Beneath the Dragon's Tongue

Before men carved their histories

in stone or wax or skin,

the dragons kept the chronicles

in embers scored within

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their caves of ribbed obsidian

where no torch dared to pass—

each breath a living parchment,

each flame a moving glass.

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They wrote of how the mountains rose

in one great exhalation,

how stars were but the cinders

of their first conflagration.

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The oldest among them (scarred and wise

with one milky moon-blind eye)

would tell the hatchlings trembling:

"To breathe is to defy.

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For fire forgets, and men deceive,

but ash remembers all.

We are the earth's own memory

before the final fall."

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Then came the knights with iron tongues

who spoke in whistling blades,

who took the dragons' lexicon

and burned it into shades.

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Now when the desert wind howls

through canyon and through keep,

you'll hear the vowels of dragon-speech

where no lips move to speak.

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And scholars wonder at the scripts

that crumble at their touch—

not knowing parchment yearns to be

a dragon's tongue once much.

From the Blistered Folios of

The Lost Books - "Libri Perditi"

Where even silence smolders.