Chương 15: Chapter 14: The First Snow

The house looked the same. The same walls. The same windows. The same porch stretching out beneath the front door. Once again, I was sitting there on the steps, thinking. Yato rested beside my feet, his body pressed against the wooden boards as he watched the empty yard. He had been unusually quiet since I returned. Even he seemed to sense something had changed. I couldn't blame him. I felt it too. My eyes kept drifting toward the mountain. The dragon's mountain. I had spent hours there. Maybe longer.

Time had become difficult to measure since I had so many things to think about. I had expected so many things about when I'd finally encountered another living creature. Fear. Aggression. Curiosity. But I didn't expect it to be like this, or to have so many more questions and to have to be patient again. The dragon had not looked at me like a threat. It had not looked at me like prey. It had looked at me like something temporary. That thought bothered me more than anything else. Not because it was insulting.

But because it was probably true. The dragon had lived long enough that my entire life was only a small piece of time. My arrival here. My struggles. My attempts to survive. All of it was brief. A mere moment. And yet it had still taken the time to warn me. Not because it was afraid. That was the part I couldn't stop thinking about. The dragon was not afraid of winter. It was preparing for it. There was a difference. To me, winter meant danger. It meant cold, isolation, and the possibility of not surviving.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. To the dragon, winter was something else. A season. A terrible one. A deadly one. But still something that came and went. Something that had happened before. Something that would happen again.

"Return when warmth comes back." I repeated the words silently. Not if warmth comes back. When. The difference was small. But it mattered. The dragon wasn't saying the world would survive. It already knew it would. The question was whether I would. I looked down at my hands. A few months ago, I would have laughed at the idea of surviving an entire winter alone in an unknown world. Now I wasn't so sure. I had survived the beast and I had survived everything that had come for me so far.

Maybe winter would be the same. Maybe. A cold breeze passed over the porch. I ignored it at first. But after a few seconds, I looked toward the thermometer mounted beside the door. I stood and walked over to it. The number was lower than I expected. Not by much. But enough. I stared at it for a moment. Fifteen degree celcius Then I looked toward the forest. Something felt wrong. Not dangerous. Wrong. The forest was too quiet. For weeks, I had listened to it from a distance. The constant movement. The insects.

The birds. The endless sounds of something living. Now there was nothing. I held my breath. No birds. No insects. No rustling leaves. Only the wind. Slowly, I stepped away from the door. The forest stood at the edge of the clearing. Or rather, it had. Because now I noticed something I hadn't before. One of the trees near the edge looked smaller. Not shorter. Lower. Like the ground beneath it had shifted. I frowned. Then another tree moved. Not falling. Not breaking. Moving. The trunk slowly sank into the earth.

There was no crash. No splintering wood. No violent destruction. It simply disappeared. I stood frozen as another tree followed. Then another. The forest was retreating. Not dying. Not collapsing. Leaving. Trunks slipped beneath the ground with impossible smoothness. Branches vanished without resistance. Leaves folded away. Roots withdrew into the earth like veins beneath skin. The forest that had frightened me for weeks was disappearing in front of me. And the strangest part was that it was peaceful.

There was no struggle. No final act of violence. The forest was simply done. I had avoided it for so long. And now it was retreating, as though making way for winter. I don't know how long I stood there watching. Long enough for the cold to become impossible to ignore. My breath appeared in front of me. The wooden boards beneath my feet felt colder. The air itself seemed heavier. The world had changed. The dragon was right. It hadn't warned me that winter was coming. It had warned me that winter was arriving.

I went inside. I closed the door behind me. Then I reached down. And locked it. Yato looked up at me. For a moment, neither of us moved. Then he walked over and pressed against my leg. I sat down beside him. Outside, the temperature continued to fall. Winter was here. A few hours later, night settled over the world. Only then did the snow come. At first, only a few flakes drifted through the darkness. Then more followed. And they didn't stop. By morning, the world was covered in white.