Wait. A few things don’t add up.

Dorothy breathed a low sigh, a leaf dropping after Banshee’s tale. Yekase felt the same ache, but her iron logic kept grinding like millstones.

First, her telling was too inside the scene. It tasted like frost on skin, not a hand-me-down myth. How could every line and gesture be etched so clean? Where did the recorder stand, in that meeting of fates?

Second, the “girl” in the story acted off. At first, she flinched and shrank, a stray sparrow in a storm. That fits a cast-off villager, walking and weighing suicide. But halfway through, after Sindagosa cursed Nidhogg and spilled her name and dream, the girl flipped. She turned bright, probing, moving like spring after ice. The swing felt like weather gone mad.

Third, Yekase had read about the Human–Dragon Millennium War in the books. But in Russia’s official version, there’s no dragon named “Sindagosa” at all. You can tweak history for politics, sure, but you can’t delete a main actor without ripples. The butterfly effects would flash like fish under ice, impossible to drown.

She still remembered that “war to end the war,” also called the Dragon Hymn War. It had one and only one lead: Aurora, mistress of Sidonia Dragon Fortress—Auroragosa.

What’s Sindagosa to her? What’s the “girl” to her?

An answer pressed like a knock behind thin paper. Puzzle pieces swarmed in her skull. Words rose to her lips, then scattered like sparrows. She stunned herself instead.

And the Icewater Sprite—where does it thread into this tale?

“I hope you remember this story… and someday, pass it on.”

Banshee spent her last breath on that line, then melted into the seat like strings cut from a puppet.

“We’ll remember,” Dorothy promised, voice steady as a hand on warm tea.

Lu Yao and Yekase traded a look. Doubt pooled in their eyes like dusk.

Yekase slid out her phone and tapped a few words.

[Undying Flame of a Hundred Nights: What do you think?]

[Peacewalker: Using Infinite Force Perception, can you confirm she’s human?]

[Undying Flame of a Hundred Nights: She’s got a sorcery base. If it’s not active, it proves nothing. Not far from a psychic’s native base. Call her lab-made if you want, but no hard proof.]

[Peacewalker: So it’s possible.]

[Undying Flame of a Hundred Nights: Yes.]

Dorothy kept talking with Banshee. Only Harrison stayed blissfully outside the storm, hands steady on the wheel.

Clear weather opened like glass. The SUV skimmed the black-and-white tundra, a lone leaf-boat on a gray sea. Even at 120 kph, it felt like standing still.

Soon, trees rose ahead like a green tide.

An evergreen broadleaf forest, sprawling where the cold should bite. Subtropical leaves in a polar breath. Without Sorcery, it made no sense. They all remembered the report: “turns its surroundings into an oasis.” The words clicked like teeth. This was the detour’s heart.

They stopped at the fringe of green.

Banshee walked in slow, as if stepping into a memory. Harrison stayed with the car. The three girls drifted after her like swallows.

A lake lay in the forest’s heart.

Its water was glass-clear and jade-bright. Reeds and pondweed swayed, soft as whispers. As if they had stepped out of polar night into a warmed, kind pocket of world.

With a gift like this, no wonder the Shadow Realm War caged Icewater Sprites for study.

Around the shore stood wood homes braided into the trees. They coiled upward in a single spiral, a wooden helix reaching for light. Through frames that were window or door, they saw tiny furniture inside—toy-perfect, meticulous as a modeler’s dream.

Yet no life stirred. Only silence, like snow falling.

“The Icewater Sprite folk here…”

Yekase realized, for once in a long while, she had guessed wrong. Those palm-sized chairs belonged to miniature hands. The Icewater Sprite was small, a pocket-born magic being. So what exactly was Banshee, whose frame fit a human cloak?

Banshee undid her collar. The fur cloak dropped onto the grass like shed skin.

From her arms, a tiny bird of ice-crystal burst out. It glowed a deep blue, wings flicking like shards of sky.

“Happy birthday… and sleep well.”

The little bird climbed and climbed, a star-chip on the wind. It vanished into the clean, high blue.

“Icewater Sprites,” Banshee said softly to the empty sky, “are the ghosts of children lost on the snowfields.”

Ghosts. Dorothy had heard something like that from a tutor. Sorcery streamlines knot sometimes, snagging into nodes under rough weather and age. Those natural fields birth strange happenings, and sometimes, magic life—like the painted creatures in every Cosmic Bubble. Many could have been born on main-world Earth, if the knots had lasted.

A thousand years ago, it wasn’t rare. Under human feet and fires, the knots thinned and vanished. The magic beings went with them, as if swept by a warm flood.

So it made sense that the poles, where few feet tread, still kept old conditions like seeds in ice.

“After the Dragon Hymn War, civilization kept climbing,” Banshee said. “Fewer Icewater Sprites are born each year.”

“At least… the last Sprite in this era died on its first birthday in peace. It went back to sleep in the sea of stars.”

“…My work is done.”

…

“Who are you?” Yekase asked.

“I’m Banshee—a banshee.”

A knife-edged wind blew through, laced with dry snow.

Yekase’s hand moved on reflex. Her blade whispered free. The spot where the girl had stood was empty. Even the cloak was gone. Only pressed grass held her outline, a shadow stitched into the lawn.

“Banshees actually exist?!”

Dorothy snapped to, memory flaring like a lantern. “You know her?”

“The ‘banshee’—a death-messenger from Irish lore. Before the Industrial Revolution, Europe was full of sightings. They appear where deaths gather, and ferry souls across the water.”

Lu Yao folded her arms. “And then the Shadow Realm War caught them and caged them?”

“Legends say they don’t fight. They’re one of the rare magic beings who aren’t evil, but get blamed anyway. People also call them ‘the washerwomen at the ford’…”

What a casual label.

“So I can think of her like the black-and-white wardens of the dead?” Yekase asked.

She knelt by the lake and slipped her hand in. The water still held warmth, like a palm on fevered skin. The Sprite hadn’t just given plants cold-resistance. It had swapped the whole pocket of climate for subtropical air.

That Sorcery was ebbing now, fading with the last Sprite’s breath.

“Got it,” Yekase said. “Time to become one with heaven and earth.”

“Eh?”

Yekase started undressing.

“Eh—eh—eh?!”

“Kids, no peeking. Back to the car.” Lu Yao covered Dorothy’s eyes with a warm hand and turned her around. They walked out of the little oasis as it cracked.

Yekase shed everything and slid into the lake. The water cradled her like late spring.

Before her eyes, the mild green forest caved in like a sand pagoda. Warmth flaked away, leaf by leaf.

Maybe Banshee had come because people slaughtered Sprites in heaps. Maybe some of her tears were for the researchers and fighters too. Death is a level snowfield. It covers all.

Yekase had thought Banshee was likely an Icewater Sprite, and maybe, just maybe, the “girl” in the tale. Now the truth had shifted. A new variable. Time to remap the board.

What birthed the Icewater Sprite? The Dragon Hymn War had to touch it. Otherwise why repay a funeral favor with that story, like a lantern passed hand to hand?

The water cooled, breath by breath.

Yekase could evolve to swim in slush and smile. Plenty of trained people could, too. But her sensors kept working. They told her the warmth was only a borrowed dream.

“…Ah.”

Then this was the “girl’s” dream, wasn’t it?

Yekase fished out her phone. A thin line of satellite signal blinked. She placed a call.

—Hello? How’s it going, hit a snag?

“I’m soaking in the unfrozen lake that Sindagosa used to soak in.”

…

How do you know that name?

Yekase rolled her stiffening neck and leaned her slim back on a cold stone. “Dear sacred dragon, here we’ll truly merge—”

“This is your real past, isn’t it, Slavic girl who traveled with a dragon?”

…To completely erase Nidhogg after it became an evil dragon, we had to merge as one. Together we unleashed the Ice-Light Dragon Hymn. After the war, we stayed merged to steady the people. In time, the two wills blurred and became one, impossible to part.

“Good. I was afraid you’d say you were actually Sindagosa and the real Aurora died long ago. Not a lifespan twist. You scared me.”

So these Longlifers…

Xiaoyuan said he was seventy-seven, yet he’d fought the Independence War. Aurora said she was a bioweapon from the October Revolution, then the timeline jumped back by centuries. Maybe Sandryon and Alicia Alicia also tucked away their true pasts behind silk screens.

It’s funny. They’re all old ladies anyway. Does seventy-seven versus a hundred, a hundred versus eight hundred, even matter under the same moon?

Yekase laughed, then the laugh snared on a thought. A century from now, she might stroll the streets of Twin Towers City and lie she was seventeen for a student discount. The smile slid off her face like thawed ice.