But Nawa—if that truly had been Nawa and not a phantom creation of my weary mind—seemed to believe in me.
Why?
That question burned hotter than all the others. Why would the Dragon of Bara, the Emperor’s companion, speak to me? Not once, but again and again, whispering in my mind. I was a nobody, a boy from a backwater island learning to hold a wooden sword without bruising his own foot. How could I possibly matter to the gods? Or to a mystical beast such as Nawa?
Son of the Goddess.
Weren’tallmen children of the gods? That’s what we were taught. The gods created the world and everything in it. We descended from them in some distant, unknowable way. So why single me out? Why name me specifically? What made me different from Daichi or Kenta or Teshi—or any of the countless other boys training in temples and shrines across the Empire?
Or the Samurai who were already masters of their arts?
Or anyone else who held more strength, more power, more . . . everything?
The darkness did not answer. Only the echo of Nawa’s words reverberated in my skull.
Then another question bloomed.
How had Nawa even spoken to me?
She had only ever spoken to me when we were close, in near proximity. Yes, she had spoken to me while we visited a shrine in the south of our island, but shrines were holy places. Surely, that allowed her to do . . . whatever it was she did.
But on this night, she was half a continent away, safe in the palace with her divine other half. I lay in the middle of a Buddhist temple, not a Shinto shrine. The monks’ martial magic was entirely different from the priests’ connection to the land and nature. How had she whispered to me as though the distance meant nothing?
My knowledge of dragons was beyond limited. I’d barely paid attention when priests schooled me in the pantheon, much less the Emperor and his worm.
Unless Nawa was . . . Unless the title “Dragon” was more than metaphor.
That made my skin prickle, made the darkness of my chamber feel heavier and more oppressive.
The legend of the tether, of the Emperor serving as man’s link to the gods, flooded my thoughts. Before, I’d believed the story, along with the celestial actors in it, to be little more than fiction, tales parents told their children to keep them abed in the depth of night. And yet, when Nawa spoke to me that first time, my eyes opened to the possibility that—
No. That’s ridiculous. There are no gods or spirits or—
But what other explanation was there? If Nawa could speak in my mind, if she could reach across land and sea to touch my thoughts, what was she? Truly?
What was the Emperor?
And were the gods . . . were they truly real?
I sat up, pressing my palms against my eyes, trying to think, to make sense of something that made no sense.
You must awaken.
Those words implied there was something sleeping within me. Something dormant. Something waiting.
But what?
I felt no hidden power, no secret strength, only exhaustion and pain and the constant, grinding awareness of my own inadequacy.
Was I reading too much into Nawa’s words? Was I hearing what my desperate heart longed to hear rather than what was actually there? Was I building fantasy from fragments because I could not accept that I was simply . . . ordinary and weak?
Maybe there was no deeper meaning. Maybe Nawa spoke to all students and this was some ritual or rite of passage. Maybe “Son of the Goddess” was just something the dragon said, a title without significance.
But even as I thought it, I knew the falseness in my thoughts.
The power in that voice—itscertainty—the way it had filled not just my chamber but my entire being, that was not casual or meaningless or false. Something was expected of me, something I had yet to understand and couldn’t imagine achieving.
You must awaken.
