The silence at the mountain's peak felt different now.
Before the girl came, silence had been a warm blanket that lulled him into a long sleep. But now, that silence had become invisible claws tearing at the inside of his chest.
Chronos had returned to his colossal dragon form. His massive body coiled around the stone lair, but his eyes were no longer closed. His usually cold golden pupils remained fixed, unblinking, on a mound of earth beside his resting place.
A plain stone without an engraved name stood rigidly beneath the relentless storm winds.
The sun rose over the eastern horizon, casting golden light that reflected off the snow. This was the time when the echo of those fragile footsteps would usually be heard. The time when the scent of warm roasted meat should have drifted into his nostrils.
But there was nothing today.
Only the smell of snow, wet stone, and emptiness.
Chronos exhaled softly. The hot air from his nostrils swept over the mound, melting the ice that tried to cover the plain gravestone. He reached for the remaining frozen piece of roasted meat in the last basket, then swallowed it slowly.
The savory taste was still there, but now it choked his throat like a sharp thorn.
'Is this what they call longing?'
The question echoed through his empty chest. As an immortal dragon, Chronos had watched kingdoms rise and crumble into dust. He had seen volcanoes erupt and oceans dry up. Yet not one of those grand events had managed to leave a mark on his soul like an unnamed old woman had.
Something so simple. Something he had never even taken seriously for decades. And yet it had managed to hollow out his chest this deeply.
'If only I had asked you to talk...' Chronos thought, enveloped by regret burning from within. 'If only I had spoken to you while you were still young, would this feeling have been stronger? Or... if I had spoken to you back then, would I never have felt this regret that is slowly killing me?'
Every passing day became a new torment for the dragon.
He sank into the same dilemma. Whenever a storm came, he imagined the woman shivering inside her wooden house. Whenever night fell, he longed for the warm gleam in her eyes as they gazed at him without fear.
The years passed like shadows flashing by.
The mound beside his lair was no longer just a pile of stones. From strange seeds carried by the wind—or perhaps kept in the woman's pocket—a tree shoot began to grow atop the grave. It grew larger, piercing through the hard layer of ice, until it finally became a broad, golden-leaved tree standing firm atop the frozen mountain.
Chronos stared at the tree in silence.
'Even after you disappeared, you still left something behind to keep me company here,' he whispered inwardly.
Yet his curiosity never faded. His desire to know who the woman was, why she had spent her entire life delivering food, and what lay behind the sincere smile she wore at the end of her life... all of it burned through Chronos's soul until he could no longer remain silent.
'I want to see you again,' Chronos decided. 'I want to satisfy all this curiosity that's tormenting me.'
The colossal dragon opened his eyes wide.
A dense, primordial light shone from his golden eyes. He activated his soul sight—a rare ability capable of seeing the threads of fate and the currents of souls flowing across the universe.
And there, directly above the mound beneath the golden tree, Chronos saw it.
An extremely thin white line, glittering like pure silk thread, stretched from within the earth, pierced through the tree's leaves, and shot straight through the clouds toward the darkness of the night sky.
The woman's soul line.
The line that revealed where her spirit had sailed after leaving her mortal body in this world.
CRACK!
Chronos straightened his massive body. The world's highest mountain trembled violently, shedding thousands of tons of ice and snow that had clung to his scales for years. The walls of the stone lair he had built with such difficulty suddenly cracked beneath the pressure of the primordial aura erupting from his body.
He spread his enormous wings, which stretched hundreds of meters, splitting apart the snowstorm and revealing the star-filled night sky.
WHOOSH!
With one mighty flap that created a shock wave across the entire continent, Chronos leaped into the air. His massive body shot upward into the sky at a speed faster than sound.
From that day on, the colossal dragon who had dwelled atop the highest mountain peak was never seen again. His sudden departure left thousands of mysteries in the minds of humans and every living creature in that world.
Yet they would never know where the dragon had gone.
Because at this very moment, Chronos was beating his wings in the darkness of the vacuum, following the white line as it pierced the edge of the atmosphere.
He didn't care how long this journey would take. He didn't care if he had to cross thousands of galaxies or cleave through dangerous dimensional layers.
As long as the white thread stretched out before him, Chronos would continue chasing it. Crossing space, traversing time, and surpassing the ages for one purpose: to find again the owner of the smile that had stolen the eternal peace from his soul.