My mother's love song

"Well……"

Tiamat tilted her head and poked her chin with a slender finger.

"That's true. It must be a torture for you to stay in the cave and study all day.

Okay, you have until today to memorize all the remaining words and carve them on a clay tablet, and then complete the arithmetic problems I assign to you.

If you can do this before nightfall, I will teach you how to grow wings from your back at night."

"Eh, really? Mother has to make a promise with me!"

"Okay, okay, when has mother ever lied to you?"

Tiamat hooked his hand and said with a smile.

"It's a deal. As long as you can complete the homework I assign, I will teach you how to grow wings."

"Great!"

Rhodes smiled shyly and threw himself into her arms, accepting her touch.

"I love my mother the most!"

"Good boy, good boy... As long as you are willing to stay with your mother, I will do whatever you say."

……

……

……

Time passes day by day.

As the sun rises and sets, Rod grows up healthily under the gentle care of his mother.

In terms of knowledge, the mother has nothing left to teach her children.

The talented Rhodes mastered all the cuneiform characters on the ancient planet, and had long been better than his mother in arithmetic.

It's not just the knowledge that's growing.

His previously immature self-transformation skills have now reached the same level as his mother's [EX], and he can now easily transform his body into a giant body that looks down on a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Recently, when playing with Tiamat, Rhodes even found that his mother's power to move mountains and fill the sea, which seemed like godlike to him in the past, could no longer suppress him.

"Maybe I am stronger than my mother?"

The first time this thought came into his mind was when the boy and his mother were living together for ten years.

He found Tiamat in ecstasy and told her, "I will protect you from now on." Tiamat cried for a day and a night.

It was another quiet afternoon, and Rhodes stood alone on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

"What's on the other side of the ocean?"

Looking at the golden and calm sea, the antonym of "mother" appeared in Rhodes' mind for the first time.

【adventure】.

"Forget it. Actually, I'm not interested."

Rhodes stuck out his tongue at the terrible thought that suddenly came to his mind and hurried back home.

After that, everything remained stable and beautiful.

Tiamat still worked at sunrise and rested at sunset as before.

Preparing food for your beloved son or cleaning the cave.

Farming, hunting and fishing are her daily routine.

If there was any change between them, it was that Rhodes had recently begun to resist Tiamat's unconscious excessive physical contact.

Of course, this is not because I hate my mother, but because I like her too much.

Tiamat, who couldn't understand the boy's thoughts, always circled around Rhodes from time to time, or followed him behind as if she was afraid that her child would be lost.

For adolescent boys, this little trouble of fever can be considered a spice of life.

……

That night, Rod and his mother lay side by side on the straw mattress in the cave.

When he opened his eyes blearily, he found that Tiamat's dragon tail was wrapped around his waist.

I had clearly refused many times before, and my mother had said that she would not do this again next time, but for some reason she came to me again tonight.

Rhodes sat up from the bed, gently untied Tiamat's tail, and then looked down at her sleeping face in the moonlight.

Even though more than ten years had passed, her appearance had not changed, and she was still as beautiful as when they first met.

“Mmmmm…”

Tiamat slightly opened her cherry-colored lips, narrowed her eyes, and murmured.

"Drink more, drink more so you can thrive, okay?"

"What on earth are you dreaming about?"

Rhodes rolled his eyes and lay down next to her again.

He sighed. Was it him that was always in his mother's dreams...

Really...huh?

Wait...a dream?

Rhodes was stunned, and a chill ran down his back.

He had not had a dream in the more than ten years since he had lived with Tiamat.

Why have I never had any dreams and never felt confused about it?

After a brief moment of confusion, Rhodes showed an expression of sudden enlightenment.

Ahhh…I see.

We cannot dream because we lack the material for dreams - reality.

Without reality as the material, no one can weave dreams.

"……what."

Rhodes' memory gradually recovered.

It is only one's spirit that is in this world, and the real self is still in the battle with the [Army of the Two Kings].

After connecting my body to my mother's with the gold of the Invading Blade, I was dragged into Tiamat's dream.

No, it would be a bit inappropriate to say that this was Tiamat's dream. After all, this was a dream she created specifically for her children.

Tiamat probably used the Holy Grail given to her by Goetia and made a wish to create such a false world.

Everything in the dream does not belong to her, but exists to make me happy.

She must be able to dream within a dream for the same reason.

To Tiamat [the mother], I [the child] am the whole world.

Rhodes, who understood the whole truth, slowly closed his eyes and held the slender fingers of the girl beside him.

"Well... I like it here very much. I will live here forever with my mother."

The boy muttered as he wrapped his red and black dragon tail around Tiamat's cyan-gold dragon tail.

The next time he opens his eyes, he will forget the truth of this world forever and return to his daily life with his mother.

……

……

……

"So, why did it become like this?"

Standing in the endless darkness, Rhodes grabbed Tiamat's wrist and questioned her.

Tiamat lowered her head and hugged her shoulders, like a child who had done something wrong.

"I'm sorry...forgive me..."

Perhaps because his body was connected to the Noble Phantasm, Rhodes was able to fully understand Tiamat's sharp singing voice.

When he regained consciousness, what greeted Rod was not the morning with birds singing. He found that he was no longer in his bed at home.

The pitch-black space is more like an ocean than a universe.

This is the imaginary space where Tiamat's real body is located.

Because the mother's presence was too great and had affected the growth of her children, the goddess of creation Tiamat was exiled to this cold and dark abyss by her children.

“…Haha.”

The dream that I didn’t want to wake up from, the dream that I couldn’t wake up from, has finally ended.

The person who woke Rhodes from his dream was none other than his mother, the Lord of Dreams.

Rhode questioned her harshly, "It was you who imprisoned me in my dream on your own initiative.

Now he is ending the dream on his own initiative. What does this mean?

You should have grabbed my hand and said, 'Don't go, don't leave me...' That's what you should have done!"

"I'm sorry, I dragged you into this dream because I was obsessed with it for a moment...but Rod...you can't sleep anymore.

You in the dream will never grow spiritually, and I can't teach you any useful knowledge... You still have a place to go back to."

"I volunteered to stay with my mother!" he said.

Tiamat smiled and shook her head: "But... it is also the mother's job to wake her child from his dream."

""

Rhodes turned around speechlessly, and after a long pause he let out a long sigh.

"What a willful mother."

"Well... I must be an unqualified mother, that's why everyone..."

She said quietly, "I had no intention of leaving the imaginary world, but that man gave me a holy grail...

The golden Holy Grail is very beautiful, and it looks exactly like you when you were a child, so I accepted it...

Consider that golden cup as your replacement..."

Tiamat secretly raised his eyes, looked at the boy's back and asked cautiously: "Rhodes, have I caused you any trouble?"

"Really?... So that's what's going on."

Rhodes was stunned for a second, then said, "It's not a problem. You can keep the Holy Grail first."

Tiamat saw that his tone had softened and slowly walked over.

Hugging him from behind and resting her face on the boy's head, the mother murmured in a tearful voice.

"Thank you, Rod...

You are the first child who remembered me and found me, and you are the only child who is willing to stay with me.

I am really happy, so happy...

The hallucinations of these ten years are also... the happiest time of my life in billions of years. Just recalling the dreams of these ten years can sustain me for another 200 million years."

"It's not an illusion." Rhodes said calmly.

"……what?"

"The ten years I spent with my mother were not an illusion. It was neither an illusion nor a dream, but a reality that belonged only to us."

Tiamat nodded happily.

"Yeah... yes, it's not an illusion. Hehehe... Rod's speech has become so handsome.

In the past, he could only cry out “■■■[Mom]” and “■■■■■[I’m so hungry]”.

"Doesn't mother like the way I am now?"

Tiamat buried her face in Rhodes' hair and took a deep breath.