Chapter 849 — The Meeting

She swept beneath the clouds, flying toward the earth. Along the edges of her wings were great steel pinions like blades and bones; the rune-flickering armor was steeped in flowing arcs of magical light that answered the last lingering glow in the clouds. She was clearly flying toward the Autumn Palace—and on that head, covered by a strange visor and brow-guard, a pair of confident eyes swept without restraint toward the Autumn Palace.

Those eyes came to rest at last upon Sir Gorosh.

She let out a roar in midair, then suddenly adjusted her angle, skimming past the Autumn Palace's balcony at an extremely close distance, and seemed to descend toward the open ground behind the palace.

Only then did Asarena's eyes blink twice. She realized she had had her mouth open the whole time, and only now did she remember to speak. "Was that... Maggie?"

Sir Gorosh was as dumbstruck as Asarena, his reaction even half a beat slower than hers. Hearing her words now, he started as if from a dream and opened his mouth, yet his face was still full of disbelief. "That... that should be her, but..."

"She is flying—not gliding, but truly flying, and that is clearly some kind of arcane device," Asarena said, quickly recovering her capacity for analysis and thought, her words racing. "It seems that is what she gained in the human world—Sir Gorosh, is she showing it to you?"

"I do not know..." Sir Gorosh said instinctively, then suddenly turned and strode toward the door. "But I know she is finally willing to meet me!"

On the road here, this knight had talked to Asarena the whole way about his philosophy of education, had spent the whole journey planning how, if he met his daughter in the Cecil Empire, he ought to maintain his reserve, how he ought to preserve his dignity and authority. But in this moment, all those boasts and schemes he had spun along the way seemed to have vanished.

Asarena watched the knight's striding back, and suddenly thought of herself twenty years ago, when word came that her father was gravely ill and she had been forced to return from the human world to the Holy Dragon Duchy—thought of pushing open the long-unseen door of home and seeing the father who had written that his "condition was critical, that he could scarcely drink water, that his days were numbered" come charging toward her in the courtyard, face glowing with health.

—To this day she still could not beat him in a fight, and her father looked healthy enough to live at least another five hundred years.

"Are all fathers such fools..."

The dragon-marked witch could not resist a soft murmur, then quickly hurried her steps to catch up with Sir Gorosh, who had already run out the door.

No one stopped them.

Soon, Sir Gorosh came upon his daughter in an open space near the Autumn Palace whose purpose he could not quite guess.

Maggie had already landed in that open ground—it was set aside specifically for her dragon form, and also served as a resting place for several dragoon flyers registered to the civil administration hall. It was, in effect, her landing pad, and ever since she had mastered the steel wings, it had become the spot where she paused to rest each evening after her pleasure flights.

She was still holding her dragon form, which bolstered her confidence. She watched her father come running up the path lit by streetlamps, a red-haired lady following behind him.

She knew that lady—Asharena, an "idol" to many young dragonkin, a woman who had truly traveled through the human world. Her adventures had, in a sense, been one of the things that had spurred Maggie to make up her mind to leave the Holy Dragon Duchy.

But today was not the time to speak of such things, and Maggie felt that if she brought it up in front of her father, it would most likely put Lady Asharena in an awkward position.

"Maggie," said Sir Gorosh, coming to a halt before the dragon-shaped Maggie. Though the surroundings were lit by magic-crystal lamps, he could not help taking two more steps forward, as if he wished to see his daughter's present appearance more clearly, "it really is you..."

"Father..." A low rumble came from the dragon's throat, carrying an indefinable sigh, and she lowered her head. "It has been a long time."

A massive, sharp, chillingly imposing iron chin came crashing down upon Sir Gorosh like a great axe—for perhaps a thousandth of a second, the good knight even suspected that his long-absent daughter meant to do away with him.

Fortunately, he reacted in time, raising his hand in the final second to seize that cold, hard steel. With a resounding thud, he cracked the ground beneath his feet, and Maggie's slightly flustered voice came down from above: "Ah! Sorry!!"

"I assume you did not mean that..." Sir Gorosh's slightly trembling voice came from below. He let go, calmly pulled his foot from the crater, and tried hard to assume the manner of a stern father, intending to ask Maggie just what this getup and that strange iron chin were about—he did try, but as he tugged his other foot from the hole, Asharena beside him burst out laughing.

"S-sorry..." Asharena said helplessly, fighting to restrain herself, "but I truly could not help it..."

The dragon-marked witch's laughter utterly demolished all of the good knight's dignity and presence.

Yet in another way, it also saved this father and daughter, who had not known how to begin.

Sir Gorosh looked at Maggie, and Maggie lowered her head to look at her father, and at last the two of them could not help laughing as well.

Miaoshuwu