The view from the heavens had never changed, not from the very beginning. Sunlight, a blue curtain, white clouds—spread everywhere, and yet as if there were nothing at all.
Then, one day,
a droning hum broke through the cloud layer and stirred a tide.
A dim, empty dream of a hundred years shattered.
A being from the ground had crossed barrier after barrier to reach the highest sky.
Tiny thing, why do you yearn for the boundless heavens?
And the colossus understood, all at once,
that even with eternal life, even able to feel every trace of Mana that existed in the world, It was still a prisoner of the sky.
"My wish now is to go down and see the ground."
"Even if it ends your life?"
Nanoda thought it was foolish. Brave, too.
If Aura had watched someone walk into death like this, she would have cursed them out—"What a waste of all those years you lived." Something along those lines.
"Just so. I would ask you to bear witness, unusual one of the Demon Race. In exchange, I will give you a magic unlike any other. It was left on my back several thousand years ago, by the being who broke through the sky and unraveled my barrier."
Magic from thousands of years ago? Frieren was only two thousand, for pity's sake. This had to be ancient magic, lost for ages—maybe even traceable to the Mythical Era.
"He told me it was a legend-class magic that overturns common sense."
The Skyvein Dragon's voice was thinning, and a fine chalky powder kept sifting down from its body.
Nanoda weighed it, then nodded.
"All right. I accept."
Not for the legend-class magic, though.
The truth was that spellbook or no spellbook, Nanoda had to keep watch on where the Skyvein Dragon came down.
The creature was simply too enormous. Even from a fair distance, the slightest deviation would still reach Gaderia.
"Thank you. I never imagined that among the Demon Race—the monsters he called things that must be killed—there could be one as kind as you."
There was joy in the dragon's slow, gentle sending.
A line of shadow crossed Nanoda's brow.
So the Demon Race's reputation had already been ruined beyond salvage back in the Mythical Era.
"Perhaps I'm an oddity among my own kind, the same way a Skyvein Dragon that longs to embrace the ground is."
"I won't deny it. Friend, shall I carry you down?"
She looked at that colossal head. Riding a dragon?
Nanoda liked the idea.
She had never in her life ridden a mount this big.
Mana circling through her, Nanoda followed the dragon's gaze and drifted to the center of its skull.
But the head was far too vast, and the two horns stood apart like distant towers.
There was nothing to hold on to. Wrapping her arms around a horn didn't feel satisfying enough, and it would hardly befit the dignity of a Great Demon.
So she settled for gripping a few scales that jutted up from the crown.
"Are you ready?"
"Mm. Mm-hm."
The Skyvein Dragon blinked once. The rhythm of its wingbeats shifted, and its whole body tipped over into a dive.
"Ngh."
Even with Mana wrapped around her, shielding and reinforcing her body, the weightlessness slammed into Nanoda.
Nothing like the climb, where she had shouldered the pressure upward. This plunged and swooped. This was glorious.
A roller coaster and a bungee jump rolled into one.
Her hair whipped free and would not settle. Nanoda watched the clouds transform and transform again, felt the wind and the roaring air scour past every part of her.
Even that unshakable heart of hers quickened for a few beats.
Strange and thrilling, all at once.
Nanoda saw the whole continent. She saw the endless ocean folded around it, running on and on to the edge of the horizon.
The world was impossibly wide.
Down again, through cloud and mist.
Looking around, Nanoda could just make out the silhouette of Gaderia not far off: the fortress capital seated in the Northern reaches, the cities strewn like stars across the Central Lands, the dense and fertile kingdoms of the Southern Lands.
Crack!
As they fell, the blue-green scales under Nanoda's hands darkened to ashen gray, cracks branching through them until they crumbled to powder.
Torn loose by the wind, she picked her moment and caught hold of a horn, hanging there and flapping like a strip of black cloth.
She had no attention to spare for the scenery now. She stared at the ground rushing up at her and sealed Defensive Magic around every inch of her body.
"When I am dead, all the growth on my back will wither and the barrier will lift. The spellbook lies at the very top of the central peak."
With those last words, the Skyvein Dragon folded its legs and drove into the earth.
Forests toppled. The ground caved. Everything in the way was swept flat. The impact set off an earthquake and rewrote the shape of the land.
"So beautiful. A pity—I only get to look once…"
The voice softened and dispersed.
That warm, unhurried voice never sounded in Nanoda's mind again.
The shuddering of earth and mountain gradually stilled. The Skyvein Dragon lay curled against the ground, motionless.
Its wide eyes never closed. They only filmed over with ashen gray.
The scales turned to stone and split, collapsing and flaking away, baring hard angles beneath. The flowers and grasses that had bloomed in a hundred colors all crumbled into dust and scattered on the wind.
As the last of its Mana dissolved back into nature,
Nanoda knew that the Skyvein Dragon had passed on—and yet its body had not vanished entirely.
What had been jungle was now a vast, barren range of stone.
Perhaps wild grass would push up through the cracks one day. That would be a very long time from now.
"Good night, Skyvein Dragon."
Watching the horn fall away into drifting ash, Nanoda crouched and patted the stone shelf beneath her feet.
She let herself settle.
Then, combing her fingers through her tangled hair, she flew toward the highest peak that remained.
On its flat summit sat a small booklet, placed there with care.
The last remnant of the barrier seemed to have protected it.
Not even the Skyvein Dragon's fall had shifted the spellbook a hair from its original position.
"This is the legend-class spellbook?"
She took a deep breath and opened the flimsy little thing that hardly deserved to be called a book at all.
Magic circle after magic circle, annotated in a crooked, antique script.
And Nanoda discovered that she… couldn't read a word of it.
Human spellbooks these days were all refined translations, prepared so that ordinary Mages could learn from them.
Take Qual's Killing Magic, the spell that had been cracked open: simplified and strengthened, it became the general-purpose attack magic Humans relied on today.
Hand an ordinary Mage the original version of Qual's Killing Magic to unravel, and without Frieren's monstrous talent and centuries of experience, they might never learn it in a lifetime.
There was nothing for it. Nanoda brought the booklet home and left it with Qual to study.
Qual was the older generation's magical genius of the Demon Race, after all.
The moment he touched the contents of that little booklet, he threw himself into the research and forgot the world existed.
According to the researchers working under him, Qual didn't come out of his laboratory once in more than two months.
Then, early one morning, Qual came rushing to Nanoda's residence to report.
"Whoever invented this magic must have been a genius. It genuinely overturns common sense. It deserves to be called legend-class."
Praise that high left even the perpetually composed Nanoda a little giddy with anticipation.
"So what magic is it, exactly?"
Qual pushed up his monocle and grinned.
"Magic that makes a rooster lay eggs."
____
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