For a dragon who spent the last hundred years of her life sealed away, but awake—
It was no wonder her memories were all a mess.
Her sanity was almost gone, too.
And her true name? Oh, she had forgotten that a long, long time ago.
If not for that stranger—a spirit? A higher being?—who started visiting her, she might have succumbed to the madness as well. Okay, she said 'stranger', but she was also rather familiar.
Someone who knew more about her than she herself did, and—
Told her that a boy would come, one still weak but with great potential, and would free her.
And while she had no chance of tracking time down there—
A man named Konrad did, in fact, show up one day in that salt mine.
To say it was love at first sight wouldn't exactly cut it.
From what this strange soul had already told her, she had fallen in love with Konrad long before they met. And when he called her Maple for the first time—something clicked.
More of those lost puzzle pieces of her memories started to return.
A whole bunch of them when she met this Lily person, too.
And as hostile as she tried to act towards her—
It didn't take her long to realise she was the same stranger helping to keep her sanity for a while.
So, who was she, and why did she help her earlier?
Maple still couldn't figure that out until she met the man who actually sealed her.
The Green Mage, or, as people had known him by then, Maou Midori.
Oh, she was so eager to kill him. To take revenge. To help Konrad until she took her last breath, as long as she could destroy that guy. But none of that was to be.
Lily revealed the truth she already knew and finally synced up their minds.
That she was, in fact, her future self, and to make sure there is a future she can exist in—
This Maou Midori guy had to survive, too.
Now, that was a tough pill to swallow.
At first, she even ignored it. She gave it her all in that fight. But as Lily had already predicted, their duel—quadriel?—ended in a draw. And, well, in yet another disaster.
By the time she came to her senses in Tokyo, she was a different girl.
Hence, she changed her name to Kaede, not only to blend in better with the locals, but—
Because now, she understood.
Only Konrad and Maou Midori together could have made her the greater demoness, Lilith.
She had to make peace with that reality, and when she met with that cursed sorcerer again—
Okay. Yeah, no. That was a lie.
Her first action was still to jump at his throat with everything she got.
Well, thank the spirits, as Earth had no ambient mana in its atmosphere, it wasn't that much.
And with her powers drained, she finally calmed down, and, um—
Midori-kun and Kaede-chan had become, uh—enemies? Rivals?
Something that still hated each other. But at least they hadn't tried to kill each other all the time.
They tolerated the other's presence, and by the time Konrad had arrived—
As Lilith predicted, he found a way out in only a few weeks.
And while in a sense it was a failure—he set her on her path.
Like a fulfillment of a prophecy.
While she couldn't stick to her lover, she could actually become the future self who'd—um.
Ruin Konrad's life? Actually torture him and lure Lucifer to him?! And then become his wife?!
Okay. Claiming that everything Lilith said had made sense would have been a lie.
But she knew that Konrad and Maou Midori—heck, even that little emo girl, Yuki-chan—had escaped. They all ended up exactly where they needed to be, and as for her—
The adventure that turned Kaede into Lilith over thousands of years had only begun.
Not that it was smooth sailing.
In fact, much of the info her future self gave her turned out to be false. But she expected as much. Since she gave her those tips, the timeline must have already changed.
Like, Konrad's rescue had happened two weeks earlier than it should've.
He had also found a way out of Tokyo without confronting Lucifer's other puppets.
They were doing way better than Lily predicted, and—
That meant the future she should have lived couldn't exist anymore, either.
But those guidelines weren't all for naught.
She knew how far she would have to fall to crawl back where she had to end up.
One of the first milestones along that long and perilous road was to confront Lucifer, and—
Um. That little girl who distracted him wasn't in her synced memories either. But she was way too familiar. By then, Kaede had wandered through time and space for a good thousand years.
And when she finally tracked that fallen angel to his fiery hiding place—
He was already fighting someone.
Brigida Brave.
Not like they spent that much time together.
If anything, her future self will, at some point, which made it all the stranger that she was here.
But, well. Who said only her own future could change?
If someone opened Pandora's box with all the accidental time travel—
It would remain open forever.
In fact, that little girl was much stronger than she expected. Had she not run into her, her first confrontation with Lucifer would have been so much tougher.
This way, the two of them managed to beat him back somehow, and—
"T-thank you," the little girl bawled. "Thought I'd never make it out of here alive. M-my parents already died. And if not for you, I would have, too, Lady Lilith. Y-you're the best."
"Whoa, calm down, sweetheart," Kaede yelled. She was also panicking a bit.
They fought off that bastard; she opened a portal, and they escaped, but—
Dealing with a lost child was not on her to-do list.
"I'm not actually who you think I am," she tried to calm her down. "Although I'm sure we met, too, but, um—you might know me as Maple, I guess? And these days, I call myself Kaede."
Not that it would matter. But the girl stopped crying and blinked at her, confused.
"Y-you're not the greater demon Lilith?" she asked, sniffling.
"Well, not yet. I've a long road ahead if I want to catch up. But at least I left myself some hints on how to do that, and—um. You weren't in them at all, so how'd you end up here?"
That's when Brigida told her about her past two or three years.
About Lucifer's invasion of Kasserlane.
How it caught her family off guard, how her parents died, and—
"All I could do was tie their souls to their wedding rings," she sniffled. As if it were that easy. "But when I thought I could finally make it back home—I ended up here instead."
"I see," Kaede hummed. "So it's still only that time Konrad had returned from Earth, huh?"
And meanwhile, she had already wandered for a thousand years across the dimensions.
Ugh. She still had about forty-nine thousand to go.
"Well, I can return you to Kasserlane," she offered. "But if I did it now, you would have no way to rescue your parents. The thing is, though—I happen to know a necromancer who could."