It is rumored that dragons sleep near, just off the coast of our dreams. Our days are short, and our troubles grow along with the darkness. We are alone and mad here in our isolation. We live in heaps of blight and scarce, scraggly vegetation, good for nothing but lighting our fires. Our trees are all dead; the branches crack and snap like brittle bones. It was not always like this. Once this was a green place, full of memory and music. Once it was, perhaps not paradise, but clean, whole, a lively place at least. There was a sense that things were growing, becoming. There were so many rhymes then, so many songs, burbling up from the soil and rivers like laughter. I was training to be a singer myself, learning to sound both the new and also the ancient notes, learning to weave the stories of the kingdom’s heroes into complex melodies. My brothers were learning to be great kings, like the kings of the days long past. There was a sense that the people were renewing themselves, and the people dreamed of a golden age come again to the world.
