The guards dragged Yuzuru to the edge of the bridge. Once there, they started arguing whether to throw him into the chasm or not.

“I want to see him get eaten,” one said.

“What if the Queen wants to see him again?” asked the other. “I’m not doing anything I haven’t been told.”

Yuzuru was fading in and out of consciousness. He tried to grab onto something but his body felt rigid.

“Let’s just toss him at the end,” said the first guard. “If he falls off because of the wind, well, that’s on him.”

“Good idea,” replied the other. They inched Yuzuru close to the edge and left him balancing over the precipice.

As the sun rose overhead, a wind picked up. Yuzuru’s instincts took hold. He reached out and dug his fingers into the ice. It was painful but helped chase away the murkiness in his mind.

Inch by inch, he pulled himself to safety. The wind shifted so it now came from above, seemingly trying to push him back down. Yuzuru fought against it. With one final push, he cleared the chasm and rolled onto his back. He felt a deep rumbling coming from below, rocking the bridge. It was like something was breathing at him and huffing in frustration.

The sky was a pinkish hue. Thin clouds hid the sun.

“Pikorin?” Yuzuru said out loud. “I need to ask you something.”

He felt his ghostly tenant stirring. She was growing weaker these last two days. Yuzuru didn’t know if that was because his lifeforce wasn’t enough to feed her or something else, and the only one he could ask about this sort of thing wasn’t here anymore.

“Yes?”

“Pikorin, can you make things other than a sword?”

“Yes, but you must explain exactly what it is.”

Yuzuru sat up. “Does that mean you’re able to make… I don’t know, a battery?”

“You wish to barter with this battery?”

“It’s a component to make larger things,” Yuzuru explained excitedly. “Like a grappling hook or a flying robot suit, that kind of thing.”

Pikorin’s hum echoed inside Yuzuru’s chest. “Sounds too difficult.”

“We can try,” Yuzuru said, scrambling for something to draw on the ice with. He was shivering all over and could feel the symptoms of a cold coming, but he was too hyped to leave. Finding nothing on the bridge, he felt inside his pockets. There was a lump. Reaching in, he took out the glass vial. The ear studs were still inside. Holding them to the faint sunlight, he watched them sparkle.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Pikorin. Have you ever seen a lockbox before?”

“I have…”

Yuzuru couldn’t hear the rest of Pikorin’s reply, because the world was shaking. The wind’s rumbling grew into a howling, and the bridge began to crack. From the chasm below, a gigantic tail reached up, filling the sky with its jet black scales. Yuzuru began sprinting back to the castle but the tail slapped down, shattering the bridge to pieces, and bringing him into the darkness.

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He woke up sometime later on a bed of mushrooms. His first thought was that he died, but surely he shouldn’t be in so much pain if he was. He looked around, seeing little in the dark. He turned upwards. The sky was a knife’s edge, impossibly far away.

I’m at the bottom of the chasm, he thought, chilled by that revelation.

Sprouting along the walls were glowing fungi. Yuzuru dug a few from their crevices and threw them, hoping to see the dimensions of his dark prison. The fungi clattered against the stones. One splashed in water, and another plonked off a dark blob in front of him.

Confused, he threw another one. This time, the glowing mushroom left a mark where it hit the shadow.

The mark then began to move. It rose up, further and further until it disappeared along with the sky. Everything went dark. Then, two slices of light cut down at Yuzuru, their blood-red glow bathing his world aflame.

He reeled back, falling harder into the mushroom bed. The lights grew brighter, illuminating the shadowy face and the long winding neck they belonged to.

Yuzuru felt the air inside his lungs freeze.

“A Dragon,” he whispered. “No. The Calamity Dragon.”

The shadowy beast laughed. The sound shook through the chasm, breaking loose the stone.

“No,” it said. “Not anymore.”

Yuzuru swallowed. “You’ve retired?”

The dragon raised its head and let out a column of fire. Heat and light flooded the chasm. Yuzuru covered his face with his hands, but during the split second where he could still see, he understood why this dragon was down here.

Apart from a head and tail, it had nothing else.

As fire burned along the walls, the dragon lowered its head again.

“I had been defeated,” he said. “My throne was taken, and I am here, waiting to die.”

“But I thought you were the endgame,” Yuzuru said, blinking back the spots in his vision. Thanks to the flames, he could see the dragon clearly now.

It was generous to call this creature a dragon. The entirety of its chest area was fused into the ground in one rocky lump. Glowing mushrooms sprouted all over the creature’s sides, and the water Yuzuru thought he heard was in fact a river of blood pouring endlessly from the creature’s gouged-out belly.

“I was,” the dragon said. “Now, there is another on my throne. That is the way of this world.”

“Ah, I get it,” said Yuzuru. “It’s one of those ‘whoever kills the Big Bad becomes the next Big Bad’ situation.”

The dragon’s eyes sparkled with the reminiscence of humor. “Yes.”

“And you’ve brought me down here to tell me this because… you want revenge?”

“Not revenge,” said the dragon. “Peace, for all of Arcadia and…”

Yuzuru shook his head, incredulous how this creature of darkness could be asking him for something so ridiculous. “You dropped monsters onto people,” he said. “You caused so much destruction and death. Now you want peace?”

“I was blinded by duty,” the dragon responded. “But now, cast into the pits beneath man’s feet, I see Arcadia as it truly is. Such a captivating world, it is nothing but a stained mirror of ours.”

“Hold up. Ours?”

“Let me show you.” The dragon lowered his head down to Yuzuru’s level, its eyes dimming so he could see into them.

What he saw floored him.

The dragon was a man. Not just any, but a man in a suit. He worked a day job in a law firm, earning enough for a house and a nice car, but not enough to live how he wanted.

One day, this man, a normal citizen of the world, got a letter in the mail. Inside was a black cube, just like the one Yuzuru received. And just like Yuzuru’s cube, when the man tossed his onto the table, thinking it a paperweight he forgot he’d ordered, it exploded.

“The rest you see before you,” said the dragon.

Yuzuru sat on a mushroom stool and tried to gather his thoughts. They were like little pinballs running across the surface of his brain. “You’re an actual person from the real world,” he said. “Not only that, you were brought here to be the Calamity Dragon?”

“I became what I am,” said the dragon, “by becoming worthy, and killing the person who was the dragon before me.”

“And you want me to do what you did,” said Yuzuru.

“That is a question each of us answered for ourselves,” said the dragon. “The time for you to ask will come. But now, you need to return and finish what you started.”

“Sure…” said Yuzuru. “Let me just grab my wings and my dragon-killing rocket launcher.”

The dragon laughed. It ran hollow through his bleeding body.

“The child of a traveler,” he said. “Bring her to me and I will grant you the power to change this world.” His tone grew dark, his eyes brightening. “Fail me, and this loop will never be closed.”

Then, without waiting for Yuzuru’s reply, the dragon stretched forward and clamped his jaws over him.