I’m an Alraune, a plant monster girl… or at least, I’m supposed to be. For some reason, I’ve turned into the blue vine-haired Dryad.
It looks like I’m dreaming about the older Dryad sister’s past.


I must’ve fallen asleep almost immediately after listening to Lady Dryad’s story.
Maybe absorbing the older Dryad sister caused the memories inside her to awaken within me.


I quickly realized that this dream was about the events that happened fifty years ago.
That’s because the events unfolding before me matched the human Sage’s story that Lady Dryad had told me about.



There, standing alone together in the forest, the older Dryad sister and the man who seemed to be the Hero of that time faced each other.
The Hero spoke to the older Dryad sister.


“I’m well aware that humans and spirits are of different races. Even so, I want you to come with me. I swear I’ll make you happy for the rest of your life!”


W-Wait, is he proposing to her!?
W-W-W-What should I do!?
I feel like I’ve stumbled onto something I really wasn’t supposed to see, and now I feel kind of guilty.

Actually, this is my first time ever seeing a romantic exchange like this between other people firsthand.
I feel bad for watching, but I’m super curious about how this’ll turn out…!


The Hero presented the older Dryad sister with a bouquet of blue flowers.


“I wonder how many times you’ve given me these flowers now…” the older Dryad sister murmured to herself.


The Hero had been bringing her flowers almost every day, and for some reason, scenes from those days began surfacing in my mind.
At first, the older Dryad sister had rejected him because she was a forest spirit, but little by little, this incredibly persistent Hero had began to grow on her.
And before she knew it, they had grown close enough for her to open her heart to him.


“Very well. I will devote my life to you.”


They reached for one another, their bodies entwining as they embraced.
The love between them, a human and a spirit who had crossed the boundary between their races, was finally fulfilled.


────The scene shifts.



Now, the Hero, the Sage, and the swordswoman were standing before the older Dryad sister.


“Please, let me talk to you alone one more time,” the Hero pleaded desperately.

“……I can’t trust you,” the older Dryad sister replied.

But when the Hero said, “Then I’ll leave my sword behind. You’ll feel safer if I’m unarmed, right?” she believed him and agreed to speak with him alone one last time to talk things through.


The older Dryad sister teleported into the sanctuary first and waited for the Hero to enter.
But to her surprise, the Hero suddenly charged through the sanctuary door with a sword in hand.

The Hero’s blade gouged out the older Dryad sister’s left eye.
That was when I realized—this was how she’d gotten the scar beneath her eyepatch.


“So asking to talk was a lie… your plan was to kill me all along……!”


The older Dryad sister’s vision went black.


“What happened!?” I heard the Hero shout.


“He’s the one who attacked me, so what is this man even talking about?” the older Dryad sister muttered coldly to herself.


When she lost her left eye to the Hero’s attack, something inside her snapped.
The chains of reason that had restrained her were severed by the Hero’s sword.


When she opened her remaining right eye, she saw the Hero had taken off his helmet and was slowly approaching her, a worried look on his face.

‘He must be trying to make me lower my guard so he can attack me with his sword again.’
‘I won’t fall for that twice.’

With that thought, the older Dryad sister summoned a poisonous blade and plunged it into the Hero’s body.


The tables had turned.
The older Dryad sister broke into a grin, only to notice what the Hero was holding in his hands.


“You had a sword just a moment ago—so why…?”


There was no sword in the Hero’s hand. Instead, he was clutching a single blue flower.
At the sight of the blue flower, the memory of the Hero’s proposal flashed through her mind.


Betrayed by the person she loved most, the older Dryad sister was consumed by a violent rejection of humanity itself.
A searing hatred surged within her, fierce enough to make her want to wipe mankind from existence.

And yet, at the same time, a small, lonely ember of love still smoldered—the part of her unwilling to forget the Hero.


As though afraid of her feelings for her lover turning to ash and disappearing, she gently picked up the blue flower the Hero had been holding.
Cradling it caringly in her hands, she tucked it into her hair.


The flower was a forget-me-not.

In floriography, the flower’s meaning is, “true love.”
It also meant “don’t forget me.”


It was the very same flower that the older Dryad sister had used to brainwash humans.

Maybe she chose the blue flower for her mind-control ability because she herself could never forget the Hero.


──────

────

──



I opened my eyes.
My consciousness was pulled out of the dream and back into reality.


At the very end of the older Dryad sister’s hazy, dreamlike memories, I saw one last thing.
It was the older Dryad sister, burying the Hero in his grave.


“So that’s what happened…”


The Hero’s grave hadn’t been made by Lady Dryad but by the older Dryad sister.


After leaving the Hero’s Helmet at his grave, the older Dryad sister departed from the forest and joined the Demon King’s army.
Later, when she tried to return, she found that her younger sister had erected a barrier around the forest.

From that point on, the older Dryad sister never saw the Hero’s grave again.
Not until today, when the sanctuary fell…


That was when I realized I still had the Hero’s Helmet sitting inside me after I had swallowed it whole.
I hurriedly spat it out through my lower mouth.

That was close.
If I’d left it in there, I might have ended up digesting a sacred relic.

As I wondered whether I should return the helmet to the Hero’s grave, the young Dryad sapling called out to me.


“Mother, what is that?”

“This is… a helmet.”

“…Mother, may I take a look?”


The little Dryad seemed fascinated by the Hero’s Helmet.
When I passed it to her with one of my vines, she carefully held it tight against her chest.


“For some reason, I feel safe when I’m holding this.”


Even though her memories were gone, maybe a part of the older Dryad sister’s heart still lived on in this young spirit.


“If you like it… then… you can have that… helmet.”

“Really, Mother? Thank you so much!”


I’m not sure whether it’s actually okay for me to just give away something like this, but I was the one who recovered it, and Lady Dryad is nodding in approval, so it should be fine, right?
The little Dryad seemed delighted with it too, and as the one who brought her into this world, seeing her smile makes me happy as well.

All right, it’s decided.
If I remember correctly, the older Dryad sister’s name was Feagismeinnicht, right?
Then I’ll call this little one Fea-chan!


As I gently patted my new daughter Fea-chan on the head, I thought back to the memories of the older Dryad sister I had just witnessed.


There was something strange about the scene where the Hero slashed the older Dryad sister’s left eye.

By that point, the older Dryad sister had already cut off one of the Hero’s arms, so he should have been missing an arm.
And yet, when he charged into the sanctuary, sword in hand, I could’ve sworn he still had both.

But when she opened her eye again, the Hero standing there was missing an arm and holding a blue flower.

It all happened in an instant, so I couldn’t be certain.
The older Dryad sister was confused at the time too, so she didn’t seem to remember it very clearly either.


Still, I couldn’t shake the thought that the Hero who charged at her with a sword and gouged out her left eye might have been an impostor.
After all, the real Hero had left his sword with the Sage, and when we actually saw him, all he was holding was a blue flower.


And that wasn’t the only reason I suspect there was a fake Hero.


That morning, the Hero and the older Dryad sister had each gone to see the other and tried to break off their relationship.
Yet neither of them seemed to remember doing such a thing.
Maybe the people they met that morning were impostors, one posing as the Hero and the other as the older Dryad sister.


There was one more detail that made me suspect there were impostors involved.


“Lady Dryad… did you go to… the Hero’s tent… that morning?”


The older Dryad sister had seen the Hero and her younger sister kissing.
But I just couldn’t imagine Lady Dryad doing something like that, especially after she had gone out of her way to ask the Sage and the swordswoman to take care of her sister.


“I have never had that kind of relationship with the Hero, nor have I ever met with him alone. The person who appeared as me in the Sage’s story was most likely someone disguised as me.”


So now we know there was an imposter posing as Lady Dryad too.

There was someone there that day who could transform into the Hero, the older Dryad sister, and Lady Dryad.
But could someone capable of disguising themselves as not only another gender, but even an entirely different species, really exist?

No matter how much of a master of disguise someone might be, transforming into the Hero and both Dryad sisters in such a short span of time seemed impossible.



Just as I was thinking that, I noticed a small shadow on the ground.


I looked up and saw a man flying through the sky.


He was a dwarf with a body shaped like a barrel.
He looked quite old, with hair as white as snow.


──Why is a dwarf flying through the sky?

But that question vanished from my mind the moment I saw the little girl the mysterious dwarf was carrying over his shoulder.


“Little witch!”


She’s not responding.
Is she asleep?


But why is the little witch, who was supposed to have gone into town after the priest, being carried around by a dwarf?
And then there’s the fact that the dwarf is flying through the air. I have no idea what’s going on anymore.


The flying dwarf looked down at us and mumbled.


“So Feagismeinnicht got taken down, eh? Well, I’ll be damned. Never thought the Crimson Flower Princess was this powerful.”


The mysterious dwarf examined me with a look of admiration.
Either way, everything about him screamed suspicious.


“Still, the Crimson Flower Princess really does look just like that saint. I heard she died, but perhaps the most reasonable explanation is that an Alraune mutated after absorbing her corpse.”


This dwarf knows about me from when I was Iris.
I don’t remember ever meeting this dwarf back when I was a saint, but he must have seen my face somewhere before.


“Who… are you?”

“Me? Hmm… since you’ve been taking care of this lass, I suppose I owe you some thanks. Been a while since I’ve had to introduce myself, anyhow.”


As he spoke so casually, the dwarf’s form suddenly began to distort.

It was exactly like what happens when the little witch transforms into a white bird.
In the blink of an eye, the dwarf had transformed into a slender woman.


The one flying through the air with the little witch over her shoulder was no longer a dwarf, but a young woman with white hair.


I was pretty shocked the first time the white bird suddenly transformed into the little witch.
But the surprise I felt this time far surpassed what I’d felt back then.


That’s because I already knew the face of this white-haired woman.

Not because I knew her as Saint Iris.
And certainly not from after I became an Alraune.

I’d seen that face in my dream only moments ago, so there was no way I could’ve forgotten it.


The white-haired swordswoman I had seen alongside the young Sage in the older Dryad sister’s memories.

For some reason, the white-haired woman now floating above us had the exact same face as the swordswoman from back then.

***

Author’s Note:

Thank you for reading.

Next Time: The White Witch