Pip: BoSt Dragon Stories has a dragon who just defeated a demon, and now his reward is finding out he has to erase the girl he loves from his own life.
Mara: That’s the territory we’re in today — a forbidden spell, a rewritten destiny, and a guardian who knows far more than he’s been letting on. Let’s start with the moment Longze learns what it will cost him to save Freya.
Longze’s Choice: Rewrite the Past, Lose the Future
Pip: The central tension here is a classic impossible bargain — Longze can save Freya from a dangerous fate, but only by altering the timeline so completely that his entire relationship with her simply never happens.
Mara: Asmund lays out exactly how it works. The pivot point is a summer solstice festival, and here’s the mechanism he describes: “The crucial time here will be the specific summer solstice festival when during which Jedrick’s wanton gaze had fallen on unsuspecting Freya, accompanying her brother through the many stalls that sold custom-made shiny trinkets and treasured items of all kinds; and more precisely, the time when he left her for a moment and went inside a shop to purchase her a surprise gift.”
Pip: So the entire catastrophe hinges on one brother stepping away for thirty seconds to buy a birthday present. The smallest ordinary kindness opens the door to everything that follows.
Mara: And the fix is equally small — Asmund says Freya’s brother Alec simply needs to take her into the shop with him. Inside, a young man named Hagen Kirk, son of Mayor Gudmund Kirk, happens to be there having an heirloom broach repaired. He sees Freya, and a completely different future begins.
Pip: Asmund spells out that future in some detail — Hagen is described as noble, brave, and devoted, the Kirk family is powerful enough that Jedrick would never dare trouble Freya again, and she lives happily into old age with three children. It’s a genuinely good outcome. For everyone except Longze.
Mara: Which is when Longze asks the question that reframes everything: why is this incantation forbidden, kept hidden in the archives, never used to prevent catastrophes? Asmund’s answer is that it can only be performed by one of two beings who carry a primeval, ancient bloodline — the Heavenly Emperor, and Longze himself.
Pip: Longze, who would have preferred, in his own words, to simply be an ordinary dragon.
Mara: That revelation connects directly to Asmund’s long silence about Longze’s parents. Ingemar, Longze’s father, had been Asmund’s close childhood friend — someone he admired deeply. When Ingemar and his wife Eldrid were charged with a transgression Asmund believed was fabricated, he petitioned the Heavenly Emperor for leniency alongside divine dragons, immortals, and ancient guardians. The petition failed.
Pip: The story doesn’t dwell there, but it doesn’t need to. Asmund looking away, still outraged after all this time, says everything about what that verdict cost him.
Mara: Then the chapter snaps back to the present — Longze is mid-conversation with Freya, explaining why it took so long to find her. He tells her the demon Sedit had woven a concealment spell around his lair, which hid her life signs entirely from Longze’s senses.
Pip: And Freya apologizes. Genuinely, warmly, without a trace of blame. Which, the narration notes, takes all the complaint right out of him.
Mara: The chapter closes on Longze suppressing the feelings her response stirs in him — aware of what she feels, aware of what he feels, and already knowing what the spell will require him to give up.
Pip: The next question the story raises is what it actually takes to set that spell in motion — and whether the Heavenly Emperor will sanction it.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is sacrifice framed as clarity — Longze doesn’t hesitate, even when the cost is himself.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see whether the Emperor agrees that erasing a dragon’s heart counts as a reasonable test of his abilities.
Leave a Reply