Kyle’s footprints were like a trail of cookie crumbs from a fairy tale.
Blue impressions pressed deep into the white snow.
I took Father’s hand and began crossing the wide snowfield, using Kyle’s prints as a compass.
That was when—
“Oh—?”
Far off along the horizon, a white-haired boy came into view.
Unmistakably Kyle.
“Kyle’s over there! I’ll go ahead!”
“Aisha, it’s dangerous to go alone—”
“Kyle!”
Calypse’s worried voice faded behind me. I was already beyond hearing it.
Pitter-patter—
My shoe prints stamped over the shapes of Kyle’s.
I was afraid he’d gone so far. Thank goodness—he hasn’t gone very far at all.
But of course he hadn’t. Even if Kyle could transform into an animal, against the creatures that inhabited this place, he was still only a child. This was a lawless land—a territory claimed by creatures that even fully trained knights from noble houses struggled to handle. However exceptional Kyle might be, there were limits to how deep he could have ventured.
Or so I thought.
“Kyle…?”
A little closer. Just a few more steps and I could call out to him—
My legs stopped dead.
Something was wrong.
Kyle wasn’t alone.
…What are those?
They had been difficult to make out from a distance—but as I drew near, the dark shapes surrounding Kyle gradually resolved into something distinct and terrifying.
And they were—
…Creatures.
Thump.
The poison needle I had been holding as a precaution slipped from my fingers and buried itself in the deep snow.
“…Ah.”
I clapped a hand over my mouth with fingers gone limp—not to stifle a scream, but to stop one before it started.
A sight I had never witnessed in either this life or the last. Strange. Chilling. Wrong in a way that burrowed under the skin.
One with a single eye. One standing three meters tall. One that walked on all fours. One with long, curved claws. One with saliva dripping from its jaw.
Different species—every one—gathered one by one around Kyle, their massive heads bowed low.
As though they were worshipping the only god in existence.
* * *
Between the pale strands of white hair tossed by the wind, a pair of calm, expressionless violet eyes stared out.
Kyle looked perfectly composed. As if it were the most natural thing in the world for creatures to prostrate themselves before him.
So what should I do now?
Run? Call out to him? Or try to grab him and flee?
“……?”
A hollow laugh rose in my chest at that last thought.
I’m going to rescue Kyle? Me? What could I possibly do?
I had been so frightened that I’d dropped even the needle I’d been clutching. What exactly was I planning to accomplish?
The thought felt like having something precious stolen—like Kyle was being erased from the memories I’d made with him.
The small child standing out there in the snowfield was no longer the Kyle I knew.
Whoooosh—
A fierce wind made me squint. And at that moment, he turned his head.
Our eyes met. By accident.
“…Aisha?”
The blankness in those violet eyes slowly, slowly expanded—
“Aisha.”
And then without warning, someone pressed a hand over my mouth and pulled me behind a boulder.
I startled and looked up. It was Calypse.
“It’s all right. Papa’s here—just don’t scream. And breathe.”
“…….”
The moment I found myself tucked inside his arms, I realized—my breathing had stopped entirely.
It was Calypse. Father. The man who wielded the Ice Affinity, who possessed a strength that felt immovable, who seemed like he would always be there to shield me.
Hff. Hff.
Perhaps because the tension broke so suddenly—my breathing began to roughen, and something hot gathered at the corners of my eyes.
“Aisha?”
Then—Kyle called my name.
The tears I had been holding back slid down over the hand Calypse had pressed to my mouth.
“…Aisha, where are you?”
He called again—like a small child who had lost their mother.
Even without looking, I could picture it. His head turning left and right, searching.
Because that was the kind of child he was.
A child who seemed a little odd, yet always listened to what I said. A child who came to see me every night by climbing through my bedroom window, like a cat. The most purely innocent person I had ever met.
“Aisha. Listen carefully.”
But the voice that called for me so desperately was drowned out by Calypse’s quiet, measured warning.
“There is something in this world called a Mage-Beast.”
A Mage-Beast?
The sudden word made me flinch—
“…God. Damn it.”
Calypse shut his eyes and exhaled.
For reasons I couldn’t name, he looked like a man confronting a regret he had been carrying for a long time.
“A Mage-Beast is a living creature that can communicate with both humans and creatures alike.”
Communicate with creatures?
“And Kyle is exactly that.”
Kyle is?
My mind flew to the original story. The reason the war between the Kingdom of Frozen and the Kingdom of Doctia came to a halt. The reason Calypse Krost was celebrated as the hero of Frozen. The reason humanity had built the Ice Wall in the north in the first place.
It was because of the god of creatures.
Humanity finally found it. The tiny god who gave language to creatures. Before it could grow—before it became too powerful—they came to cut it out at the root.
The passage from the novel surfaced in my memory, and my eyes went wide.
A minor character who had died in the earliest chapters of the story, before accumulating any real significance—’Kyle,’ the trigger behind everything called The Sword of Judgment. The small god who had tried to bring civilization to creatures. Humanity had trembled before what he represented, and the Ice Wall had been built to keep him contained.
The evidence in front of me, and Calypse’s words, pointed to only one conclusion.
That was Kyle. The boy I’d found was Kyle.
Which meant that I—
I had rescued the tiny god.
“…….”
It was then.
“Aisha? Aisha, are you here?”
Kyle’s voice reached me again as Calypse finished speaking. By the sound of the snow crunching underfoot, he was wandering, searching for me.
One minute stretched like an hour.
And then—at last—as though he had given up on finding me, his footsteps stilled.
“She was definitely here.”
His voice cracked slightly.
“She ran away because I’m a creature. I know it. She went rigid just looking at me back in the bookshop, too.”
Something strange happened inside me.
The fear that had gripped me moments before began to loosen—
“…I’m a creature.”
Why does it itch so much?
“People called me an ill omen.”
Kyle. That’s not true.
The words I said in my mind pressed against the inside of my chest. I brought my hand up and pressed it there.
Hearing his voice made something in me surge and roil—like a chrysalis trying to burst free from inside me, turning everything inside out.
And that chrysalis—
“I should just live here. Even if I want to go back to Aisha—I’m a creature, so—”
“That’s not true!”
—broke free before I could stop it.
It happened on its own.
Hff. Hff.
I gasped and came back to myself. I had slipped free of Calypse’s arms without even realizing it.
And not far away—
“…Aisha?”
Kyle was staring at me with startled eyes.
Oh no.
By the time I understood what I’d done, it was already too late—Calypse had risen from behind the boulder, sword drawn.
I knew it was dangerous. Kyle’s gaze had found me—and with it, every creature that had been worshipping him had turned to look at me too.
And yet.
“If you don’t want to live here, then don’t!”
This much, I needed to say.
“If you don’t want to be a creature, then live as a person!”
I had woken up one day as a spy. And for every life since, I had fought to claw my way out of that role—nothing about it had been easy. There had been hardship upon hardship, and a desperate, endless striving to be recognized as something more.
“Then tell people—tell them you’re not a creature!”
I had screamed in frustration before. I had cried because of how others looked at me.
Even if I was born a spy—if I don’t want to be one, I don’t have to be!
That was why—watching Kyle now—I knew. I understood that even my frightened expression had become a wound for him.
Ah.
Only then did I understand.
Why I had rushed toward him in such a scattered, breathless way. Why my chest had ached with that unbearable itch. Why the chrysalis inside me had been so desperate to break open.
“Kyle.”
An apology.
“…I’m sorry for looking at you that way.”
I had wanted—more than anything—to apologize to him.
