Julias Gilliard

SPOKEN BY FIRELIGHT

Sit closer to the fire. What you have been told about this world is only the world's skin — let me show you what moves beneath it.

They will tell you the City of Gears is where history begins. It is not. Before there were gears, before there were walls, before men learned to fear the sky, there was a dragon — vast beyond counting, first of her kind, mother of magic itself. They call her many things in many tongues, but she is known best as the Sleeping Dragonbride. Her blood was not blood as you know it. It was Spirit given shape. It was the seed of every marvel this world has ever produced.

She loved a man once — a knight, the first of his kind, who carried the first sword ever forged with purpose. Theirs was a love that should not have been possible, and for a while, it wasn't tragic at all. But what is vast cannot stay small forever, and when she remembered what she was, she nearly unmade everything that loved her. So he did what love sometimes demands: he built her a prison from her own power, and called it the Midnight. And in leaving pieces of himself behind to do it, he became something smaller too — a wanderer, a teller of tales, a man who has forgotten his own name more times than he can count.

Her blood did not vanish with her. It seeped into the roots of the world, wild and untamed, and it was dangerous in that raw shape — it corrupted, it consumed. It took roots — real roots, real trees, real patience — to draw the poison out of it and leave behind something the world could hold without breaking. That gentled blood is what your city calls Nhalis. They tell you it is myth. They are wrong. They tell you it is dangerous. On this, at least, they are not entirely wrong — they simply do not know why.

The men who rule your gears did not create anything. They found what was already sacred, and decided it should be owned instead of honored. They built islands that float on borrowed power and called it progress. They built walls and called them protection, though you should ask yourself, always, protection from what — or protection of what, and from whom.

There is a boy who sings in your alleyways. Pay him no mind yet. That is a different fire, for a different night.

The flame remembers what the roots forget. And the roots remember everything.