The night wind roared more fiercely than usual.
Atop that highest mountain peak, the ice creaked violently every time the storm swept across the craggy rocks. But to Chronos, the howling wind and the biting snow were not enough to disturb his peace. Something else kept the dragon's golden eyes from closing tonight.
An unfamiliar unease.
More than a decade had passed since the old woman’s hair had turned completely white. Every week, no matter how thick the blizzard blocking her path, the echo of her footsteps and wooden cane could always be heard at the same time. Precisely when the sun reached its peak, a basket of warm roasted meat would be placed on the floor of that stone lair.
But today... the night had grown late.
The moon hung directly above Chronos, casting a cold silver light over the expanse of ice. And on the floor of his lair, there was no new basket. No scent of roasted meat crept through the frigid air.
There was only an unsettling silence.
'Why hasn't she come yet?'
The question knocked repeatedly against Chronos's consciousness. The dragon shifted slowly, sending cracks rattling along his back through the ice. For the first time in decades, he did not merely wait in silence.
CRACK!
Chronos shifted his massive head to the edge of the lair's basin. His golden eyes lowered, gazing toward the cliff slope the old woman usually crossed. With vision that pierced the darkness and storm, he scanned the snow-covered rocks.
Then his eyes stopped on a particular spot.
Just ten meters below the boundary of his main lair—in a cliffside alcove hidden from the brunt of the wind—stood a small building.
A very simple wooden house.
Its walls were made of thick tree trunks stacked tightly together, while its stone roof had been arranged carefully so it would not be blown away by the storm. No thin mist rose from its little chimney as it usually did. The house was pitch-black.
Chronos was stunned.
'How could this be...?' the dragon wondered. 'How did she build a house on the edge of a slope like this? And when?'
He had never known. More accurately, he had never wanted to know. For years, Chronos had cared only about the moment the woman stepped into his lair, set down the food, and left. He had never bothered to wonder where she came from or where she took shelter when the storms raged.
It turned out that all these decades, the woman had lived just ten meters beneath his feet.
Time continued to pass. Hour after hour, yet the wooden house's door did not open. There was no sign of life inside.
Chronos suddenly felt a pressure in his chest. A strange, unpleasant sensation stirred behind his hard scales. The unease continued to grow, wearing away at his patience until he could no longer simply lie still.
'I have to see her,' Chronos thought.
SWISH!
Golden light suddenly enveloped the dragon's colossal body. His mountain-sized form slowly shrank, compressed, and changed shape. His golden scales fused into a thick, dark-colored robe, his enormous horns shortened, and his ancient beastly form transformed into a tall silver-haired man whose golden eyes glowed faintly in the darkness.
His humanoid form. A form he had not used for thousands of years.
With awkward human steps, unused for far too long, Chronos walked across the thick snow. He descended the ten-meter cliff without difficulty, eventually coming to stand before the simple wooden house's door.
There was no sound from inside. He could not even hear the heartbeat that usually came from living creatures.
Chronos clenched his hand around the frozen wooden doorknob.
CREAK...
The door opened slowly, producing a painful wooden squeal amid the silence of the night. Cold air blew into the room, revealing the scene inside the little house.
And there she was.
The old woman lay motionless on the cold wooden floor. Her hunched body was curled up frailly, without the slightest movement. Clutched tightly in her hands, already blue from the cold, was a bamboo basket filled with roasted meat that had frozen solid.
Chronos froze in the doorway.
No words came from his throat. The silver-haired man approached slowly. He knelt beside the frail body, then extended his trembling hand to touch the old woman's neck.
Cold. No pulse. No breath.
The old woman had breathed her last just before she could step out the door to deliver today's food.
Chronos gazed at the wrinkled face, now so peaceful in eternity. For a while, the dragon in human form could only stare, feeling a tremendous emptiness suddenly strike his chest without warning.
He turned his gaze away, trying to look elsewhere instead of at the corpse, and observed the rest of the simple house.
What he saw made Chronos's golden pupils tremble violently.
In one corner of the room, dozens of weapons had been neatly stacked—old, rusted swords, bows and arrows, and shields covered in scars from battle. On the other side of the house was a pile of preserved food, enough to survive alone for months atop this isolated mountain.
This woman had spent her entire youth here. She had grown old atop a lonely ice mountain, living alone without a single companion, never having children or descendants, and spending the remainder of her life doing nothing but roasting meat and climbing the ten-meter cliff every week.
All of that... just to give food to a dragon who had never even spoken to her.
'As if...' Chronos thought, his mind suddenly thrown into chaos. 'As if she were raising her own child.'
A child?
The thought struck Chronos's consciousness like lightning from a clear sky.
A mighty dragon, an ancient creature feared across the entire continent... regarded as a child by a weak human?
'No.' Chronos slowly shook his head, rejecting the absurd thought. 'There’s no reason for a mother to feed her child without ever speaking to him. She never even told me her name. Doesn't this look more like someone keeping a pet than raising a child?'
And yet, somehow, that denial felt hollow. No logic he tried to assemble could explain the old woman's boundless devotion over all those decades.
Chronos let out a long sigh. A thin mist escaped his lips. He stopped thinking about it. Spending time searching for answers from someone who was already dead would change nothing.
Carefully, Chronos used his invisible power to lift the old woman's corpse together with the basket of meat clutched in her hands. The light body floated slowly through the air, following him as he stepped out of the wooden house.
Chronos climbed the ten-meter slope, returning to the mountain peak where his main lair lay.
There, on the rocky ground beside his warm lair, Chronos used his power to dig a hole deep enough. He laid the old woman's body inside it, together with the last basket of meat that had never reached his hands.
He leveled the earth and icy stones again, raising a simple grave at the highest peak in the world.
But when he was about to carve her name into the gravestone... Chronos stopped.
His finger hovered above the rough stone.
'I... don't know her name.'
A deep pain suddenly pierced his solar plexus. This woman had been present in his life for decades, feeding him for decades, yet he had never once asked her name. He had never heard her voice.
With trembling hands, Chronos could only plant a blank stone with no writing at all atop the mound of earth. A silent gravestone for a woman who had lived and died in silence.