Gardenia's Heart

Before she could even become aware of what the world was, the girl learned that she was weak.

Trapped helplessly inside the vessel that had given her life, her tiny existence was so frail that she couldn't even crack her own eggshell and hatch on her own.

She was weak.

That was the very first thing those who helped her hatch told the rest of her family.

Although she didn't understand those words at first or what they meant, it didn't take long for her to realize their consequences.

Dragons were a people who lived for battle.

Whether against monsters or other races, a dragon could only prove their worth by fighting worthy opponents.

Yet no matter how hard she tried, the little girl couldn't even pose a threat to the smallest insects.

Her body never developed enough to withstand the capabilities of her own race, and in order to survive, it adapted by discarding everything that would have placed too great a burden upon it.

Her own biology chose weakness as the price of survival.

If she abandoned her humanoid form and transformed fully into a dragon, she would collapse from exhaustion before long. If she tried to reinforce her body with mana, even ordinary punches could shatter her bones.

No matter how much mana she devoured from the prey her parents hunted, her body never grew stronger, regardless of how desperately she tried.

Even her dragon's blood was lacking. Her heart pumped so little mana through her veins that it was scarcely different from ordinary blood. Even minor wounds took weeks to heal, making her regenerative abilities inferior even to those of a human.

She was weak...

To the very core of her existence.

And for a dragon, being weak was no different from being dead.

She had already been dead to everyone from the day she was born.

---

The little girl had already turned ten, yet she still hadn't been given a name.

She had read in the dragon scale tablets that other races named their children at birth. Dragons, however, bestowed names upon their offspring only after they returned victorious from their first battle.

Her older brother and sister had names.

She did not.

Called things like "that" or "it," the little girl lived like a piece of trash discarded in the corner of a room that no one ever bothered to clean.

Unable to survive on mana alone, her family had to feed her regularly just to keep her alive. The city had communal fields and grazing livestock such as cows and sheep. However, food raised collectively was not to be wasted on someone like her.

Because of that, her parents had to cultivate their own crops behind the house or travel long distances in search of livestock.

Determined to at least care for the crops that kept her alive, the girl regularly watered the fields and tended the pasture behind their home. Then one day, while pulling a weed that had grown beside the wheat, she was struck by a terrible fever.

She was so weak that an ordinary poisonous plant—not even a mana herb—was enough to put her life in danger.

"Cicuta."

That was the name of the common weed that had nearly claimed her life.

And, on a whim, it was also the name her parents decided to give her.

---

For the following decades, Cicuta spent her days tending the Library of Scales.

Thanks to her lack of mana and fragile body compared to the other dragons, she was the only one in her clan capable of carving the crystal scales of the Scale Clan and writing upon them.

Yet simply knowing how to write did nothing to earn the respect of others.

At one point, Cicuta wondered if anyone would even care should she disappear.

She soon found the answer.

Somehow, even when she vanished for weeks or months at a time, no one noticed her absence.

Her existence was so insignificant that no one even remembered she was there.

Nothing she did was ever noticed.

Everything she did was ignored.

When she began to wonder whether there was any point in continuing to exist if that was all her life amounted to... she met that person.

It was a strange individual, unlike anyone she had ever known.

"If you can't fight like a dragon, then why not try learning magic?"

A person utterly bizarre to the very core of their existence, making her a proposal just as bizarre.

It made no sense.

There was no logic to it.

And yet...

For a very long time, she wondered why she had taken that hand.

---

Somehow, that strange person was surrounded by people just as bizarre as they were.

As absurd as that thought would have been given the life she had lived until then, Cicuta considered herself the most normal among them.

Traveling across countless lands, she learned more and more about the power of the weak, magic.

Just as the person who had become her master had explained, because her body had discarded the draconic traits of her species, she was, biologically speaking, perfectly suited to wield magic.

Of course, learning it was anything but easy.

It took her an entire decade just to channel mana outside her body, and another two before she could cast her first spell without fainting in the process.

After another two decades, Cicuta mastered simultaneous spellcasting, and three decades after that, she was finally creating spells of her own.

For the first time, she discovered the possibility of thinking beyond what she had once believed to be common sense.

To make use of her innate ability to devour mana—not only from prey, but from anything that contained mana.

It was incredible.

Everything she learned was exciting.

Everything she learned filled her with wonder.

From the bottom of her heart, Cicuta believed it was truly amazing.

Magic—the very thing dragons looked down upon simply because they could not use it—was so marvelous that it captivated her more with each passing day.

All of it had been possible because of her master.

She had become a new person.

She had been reborn.

To celebrate that rebirth, she asked her master to give her a new name.

"■■■■."

Those words seemed to engrave themselves upon the depths of her soul.

"Yes. From this day onward, your name will be ■■■■."

---

After bidding farewell to her master, ■■■■ returned to Athamas.

Coming home after so long felt strange. She found herself wondering why she had decided to return at all.

Yet just like every other time, no one even noticed that she had been gone for nearly a century.

Her monotonous routine resumed as though it had never been interrupted.

Not long afterward, the war erupted in full force.

Dragons were divided among countless battlefields, fighting against the demons.

Apparently, after one of those battles, her older brother had become the leader of their clan following the deaths of their parents on the battlefield.

Even though they had been her family, she wondered why she felt nothing.

Perhaps Cicuta would have cried for them.

But ■■■■ felt nothing upon hearing the news.

Even noncombatants had been assigned ways to contribute to the war effort. Yet with strength as insignificant as hers, ■■■■ was not entrusted with even the smallest task.

Throughout the years that followed, battles in the Valley of Dawn became so common they were little more than routine. Naturally, she was never assigned to defend her homeland.

However, because her city lay close to Finis, the continent of the demons, there were times when demons approached Athamas.

She did not particularly care, but the destruction of her capital did not sound appealing.

So, hidden from everyone's sight, she quietly aided in the fighting, little by little, using her magic.

Was it irony?

"How beautiful..."

Surrounded by emerald flames and the charred corpses of several demons, she heard those words.

They had come from a young dragon boy.

There was no contempt for her physical weakness.

No disdain for the way she had defeated her enemies.

Someone had praised the strength she had earned through her own training.

Those words had not been directed at Cicuta.

They had been spoken to ■■■■.

For the first time, someone from her homeland had noticed and admired who she truly was.

The moment their eyes met...

She knew.

She had fallen in love.

---

That young dragon had learned her secret and sworn to keep it.

He acknowledged her strength in his own way and genuinely loved her.

Yet even though she was in love and wished to build a family with him, there was one problem.

The young man she loved belonged to another clan.

Though their love was genuine, no one would ever support such a relationship. Intimate relationships between members of different clans were strictly forbidden.

For years, ■■■■ searched for a way to have their love accepted by everyone.

She was not foolish enough to believe that mere words could overturn an ideology that had endured for millennia. She needed something more...

Or rather, someone.

One day, she appeared at a rear-line military camp and asked her older brother to speak with her in private.

Family.

It was something she had abandoned along with the name Cicuta, yet perhaps it could also be what would help resolve this situation.

For the first time in her life, she opened her heart to someone.

She begged him to stand by her side.

Not as the leader of their clan, but as a member of her family.

She pleaded with him to accept her love.

She wanted nothing more than happiness.

It was such a simple wish.

And yet, in the end, even that wish was denied.

Her older brother could not understand.

How could he?

The dragons' foolish laws.

Their meaningless traditions.

She tried to explain, but all she received was a look of pity from her own brother.

And that filled her with rage.

She was no longer that weak little girl whose existence went unnoticed.

Now, she possessed the strength to do as she pleased.

That day, her older brother paid for his ignorance with his life.

Within an ordinary cave that would soon be forgotten by the world, he met an unworthy end.

And from that day forward, his name would forever bear the stain of disgrace.

---

Some time after her older brother's disappearance, her older sister became the leader of the Fang Clan.

For a brief moment, ■■■■ wondered whether her sister might be easier to manipulate than her brother had been.

Yet, contrary to her expectations, Tiamat adhered to the traditions of their race even more strictly.

To atone for the disgrace brought about by the former leader's supposed desertion, Tiamat ordered every member of the clan to wear golden masks to conceal their faces.

She was a fool.

■■■■ believed that from the bottom of her heart.

As expected, acceptance would never come.

Exile was the only option.

However, unlike her, her beloved's presence was far from insignificant. If he were to disappear, people would obviously come looking for him.

She would have to destroy the dragons and flee with the one she loved.

Finally deciding to tell him the truth about everything that had happened, along with the plan she had devised, she never expected to receive that look.

Disgust.

For the first time, the one who loved her was no longer on her side.

He could not overlook the death of the former leader of the Fang Clan, much less the fact that she had hidden the truth from him for centuries.

As one final act of love, he departed for Finis.

If he fought the demons, proved his worth to his father, and inherited the position of clan leader, then perhaps he could atone for her crimes and obtain redemption for her.

■■■■ could not stop him.

As expected...

He never returned.

---

They had to pay.

That entire culture had to pay for denying her happiness.

All those fools who blindly followed those laws had to disappear.

No one could be allowed to live.

They all had to die.

That day, after losing everything...

■■■■ began planning the extermination of the dragons.

---

The cold, dark stone floor was uncomfortable.

Her tail and wings felt numb. Nausea washed over her every time she forced her eyes to focus in an attempt to make out her surroundings.

She was in a cell.

She was lucid enough to be certain of that.

How long had she been unconscious? She could not say for sure, but judging by the overwhelming hunger gnawing at her, several days had passed.

As she examined her surroundings, she noticed that the cell appeared to have been hastily built inside one of the caves.

Dragons did not take prisoners, so the very fact that they wanted her alive brought her a small measure of relief.

"If I'm imprisoned, then that means that human managed to convince them the blame is mine..."

She had been defeated.

Worse still, she had been defeated by someone using the very magic that gave her strength.

There was someone among the humans whose magic was powerful enough to rival her own.

She had been careless.

Having lost consciousness before witnessing the trial that woman had arranged, there was no way for her to know its outcome with certainty.

Ironically, unlike at any other point in her life, she was certain that her existence now held value to them.

Was it curiosity about her motives? Or perhaps because she was related by blood to Tiamat? No. They most likely wanted her alive to study the way she used her innate ability to draw mana from spells—and, of course, her ability to wield magic despite being a dragon.

She would truly rather die than help them with that.

Even if they tortured her, she would tell them nothing.

Which was precisely why she wished to escape before it came to that.

"There isn't a single herb here whose mana I can absorb."

She muttered to herself as she examined every crack in the floor and walls.

The cell measured roughly two square meters and faced a corridor lit by an orange torch.

If the fire had not gone out yet, then fresh air had to be flowing through the cave from somewhere outside.

If she transformed completely into a dragon and tried to break her way through the mountain itself would crush her.

"Not that I could manage it anyway."

Very few dragons knew how to fight properly in their humanoid forms.

Even if she was far too exhausted to fly, as long as she reached one of the underground caverns, she could slip away, conceal her scent with herbs, and escape.

She still possessed the advantage of knowledge.

It did not matter that her plan had failed today.

She simply needed to rethink everything and try again.

"The dragons will meet their end. I'll make sure of it."

Forcing herself to her feet, she gripped the bars of her cell, a scowl of irritation forming on her beautiful face.

She was so weak that she could not even break such ordinary restraints.

The bars looked like common iron, but perhaps they contained mana.

Should she try biting them to absorb it? If she could recover even a little more mana, she might be able to carve herself an escape route with magic.

"Don't waste your time. Knowing you can use magic, they aren't going to let you come into contact with anything that contains mana, since you could absorb it through your fangs."

Just as she was mentally planning her escape, the last voice she expected to hear echoed through the corridor.

It belonged to someone she had met over the past few days.

Someone she had even framed for a crime she herself had committed.

The girl had silver hair that gradually faded into purple at the tips. Her adorable, slightly flushed face framed a pair of sky-blue eyes that seemed to hold the daytime heavens within them. She wore a sleeveless black dress with a large blue ribbon tied around her waist, accentuating her natural beauty.

"What is that human's child doing here?"

Frowning as she stared at the small silver-haired girl, she tried to understand what was happening.

Perhaps she had lied when she said she would bring her before a tribunal and was now keeping her imprisoned for some other reason.

Nothing about this situation made any sense to her.

In response to her question, the little girl sighed and gently waved her index finger from side to side.

"If this were a test, I'd give you nine out of ten points for your plan. There were moments when even I was caught by surprise."

She had seen that girl before. Many times.

The body was the girl's.

The voice was the girl's.

But something deep inside her told her it was not that girl.

"If you had managed to accomplish your objective, I would have given you a perfect score. But as we can see..."

The little girl rested a finger against her rosy lips, a smile appearing on her face—one that looked utterly unnatural on such an innocent expression.

"...you failed, didn't you, Cicuta?"

It made no sense.

It couldn't possibly be.

And yet, the moment those lips parted once more, it felt as though a shockwave coursed through her entire body.

"Or should I call you... Rain?"

A dull thud echoed through the cell.

Dropping to her knees, tears welling in her eyes, the woman stared at the little girl standing outside the bars and screamed at the top of her lungs.

"Master Sylvan!"