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Prologue: Storm -enemy attack-
That night, an island in the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago was assaulted by an intense storm. Though not as strong as a typhoon, the island was still pounded by heavy wind and rain. The island folk took shelter in their wooden houses, listening to the sound of the buildings creaking under the strain of the wind and the rain beating on their doors. It was a sleepless night filled with worrying their homes might collapse.
“Daddy, I’m scared...”
A family of two parents and two children were huddled together. Holding his youngest tight, the man who was master of the house said, “It’ll take more’n this wind to blow our house away.”
“Come now, don’t be scared. Go to sleep,” said the children’s mother, trying to put them to bed, and then it happened.
Whoosh... Thud! Ker-crack! Wind howled, and a sound like a violent crash shook the island. Almost like the impact from being shelled by a warship.
“Wh-What was that sound just now?” Even the man was scared by that impact. “That weren’t no natural sound.”
“Dear, you don’t think it’s... that, do you?”
The blood drained from the man’s face at his wife’s question, and he hugged his children tighter, unable to respond. This family’s battle against terror would last until dawn.
The rain and wind let up as morning approached. With the quiet breaking their sense of tension, the man and his family fell asleep. Later, as the light streamed in, the man woke and went outside to find skies so clear that yesterday’s storm seemed like it was all a lie.
As he was still feeling relieved to have made it through the night, he noticed there was a disturbance down by the shore. Hurrying to the beach where people were, he found other islanders gathered together, murmuring among themselves.
“Did somethin’ happen?”
As the man approached, one of the other men who were already there turned around. “Oh, did somethin’ ever. Take a gander at this.”
He was pointing at a large hunk of stone, which was more than twice the height of a grown man, sticking straight up out of the beach. The man cocked his head to the side as he looked at it.
“There weren’t nothin’ like this here yesterday, right?”
“Mm-hm. Mm-hm. There’re chunks scattered all over, too.”
Looking around, he could see more pieces made of the same kind of rock lying around on top of the sand. What was more, the ornamentation on them made it clear that they weren’t just hunks of stone. They were clearly man-made.
The man felt like he recognized this hunk of rock.
“Could this be... a stone bridge?” he asked.
Looking amongst the rubble, he could make out what appeared to be remnants of an arch structure.
“Mm-hm.” The other man nodded. “We was all sayin’ it looks like a stone bridge.”
“But there weren’t nothin’ like a stone bridge on this island, right?”
“There weren’t. A little island like ours never needed a big, impressive bridge. A wooden one’s been good enough.”
“Well, what’s this stone bridge doin’ here, then?”
“We dunno. That’s why we was all talkin’ about it.”
If this were just an ordinary boulder, they might have imagined it being brought by the storm or a landslide, but what were they to make of a stone bridge, something they didn’t have on this island, stabbing into their beach?
The islanders all cocked their heads to the side in confusion.
“This is terrible! Terrible!” a young man ran over shouting.
“Oh, what’s terrible now? You’ve gone right pale,” the man asked him.
The young man caught his breath, then explained, “They say... ‘it’ appeared on the neighboring island, last night.”
“““?!”””
Immediately the air grew tense, and the islanders pale. People in the archipelago were so terrified of this dreadful being that just saying the word ‘it’ was enough to send fear down their spines. Had he said it was the neighboring island? Was that the slightly larger island, visible from this one?
In the dead of night, during the storm, it appeared close to this island. If things had gone just a little differently, they might have been attacked instead.
The young man said, “Things are a real mess over there. They say it leveled half the island.”
“No way...”
“What’re we gonna do...?”
The islanders seemed dejected.
“H-Hey...” the man, who was still looking at the bridge, said. Everyone turned to look at him. He pointed at the bridge. “Isn’t this the bridge from the neighboring island?”
““.........””
It can’t be... said no one. They started to think it looked like the bridge on the neighboring island. But still. Even if the other island was only a stone’s throw away, what was their bridge doing stabbing into this island’s beach?
“Now that I think of it, there was this wooshin’ sound, and a loud impact durin’ the storm last night,” the man said, recalling the night before.
When they thought about what his account meant... they all shuddered as one.
“You’re not tellin’ me it threw it?”
“This huge thing, over the sea?”
“No, no... I can’t believe it...”
However, none of them could completely deny it.