with black and blue scales, accented by small diamonds of gold along its back. 

‘Dragons are often said to be one of nature’s most beautiful souls, in any form. However, unlike the beauty of souls such as elves, their beauty is described to be a culmination of not only their visual composition, but also the magic that surrounds them.’

In front of her is Shiraishi An who has blue-black hair, with eyelashes that fan against her cheek and a gentle smile so warm it eclipses the moon.

A week has passed since she first came under An’s care.

An doesn’t have a traditional calendar to count the days, but she marks down every sunrise each morning on a hanging scroll without fail. Kohane doesn’t know when An usually wakes up, but she’s only been awake early enough once to find her in the act. Seven marks ago is a circle that reads her own name: so today, seven marks later, is one week.

It hasn’t felt like one week, but it hasn’t felt particularly short or long either. It was easy for her to become comfortable with An’s routines and schedules, and it’s still easy today, with all of An’s habits. Kohane’s knighting quest was originally estimated to take around a month, even though she’d only whispered it secretly to Touya. It means that after that time has passed, he’ll consider her dead, or at the very best missing.

But she isn’t dead. Her body is still recovering, but she feels more alive than ever, with fresh air clearing her thoughts courtesy of the mountains and fresh water to drink courtesy of the rivers An collects from. The daily medicine and treatment has made the remaining scars on her skin almost fade completely, leaving only faint outlines of scale-like imprints. In terms of strength, while she can’t use her sword properly, she can pick it up again.

She’s also working on exercising more. Instead of walking around the cottage or the premises of the cottage that she now knows is An’s version of a nest, she can go farther down into the forests. It took a bit of convincing, but today, she’s accompanying An to hunt for the first time.

“We call it hunting, but it’s not like we’re killing things all the time,” An tells her. She ducks below a moving branch (from a tree that quite literally moves, almost like an octopus) and Kohane copies her. “A big part of our diet is fruit! And we’re careful about what we pick.”

An leads her down the path. The only sounds around them are the crunches of sticks and dry grass beneath their boots and the gentle rustle of the leaves when the wind passes by them. “Where does all of the meat at home come from?” Kohane asks.

Clearing her throat, An averts her gaze. “Okay. We kill sometimes,” she admits. “But we’re still careful, I promise.”

It feels like what An is the most careful about is what to say. In the back of her mind, Kohane thinks it might be because she doesn’t want to be judged. 

So Kohane reaches forward and takes her hand. An jumps in surprise and stumbles across the root of a tree sprouting up from the ground- Kohane only barely manages to pull her back to balance. She squeezes An’s hand and smiles when she sees her eyes go wide. “I trust you, An-chan,” she says.

An’s shoulders fall in relief, and her tail shifts from rigid to relaxed. It swings back and forth behind her like a puppy’s tail. “Thanks,” she says. “Recently, I’ve been hunting a lot of underground fowl. They’re invasive, so I thought it would be okay to… you know.”

Kohane makes sure not to let go of An’s hand as they walk out of the tree-lined path and into an open field. An stops and looks directly at Kohane from beneath her eyelashes, head drooping downwards. It’s like she’s waiting for approval. Or, like a puppy again, for praise.

With her free hand, Kohane offers An a pat on the head, right between her horns. An nuzzles into her touch. “That’s good to hear,” she says.

The way An’s lips curl up just enough for her to see the tip of her fangs is too much for Kohane’s heart to handle. She wonders if her heartbeat has ever reached this far to the tips of her ears before. 

Afterwards, An takes her (still by the hand, still connected from skin-to-skin) to the edge of the open field and crouches down. She points down at a gathering of short plants, clustered together in patches by where the thick grass meets sandy dirt. “See these clovers?” she says. “Usually, they don’t mean anything interesting. But in areas like this- where plants are prone to being picked by flying animals- clovers will cover them to let them grow underground.”

Beneath her cloak, she opens a thick leather pocket and grabs a small garden trowel out of it. She gives it to Kohane and begins to separate the clovers. “Are you going to use one too?” Kohane asks.

“Nope,” An says. She instead presents a pair of work gloves and puts them over her hands- they’re customised, apparent with how the tips of their fingers become sharp to suit An’s claws. “I dig like this. Look.”

‘Like this’ apparently means with her hands and nothing else. She begins to scratch at the top layer of hardened dirt, which makes way for a softer soil underneath. Kohane waddles forward one step and helps her with the trowel, careful to disturb as few clovers as possible as she digs.

Eventually, they hit something tougher than dirt but softer than rock. An reaches her hand into the hole and pries at it before pulling out a tangle of bright green stems. “This is hollowvine,” she tells Kohane. “Super thick, but super light. You can’t eat them like this, but if we bring them back and grow them, they’ll bear fruit in less than a day.”

“They- I’ve seen them!” Kohane gasps. Touya had mentioned them to her once, in one of his rare but long-running rambles about plants he wanted but could never have. “Not in real life. But I know about them. It’s my friend, he knows about them.”

“For real?” An grins. “That’s seriously crazy. They only grow on this mountain, and we don’t tell anyone from outside about them. There are copies on other mountains, but none of them taste as good as these.”

Kohane wouldn’t put it past Touya to really know about them, even if they are as exclusive to the mountains as An says they are. He’s never gone to the mountains himself, but wandering travellers usually visit his workshop when they pass through the city, so he could have heard about them in passing. 

Travellers aren’t the type to travel through mountains so high up and so casually, though. The smile slowly fades from Kohane’s face. Had he seen them himself, or had he truly only heard of them? And if so, from who? From where?

An waves a hand in front of her face, and Kohane blinks. “Hey, you okay?” An says, concerned.

“S-Sorry,” Kohane mumbles. “I’m fine.”

“Hm.” An hums absentmindedly. It’s another habit Kohane always notices. Between them, there’s a thick fog of momentary silence that passes, and then An busies herself once more with the clover patch. Kohane watches in half-interest.

She returns with the hollowvine safely packed into her bag and one hand closed, outstretched for Kohane to look at. “Here,” she says.

When she opens her hand, she reveals a small clover in the middle of her palm. Around it are four small petals that frame its center. “A lucky one,” Kohane murmurs quietly.

“Yeah.” An knocks her knuckles against Kohane’s, gesturing for her to open her hand. She does, and An puts the clover in it. “For you.”

The clover is small and each of its petals are a different size. Compared to the strange flower that An showed her before, it’s significantly tinier, so much so that Kohane wants to laugh. Compared to all of the plants she saw in the kingdom, grown with magic roots and stems and flowers, it’s closer to a weed than anything else. Four-leafed, unenchanted. Simple.

When Kohane closes her hand carefully, she feels the clover brush against her skin. “For me,” she says. She smiles. “Thank you.”

For the first time in a while, Kohane dreams of when she was a child.

Maybe she’s six, or seven, or another year off from that. She’s around the age where kids start to remember things about themselves and the world around them. She can’t tell if she’s living through her life again or if she’s watching her past self live. In the end, she settles on the former.

She’s sitting outside of the local blacksmith, and in front of her is Touya, from when he was shorter than her and chubby-cheeked and couldn’t buckle his shoes. They’re drawing on the gravel with branches from the fields, the ones they aren’t allowed to enter. She draws circles and stars and shapes with no meaning. Touya draws scenes and real places and tangible things.

Kohane watches as he traces the outline of a circle and creates a stem growing from its top. “What is that?” she asks, peering at it with her hands on her knees.

Touya doesn’t look up at her. “A bottle,” he replies, and that’s it. Even as a child, he wasn’t talkative. He colours in the circle until Kohane can make out the fact that it’s liquid- it’s a potion, captured in a glass flask.

But that’s what she knows now. Back then, she barely knew what alchemy was. “Do you like bottles?” she says.

“They’re okay,” Touya says. His concentration gives him away more than he thinks.

Touya draws like he has no control over his arm, letting the ground lead him to his next corner. Kohane tries to do the same: she closes her eyes and copies the first thing that comes to mind. Two straight lines connected by the handle, and decorated with a sharp point at the end. The sword in the dirt is rough and jagged, contrasting the one she imagines, sharp and heavy and made with the finest material, decorated with the rarest gems. She mouths a word under her breath.

When she opens her eyes again, the sword is gone, and she isn’t six anymore.

She’s much older. The next memory is one she recalls clearly, from a sliver in the hallway with each spoken word floating in the air around her. It isn’t her who’s talking, but rather her parents, behind a closed door as thin as paper, thinner than they believe.

Kohane sits down and presses her ear to the crack between the door and the wall. It isn’t wide enough to see anything, but she’s always had good hearing. Her father’s voice rings out clearly. “I can’t help but feel worried,” he says in choked frustration. “The kingdom hasn’t been able to reinstate their relations for a long time. It’s bound to take a turn for the worse.”

“Do you think they know about us?” her mother replies in a hushed tone.

“Surely not,” her father says. “But the quest given to her- it’s far more dangerous than what’s normally assigned. Even reports of dragon sightings are rare. Couldn’t she become a regular knight?”

“... You know how they’re treated. Better a royal one than a common one.”

“Best would be neither. I’m worried.” Her father’s voice breaks. “I don’t know what to do.”

A twisting weight settles in the bottom of Kohane’s stomach, grounding her to the floor, filling her with a heavy sense of uneasiness. The voices of her parents start to blend in with each other, turning into a cloud of white noise and unfamiliar intonation. She tries to reach for the doorknob, to tell her parents that she’ll be okay, to tell them that she’s okay now. 

Her fingers almost make it far enough to touch the doorknob before the floor opens up beneath her and she’s drowning in darkness.

For one second. For two. She’s forgetting the creak of the door. 

The light that saves her is dim, and flickering against something- the walls of the emptied log, abandoned in a fenced off pen. It held animals at one point. She can’t remember which ones. Now, it holds thousands of hollowed out tree trunks like this one that make for good playgrounds when you’re young and secret bedrooms when you’re older. 

It’s Touya again, but they fall into the ‘older’ category. Fifteen. They could be fifteen. Touya is the one holding a candle, a little wax block in one of his family’s carved candle holders. The Aoyagi crest reflects the flames.

Kohane doesn’t know what they’re talking about. His eyes are teary, but he doesn’t look sad. Inside of the log, they can only fit if they fold their knees up to their chests. The wind is blocked from the front.

“Azusawa,” Touya finally says. “Akito told me something.”

This must have been a while after Akito had arrived in the village. Before fifteen, then- and a few small, small things sink into place. “What did he say?” she asks. It’s warm. It must be summer, or close to autumn.

Touya casts his gaze down at his free hand, fiddling with a scratched silver ring on his index finger. “He said he has a dream,” Touya murmurs. “And that he’d share it with me one day.”

To share a dream. To give it to somebody else. Kohane tilts her head and looks past Touya, out the other opening of the log where the stars dance around themselves. “So he did,” she mumbles. 

There’s more. She remembers that there’s more: not what it is, but that it exists. “He said he’d take me out of the village.” Touya closes his eyes. “And that the most important thing in life is protecting what you like.”

Kohane’s vision blurs.

All at once, she’s submerged in a flurry of thoughts. Of Touya, and Akito. Of her father and her mother. Of her home, and her bedroom, and the paper crane she’d been taught to fold at eight or seven or six. Five flowers on her windowsill. Her first greatsword and its perfect sheath. 

The cloak on her back. The cloak on the chair that isn’t hers. Wings that stretch wide and wrap around her like a blanket. A smile. A laugh. One colour ripping into two, leaving nothing but torn gradients and paper scraps in the middle.

A cottage. Whose?

Kohane wakes up in cold sweat with an exhale that’s lost to the wind.

Sometimes, she and An fall into a comfortable silence.

It’s different from the silence she’s used to with people like Touya, for example. It’s a certain kind of silence that isn’t derived from the absence of something, but rather the presence of an invisible thought, of words that make no sounds yet travel all the same.

They still talk. More often these days than before, they talk for hours at times they’re supposed to be sleeping, until An will eventually slump down by the bedside and Kohane will drape part of the blanket over her shoulders. But it isn’t always, and in moments like this one where they sit together and busy themselves with menial tasks in front of them, Kohane treasures An’s presence all the same.

Kohane, after a long time, is cleaning her sword. They decided to start training with it soon, so Kohane is dusting it and wiping off what has to be wiped off in preparation. An, lying down with her head beside Kohane’s thigh and her legs hanging over the end of the cushion couch, is half-asleep. Her left hand dangles off of the side.

The weather is good. It’s closer to perfect than Kohane has ever seen- while the sun is bright, it isn’t blazingly hot, nor is it blinding. The air itself is crisp enough that there’s no need for wind. If she were back in the village, she would have gone exploring in the morning. To find plants for Touya, or trinkets for herself.

Her hands pause. She looks down at the scrap of cloth to see it smudged with dirt. Her sword is much cleaner than it was before.

If it’s with An, the silence is nice. That’s why Kohane is afraid to break it. If she says something now, something that she doesn’t want to say and that An doesn’t want to hear, she’ll lose hold of the liquid air they’re swimming in, the deep blue that fades into the clear sky. Outside of the silence, time goes faster (fifty nine seconds a minute) and An’s smile falls (surely, it will). 

She has to keep her mouth shut. She has to enjoy being here, with her sword resting heavily on her legs and An close by. The village far away. 

“Hey.”

It’s An, whose eyes are still closed even though Kohane feels like An can see everything. “D-Did I wake you?” Kohane mumbles, untangling An’s hair from her horns. “Sorry.”

“That’s not it,” An says. Her right eye opens slightly to peek up at Kohane. “There’s something on your mind, isn’t there? I can tell.”

Kohane wants to know exactly how An can tell. The silence is gone already, but because it’s An’s voice that replaces it, Kohane finds that time hasn’t changed. It goes backwards. “It’s nothing,” she finally says. “A few stray thoughts.”

In response, An hums and stretches her arms out. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says, “but if there’s anything weighing you down, I’m always here to listen.”

“Thank you,” Kohane replies.

“No problem.” An smiles. “Since you’re stuck with me here, it’s the least I can do."

Oh. Hearing An say that makes Kohane feel- she doesn’t know. Guilty?

She feels guilty over this. She’s staying here, enjoying the company of the girl she’d originally planned to kill, all for a kingdom her parents hate and for her own selfish wants. At home, Touya is alone in his workshop, without the Tenmas who visit from the city and without Akito and now without her. Her parents must know by now that she left for the quest. Count Pearl should be curled around her favourite branch.

But here, at a different home that might or might not be hers, is An. An cares for her selflessly and doesn’t ask for anything in return. She tends to her injuries and gives her beautiful flowers and beautiful smiles and everything she could ask for. This is the girl Kohane will be leaving, one day, in favour of the kingdom she hates full of people she loves. 

Kohane is selfish. She doesn’t deserve An’s happiness, but she takes it anyways and blames it on the passing wind. And even then, she can’t tell An a single honest thing about herself.

She has to try more. She has to do better. Before she knows it, she opens her mouth, and the salty taste of tears dips into her lips. “I was thinking about the village,” she says shakily. 

An looks up at her fully. If she sees Kohane crying, she doesn’t mention it. She finds Kohane’s hand with her own and tangles their fingers together. “Your family?” An asks carefully.

“My dad and my mom,” Kohane says. She keeps her hands still. “And my friends. They’re worried about me, but I’m alive and here. I can’t even tell them. How can I tell them?”

“Hey, hey,” and then An is sitting up. She wraps one arm around Kohane’s shoulder and pulls her close, so that Kohane can lean her head on An’s side. “It’s not your fault. Wards like that are unavoidable.” Her lips press together. “But you’re alive, aren’t you? And you can go back to them one day.”

“I shouldn’t have left in the first place,” she murmurs, hiccuping.

“Kohane.” Her name called out by An’s voice rings clearer in her mind than anything else. “Look at me.”

She does. An’s eyes are gold. Nature falls flat to her gaze. “An-chan,” she croaks, weakly holding onto An’s hand.

“Don’t feel sorry for doing what you wanted to do,” An tells her. She squeezes back. “You have a dream, don’t you? If that dream is what you want to do, no matter what it is, it’s okay to work towards it.”

What is her dream?

She had a dream before. About empty logs and empty houses. When she thinks of her future, she imagines herself within the kingdom, standing with polished armour and her favourite greatsword. And then all at once, the stone tiles under her feet morph into shifting clouds, ones with tendrils that carry her across the sky. 

Someone is beside her. There or here. 

“The only reason I survived is because of you, An-chan,” she says quietly. “Here I am, bothering you too.”

“That’s not true.” An says it with such conviction that Kohane’s head jerks towards her to catch her eyes, like the strength in her voice itself demands it. Her stare is concentrated and sharp. “Wards like those can kill on the spot. You survived because you held on.” She inhales and leans forward. “And you aren’t a burden. You kinda saved me too.”

Kohane blinks. A tear beads at the corner of her eye. “You?”

“Yeah,” An says. “Sometimes, I feel like I left my dad too early. It’s lonely out here, you know? I don’t know what I’m doing even when it looks like I do.” She pauses, only to look at Kohane and grin, so bright that the corners of her eyes crinkle and once more, Kohane can see her fangs. “And then you came, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I gained something missing that I didn’t even know was gone.”

It isn’t right. It isn’t, because Kohane’s heart feels fuller too, so full of warmth and sparks of light and gentle weather. All she can ask is, “Why me?”

An laughs. It’s mellow, and to herself. “I don’t know,” she answers. “Because you’re honest and hardworking even when nobody’s there to see it. Because talking to you feels like it washes all of my problems away.” She closes her eyes. “Because you’re Kohane.”

That’s all An has to say. Apparently, it’s all An needs to have a reason to give and give and give without wanting anything back. If that’s the case, Kohane wants that to be her reason to. She wants to give An the world. She wants to make An smile as many times as she’s made Kohane smile.

More than that, she wants to stay by her side. Kohane sheathes her sword and rests it on the floor so that she can cuddle closer to An and share a little more space. “I have a childhood friend,” she says softly. “I think I’d like you to meet him one day.”

“That so?” An laughs. Behind them, An unfolds one of her wings and covers Kohane’s shoulders with it, like a blanket she can always come back to. “You should meet my friend too. And at the end, I’ll ask for approval from yours.”

Their legs press together. “Approval for what?” Kohane asks.

An’s lips touch the top of her head in a faint kiss. “You know,” she says.

Kohane does.

After the talk, they change.

It’s more like Kohane changes. Specifically, the way she sees An changes. Although she’s always found An to be beautiful, and in more ways than one, it’s only after the talk that she lets herself acknowledge it. 

Because An smiles at her every day. Because An’s hair is a pretty mess. Because An is… An.

She notices it when it’s her first time truly using her sword again. She’s still working her way towards how strong she was before the effects of the ward, but she’s building it up each day, and the feeling of her sword in her hands is strikingly familiar. She hasn’t lost any of her skills, so in the end, it’s merely a matter of executing them. 

With a haul of her shoulders, she lifts her sword up and swings it in front of her diagonally. The handle beneath her palms is sturdy and easy to grip, especially after having been cleaned. The weight of the blade itself balances the same as she remembers. 

An, sitting on the branch of a tree about four meters above ground, peers down at her with her hand blocking the sun. “How is it?” she calls out.

“It’s good!” Kohane replies. She looks up to see An perched above her, with her legs dangling freely and her wings stretched open behind her. Her tail wraps around a smaller branch. “I missed this a lot.”

“Enjoy swinging like that while you can,” An chuckles. “Tomorrow, we’ll start doing serious drills.”

Suddenly, An leans backwards. Her legs unhook from the branch and her tail uncoils, and at that height, she’s on her way to falling right onto the ground- until there’s one loud flap of her wings, and she’s floating in the air with her legs crossed and hands waving.

Kohane’s heart returns to her chest again. “Ah, that scared me,” she sighs.

“My bad,” An says. She flies to the fence that separates the backyard from the open cliff and picks up a few stray sticks. “Hey, how do you feel about a bit of practice right now?”

“I thought you said tomorrow,” she replies.

An shrugs. “You against it?”

“No.” Kohane smiles and rolls her shoulders, tightening her hold on the sword handle. “Let’s do our best.

In that manner, An flies around Kohane in gentle swoops, throwing measly sticks at her from every angle. Kohane catches the first one in her peripheral and swings her sword, slicing through it in a melted line. An throws the next, from directly above, and Kohane steps to the side while slashing at it with the tip of the blade.

One from the right, cut into two pieces. One from the left again, and another from the right immediately afterwards. Kohane gets them both in one swing. For a moment, An flies higher up than she had before and throws three at once straight down. Kohane barely manages to catch all of them.

There’s one being thrown on her left side again. She swings at it and watches the blade divide it easily, watches as it travels through the air past the stick to the other side, where suddenly there’s An’s face and the side of her neck-

It takes all of Kohane’s strength to stop the sword midair. It’s a finger’s width away from touching An’s neck. “You- An-chan!” Kohane pants. Her hands are shaking.

“As I thought, you’re amazing,” An says in clear awe. “Why did you even need to go on a quest? They should have accepted you right away.”

“You could have gotten hurt-” Kohane coughs and drops her sword to the ground. An is still flying, even as her legs swing up so her body is parallel to the ground. “What if I wasn’t careful?”

She stares at Kohane with her chin in her hands and her elbows resting on an invisible table. “But I didn’t, and you were,” An says cheekily. Her smile is contagious. “That’s my Kohane.”

Here. Right now. An glows in the afternoon sun, takes the orange-blue hue of the sky and makes it her own. Kohane’s heart beats in her chest, embarrassingly clear and embarrassingly loud. Can An hear? 

If she can, she doesn’t show it. She never shows it. Kohane picks her sword up again. “No more of that,” she insists.

“Sure,” An agrees. Her eyes glint. 

An’s wings capture the air in front of her in one swift move- she takes Kohane’s hands in hers quickly and drifts backwards, pulling Kohane along with her. When Kohane thinks about it, it feels like a dance.

An first suggests it when they’re having lunch in the front yard.

Is it really the front yard if An’s cottage isn’t even in sight anymore? They’re a bit of the way down the mountain, at a field that hangs in jagged cuts over the rest of the land below them. It isn’t lunch, either, since Kohane refuses to eat a lot because of her plans on practising more a bit later and An is content with enjoying a suspiciously blue drink.

But those are details. It’s about the larger picture, and the sky above them that colours itself blue around the clouds and purple farther away. Kohane, sitting beside An, finds comfort in An’s wing behind her (a common occurrence these days). She wonders if An finds comfort in holding Kohane’s hand as tightly as she is.

A flock of birds circle the peak of another mountain and disappear into its depths within the blink of an eye. The air this far up is, for once, still. Kohane takes deep breaths and nuzzles the side of her face into An’s cloak.

There’s a press of the bottle to her lips. “Wanna try some?” An asks her, tilting the drink forward.

Kohane doesn’t have any particular inclinations to try, but at the same time, if it’s An who’s offering it she doesn’t mind. It’s surprisingly refreshing on her tongue, like biting into watermelon. She decides that she likes it.

But she doesn’t drink any more. An returns the bottle to her own lips and drinks the mouthful that’s left until the bottle is empty. She sighs in satisfaction and puts it down beside her. “It’s nice,” she says simply.

“It is,” Kohane replies.

They spend time in each other’s company. Kohane watches the clouds and the birds and the unmoving mountains, and in the corner of her eye, she watches An too. An is looking past the hills far into the distance, where each spike of the landscape looks like a tiny bump. She whispers words to herself without a voice.

It’s curious, and Kohane is curious, and An is warm when she holds onto her arm. “Are you looking for something?” she asks.

“Kind of,” An says. She points to the left, far past the other mountains surrounding them, to a space in the sky below the hanging sun. “Over there. That’s where I came from.”

Kohane turns her head to see. “From that one?” she says, gesturing towards a mountain she can’t see.

“Nope,” An laughs. She takes Kohane’s hand and shifts it to the right. “From that one.”

There’s no difference at all, because Kohane can’t see it either way, and it isn’t as if An can see it either. But now Kohane knows that An is from ‘that way’, wherever ‘that way’ is, and just that much is enough. 

Shiraishi An, a dragon-girl from ‘over there’, who smiles ‘like this’ and laughs ‘like that’.

Out of curiosity, she looks across the horizon to see if she can find her own hometown. The village, although technically part of the capital city, is so far out on the outskirts that it’s barely acknowledged as one. There’s no point in trying to look for her village specifically, so Kohane looks for the kingdom’s central buildings: the castle tower, or the clocktower, or something similar.

She finds the clocktower first, peeking up from well above a thick gathering of forest land. “That’s the kingdom,” she tells An, pulling at her shirt to catch her attention. 

“Over there?” An uses the back of her hand to block the sun from her vision. “What is that, a giant pole?”

“It’s the clock,” she replies. “In the city square.”

An hums. “Have you been there?”

“Once,” Kohane says. She looks down at her boots. “I don’t remember it, though.”

“Huh,” An says. She sits in silence, and Kohane sits beside her. For a spare second, the wind blows and becomes lost in the thinning atmosphere of the terrain.

Eventually, An stands up abruptly. She stretches her arms above her head and bends left and right, like she’s preparing for a fight. “Alright! Let’s go,” she says, rubbing her arm muscles with her thumbs.

“Go where?” Kohane says, clueless.

“Isn’t it obvious?” An replies. She offers Kohane a hand. “We’re going flying!”

Ah. Are things like that supposed to be obvious? Kohane looks from An’s palm up to her smiling face, and then to her slow-moving wings, and her puppy-like tail. Neither of them are wearing proper travelling attire, having planned to exercise more afterwards anyways. It’ll be cold, probably, especially when they only have one cloak shared between them that’s currently on An’s back.

Kohane considers all of that- she really does. She accepts An’s hand in a heartbeat.

As soon as their fingers touch, An grabs her hand and pulls her forward. At the same time, she jumps upwards and lets her wings carry her off of the ground- flying upwards, An throws her up into the air and dives down to catch her with one arm under her legs and the other supporting her back.

“Like this?” Kohane squeaks. She looks over her side down at the ground, slowly drifting away from them with each beat of An’s wings. 

“Yup!” An says. Kohane turns her head and sees her beaming, with a strand of hair in her mouth. “This is how they carry princesses, isn’t it?”

It isn’t quite right, but Kohane can’t find it in herself to correct An. She’s too busy hiding her blush in An’s clothes. 

An brings them closer to the ground but swerves away from it until they’re on a steady descent. As Kohane had expected, the air is cold when they cut through it, but the heat of An’s body right against her remedies the discomfort. Their clothes flutter freely, standing upright when they fly down and falling down when they angle up. A stray gust of wind blows the hair out of Kohane’s face, making her bangs curl above and away from her forehead. Her pigtails feel like they might be falling loose.

An keeps her in her embrace as she flies between the sides of two mountains. When An passes underneath an abandoned bridge, Kohane catches the view of its underside, composed of old wooden planks and rusted nails. They go left, and then right, and then up and around the earth.

She dives close to the top of one forest, and then far above another. The clocktower in the distance grows taller, and Kohane feels the thumping of her heart grow faster and faster and faster. Each breath she takes sends chills from where An holds her legs to the tips of her fingers. Each dip of height they make is like bursting out of the ocean for the first time in forever.

This is what flying feels like. When she catches An’s eyes, An smiles and says something to her that she can’t hear over the sound of the wind. She feels inclined to agree regardless.

As they near the kingdom, An slows down to a calmer pace, enough so that her hair isn’t entirely caught in the wind- some of her bangs fall back down, touching her eyelashes. “We’re almost there!” she says cheerfully. “You doing okay, Kohane?”

Kohane is very much doing okay. An’s face is close to hers, and along the way, Kohane has come to wrap her arms around An’s neck. “I’m fine,” she says. 

“Awesome.” Her fangs again. “Let’s go.”

In one final stride, An flies them around an angular pathway to the back of the kingdom. There are less chances to be spotted here, especially considering the fact that the kingdom’s security is largely limited to lower altitudes. It helps that they’re also blocked by the masses of land and rocky bridges. 

Once An is satisfied, she finds a ledge to stop on that sticks out the side of a shorter mountain, far from the kingdom but close enough to see the hands of the clocktower. She doesn’t stop carrying Kohane, though- and when Kohane tests it out by wriggling around, An simply holds onto her tighter. “So that’s the tower, huh?” An says. She isn’t looking at the tower.

But neither is Kohane, because there’s something more important right in front of her. “That’s the clocktower,” she repeats softly. 

It was never about the clocktower in the first place. In reality, Kohane could have lived out the rest of her life without wanting to visit it again. The thought of the kingdom itself leaves a bad taste in her mouth, more so now than ever before.

It was an excuse. She’s sure that An knows that.

Now that they’re here, though, Kohane wants to stay a bit longer. The sun is starting to set earlier than she’d expected, and as it slowly inches towards the horizon, it casts a faint orange glow on the side of An’s cheek. She reaches out and cups it with her palm instinctively, like she wants to see if An doesn’t just look like the sun, but feels like it too.

An isn’t surprised. She smiles gently and nuzzles Kohane’s hand. “Hi,” she says. 

Kohane inhales. “Hi,” she replies.

That’s all they say.

When An lifts her up again and brings her home, Kohane watches the grass change colours with half-lidded eyes. They eventually pass by where Kohane had entered the mountain, and consequently where An had first found her. She sees a change in An’s expression that she can’t pinpoint the source of. She looks unsettled. Unsettled, or contemplative.

But An assures her that she’s okay, and Kohane trusts her. At some point, she falls asleep in midair, carried by An’s wings and An’s arms. She wakes up on the couch later that night with An tucked under the blanket right beside her.

It happens three days later.

In the morning, Kohane practises alone outside of the cottage. An is gone, having needed to find something or other somewhere in the mountain, but she promised to be back by noon. Judging from the sun, it’s well into the afternoon. Kohane tries not to keep track of the time.

She’s sweating, given the physical burden of lifting her sword repetitively and the incessant heat of the sun. Until An is back, though, there isn’t much else she can do to feel productive. They’ll have lunch, and then Kohane will help her do some gardening, and then she’ll practise again before bathing.

Like yesterday, and like tomorrow. That’s the thought Kohane entertains herself with.

Until An comes home an hour later, with her hair as disheveled and her clothes as loosely worn as always. Kohane sees her walk inside from where she’s preparing half-lunch half-dinner. “An-chan,” she says, offering her a smile. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Huh?” And as An walks forward, Kohane’s smile disappears. An looks different. “Ah. Yeah. I did.”

Her eyes are glazed over and her gaze is flat, even as she weakly tries to laugh. Kohane tells herself that it’s because An is tired, but somehow, she knows that isn’t the case. “I washed some berries,” she says, showing An the bowl. “You should have some, if…”

An stares at them. She blinks, but doesn’t react, like she isn’t there at all. It’s only when Kohane opens her mouth again to talk that An takes one and bites into it halfheartedly. “They’re good,” she says. “Thanks, Kohane.”

It really isn’t right. A prick of nerves starts from the back of Kohane’s neck all the way to her heart. “Are you okay?” she asks carefully. Delicately.

The question brings An out of her daze. Her posture stiffens and she straightens her shoulders. “Yeah! Yeah, don’t worry.” She laughs awkwardly. “I’m- I’ll come eat later.”

Don’t worry. Kohane doesn’t know how to tell An that she wants to worry. She tries to keep her- tries to hold onto An’s sleeve, her hand, anything that can get her to stay a bit longer.

An’s head drops and she shuffles towards the back of the cottage, dropping her cloak to the floor as she opens the door to the library. Kohane is frozen in her spot, unmoving until she hears the final click of the door. An is gone by the time she breathes again.

‘She needs to do something important,’ she thinks. She has a lot of things on her mind. It’s better to leave her be. And Kohane can always ask later, can’t she? An will tell her. An always tells her.

But An might not. Kohane digs her hands into the hem of her shorts. The selfish truth is that she wants to follow her, to talk to her more and to get her to talk more. She wants to know why An is so visibly upset, so much so that she feels a need to hide it from Kohane.

Kohane has been relying on An so much that An doesn’t think she can rely on Kohane. The realisation digs itself into her gut, cloying and uncomfortable.

She makes a decision.

Even if it isn’t any of her business, she at least wants An to know that she’s willing to help in any way she can. She won’t pry and she won’t prod, but if there’s even the slightest chance that An could rely on her too, she wants to take it. With one final glance at the berries, Kohane leaves them on the counter and follows An’s path to the library. 

Before she opens the door, she picks her cloak up and hangs it on the door to the bedroom. 

The first thing Kohane sees when she peeks in is An kneeling on the floor with a large scrap of paper unrolled in front of her. She knocks on the door lightly, and then harder when An doesn’t respond. “An-chan?” she murmurs.

An’s eyes are filled with panic when she looks up, but they relax immediately after seeing that it’s Kohane. “Hey,” she says. “Sorry. You can come in.”

Without needing to say anything more, Kohane steps in and lets the door close by itself behind her. She sits down in front of An, surrounded by dusty stacks of books, and looks down at the piece of paper. It’s a map- presumably of the mountains they live on, given the location of the kingdom on one corner and the bright red circle in the middle.

An holds a pen in her hand and bites at its end. “Kohane,” she says. “Where did you leave the kingdom?”

It was the path. Kohane turns her head at the same time An turns the map. “Here,” she says, pointing at the edge of the village, right at the outskirts.

An dips the end of her pen in a capsule of ink and dots the location with one thick circle. “Is that the only way you can leave the village?”

“It’s not a real exit, but it’s the fastest way to get to the mountains,” she explains. She traces an invisible line from the dot to where she had met An (or where An had found her). “There’s a path like that.”

“How did you find out about it?” An says sharply. The drawn curtains flutter in stagnant air.

“I-” Kohane pauses. The path had always been there, even without any specific gates or markers. But nobody goes to those mountains, and normally, nobody comes from them. “Someone must have told me about them,” she concludes.

An continues. “And you knew they were the fastest way because of that ‘someone’ too?”

“I think so,” Kohane murmurs. “It must have been like that.”

Who was it? It wouldn’t be her parents, nor anybody else in the village with the secluded lives that everyone led. It wasn’t Touya. She entertains herself with the thought of it being An (if they’d met and she’d forgotten about it) but she quickly dismisses that too. There’s a muffled ache in the back of her head.

“Weird,” An says under her breath. She frantically runs her hand over one side of the map to the other, focusing on the part of the mountain where Kohane had intended to set up camp for the night. “It’s weird. A ward right there, with no real reason. One that takes a lot of magic at that.”

The ward. The seasonal ward, the one that An knew how to treat like it was her nature. A glimpse of orange. Who was it?

As if she can read her thoughts, An keeps talking about the ward. “I knew how to treat it because it’s happened to me before.” Her voice quiets to a whisper. “As an accident. And the only person I know who can cast magic like that is-”

“Shinonome-kun.” Kohane finally remembers. She gasps and turns to An excitedly. “It was Shinonome-kun who told me about the path.”

The curtains fall still. An, sitting in front of her, doesn’t move. Time passes.

“Do you…” An lifts one hand and then drops it. She grasps aimlessly at the floor. “You mean Akito? Shinonome Akito?”

Kohane’s breath hitches. “You know him?”

“Yeah.” An’s voice is shaky. She tangles a hand in her hair and hides her face with her arm. “The friend I told you about. From when I was a kid.”

The nature spirit. The autumn spirit. Kohane recalls each and every one of her words.

But it doesn’t add up. “Shinonome-kun is human, isn’t he?” she says breathily. He’d come to the village from the kingdom all those years ago, when it was just Kohane and Touya drawing fading shapes in the dirt. He lived with the Akiyama household, and when the Akiyamas decided to leave, he and Touya shared a space in the workshop. He had left for his own knighting quest before Kohane left for hers. It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t-

Until it does.

Because he said strange things sometimes, that people from the kingdom would never say. Because he was always in awe of every potion Touya would make, even if they were the most common ones on the market. Because there’s no way he would have known about the path if he’d never been there before.

Although he seemed unfamiliar with using a sword, he had considerable fighting prowess. When Touya once mentioned to him that he wished the trees would be more vibrant near the later months, the leaves had changed to bright shades of orange and red the very next day. If he wasn’t in the workshop, he was outside. He wanted to help Touya remake the Aoyagi crest.

He wasn’t human, and he casted the ward. 

Kohane sees her hands start to tremble before she feels it. The curtains pick up again, dancing in folds of fabric around the windows. The map below them is starting to blur, and she- she doesn’t know what- or how-

A pair of hands cover hers. “Kohane,” An says. 

Her breath hitches. She looks at An.

And then An pulls her forward, for the thousandth time that week, that day, that hour alone. One hug feels like a million. Her breath is warm against her ear. “He’s not a bad guy,” she says. “It’s okay to feel surprised. I’m seriously- I don’t know what to think either. But he’s not a bad guy.”

What’s left unspoken is Touya’s name. Out of everything, Kohane worries for him the most. “Sorry,” she says. She clings onto An weakly, buries her nose in her clothes and clings and clings and clings with everything she has. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” An says. Kohane can’t see it, but An smiles against her cheek. “You can ruin all my clothes with snot if that’s what makes you feel better.”

“An-chan,” she mumbles. Separating herself from An, she sees An’s face and each line of her features. Sees that warm glow from her smile and her eyes. Sees that she’s there.

Daytime stars. She’s okay.

An puts one hand behind Kohane’s head and pats her gently. Her wings unfold and block the little streams of sun that hit her eyes, and her tail moves to wrap around Kohane’s wrist in a gentle hold. “That friend you told me about once,” she says. “I think everything has to do with him.”

“Aoyagi-kun?” Kohane questions.

“Is that his name?” she says. Kohane nods. “Here’s the thing. When we went flying, that one day, I remembered something I forgot about.”

She points at the map again. From an awkward angle in An’s lap, Kohane turns her body around to see. “This is where we met,” she says, circling the west side of the mountain. “The reason I found you there in the first place is because that’s where I go to harvest sugarvine.”

“The sweet one,” Kohane says.

An nods. She picks the pen up and marks the area with a poorly drawn leaf. The same symbol appears again at the mountain’s north, east, and south sides. “There are only four spots on the mountain where it can be harvested.” She comes full circle back to the west. “Nature spirits tend to gravitate towards their respective directions. That means winter spirits up north, and- you get the idea.”

“So, in the west,” Kohane says, “it would be autumn.”

“Yeah.” She taps on the symbol and fiddles with Kohane’s fingers between her own- maybe unconsciously, or maybe not. “When Akito left like I told you, he said he’d leave me a sign here. I think that ward was supposed to be the sign.”

“A sign for what?”

“To let me know he’s back,” she says. “I told him that this is where I wanted to make my den.”

He must be alive. The knighting quest was an excuse to leave the kingdom, and strangely, Kohane finds that it might have been an excuse for her too. “Couldn’t he find you instead?” she suggests.

“Probably because he didn’t know exactly when I planned to move.” She clicks her tongue. “Making trouble for me even when he isn’t here. Damn, I hate that guy.”

“Then the way it is now…” Kohane trails off. She’s trying to fit things together that don’t work. 

“I said I didn’t know why he left, but the truth is that nature spirits are pretty free-floating in general.” An stretches her arms, and her wings move along with them. “They always leave. For him to come back means he needs my help with something, and there are very few things he could need my help with.”

It must have been something at the village that he wanted to change. Kohane closes her eyes and thinks back, as far as she can, to what it might have been: disputes with the kingdom? Close, but no. The Akiyama household might have- not that either. Something more important to him. 

“He said he’d take me out of the village.”

Her eyes fly open. “Aoyagi-kun,” she says.

An presses her lips together. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s probably it.”

Kohane can see everything fall into place. Touya and the burden that hangs outside of his workshop. The Aoyagi name, and the crest, and the blood. His sense of responsibility that roots him to the village, locked by the trees that surround them on one side and the looming kingdom on the other. 

His alchemy, and his potions, and his workshop again. He can’t find a way out. 

If it really is that that Akito aims to do, Kohane can understand his sudden absence. Human or spirit or anything else, she’ll help. “Do you know where to find him?” she rushes out, turning in An’s lap.

“Nope,” she answers. “But I’m a dragon. I can fly, and if he’s on this mountain, I can find him.”

“I’ll come with you!” Kohane holds onto An’s arms and looks her straight in the eye. “I’ll come, and we can both talk to him, and-”

She stops. In the condition that she’s in right now, even if she can use her sword close to how she was able to before, she’ll be nothing but a burden on An’s back. She can’t fly, and making An carry her the whole way without even knowing where Akito is would be unfair. 

“Hey,” An says, gently moving her hands to rest on Kohane’s. “You’re close to full health, but you’re still healing. Don’t overdo it.” She grins and swishes her tail behind her. “But when I find him and drag him back, you’re totally helping us get that Touya guy out of there.”

She’s right. It’s the best thing she can do right now- take care of the cottage when An is gone, rest well and recover quickly, and prepare to return to the kingdom and find a way to convince him to leave. Kohane tells herself that, over and over again, in an effort to ignore the unsettling numbness in her gut. 

“When will you leave?” she asks instead.

“Tomorrow. I can probably find him within a day if I really try,” An replies.

Kohane shakes her head and tugs at An’s clothes. “The day after tomorrow,” she suggests. “Take tomorrow to prepare.”

An scratches the side of her cheek, but eventually agrees. “Sure. I’m good with that,” she says. And then leaning into Kohane, she smiles, holding her around her waist. “If it weren’t you asking I would have totally said no, though.”

“I’m glad it was me,” Kohane responds. She feels airy. Light. Breathless.

They spend more time in the library after that to talk about what An should bring. A bit of food, a drink, and some potions just in case. Kohane suggests giving An one of her things to show Akito that she’s alive and with her, but An waves it off. Idly, An jokes that she might find her dragonspark during the mission and forget about Akito altogether. Kohane forces a laugh that comes out as a stuttered cough.

The night creeps towards them faster than it has before. When Kohane finds An asleep on the floor of the living room, she drapes her cloak over her. 

The next day passes in a blur.

Kohane wakes up to the smell of burning apples. When she shuffles out of the bedroom with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, she sees that An actually is burning apples, right there in the living room. She offers Kohane one, and Kohane promptly turns on her heel and buries herself back into the bed.

Eventually, An drags her out of it and promises that she won’t burn anything in the cottage “ever again, I swear! Unless it’s something that would be funny.” It’s barely comforting, but then An smothers her in a hug and refuses to let go until she agrees. The apples turn out to be ingredients for potions rather than food, which makes it only a little more reasonable.

In terms of food, Kohane takes responsibility for making sure An will have enough for the short day trip. She digs through three of the wrong cabinets before finding the snacks they normally like to have and scoops them out into small pouches. An eats one directly from her hand before she can stop her.

They still practise outside in the afternoon. An asks if she wants to go flying again, and Kohane shakes her off with the excuse that she should save her wings for tomorrow. She lets An lift her around for a strict five minutes (that becomes ten, and then fifteen, and then twenty) before wiggling down to the ground.

In the evening, An tells her about the mountains while they have dinner. She’ll stay on the west side and start from the peak all the way to the ground. If her predictions are accurate, she’ll be able to find Akito before the sun sets. Kohane promises to throw a welcome back party for them both.

She falls asleep in An’s arms that night. An’s arms, and wings, and warm embrace. An falls asleep first, snoring directly into Kohane’s ear. The blanket draped over them crumples onto the floor at some point because An’s wings twitch when she sleeps. 

Then it’s the morning, and An is waving goodbye. “I’ll be back soon!” she calls out.

Kohane holds onto the railing of the porch and smiles. “Be safe,” she says.

“I will,” An promises. She grins and gives Kohane a thumbs up. “And I’ll have Akito in tow.”

She turns around to leave into the forest, but not without looking over her shoulder every half minute, as if to see Kohane as much as she can before she’s gone. As ridiculous as it is, Kohane doesn’t want to see An go, so she enjoys those spare seconds as much as she can. An’s hair blows in the wind.

Her silhouette is swallowed by the trees. A few minutes later, Kohane sees a pair of dragon wings float up and out of the forest.

Today, Kohane realises as she marks the sunrise on An’s calendar, is the first time she’s going to be alone for the whole day without An.

She wonders what there is to do. At this point, she’s learned that cleaning or organising any parts of the cottage is going to be rewardless since An insists on having everything exactly where she remembers them. The lines of potions and overfilled shelves are worrying, but they’ve been worrying since day one.

That would be better than what she’s doing now, though- sitting in the middle of the hallway with her knees pulled to her chest. Sighing, Kohane chews on her index finger. She could take her sword and practise more outside, but without An to give her an actual challenge, she’d be swinging at nothing.

Her legs feel restless. What she wants to do the most is fly again. 

Once more, her mind returns to the image of An in the air, with her hair pooling around her shoulders like a spread of the galaxy. When she flies too fast, strands of her hair get into her mouth, and she has to spit them out like sunflower seeds over and over again. The same would happen to Kohane if not for her pigtails.

Kohane stops chewing. She could make An hair clips.

She keeps one side of her hair tucked behind her ear, but it still gets messy just as easily as the rest of her hair. If she can somehow come up with a way to make her clips, or something to keep her hair out of the way, it would be a lot easier for her in the air. She’d done something similar once- in the village, with Touya and Tenma Saki from the city- and it might be harder without the right materials, but An’s cottage itself is a treasure trove.

Instead of a dragon’s nest full of stolen gold and gemstones, it’s An’s mismatched cottage full of random plants and plain rocks in jars. Kohane wouldn’t trade it for the world.

She finds gold wire first, tucked behind a display of what looks like… framed blades of grass. Some things are better off without questioning. Digging around the bedroom, Kohane manages to get a hold of makeshift pliers (with the kingdom crest- were they stolen?) and a jar of suspicious green oil.

She lifts the jar to the window and shakes it. If she didn’t already know that it was a basic adhesive, she would have thought it to be a preserved slime, alive and all. Gathering everything in her arms, she brings her materials to the front yard.

Cutting the wire is a bit of a task. In the end, she has to wedge it between two rocks and smash it in half with her sword- which, while messy and more dangerous than it needs to be, works perfectly fine. The edges can be sanded with a few grainy rocks, leaving Kohane with a smooth segment of gold. 

The pliers come in next. She presses it in half until it curves around on one end, and then curves it back up again. The goal is to make something An can hook into her hair, so she makes sure to test it on her own hair every now and then. It bends the wrong way a couple of times, and Kohane ends up with a small cut on her finger by accident, but it comes out okay.

She thinks about adding something while patching her cut up. If it’s something she can wear, it should be reflective of her, shouldn’t it? If this counts as something she can have a bond with, it could be her dragonspark. The thought doesn’t upset Kohane as much as it would have before.

And then she remembers the flowers. The ones An had found and left by the window.

They’re dried out, but that’s better. Kohane takes a petal in her palm and brings it outside, dipping into the adhesive to cover it in a clear coating for protection. After it’s dry, she puts a drop more onto the clip and angles it on, fanning at it to help the adhesive set.

Even when it’s dry, the petal changes colours as the day goes on. By the late afternoon when the sun is about to set, the petal is already less opaque, turning jelly-like at the tips. She has a quick dinner of rose broth and fruit, and the sun is half past the horizon by the time she finishes.

An will be home soon, and she can give her the clip.

Kohane decides to sit outside on the porch to wait. The weather is as nice as it always is up here (to the point where Kohane wonders if it’s a ward in itself), and now that the moon is in view, the petal has returned to its crystallised form. The constellations inside of it dance.

She settles herself into the corner and waits- this is her makeshift welcome back party. She hums meaningless tunes and waits. She looks past the edge of the land to see the expanse of height and air and nothing at all, and waits. 

The air turns stale. No matter how long she waits, An doesn’t come home.

The clip is still in her hand when she wakes up. She’s still on the porch when she wakes up.

Kohane doesn’t know when she fell asleep. She stands slowly and feels the strain in her legs from another bad angle. The sun shines hotly on her face. It’s already late morning.

There’s no An in sight. It’s just Kohane, with the cloak she’d used as a blanket and her hair clip, abandoned in her pocket. An is gone, or isn’t back yet- she’s starting to miss the difference.

No. ‘She could have come home while I was asleep,’ Kohane thinks. She knows it isn’t the truth, but thinks so anyways. 

There isn’t anything to stress about, though. She’s making herself more anxious than she has to be. It would be better if she did what she normally does for the day, and when An does come back, she’ll run up and hug her and cry about making her worry.

That’s what she does. The image of An waving at her, promising that she’ll “be back soon!” sits at the back of her mind heavily.

It’ll be fine. It always turns out fine. 

Sometime in the afternoon- Kohane can’t tell, because the hours between noon and sunset are all the same- she looks outside and sees a figure walking down the path. They’re masked by the shadows of the trees for the most part, but Kohane steps outside onto the porch and squints past the sun, and-

She sees dragon wings first, half-folded. Then she sees deep blue hair and golden eyes, and a gentle smile with fangs on either side.

And then she doesn’t see any more because she’s running forward, with the wind behind her back pushing her down the path. “An-chan!” she calls out with her hands cupped to her mouth. “You’re back!”

She doesn’t notice the fact that Akito isn’t with her. She doesn’t notice how An winces as she smiles. “Kohane!” An yells, waving with one arm. 

An steps out into the sunlight, and Kohane feels her heart drop to her stomach. 

Behind where her other arm covers part of her stomach is a deep, deep red, staining the edges of her shirt in creeping lines. The edge of her cloak is dipped in the same colour, dried up and flaking and dripping with more blood at the same time. It doesn’t end. Kohane sees it on her arms, on the side of her face, in streaks across her everywhere.

Her legs feel numb, like they’re stilts that do no more than carry the weight of her body in meaningless strides. Her arm drops uselessly. She breathes in and in and never out. 

An, with her sweet smile permanently drawn across her lips, reaches her other arm out as if to ask Kohane for a hug. The bloody gash behind her shirt is open for her to see.

Kohane runs. She runs forward, as fast as she can, which isn’t fast enough, not enough, she couldn’t protect her enough. As she reaches her, too slow, not enough, she sees that it’s a wound around the side of her waist, right where her arm lies at night. 

She covers that waist in useless protection now, as she reaches An and throws her arms around her shoulders and holds onto her.  “An-chan,” she says, voice breaking as it lilts on her name. “An-chan. An-chan.”

“I’m home,” An whispers. “I promised you I’d come home, didn’t I?”

She falls to her knees, and Kohane falls too, because she’s too weak. An is hurt. An was hurt. She’s bleeding out, faster than Kohane can speak, more and more with each second that goes by in strained silence. Her lips move and An rests a hand on her head and pats her hair and everything is too much and there’s blood on her shirt too and An might be dying right in front of her and-

And what is she doing?

“How- Where did you-” She can’t collect her thoughts. The more they sit here, the heavier An’s body feels against her. “What did… Can you stand?”

“Ah, yeah,” An says, dazed. Kohane stands first and lets An hold onto her arm for support- An tries, but falls back down, with legs like lead and a head full of static. She laughs to herself in broken hiccups. “Or not, I guess.”

She doesn’t need to hear anymore. Maybe it’s that she doesn’t want to. She pulls An up by her arms until she’s on her knees again, and then with one arm by her legs and another pressed below her folded wings, lifts her up. “Sorry if it hurts,” she murmurs. “I’m not… used to it.”

An blinks at her. She smiles, like she always does. “It’s all good,” she says.

Keeping An as close to her as possible, Kohane heads back to the cottage. An’s tail flutters between her arms and eventually finds a place curled around her waist. She doesn’t mind it. She keeps her eyes fixed on the front door. 

An’s wings twitch in the confined space they have, like she’s trying to fly.

She scrambles to get An into the bed first. It’s easier to see her wound this way, even as much as she doesn’t want to.

An doesn’t seem to want to show her either. She folds her shirt up to reveal the wound, a deep gash punctured into her skin clotting with blood and skin and everything that isn’t right. Nervously, An tries to mask it with part of her wing as it folds over her. “It’s gross, isn’t it?” she says.

“No,” Kohane replies quickly. It isn’t gross. The thought of it makes her feel sick, like there’s an ocean in her throat that presses waves against the back of her tongue. But it’s not An’s fault. 

An stops smiling. She’s too tired to even do that.

Kohane crouches down and looks closer at the wound. Past the concentrated smears of blood, there’s a clear laceration that goes from her side to the middle of her stomach. That in itself isn’t enough to make out what it was caused by, but Kohane at least knows where to start. 

She rushes towards the bathroom to grab a towel and rinses it with warm water. On the way back, she finds a roll of bandages, conveniently dropped in the middle of the hallway along with a scattered gathering of other miscellaneous items. “Use this for now,” she says once she’s back to An’s side.

An lifts her back off of the bed to let Kohane wrap the towel around her waist. When it touches the wound, she grits her teeth and inhales shallowly, but doesn’t say anything. “Will this stop it?” she says airily. LIke she’s making a joke. “It’s… uh…”

“Sorry,” Kohane murmurs again. It’s all she can say. Sorry. Sorry.

If it’s a wound that deep, a towel alone won’t stop the bleeding. She has to make a clotting solution. The ones that sell for a month’s worth of wages in the city market. “An-chan,” she says, holding onto An’s hand. “A solution. Blood clotting. Do you… do you know how to make one?”

“Huh? Oh,” An says. She doesn’t sound happy about it, but masks it with a dry breath. “Yeah. But it’s fine, I think. The towel is… it’s working well.”

As if to show it off, An shifts her hands to either side of the wound. The sticky red has already bled through the towel entirely, and it spreads more when An moves her hands. Of course it isn’t working. Kohane’s a fool to have thought it would work.

But An shivers and steels her composure. “I’ll be fine.” Her voice cracks into that of a ghost. “I’m always fine.”

Kohane can’t accept it. “Please,” she says, and then she lifts An’s hand to her forehead and closes her eyes. She hopes An can feel every one of her thoughts, all the thousands of them. “Please. I just want to try.”

A second passes, and then it stretches into two, and then more and more until she can’t count them. Sheep on a field. Dandelions in a vase.

An’s eyelids fall. “Okay,” she says. “The shelf. Plants and Medicine, the seventh edition. I can’t remember which chapter.”

Kohane stumbles towards the bookshelf. She glances at each cover in a rush, looking past The Collective History of Dragonkin and A Comprehensive List of What Humans Can Digest until she finds it, wedged between volume one and volume four. She pulls it out from the top and flips through it quickly, looking for the healing section, then the heavy injury section, then there it is.  

Blood clotting. Effective within one to two hours after initial application. A gentle mixture should be used three times a day in order to enhance healing. She reads it all over and over again, traces the inked outlines of every letter until she can see them even when she closes her eyes.

The ingredient list is long, but doesn’t consist of anything they don’t already have. She turns over her shoulder to look at An, curled up on the bed with limp wings and a cut on her lip and blood over her stomach.

Kohane has to hurry. First it’s leaves from the jars in the kitchen, and then it’s a couple of charmed gemstones she barely manages to find without An’s help, and then it’s all crushed up with a pestle and mortar. She takes a potion from An’s stock, already premade and shining bright green, to add it to the powder. It mixes into a sticky paste that goes from grainy to smoother the more she crushes it together.

Everything goes on top of the stove. In the meantime, she pours hot water for An to drink and dried fruits for her to eat, if she has the strength to, She counts to ten minutes down to each second, and as soon as it’s over, she takes the melted paste and scoops it out into a ceramic bowl.

“An-chan?” she says, pushing the door open to make her way back into the room. “Are you okay? Is it worse?”

An groans but manages to roll over. “Doing great,” she says.

Kohane holds her breath. She kneels by her bedside again, now with a bit of drink and food and medicine. With a hand lifting An’s off of the towel, she gently peels it off, trying her best to ignore the strings of blood sticking to its surface. “Drink this,” Kohane says to An, giving her the water.

She makes sure An has a pillow behind her neck when she angles her head up to drink. The towel is past stained, but Kohane folds it and dips it into a large bucket of instant cleaning fluid. Without the towel, her wound looks worse than before. A hole punched halfway through her body. The smell is suffocating.

But Kohane can’t let that bother her. She gathers the clotting solution on her hands and smears it across An’s wound. Mixing with the blood, its colour turns from pale yellow to a murky shade of orange. Regardless, she keeps adding it to every inch of blood she can see, until the entire wound is masked in the paste.

One to two hours. “Does it feel better?” she asks, knowing what the answer will be.

An entertains her, still, with eyes that are crinkled at their corners and a gaze that rests somewhere far, far away. “Yeah,” she replies. A whistle of the wind against the cottage. “It’s better.”

Kohane wants to believe her.

“I’ll stay here for a while,” she says. Taking a spare pillow from the floor, she puts it on her lap so she can rest her elbows on something soft. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s okay.”

“No, I want to,” An says. She takes a shaky breath and turns her head, left cheek against the pillow and eyes set straight on Kohane’s. “Sorry I couldn’t find Akito.”

“Don’t-” Kohane bites at her lip and tugs at the edge of the pillow’s frayed threads. “I want you to be safe. That’s all that matters.”

“That so?” An hums.

Kohane looks down at her lap. She can still feel An’s gaze on her- not critical, but curious, or unfamiliar, or another feeling she can’t stand. “Is it because you got hurt?” she murmurs.

The wind passes through one of the smaller windows, near the top of the room. It creaks with sticky hinges. “Yeah,” she says.

“When was it? Where?”

“Maybe close to midnight,” An answers. The air tastes stale on Kohane’s tongue. “Closer to the bottom of the… Not that far from where we met.” She smiles, stretching the cut on her lip. “That’s why I took so long to get back. No energy to use my wings. Sorry.”

Stop apologising, she wants to say. Please don’t apologise. I’m the one who’s sorry.

She doesn’t. Her mouth opens but her voice melts onto her tongue as she tries to speak, weighing it down in heavy drops of silence. She tries again. “What was it?” she says, barely whispering. Barely there.

An’s eyes glaze out of focus. “Dunno,” she says. “Could have been a ward. Could have been something I didn’t see.”

Hearing her say so makes Kohane feel sick. There’s a thick smoke in her chest that clogs her lungs, folds into itself to make a twisting matrix of inescapable walls. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know anything. That in itself is crushing.

But An is hurt, and it’s Kohane’s turn to take care of her. She wants to do the best she can for An. To make it okay, or just better, or just something else. If An needs any more treatment, it’s best that Kohane tries to at least figure out part of what could have made the wound. She’s ready to read every book on the shelf if she has to. “Will you let me look at it again?” she says carefully.

“You don’t have to,” An insists. “You put the medicine on already. It’ll be fine for now.”

An’s voice is wrong. It doesn’t ring clearly anymore. 

Kohane doesn’t know why. “So I can feel more at ease,” she says. It’s half of the truth. “A little bit. I’ll only look a little bit.”

“Ah, I can’t say no to you,” An jokes. She lets her hands fall and leaves the wound, covered in medicine, exposed to the air. “Yeah. Go ahead.”

While the medicine will take longer to fully affect the wound- rates of clotting are hard to measure, but are visible over time- she can check on how the wound is reacting. The medicine has largely been absorbed, with a few smears of it left in deeper areas. Everything looks good so far, but the chance that it could take a turn for the worse keeps Kohane fixed right where she is.

She leans against the blankets. It’s nice, being close to An again. It’s nice to know that she’s okay. The flow of blood is slower, and while it still drips freely down her skin, it’ll eventually form together and reduce itself. 

Momentarily, Kohane indulges herself and finds An’s hand, lost somewhere in the covers. An is tired, so it’s Kohane who tangles their fingers together in a messy knot. She idly wipes a thin trail of blood off with a towel.

It starts there.

Behind a thin red stain that crumbles when Kohane cleans it off, there’s a thin jagged line that runs outwards and fades into An’s skin. It’s rather faint, so even though it’s tinted a stark purple in colour, it’s easily masked by the dried blood. Kohane wipes it instinctively. It doesn’t disappear.

She wipes again, a bit more insistent. The purple stays, shaped like a thin ravine that stretches from the wound to An’s unmarked skin. And then there’s another line of it to the right, and then another one revealed by the soft fabric of the towel, and then Kohane realises that behind the blood, the wound is surrounded by strokes of purple.

‘A side effect of the medicine,’ she thinks to herself, even though it’s never been documented as one. Because An is a dragon, potentially. She’s grasping for something reasonable. Anything that’s normal, that’s happened before.

Suddenly, An sits up in the bed. Kohane clings to the sheets and waits. For a reason. 

“Ah,” An says, and then An gives that reason to her. “Looks like it’s started.”

Her voice is empty. There’s a plate made of glass in Kohane’s heart, displayed on a pedestal of clouds and lilies, that tips and tips and tips until it crashes at the bottom of her stomach and everything goes wrong.

A sharp pain in her head. The purple, growing farther out as An breathes heavily. The wound too deep and too concentrated for a sword. An’s uncharacteristic loss of energy. The location. The time.

Kohane covers her mouth with one hand. “The archers,” she whispers. “It was the kingdom.”

She wants to be wrong. She wants so desperately for An to pick her up into a close embrace and fly them near the sun. She wants to be woken up.

An’s broken laugh is flat. “That’s my Kohane,” she says.

The revelation never grows very large. It starts as a small bud of purposeful ignorance in Kohane’s hands and becomes no more than a sapling before it dies again, because the truth is that maybe she’d known. An didn’t tell her everything, and she didn’t ask, because she didn’t need to. 

In the time she’s spent playing tightrope between the clocktower and the cottage, An has been waiting for her, an open target for anybody who cares. She shouldn’t have tried to become a knight. 

The feeling of a tear melting against the back of her hand pulls her out of her thoughts. Her eyes run from that to the poison in An’s wounds up to An face, blank in the shadows and tear-stained in the sunlight. “I wasn’t paying attention,” she mumbles. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to tell you, because-”

“An-chan,” Kohane says. Her fingers lose strength. She rests her head on the blanket. “An-chan.”

“Because I didn’t want to make you choose,” An finishes. “Between the kingdom and me.”

There isn’t any choosing that’s supposed to happen. There’s the kingdom, the village, and there’s An. There’s a poisoned wound in An’s stomach, made by the crested arrows of the kingdom archers. There’s the smell of blood, and the smell of flowers that overpowers it in fragments.

There aren’t any more treatments- not for poison. There isn’t any medicine left to make. There isn’t any time left to read.

“I don’t know what to do,” Kohane says quietly. 

With the rest of her strength, An traces shapes on Kohane’s palm. “Stay here.”

There’s An, who has warm dragon wings and curved dragon horns and a limp dragon tail. There’s Kohane, whose greatsword is abandoned and hands are powerless. 

She doesn’t even have wings to offer An in return. All she has is a bundle of words stuck in her throat, and a million thoughts that exist fruitlessly. In her mind, she runs through every chapter she’s ever read, every script in Touya’s workshop she might have glanced at. Think. Harder. More, until you can’t. An itch appears at the back of her head.

All at once, the sapling grows. Petals. Frayed twine. Touya’s workshop.

Her body is flooded with electricity. She stands up abruptly, enough that even An flinches in the bed. “Wait for me,” she says to An, hands shaking. “I’ll be right back.”

“Kohane, wh-” An bites her own tongue to cut herself off. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll wait.”

It’s hard to leave the room, but Kohane makes it with the wall as a brace and An’s fading voice as incentive.

Her bag is somewhere. The one on the belt that she wears all the time- she didn’t always keep it on after arriving at the cottage, but it’s somewhere here. 

She digs through the heaps of old robes and fabrics in the living room first. There are spare shirts and cloaks, ones she’s never seen and ones she recognises, but the absence of leather is apparent. Next are the bookshelves running throughout every wall. Next is the floor and all of the things that cover it.

It’s nowhere. Frayed twine that doesn’t exist. Kohane runs a hand through her hair and lifts her bangs up to fall lightly against the sides of her forehead. She’s sweating, whether due to the weather or her own nerves.

She looks at the front door and scrambles towards it.

It opens with the gentle creak that it always does, and against her face is a gust of cold wind. Kohane squints as she looks around, at the messily made planters by the front of the house, at the porch where dried fur hangs over the railing, and there it is. Her bag and belt, empty of potions but still full of what she needs, resting on the beam of the porch.

Grabbing it, Kohane runs back inside.

She closes the door behind her with her elbow and digs through the bag, hurriedly making her way down the hallway. Her hands brush against folded paper, smooth rocks, frayed twine- she pulls it out. 

A small cloth bag and a glass vial wrapped with it, all tied twice.

Take together in the case of an emergency, in the case of a dragon-girl on her bed using the rest of her strength to smile. Kohane covers the items with both her hands and returns to the bedroom, sliding along the wooden floor and the rugs draped over it.

She collapses by the side of the bed. “I found it,” she pants harshly. 

An exhales softly. “What is it?” 

“Medicine,” she replies. With shaky hands, she places the vial on the table and begins to undo the knot of the bag, feeling the crushed petals through the fabric. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but I want to try. It was- I got it from-”

“Hey, Kohane,” An says. 

Kohane freezes. She turns to look at An. Her lips are dry, cut having long stopped bleeding. Her wound is a mess of clotting blood and cracking smears. “It’s from Aoyagi-kun,” she says. It’s barely louder than a breath.

Weakly, An holds onto the edge of the blanket. “You don’t have to try.” She closes her eyes for a moment. “It’s okay.”

“What do you mean?” Kohane asks.

Her mind is swirling with the pink of the vial and the red in front of her. Without being able to see An’s eyes, she doesn’t know what to do. She’s lost where she sits, swallowed by the floor and the earth and the kingdom once again. An is alive (her heart beats, Kohane can hear it) and talking, but all she understands is nonsense.

“Seriously, I mean it when I say I’m okay,” An says. It doesn’t make sense, because she isn’t, and the purple crawls outwards with every second that passes by. “And you… don’t know if it’ll work right?”

She must mean the medicine. “It might,” she says, only interrupted by a crack in her voice. “It could. Aoyagi-kun, he told me to… for emergencies. It might work.”

“He sounds like a nice guy.” She coughs. “But he meant to save that for you, didn’t he?”

It’s not a rejection so much as it is a few scattered fragments of it, but each piece (each press of An’s lips together) wedges itself into Kohane’s heart, settling itself into each crevice of her impulses. Her ears ring with silence. She feels more than she sees. The bag in her hands is untied, enough that she can see the crumbling petal inside of it. 

“An-chan,” she says. She doesn’t understand.

An hums. “This is good for you, too,” she says.

A drop of ink, spreading across her vision. She breathes and breathes but can’t get the weight in her throat to clear. “What do you mean?” she repeats. Carefully. Nervously.

Parts of An’s hair pool over her shoulders in gentle waves, like the line where the ocean meets the night sky. “You can become a knight,” she says. “And you wouldn’t have to kill me either.”

One. Two. Constellations dance behind Kohane’s eyes in a suffocating circle. “What?”

“Just promise you’ll take care of the cottage.” An’s voice floats. “Sometimes. And find Akito. Help him out.”

“I don’t know what you-” Kohane’s tongue slips and she bites on it. A swell of pain forms in her mouth. “An-chan, have the medicine. Please.”

“You’re cute,” An whispers. Her eyes finally open, half-lidded and glazed over, like there are sheets of glass separating their contact. “I like you, Kohane.”

It comes together silently. Instead of a click, there’s a wilting stem, half-buried in the dirt.

Since she first met An, the thought of her knighting quest has slowly been pushed to the very back of her mind, only brought up in instances of sudden clarity. But to An, it isn’t the same: An’s always been aware of it. Aware of the fact that to become a knight, Kohane was sent to kill her. And she’s in bed now, with unmoving wings and an unmoving tail and a hole in her stomach. 

Her unspoken words are clear: Even if I die, it won’t be because of you. The medicine might not work. Save it for yourself. Become a knight after years of dreaming. I want you to be happy.

Kohane’s dread overflows until it spills. “It doesn’t work like that,” she says in a rush. “You can’t die. I don’t care about- I don’t want to become a knight if it means you die.” Pushing herself closer, she clings onto the blankets, until she can break the glass of An’s gaze. “I don’t want that. An-chan, please-”

“Isn’t that your dream?” An says. Her cheeks are flushed red but still sickly pale, cold to the touch of Kohane’s hand. “That’s why you came here.”

“What about yours?” she hiccups. “The dragonspark.”

 And oh, there are drops of tears across An’s cheeks. In the sunlight, they shine golden, like gemstones growing on her skin. “It’s okay,” An says again, like she always does. Smiles, like she always does. “I got to meet you. That’s enough.”

One more drop. Another one. Kohane blinks and realises the tears are hers. “We can just try,” she says. She can’t recognise herself. “Even if it doesn’t- if it doesn’t help. We can try. An-chan, I can’t… if you…”

“What about becoming-”

“I don’t care about that!” Kohane says. (She yells it, honestly. An closes her mouth.) “Not if you- the medicine. Just have a bit.” She bites her lip. “Can we try?”

An stares at her, and eventually, she nods. “We can try,” she says.

What are they trying? As soon as she hears An’s words, she takes the vial and unplugs it. There’s a burn in her chest that controls her movements- maybe it’s anger, or frustration, or something else she’s been hiding this whole time. Slowly, she takes pinches of the petals and drops them into the glass. They dissolve as they meet the liquid, turning it from clear pink to a foamy white.

Kohane brings the glass to An’s lips, against the dryness and the cut. An lets her mouth fall open. She tilts her hand, and the foam spills onto her tongue. 

It takes an hour to pour it down, except it doesn’t. It takes one second for An to swallow it down, except it doesn’t. The sky changes from day to night to day. The vial is empty now, but Kohane still holds it, and An still drinks empty air.

She doesn’t know how long the medicine will need to take effect, or if it’ll take effect at all. It bumps against the corner of the table when she puts it down. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

An coughs up a bubble of invisible ink. “What are you sorry for?” she says, lips curling up. Her hand twitches. Kohane holds it in hers and covers her fingers with the warmth of her palms.

Her wound isn’t bleeding anymore. The purple veins still run in jagged lines, but they stop when they reach closer to An’s heart and instead pulse in flashes of pink. Nothing more happens. She lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

There’s still the burn, and the flashes that come from it, but Kohane’s legs give way and she can’t get up. She doesn’t want to. “I’ll stay here,” she says quietly. “Until you want me to go.”

The medicine is gone. The wind grazes the trees outside. It’s only the late afternoon.

An, moving her arm, touches her finger to Kohane’s lips. “I don’t want you to go,” she says.

So Kohane stays. She’ll stay until she can’t anymore.

“-hane. Kohane, hey.”

She wakes up to static dotting her vision and a gentle rumble of her stomach. Next to her ear, there’s a puff of hot air, and it’s only when she hears that voice again does she understand why.

“Did I wake you up? My bad. Your stomach was growling pretty loudly, though.”

Ringing. A laugh. Kohane’s eyes open all at once and she’s met with An’s face, close to hers and colourful again and bright. Bright like she should be. In her peripheral vision, she sees An’s tail swishing left and right. “Morning,” she says, voice low. “Even though it’s the middle of the night.”

Her eyes sparkle. Kohane’s breath hitches. “An-chan,” she murmurs. “Did the- Did it…”

“See for yourself,” she replies. Gently, she pulls the blanket aside, revealing her wound. The towel that covers the upper half of it is partially stained. Kohane leans forward, ignoring the throbbing pain in her thighs, and lifts it off.

The wound is still obvious in its bleeding, but only because of how it’s clotted. And around it, past the dry skin and wrinkled detail, is the purple- fainter. Shorter, as if retracting back into the wound. It’s barely there. 

“I think it worked,” An says. She inhales deeply so that her chest expands, and the movement sends another pulse of pink through the purple. “Kohane, I-”

She doesn’t get the chance to finish her sentence because Kohane is throwing herself towards her and wrapping her arms around her torso and burying her face in the crook of her neck, crying before she knows it, squeezing her eyes shut before she decides to. “You’re okay,” she says, trembling. Her body, her voice. “It’s working. It’s going to be okay.”

An sits up a bit more, and keeping her close, she hugs her with her arms and her wings again, her wings, the wings she can’t imagine An without. It’s warm and familiar, the spot that An makes for her to fit into. She has the perfect place for everything about her. Both of them do.

She cries, and An cries too, though it’s filled with wide smiles and the press of soft lips to her cheek and glinting fangs. “Sorry,” An says, pulling away momentarily. Kohane is about to say she doesn’t want to hear it until An holds a finger to her lips. “It’s not about that,” she says. Her gaze falls downwards. “About what I said earlier. It upset you. I just- I don’t know.”

About that. Kohane nods, and An’s hand falls. “I didn’t want you to…” she trails off.

“I know, I know,” An says. “But I don’t- I wasn’t thinking. I was focused on the fact that you could go home and become a knight. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It was my fault too,” Kohane insists. “Because I-”

“You told me what you wanted and I didn’t listen.” An won’t meet her eyes. “It’s because of me that you’re crying right now.”

“It’s not,” she says, even though it might be. “An-chan, can you look at me?”

Finally, her focus flickers up at her again. “Yeah,” she says.

“All that matters is that you’re okay.” Kohane scrambles to organise all of her thoughts, but she’s left with a blank script and a flurry of words that appear in front of her. “I was… I was scared. I think then, I knew that you were more important than the kingdom.” She lifts An’s hand to her forehead. “You’ve been more important than them since I met you. You knew what I came to do and you still took care of me.”

“Kohane, that much is-”

“And do you know what I was thinking?” she says, closing her eyes and leaning into An’s hand. “I was thinking that I didn’t know a girl as bright as you could exist.”

“But what about you?” An says. Kohane opens her eyes to find An’s tear-stained cheeks, her lips, her comfort. “You’re unreal, Kohane. I’ll tell you a million times a day. You’re curious and strong and sweet. You feel like another home.” She chuckles. “When I took you flying, your eyes looked like another sky. I didn’t want to let you go.”

“You don’t have to.” Kohane takes a deep breath. “I don’t think I want to go.”

Outside the bedside window, the stars line the edges of the mountains in clustered shapes. The moonlight reaches past the trees, painting shining streaks of glowing light across An’s face. Her hair is tangled, like it always is. Her bangs fall in her eyes.

She leans forward, until their noses are close and her breath exists in fading ocean waves against Kohane’s lips. “If I can be selfish for a second,” she says.

Being selfish is something Kohane is all too familiar with. “Go ahead,” she says.

“Don’t go back to the kingdom.” Her voice breaks into a whisper. “Stay here. With me.”

Flashes of her childhood cross Kohane’s vision. She expected for An to say so, but hearing it is heavy, even with her resolve. She pictures her sword, and her family, and the broken Aoyagi crest. She visits the city market in her mind. She sees An’s wound in front of her.

At the very least, she knows An understands. An tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear and tilts her head, always close. “Can I ask you something?”

She nods. She doesn’t know what else she can answer with.

“Why do you want to become a knight?”

Kohane opens her mouth to speak, but it’s only when nothing comes out that she realises she doesn’t know. 

There has to be a reason. From before, when she first saw the royal knights in the kingdom, right there in the city market. They wore the crested armour and carried swords with them, standing two times taller than she was at the time. Around her, she heard murmurs: they were the protectors of the kingdom, and therefore, the protectors of the village.

She encountered a knight coming home from her journey once. She returned with cuts on her face and dirt on her clothes, but smiled wider than she’d ever seen before. She dropped her sword by the city gate and ran into the arms of another girl. Mixed between the rustling forest, there were cheers. Kohane might have been one of them.

She remembers Akito’s words, finally. The words that had gone from him to Touya to her. ‘The most important thing in life is protecting what you like.’

It’s enough of an explanation, for now. “I want to take care of the village,” she forces out past the bitter taste at the bottom of her tongue. “I want to… I want to protect what I love.” It’s an echo of an answer that isn’t hers.

But An accepts it regardless. “Permission to be selfish one more time?” she asks.

“Granted,” Kohane whispers.

An gives her a soft smile and presses their foreheads together. “If that’s the case,” she murmurs, “then you should just fall in love with me.”

Gently, the wind touches An’s hair and brings it forward in floating strands. Kohane’s thoughts are replaced by one small dot; a blot of ink, growing from the middle in stretching petals. 

She thinks of her first day at the cottage. She thinks of how her heart flutters, how An’s arms fit around her like a knot, how she feels when they run or fly or disappear into the mountains. But she loves the village. She does, and yet she can’t bring herself to call it her home.

Oh. It was never the kingdom she wanted to protect.

The girl in front of her makes that clear enough. Shiraishi An, who’s a dragon with dragon wings and a dragon tail, who’s a girl with stars in her hair and the sun for a smile. The blot of ink grows and grows. Even in the silence, An’s expression tells her it’s okay to take all the time she needs to decide. The ink takes form, makes rounded edges and angles, spells something out that she’s known a long time ago.

Kohane’s breathing is uneven. Her eyes feel puffy, still stained with tears, and there’s no strength in her hands. An still looks at her like she’s the world. Like she’s enough. 

The stars outline the horizon. “You know, An-chan,” she whispers. “I think I’m already in love with you.”

“Yeah?” An says. She hiccups, and silently, she cries again. “Really? You- Kohane, I-”

Kohane can hear her own heartbeat in her ears- or maybe it’s An’s heartbeat, in sync with hers. It doesn’t matter. The warmth of An close to her surrounds her, in a blanket on top of her wings, on top of her promises. “It took me a long time.” To notice. She exhales. “I don’t know since when. I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s okay,” An says. The corners of her eyes crinkle. “I love you, Kohane. I’m in love with you. Since- maybe since I met you. I love you.” She closes her eyes and holds Kohane and breathes. “I want to be yours, if you’ll have me.”

Kohane wants to. She wants to be An’s just as much as she wants An to be hers. Her girlfriend, or her partner, or her An. She’s okay with anything. “An-chan,” she says quietly. 

An is beautiful. “Kohane.” She always is.

She’s beautiful from afar, and beautiful up close, even when Kohane leans in and closes the space between them. Her lips are soft against hers and her hands are a steady anchor around her waist. The ink blot melts and colours the paper of her heart a soft blue. A thousand paper cranes. A million paper butterflies. They fly up, up and out of her chest with every thump of her heart, dancing around them in slow circles.

Kissing An is the same as hugging An, and flying with An, all because it’s with her. Kohane gasps for a breath as she separates. There’s a faint glow around her vision, whether from the moon or her own blurry sight. There’s a colour that fills the space between them, vivid and changing so much that Kohane can never name it. 

So she decides that it’s the colour of the two of them together. An, with her flushed cheeks and red lips, buries her face in Kohane’s neck. She cries silently. Kohane finds herself crying too. 

“I had a guess,” comes An’s muffled voice. “I thought I was being too hopeful. But I’m sure now.”

“A guess?” Kohane looks down at her, tangles a hand in her hair and tucks it to the side so she can see An’s face. 

In response, An nods, holding onto her. “Not anymore. I can tell now- it’s obvious. I’m sure of it.”

She’s about to ask what she means, until An herself sits straight up in front of her, close to her, beside her. They fit together between the blankets that surround them in layers, like waves of an ocean. An feels like a sunset. 

Touching the water is her gaze. “It’s you,” An says. “You’re my dragonspark.”

Within the space of the bed, in An’s embrace, Kohane’s breath stops in her throat. “Can I-” She stops herself. Something else. She should say something else. “But if it’s…”

On her skin, An draws shapes and lines passing through them, a copy of the universe in the bubble between them. “I don’t know, but it has to be you,” An promises. “There’s no way it isn’t you.”

An echo. What is most important to note is that the dragonspark can not be identified until a sufficient connection is created between the individual and the form. Words on a page, inked beneath her fingertips. 

It’s possible, and because it’s possible, it’s true. Kohane’s heart swells in a burst of floating clouds, flying kites, a vivid feeling that she thinks she can call love. It’s right. It finally feels right.

“An-chan,” she says. 

An laughs. “I found you,” she whispers. “Or you found me. My Kohane.”

Instinctively, their pinkies lock together with an imaginary click. Around them are stacks of books on dusty shelves, a blanket falling onto the floor, and glowing dots drifting like fireflies. “Oh,” she says. 

Oh , because even now, all she can think about is An. Her An.

The wind blows An’s hair across her face unceremoniously. It reminds Kohane of golden wire and translucent petals: the hair clip. Slowly, she reaches into her pocket and feels for the metal surface. An tilts her head. “What is it?”

“It’s something I made for you,” Kohane replies. Taking the clip out of her pocket, she bends it open with two fingers and lifts it to An’s hair. She combs through An’s hair and lets it fall to the side before slotting the clip on that side, tucking her bangs back.

A bit more up, forward, and it’s perfect. She withdraws her hand. “Is it okay?” she asks softly.

An reaches up and touches the clip. It sits comfortably against her hair. “Yeah,” she replies. “Thank you.”

When the wind blows again, An’s hair stays tucked behind her ear. There isn’t anything between them when they share another kiss. Light, gentle. They have time. Tomorrow, they can talk about the small things. The little details. Kohane can fall into An’s arms all over again.

Between the universe decorated with ceramic ornaments and the gap between her and An filled with an equal amount of stars, there’s an infinite space with cotton candy clouds and the thread that ties it all together.

This time, Kohane wakes up before An.

There’s a crick in her neck and she’s even hungrier than she thought she was, but An pulls her back into the bed before she can do anything about it. An’s wound is better- the purple around it is entirely absent, leaving only the wound itself to close and heal over time. Since An isn’t drained by the poison, her regenerative speed is better too, and it gives Kohane room to breathe.

They share breakfast on the porch between muted conversations. Kohane talks about her village. An talks about her family. They decide that they’ll find Akito first, and then take him to the village, where they can find Touya and Kohane can talk to her parents.

She doesn’t know what she’ll say, especially after having left without telling them. An holds her hand and tells her about the flowers on the other side of the mountain while she collects her thoughts. Kohane, ultimately, settles on apologising. For the fact that she won’t always be home, and for the fact that she won’t become a royal knight in the end.

(Considering the conflict they’ve always had with the kingdom, she has a feeling that they’ll support her. She makes up her mind to properly introduce them to An before they leave.)

And after they find Touya, they’ll escape. Silently. Through a path that only Akito knows of. After that, she wonders what they can do. She and An sit on the porch until it’s late, with her on An’s lap first and An on her lap second. They talk and laugh and be with each other. Love each other.

Like they always did, maybe. 

Kohane thinks she’d like to explore the world. With her sword and An standing beside her. She dreams of clear skies and vivid sunsets, and of seeing An’s full dragon form one day. She dreams of kingdoms across the terrain. She dreams of flowers that bloom in every season. 

She dreams of the future, and of the present afternoon.

It’s too early to be awake, but Kohane manages to power through.

It’s better that they get an early start, since finding a place to stay across the entire expanse of the mountain isn’t the easiest. If it’s possible, it would be best to avoid nighttime in the forests altogether, especially with how dangerous the lower altitudes are.

There’s a broken mirror in the corner of the living room, likely one of An’s trinkets, that Kohane uses to adjust her clothes. She buttons her shirt up to the top and pulls the suspender straps of her shorts over her shoulders, straightening and flattening each crease as she goes. Resting around her neck is a ribbon and her protection charm, reflecting the light of the rising sun outside. 

In the mirror, she sees An appear behind her, dressed in her own travelling outfit. She’s holding Kohane’s cloak and belt over her arm. “They managed to dry off in time,” she says, sighing in relief.

“Really?” Kohane says. An lifts the cloak over Kohane’s back and Kohane fits her arms through the oversized sleeves- like An said, it’s dry to the touch. “I didn’t think they would be after yesterday, when you-”

“I said I was sorry,” An laughs. “It was an accident, I swear!”

The way An grins cheekily isn’t helping her case, and Kohane doesn’t know how you can blast water at someone on accident, but there’s no point in bringing it up. “How about your cloak?” Kohane asks.

“Ah.” An coughs and looks to the side. “It’s still, uh, kinda wet. I’ll still wear it though.”

Kohane nods in satisfaction. There’s no way she would let An go scot-free and water-free after pulling a stunt like that. 

It doesn’t really matter, though; in the end, it’ll probably dry off as they travel. From the top of the mountain, everything looks like drops of distinct colours, with the ravines as sharp lines of gray and the clustered trees as shapes of deep green. It’s an entirely different world compared to the view from the village.

After she puts her belt on, she takes An’s hand. An takes hers. They walk to the entrance, where An grabs her cloak and throws it over her shoulders recklessly, stretching her wings outwards to fold it up. Kohane herself takes her greatsword and sheaths it into the strap across her back, a new addition made by An herself.

“We should probably water the garden,” An mentions offhandedly. 

Kohane closes the front door and steps down the porch. “I can remind you to do it when we’re back home.”

“If that’s the case, you should just water them yourself,” An teases, throwing an arm around her shoulder and pinching her cheek.

She opens her mouth to respond, but decides that it’s fine either way. They’ll be back soon, with Akito in tow, and the plants will be watered. The sugarvine has been growing well recently.

Down the path and at the edge of the mountain, Kohane checks the buckles of her boots and her belongings to make sure they’re secure. An stretches her arms and wings at the same time, rolling her neck from left to right. “You ready?” she says.

Kohane nods. “Ready,” she replies.

“Alright!” An dips forward off of the edge, holding the air with her wings as she floats upwards and pauses in front of Kohane. “How do you want to be carried today? On the menu is princess, piggyback, standing on my shoulders-”

“An-chan,” Kohane mumbles. She doesn’t even want to ask about the last one. “The normal way is fine.”

As embarrassing as it is, the ‘normal way’ is An’s beloved princess carry. An winks and flies closer to her until she can lift her up with an arm behind her back and another behind her legs, pulling her close. Conveniently, the strap of her sword can rotate so that she’s hugging her sword to her chest instead of letting it hang on her back. 

“Is this okay?” An asks, lifting her up and down.

An always knows it’s okay, but she asks anyway. Kohane is pretty sure that it’s to embarrass her. “It’s nice,” she replies quietly.

“Awesome,” An says. She grins, and the streaks of sunlight that fall across her face make her eyes glow in shifting golden hues. With the oncoming day, the petal of her hair clip is returning from its transparency to a solid colour. Her hair, as always, is tangled around her hair clip.

It’s close to unfair how pretty she is. Kohane feels her cheeks flush, whether from embarrassment or affection or something else entirely. An asks if she’s ready to take off, to the west of the mountain, and she nods without saying any more. She holds onto An with an arm around her neck.

It’s embarrassing to fly like this, and Kohane is more than aware of it. But seeing An smile wide is worth it. An will always be worth it- the embarrassment, the time, the world.

At the very least, Kohane is grateful that the weather is good for travelling today.