I stood at the edge of the enormous bridge and looked down.
There was no visible ground beneath us.
Only clouds.
They stretched endlessly beneath the bridge, drifting slowly through the pale sky like a white ocean. The air was colder here, and the wind was strong enough to make my clothes flutter. From this height, the Fairy Kingdom looked completely different. The giant trees that had seemed enormous from the streets now looked almost small, scattered throughout the kingdom like pieces of an ancient painting. I could see the distant buildings, the roads winding between them, and countless tiny figures moving below.
For some reason, a strange thought entered my mind.
Do kings and queens give speeches from here?
It seemed like the perfect place for it.
A massive bridge overlooking an entire kingdom, with a gigantic gate standing at the other end.
If I were a king, I would probably stand here and dramatically announce something whenever I felt like pretending I was important.
...Thankfully, I wasn't a king.
I turned toward the gate.
It was enormous.
Its doors had already been opened, and voices could be heard from beyond them. The sound of an entire crowd waiting somewhere inside drifted toward us with the wind. Fairies, guards, nobles...
I took a step forward.
Then someone grabbed my hand.
I stopped.
Slowly, I looked back.
Gray was holding my hand.
His expression wasn't his usual carefree one.
There was something serious in his eyes.
Something worried.
We had fallen a few steps behind the others without me even realizing it.
I raised an eyebrow.
"What is it?"
Gray didn't answer immediately.
I looked at him again.
"Don't tell me you're nervous now."
I said it mostly because I needed to say something.
He didn't look nervous.
If anything, he looked like someone who had already figured something out.
Then he asked quietly,
"Tell me what is bothering you."
I froze.
What?
For a moment, I wasn't sure I had heard him correctly.
His eyes remained fixed on me.
"You've been different since you came back."
I didn't answer.
"After everything that happened... you look worried."
He paused.
"Did something else happen to you?"
His grip loosened slightly.
"Something you're not telling us?"
I stared at him.
Do I really look that suspicious?
I hadn't thought anyone noticed.
The assassination.
The dungeon.
The strange knight.
The stone.
The memories I could no longer fully understand.
The meeting with those lunatics.
The things I had seen and the things I couldn't explain.
Perhaps I had been carrying too much of it on my face without realizing it.
And now Gray had noticed.
Of course he had.
He had always been annoyingly observant when it mattered.
I looked toward the others.
Alysa was farther ahead with Elta. Neither of them seemed to notice our conversation.
I looked back at Gray.
A promise I had made only moments ago came back to me.
I'm not going to lie to them anymore.
It sounded like such an easy promise when I made it.
Now reality had decided to test me almost immediately.
I sighed.
"You're right."
Gray's expression changed slightly.
"I didn't want to hide it from you."
I paused.
"If there's anyone here I can trust..."
I looked at him.
"It's you."
His eyes widened slightly.
I took a breath.
"The truth is—"
I stopped.
Something was wrong.
The wind had changed.
No.
Not the wind.
Something else.
Something beneath us.
I felt it before I understood it.
A vibration.
So faint that I might have mistaken it for my imagination.
Then it became stronger.
The bridge trembled.
My expression changed.
Gray's grip tightened around my hand.
Alysa stopped walking.
Elta stopped too.
For one brief moment, nobody moved.
Nobody spoke.
Then I felt it again.
A presence.
Massive.
Cold.
Ancient.
It was coming from beneath us.
I slowly turned my head toward Elta.
She was staring down.
Her expression had changed completely.
There was genuine shock in her eyes.
That alone was enough to make my stomach tighten.
What the hell is that?
The sensation grew stronger.
It felt as if something enormous was moving underneath the bridge.
Something so large that the bridge itself seemed insignificant.
Then—
Gravity disappeared.
My feet left the ground.
"What—?!"
My body floated upward.
Gray rose beside me.
Alysa was floating several meters away.
Even Elta's clothes drifted weightlessly around her.
For a moment, I couldn't understand what was happening.
Then something emerged.
It rose from beneath the bridge.
Slowly.
Massively.
A long body passed beside us.
At first, I couldn't understand what I was seeing.
It looked like a snake.
But calling it a snake would have been like calling a mountain a hill.
Its body was enormous.
Long enough that I couldn't see where it began or ended.
Dark scales covered its body, reflecting the pale light of the sky. Small limbs extended from its sides, moving through the air as if they were grabbing something invisible.
The sky itself.
That was what it looked like.
As though the creature wasn't flying.
It was climbing.
Climbing through the sky.
I stared.
My mind went completely blank.
What... is that?
The creature continued rising.
Its massive body passed the bridge.
Only after it had moved beyond us did gravity slowly return.
My feet touched the wooden bridge.
I barely noticed.
I was still staring upward.
The creature hadn't disappeared.
Its body had curled through the sky above us, farther away.
Then I saw its head.
Long horns.
Ancient eyes.
Scales covering its enormous body.
No wings.
Yet it moved through the sky as naturally as though the entire world belonged to it.
My heart skipped.
I had seen something like this before.
Not in reality.
In books.
In stories.
In human imagination.
A creature humans had invented centuries ago.
A creature that shouldn't exist.
My lips moved before I could stop them.
"...Dragon?"
The word came out quietly.
The creature's head turned.
Its eyes fell upon us.
No.
Not us.
One by one.
It looked at everyone standing on the bridge.
Then its gaze reached me.
And everything inside me became still.
That gaze wasn't ordinary.
It didn't feel like the creature was merely looking at me.
It felt as though it was looking through me.
Past my body.
Past my memories.
Past the things even I didn't understand about myself.
For one terrifying moment, I had the strange sensation that if it stared long enough, it would see every secret I had buried.
Every memory.
Every lie.
Every missing piece.
Even Shadow.
The creature moved.
Its massive head shifted slightly toward me.
Gray reacted immediately.
He stepped in front of me.
His weapon was already in his hand.
I stared at him.
Is this idiot seriously planning to fight that thing?
We had just discovered something that looked powerful enough to erase this entire bridge by accident.
If it attacked us, I doubted any of us would survive.
I knew that feeling.
I had felt it in the dungeon.
That feeling of standing before something that didn't need to fight you.
Something that could simply decide you should no longer exist.
I reached out and grabbed Gray's shoulder.
"Don't."
He glanced back at me.
Before either of us could do anything else, Elta stepped forward.
Her voice broke the tension.
"You startled us, Lord Shisham."
I froze.
Lord?
The creature's enormous head turned toward her.
Elta continued calmly.
"You were permitted to meet the creators during the announcement, weren't you?"
A pause.
"So why did you come here?"
The dragon stared at her.
Then a deep voice echoed across the bridge.
"I was going to inspect a few places."
His voice was heavy.
Not loud.
It didn't need to be.
The sound itself seemed to vibrate through the air.
"I noticed them."
His enormous eyes shifted toward us.
"I thought I should take a look."
I blinked.
He came here... just to look at us?
That wasn't reassuring.
Not even slightly.
Elta glanced at Gray.
"Look at them?"
She sighed.
"They were about to attack you."
The dragon's eyes shifted.
For a moment, his gaze landed on Gray.
Then Alysa.
Then me.
He stared at my white hair.
Something changed in his expression.
A thought seemed to pass through his mind.
That white-haired human...
His eyes narrowed.
Could it be?
Before I could ask, the dragon suddenly looked toward the horizon.
He didn't say anything else.
His enormous body began moving.
The clouds parted around him.
The creature disappeared into the sky with terrifying ease, leaving behind only the faint disturbance of wind.
I watched until I could no longer see him.
Silence returned to the bridge.
For several seconds, nobody said anything.
Then Alysa suddenly ran toward us.
"WHAT DID WE JUST SEE?!"
She nearly crashed into both of us.
Her eyes were shining.
Not with fear.
With disbelief.
She looked at Elta.
"What was that?!"
Gray lowered his weapon slowly.
I looked at Elta too.
She sighed.
Then she gave us an answer I wasn't prepared for.
"You just met one of the Lantern races."
I frowned.
"Lantern?"
What was a Lantern?
Was that supposed to be the name of a race?
I looked toward the sky again.
"That thing was a Lantern?"
Elta nodded.
"And the one you saw was Lord Shisham."
She paused.
"The king of the Loong Dragons."
I stared at her.
"...Loong Dragon?"
Alysa's expression somehow became even more shocked.
"There are dragons too?!"
Elta looked at her.
"There are several Lantern races."
She continued as though she were explaining something completely ordinary.
"They live much farther from the territories you are familiar with. They eat, speak, think, build civilizations and wage wars just like any other race."
I looked at her.
Just like any other race?
I wasn't sure anything about that creature could be described as ordinary.
Elta continued.
"They coexist with the other races. Our relationship with the Loong Dragons is particularly good."
Then she looked toward the sky.
"They are also famous for their knowledge of space and dimensions."
My expression changed.
"Space... and dimensions?"
"Yes."
She nodded.
"Among the Lantern races, the Loong Dragons are considered some of the greatest masters of dimensional knowledge."
I stared at the place where Shisham had disappeared.
A creature capable of moving through the sky without wings.
A race that apparently possessed knowledge of space and dimensions far beyond anything I knew.
And nobody had ever told me about them.
Not Captain Shin.
Not Gray.
Not anyone.
Gray had been a creator for a long time.
Even he hadn't known.
That meant something.
The world I thought I understood wasn't simply larger than I had imagined.
It was hiding entire civilizations behind the edges of what I knew.
I looked toward the Fairy Kingdom below.
Then toward the sky.
The human world had told us that dragons were myths.
Fairies were myths.
Monsters were myths.
Magic was fiction.
And yet here I was.
Standing in another realm.
Watching an actual dragon disappear beyond the clouds.
A creature humans had once imagined into existence in their stories was apparently a living being with a kingdom, a race, a history and a king.
So what exactly is real?
The thought came naturally.
It was the same question every creator eventually had to face.
The moment they stepped beyond the human realm, the world they thought they understood began to crack apart.
Humanity believed it lived in a normal world.
But that normal world was only one layer.
Beyond it was the Imaginary World.
Beyond that were the Fairy Kingdom and countless other realms.
And now...
The Lantern races.
I looked toward the sky again.
The dragon was gone.
But somehow, the world felt different after seeing him.
As if someone had quietly opened another door.
And behind that door was an entire civilization I had never even known existed.
I let out a slow breath.
Imaginary World.
Fairies.
Creators.
And now Lanterns.
I shook my head.
"At this point..."
I muttered.
"I don't think anything can surprise me anymore."
A pause.
"...I think."
That last thought immediately made me regret saying it.
Because every time I thought I had finally reached the edge of this world...
Another door opened.
And something far more impossible was waiting behind it.