Erza stirred in her sleep, her fingers gently gripping the bedsheet. The room around her was dark, unfamiliar, the kind of darkness that pressed in from all sides and made it hard to remember where she was, why she was here, why her chest felt so empty and so heavy at the same time. But the darkness of the present was fading, dissolving into something older, something she had been running from for centuries.
A faint smile touched her lips as she drifted deeper into a long-forgotten memory, a flicker of warmth in her dreams that she had not allowed herself to feel in a very long time.
She was a little girl again.
Her feet were small, bare, pattering across the grand halls of the Dragon Palace. The stone beneath her was warm, heated by the fires that burned deep in the mountain, and the walls glowed with the light of enchanted torches that had been burning for centuries and would burn for centuries more. She ran without knowing where she was going, her wings tucked tight against her back, her tail trailing behind her, her laughter echoing off the high ceilings.
Her mother was waiting for her on the throne.
She was a towering figure, She stood at roughly five and a half cubits in height , her scales shimmering like Snow white, her White horns rising from her head like a crown, her eyes the color of Voliet and Shadow.
She sat on a throne of obsidian touched with gold, a throne that seemed to float between heaven and earth, a throne that had been built for the queen of dragons and had never known another to sit on it. Her hands were folded in her lap, her claws gentle, her face fierce and kind in equal measure.
"Mama," Erza said, skidding to a stop in front of her, her voice small and curious, the voice of a child who had not yet learned to be afraid of anything. "What is this ring?"
Her mother looked down. Her eyes, fierce and gentle, softened in a way that Erza had never seen before and would not see again.
She held out her hand, and in her palm lay a ring—delicate, intertwined, two bands twisted together like the roots of an ancient tree, like two rivers meeting and becoming one. At its center, a gemstone pulsed with a gentle, ethereal light, the color of flowers that bloomed once in a thousand years and never faded.
"This, my dear, is the Eternal Two Flower Ring," her mother said. Her voice was deep, comforting, the voice of someone who had seen the world change and had learned what mattered and what did not. "It is a symbol of undying love. A bond that lasts beyond time itself."
Erza's eyes sparkled. She reached out, her tiny claws tracing the intricate designs on the ring, the two bands that twisted and turned and never parted. "But it's just one ring, Mama."
Her mother chuckled. The sound echoed through the grand hall, warm and full, the laugh of someone who had not laughed in a very long time. "Ah, but it is not, my little demon. It is two rings, bound together as one. Waiting to be separated."
Erza tilted her head, confusion scrunching her small brow. "Two rings? But why, Mama?"
"Because, my dear, when you find the one you truly love. The one who makes your heart burn brighter than the sun. The one who fills your soul with warmth. You break it apart. You keep one half. And you give the other to your beloved." She paused, her eyes soft. "Forever binding your souls together."
Erza's eyes widened. Her small heart fluttered with the innocence of a child's dreams, with the hope of a future she could not yet imagine. She looked at the ring, at the light that pulsed within it, at the two bands that twisted together like lovers in an eternal dance.
"Can I have it?"
Her mother's eyes softened. Her massive hand, the hand that had crushed armies and built kingdoms, reached out and gently brushed her daughter's cheek.
"Of course, my precious daughter. One day, when you find someone worthy. Someone who loves you not for your power, but for who you are. You will break this ring and share it. It will become a symbol of your eternal bond."
Erza looked at the ring, then at her mother, then at the ring again. A small worry crept into her voice. "But what if it slips through my fingers, Mama? What if I lose it?"
Her mother smiled. It was a smile that held centuries of knowledge, centuries of loss, centuries of love that had been given and taken away.
"Do not worry, little one. The ring has its own soul. Once it is separated, once it finds the one it belongs to, it will attach to your finger for the rest of your life. Until death parts you. It will never leave you. It will never be lost."
Erza looked at her mother's hands, at the fingers that held the ring but did not wear it. "But, Mama, why did you not wear it?"
Her mother's face shifted. The fierce queen, the golden dragon, the woman who had ruled for centuries—she looked, for a moment, like someone who had lost something she could not name.
"We dragons," she said, and her voice was quieter now, softer, "are not bound to love. We are bound to power. To duty. To the kingdom. I never found someone who made me want to break the ring. I never found someone who made me want to give it away."
Erza looked down, her small face clouded with quiet sadness—the kind a child feels when something doesn't make sense, yet still hurts.
She didn't understand it.
Her mother was married, yet she had never known love. There had been no warmth, no gentle hand to hold, no presence beside her.
Why did her mother sit alone upon a throne of obsidian and gold… with no one to share it with?
In the world of dragons, love was simple—cold, even. They loved their children, fiercely and without question.
But never their partners.
That was what they were taught.
That was the law they lived by.
Her mother saw her face. She reached out and lifted her daughter's chin, her claws gentle, her eyes warm.
"But look," she said. "The ring has been waiting. It has been waiting for you. It wants to go with you, little one. On your journey. To help you find the one you are meant to be with."
Erza's face lit up. Her small heart swelled with dreams of a future she could not yet see, with hope for a love she could not yet imagine. She reached out and took the ring, held it in her small palms, felt the warmth of it, the light, the promise.
"But, Mama," she whispered, a small worry creeping into her voice. "Do I have to marry a dragon? Like you did?"
Her mother laughed. It was a deep, rumbling laugh, the laugh of someone who had been asked a question she had not expected and was delighted by it. She leaned down, her golden eyes sparkling, her face close to her daughter's.
"Are you afraid of other dragons, my little demon?"
Erza nodded quickly, her small wings fluttering, her tail curling around her leg. "Yes. Everyone hates me. Everyone wants to get rid of me, They are so mean to me. I am the weakest dragon. The smallest. The slowest, they said when I grow up, I'll only be three cubits and five handbreadths tall. Is it okay if my husband is not a dragon?"
Her mother's massive claws cupped her tiny face. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper, the voice of someone who was giving her daughter something she had never been given herself.
"Yes, my dear. If you find someone—no matter what they are—who truly loves you, then follow your heart. Because in the end, love is love, Don't end up like me."
Erza's eyes sparkled with tears. She threw her arms around her mother's thick neck, pressed her small face against her golden scales, breathed in the smell of fire and warmth and home.
"Thank you, Mama. I will protect this ring forever. I will never lose it. I will never let it go."
The memory faded.
The golden scales dissolved into darkness. The warm halls of the Dragon Palace became the cold walls of an unfamiliar room. The light of the enchanted torches became the pale glow of moonlight through a window she did not recognize.
Erza's lips trembled. Her fingers tightened around the bedsheet, clutching it like she had once clutched her mother's neck, like she had once clutched the ring that was supposed to be on her finger and was not. Tears slipped from the corners of her closed eyes, staining the pillow beneath her head.
"Mama," she whispered. Her voice was small, fragile, the voice of a child who had lost something precious and did not know how to get it back. "I am sorry. I lost it. I lost the ring."
She curled tighter, her body folding in on itself, her arms wrapped around her chest, her knees drawn up, her wings pressed flat against her back. She was the Dragon Queen. She had ruled for centuries. She had faced armies and monsters and gods. But in this room, in this darkness, with her mother's voice fading and her mother's ring gone, she was just a child who had broken a promise she had made a very long time ago.
She had said she would protect it forever. She had said she would never lose it. She had said she would never let it go.
And she had given it away. For a scholarship. For a school. For a man she had known for two weeks, who had nothing to give, whose hands were empty, whose life was borrowed.
She closed her eyes. She let the darkness take her. She let the memory fade. She let herself be small, and tired, and sad.
And somewhere in the field below, a young man with red eyes and bleeding hands was still searching for something he did not know he was looking for, something he did not understand, something that had been waiting for him for a very long time.
Author's Note: Dragon memory is sharp as a blade. The moment a dragon loses something, they suffer terrible regret. Their brains are designed to remember everything, which becomes a curse. The moment Erza lost the ring, her memory began to return—every detail, every word, every promise she had made. Her mother's face. Her mother's voice. Her mother's love. And now, in the darkness of this unfamiliar room, she is reliving it all. This is the curse of dragon memory. This is what she has been running from since the moment she arrived in this world.
The hours had blurred together. The moon had climbed higher and begun its slow descent toward the mountains, and still Yuuta searched. His hands moved through the grass with the mechanical persistence of a machine, pulling, digging, sifting, discarding. He had lost track of how long he had been out here. The palace lights behind him had dimmed one by one until only a few windows still glowed—the Headmaster's study, the room where Elena slept, the room where Erza lay with her memories and her grief.
He did not look back at those windows. He could not. Every time he raised his eyes toward the palace, he saw her face as she walked away from him, empty and silent, and his hands began to shake again. So he kept his eyes on the ground, on the grass he was tearing from the earth, on the soil he was digging through with fingers that had long since stopped feeling anything.
The grass had changed color. It had been green when he started, deep and dark in the moonlight, the kind of green that looked almost black in the shadows. Now it was red. His hands were red. His fingers, his palms, the sleeves of his borrowed jacket—all of it was streaked with the particular red of blood that had been flowing for a long time and had not been allowed to stop.
He had not noticed when it started. The first cuts were small, the kind of nicks and scratches that came from pulling at grass that was tougher than it looked, from digging through soil that hid stones with edges like knives. He had felt them, briefly, a sting that was there and gone, a warmth that he had assumed was sweat or dirt or the particular heat of working in the cold night air.
He did not feel them now. His hands had gone numb hours ago, the nerves deadened by the constant pressure, the constant digging, the constant, desperate search for something he was not sure existed. He pulled at another clump of grass, and the stems cut into his palm, and blood welled up between his fingers, and he did not stop.
He could not stop.
The ring was out here somewhere. It had to be. He had not found it yet because he had not searched enough, had not dug deep enough, had not been thorough enough. He would find it. He would find it if he kept searching. He would find it if he did not stop.
Dirt had worked its way under his nails, deep into the cuts on his palms, into the raw places where the skin had been scraped away entirely. He did not feel it. He felt nothing except the need to keep going, to keep searching, to keep hoping that the next handful of grass would be the one that held the ring, that the next hole he dug would be the one that revealed what he was looking for.
The guards on the palace walls watched him. They had been watching for hours, their faces pale, their hands tight on the rails, their eyes fixed on the small figure moving through the field below. They had seen many things in their years at the academy—parents who wept, parents who raged, parents who bargained and pleaded and tried to cheat the system that had been built to keep them honest. They had never seen anything like this.
A man on his hands and knees, crawling through a field of thorns and stones, his hands bleeding, his clothes torn, his whole body bent on a search that was almost certainly hopeless.
They wanted to help him. Some of them had already taken a step toward the stairs before they remembered their duty, before they remembered the Headmaster's orders, before they remembered that the rules applied to everyone, even the desperate, even the broken. They stood on the walls and watched, and they prayed to whatever gods they believed in that the man in the field would find what he was looking for before the night ended.
In her room, Erza sat up.
She did not remember falling asleep. The last thing she remembered was the darkness, the weight of her memories pressing down on her, her mother's voice fading into silence. Now she was awake, her body stiff from lying in the same position for too long, her face wet with tears she did not remember crying.
She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands in her lap, her eyes on the window where the moonlight was streaming through, pale and silver and cold.
She looked at her hand. The finger where the ring had been was bare, the skin pale where the band had rested, the mark of something that had been there for so long it had become part of her. It was gone now. She had given it away, and it was gone, and there was nothing she could do to get it back.
She stood. Her legs were unsteady, her body heavy with the particular exhaustion of someone who had spent hours fighting memories she could not escape. She walked to the window, her bare feet cold on the stone floor, and looked out at the night.
The field spread before her, vast and dark, the grass silver in the moonlight, the mountains rising like shadows at the edge of the world. It was beautiful. She had not noticed it before, in her panic, in her rage, in the desperate search that had consumed her. The moon was bright, the stars clear, the air sharp and clean. For a moment, she let herself breathe. For a moment, she let herself be still.
Then she smelled it.
Blood.
Her body tensed before her mind understood what she was sensing. Her nostrils flared, her eyes narrowed, her hands curled into fists. She had smelled blood a thousand times, ten thousand times, in battlefields and executions and the long, bloody work of building a kingdom from nothing. She had never smelled blood like this.
It was not the blood of an enemy, hot with rage and violence. It was not the blood of a soldier, spilled in service of a cause she understood. It was something else. Something that made her chest tight and her breath short and her heart beat faster than it should.
It was her blood. Not literally—she knew that, even as the thought crossed her mind. But it was blood that belonged to her. Blood that was being spilled for her. Blood that was soaking into the ground because of her.
She leaned closer to the window, her eyes scanning the darkness below, her senses reaching out, searching for the source of the smell. The field spread beneath her, vast and dark, and in the moonlight, she saw it.
Blood on the grass.
It was everywhere—streaks of it, pools of it, drops of it scattered across the ground like rain, like tears, like something that had been bleeding for a very long time and had not stopped. The grass was torn, pulled from the soil, thrown aside in piles that marked the places where someone had been searching. The ground was gouged, the soil turned over, the earth disturbed in ways that spoke of hours of work, of desperation, of a search that had not stopped even when the hands that were doing the searching had begun to break.
She followed the trail with her eyes, past the torn grass, past the gouged soil, past the blood that marked every inch of ground like a path leading somewhere she did not want to go. And in the distance, at the edge of the field, where the grass gave way to the forest and the forest gave way to the mountains, she saw a figure.
It was too far to see clearly. The darkness hid the details, the shape, the face. She could only see the silhouette, the outline, the shape of someone who was kneeling in the grass, who was digging at the ground, who was searching for something with a desperation that she could feel even from this distance.
She narrowed her eyes. She called on her dragon sight, the vision that could pierce darkness, that could see across mountains, that could find the smallest thing in the vastest space. The figure came into focus.
Black hair. Dark clothes. A borrowed suit that had once been clean and was now covered in dirt and grass and blood. Hands that were torn, bleeding, broken. A face that was pale, exhausted, streaked with tears and dirt and the particular desperation of someone who had been searching for hours and had not found what he was looking for.
Her heart stopped.
It was Yuuta.
Her Mortal.
To Be Continue...