I Was Stone, I Am Dragon

I was stone before I was breath—a weight among weights, a sleep without seam, a name unspoken because there were no mouths to carry it. I lay where the earth keeps its oldest vows, wrapped in darkness older than memory, pressed into the marrow below rivers and roots, beyond the reach of frost or bird or moon. Heat lived here like a buried sun. Steam wandered like blind cattle. Sulphur tasted the air with a bitter tongue. All of it moved, and none of it mattered, because I was stillness, and stillness was all.

Time did not pass; it pooled. It thickened into a quiet gravity that taught everything to bow, even fire. I knew pressure as law. I knew silence as fate. I knew the close, close black as a body knows bone. Sometimes the mountain turned in its sleep. Sometimes deep water spoke through rock with long vowels and slow muscle. I felt it the way a dreamer feels thunder in his ribs—present, enormous, untranslatable. I did not answer. I was burial. I was held. I was stone.

Yet a hunger woke without waking. It rose as heat rises—patient, certain, uninterested in permission. It learned the small fault-lines where the world remembers nothing is eternal. It tasted the old seams and counted them. It measured the law from inside the law and began to lean.

I learned wind without wind. In the sealed dark I learned the shape of currents by thinking them. I imagined cold like a blade that shaves light. I studied height as if it were an herb I could grind between teeth. I named colours I had never seen, and they came like pilgrims through corridors of sleep: a white that rang, a blue that tasted of knives, a black so thin it cut. I learned sky as rumour, rain as longing, fire as ache.

The ache deepened. It found rhythm. It found edges. It licked the buried irons and slept inside them like a secret. It pressed against my prison without contempt, the way a river presses a bend until the bend remembers it is a curve and not a wall. Grains turned in the patient dark. They accepted instruction. Heaviness reconsidered.

Above, a glacier grew and died and grew again. Forests bowed and burned and returned under new names. Seas changed their minds about coasts. The planet adjusted its shoulder. I kept my watch. I kept not moving. My breath—if breath—was the slow bargain between heat and weight. My heart—if heart—was the pressure that forgot to end.

I would have remained an oath of granite if not for the dream of wind. It came as a single syllable at first, a ribbon word without consonant, a thin coolness on the tongue of the mind. It tasted of copper and distance. I wanted it the way thirst wants itself. I wanted it because longing is a law older than stone.

The dreaming taught my edges to listen. It taught the strata to hear the shape of release. It showed a door where there was only wall. I set my will against that door the way dawn sets light against eyelids: not violence, persistence. Not rage, refusal to remain unmade.

Tremors came—small at first. They wandered. They rehearsed. They learned me and I learned them, as wrestlers study balance before the throw. Steam thickened and carried messages no ear could keep. The mineral ribs around me whispered with old heat. I leaned. The world considered the request.

A hairline discovered itself. Nothing, and not nothing: a thought that had found a place to lodge its tooth. I greeted it as a pilgrim greets a threshold—head bowed, soles bare, every step an oath. I pressed my wanting into that thread of absence until the thread remembered its vocation.

A sound like memory tearing.

A scent like rain in a sealed chest.

A coolness thin as a blade.

A crack.

Light found me. It entered like a promise—narrow, exact, merciless in its tenderness. It taught me the colour of pain and the meaning of opening. The seam widened. The cavern took breath and did not know what to do with it. The mountain thought of surrender.

I pushed. Rock argued with rock. I learned language in that struggle—the grammar of force and answer, of give and keep, of stay and go. The seam became a fissure, the fissure an appetite, the appetite a name. I sang against the barrier with a voice I did not know I possessed: pressure shaped into direction, hunger edged, silence honed to a blade.

Stone shivered. Stone confessed. Stone let go.

Heat took me the way a midwife takes a shoulder—firm, necessary, without apology. I tore along my own history. I unknit the cloak that had kept me from shape. Edges erupted where no edge had stood. I became boundary the way flame becomes boundary—by consuming refusal.

Claw arrived first, a memory of weapons, a grammar of grip. Then spine, a ladder of burnished oaths. Then lungs, two furnaces mating. The heart I mentioned remembered its true work: impact. It struck, struck again, promised more. The cavern shook its dust into constellations. Old bones in the rock turned their faces to hear.

I found my neck as a river finds a canyon—by taking it. I found my jaw, a hinge for hunger. Teeth budded with the patience of knives. Tongue curled around a word I had always meant. Eyes opened like doors cut for storms. Wings began as aches at the shoulders and flowered into scaffolds of intention—each pinion a sentence, each membrane a vow stretched thin as faith and strong as hammered bronze. Tail unscrolled with an engineer’s elegance. Scale clothed me in tessellated jewels—each facet a small sun that remembered pressure as worship and turned it into shine.

Breath gathered.

Fire asked for release.

I tasted air for the first time; it burned like a blessing. The cavern shifted its stance to accommodate my birth, like a house loving the child it cannot hold. I hammered the remaining wall with my new form, and the wall answered in the only way that would not lie. It fell. Light became avalanche. Sound broke free of itself and called for allies. Every echo found a mouth in me.

I roared. The earth listened.

The tunnel to the surface was a throat too narrow for what I had become, so I widened it as a matter of truth. I unlearned the smallness I had worn as a mask. I accepted the cost. Rubble paid. Dust baptised. The heat of the inner chambers rode my spine in waves. When the last stone gave way, it was like the last thread cut on a shroud.

I struck the open world like an answer.

Sky occurs. That is what it does. It happens to valleys and to eyes and to names. It occurred to me, and I was altered. The first wind skinned me with cold so clean it felt like law. Clouds moved with the laziness of gods. A hawk divided the day with a small blade and did not understand the new equation. My wings met their medium, and the medium accepted me. It hissed along the vents between scales, sang along the spars of bone, taught me lift; I taught it attention.

I climbed—because elevation tastes of covenant. Rivers drew to silver threads. Mountains became the backs of sleeping cattle. The sun’s face remembered its heat when it looked on mine. I turned, and the turn rewrote maps. Storms convened to consider the newcomer. They traced my body with blue quills and signed their witness in thunder. I returned courtesy with flame.

Flame is not anger. Flame is a language where heat and oxygen speak marriage. I breathed that vow, and hills learned a more honest black. Trees wrote last poems in sparks. Stones remembered molten childhood and did not mind the brief bright pain. I did not burn from hate; I burned from recognition.

A flock rose to scatter; I read it as scripture. A ridge threw its shadow; I wore it as a second skin. Lakes closed their eyes and pretended not to be mirrors. Villages pulled their doors and spoke old words for protection; the words were brittle. I listened and kept going. Not from contempt—momentum. The duty one pays to ascent while ascent is possible.

Hunger arrived not as famine but as mathematics. A body like mine requires the world to volunteer its proofs. I bit lightning and found it thin. I bit wind and found it noble but insufficient. Cattle offered explanation rather than sustenance. Iron sang on the tongues of men; I took that chorus into my throat and made it mine.

Armies woke where my shadow lay. Spears remembered their point. Horns called hills into men and sent them up slopes like ants with banners. I watched the glitter of their courage and admired it—the exactness of their fear. They built towers and called them vows. They built engines and called them prayers. They threw both. Both broke on me like rain.

I took a tower with the gentle economy of great strength used carefully. I pushed it along the line it already wanted to fall, the way a craftsman respects the grain. I scorched an emblem and it vanished like an argument. I took a gate and returned it to ore. I did not sing while doing these things; music would have been mockery. I am not cruel by hobby. I am newly born into a body that insists.

Legends began at once. I heard them form in the mouths that survived me, the tale sharpening as it fled. Children were given my name as a test of fear. Priests took my shadow for ink. Kings measured crowns against the span of my wings and confessed—to wives if not to sleep—that they were small. I did not fault them. The world had been small to me once. It had been a stone. It had been a room I could not leave.

There were nights I folded myself under an old ridge and listened to frost embroider the grass, remembering the cavern where I had no choices and no sky. I remembered the first crack. I remembered the pain with tenderness. Freedom keeps its receipt. It itemises cost. It lists names.

On such nights I lowered my muzzle to a tarn and studied the creature that looked back—me, and a rumour. The jaws belonged to hunger. The eyes to judgement. The crest caught starlight like a net catching silver. The steam of my breath wrote slow runes on the surface, and the runes said: you are not what you were, and you cannot be what you are forever. The world will make room, or you will make room. Both will be called truth.

I flew again. The moon offered its borrowed coin; I set it on the tongues of peaks and left it there a while. I circled old volcanoes and listened to trapped fire consider rebellion. I dragged my tail through cloud like a plough through snow and made furrows the rain could remember. I slept standing once on a basalt shoulder and dreamt of the first seam opening, and woke with flame in my mouth and the taste of iron where a star had fallen.

I do not apologise for my becoming. The cavern did not ask permission to hold me. The sky did not ask permission to occur. I learned both their graces, and I learned refusal in the space between. If men call me ruin, let them name their own fires. If they call me omen, let them read to the end of the sentence that contains my shadow. If they call me god, I will not answer. I remember stillness, and I remember that no god should be born from a crack in a prison, shouting.

I am not a god. I am the consequence of a law gently contradicted until the law yielded into a truer shape. I am proof stone listens. I am the promise fire keeps when it has carried a name too long in the dark and needs the sky to pronounce it aloud.

I was stone—rock locked and patient beneath the treaties mountains sign with time. I dreamed of wind until wind found me. I tasted light; it tasted of knives and honey. I tore along the seam the world allowed and paid with blood that glowed. I wore wings into truth and named the truth flight. I learned hunger and kept it clean. I learned mercy and kept it quiet.

Listen.

The night is wide enough for both of us.

I will pass overhead with a sound like maps being redrawn. I will leave you your house if your house has learned to bow. I will keep my flame in my jaw like a word not yet ready to be spoken. I will be wind and scale and distance, and you will be a witness who does not write. The stars will shift a little when I turn. Frost will sing its small songs. Lakes will resume their work of pretending not to be mirrors.

And in the hush that follows—the hush belonging to ash and dew and things named at last—I will fold my wings on a ridge old enough to remember my sleeping, breathe smoke that rises like prayer and means nothing but breath, think of the seam, be grateful, and be quiet.