Inside the Rooster’s blood, worlds ignited before they were named, unfurling like fists breaking open into gardens stitched from lightning.
Each pulse wasn’t a beat — it was a cataclysm, a golden collapse, flooding empires into existence, soldiers born with crowns dissolving into parades across fields that shimmered with the memory of fields that had never been.
The beings there cracked themselves into form between one breath and the next — not stone, not flesh, not air — something sharper, something that remembered promises made in the blind white noise before the first star scratched its way open.
Cities tangled themselves into his veins, castles braided from the gravity of lost songs, temples buoyed on the hum where reality thins to a thread.
Each hymn was a blade:
Do not wake.
Do not wake.
Do not wake.
Because if the Rooster shifted, rivers would boil backwards into the mouths of mountains, rain would forget how to fall, names would bleach out of bones, and grief itself would burn until it could no longer remember the shape of sorrow.
The sorcerer-kings and poet-queens raced along capillary catwalks, bleeding thunder into the walls, weaving knots of breath and cedar and rain into braids tight enough to bind a god’s dream without tearing it apart.
They left gifts, frantic:
gardens breathing laughter too pure to ever wither,
suns folded out of silences brittle enough to slice dawn into ribbons,
waters hoarded from the wells where even hope had drowned.
Time inside the blood looped back on itself, tied into invisible knots only existence could trip over.
And while the Rooster slept —
we flickered.
We burned our tiny fires in the belly of a sleeping storm, sang songs to each other without knowing the language was borrowed, loved each other across the trembling mesh of a blood-dream that could never belong to us.
But now the threads are snapping.
The air behind the hours shivers.
The wrong noon yawns wider.
The heartbeat curls tighter, flinches like a dream about to become teeth.
In the crawl between tick and tock,
if you hollow yourself enough,
you will hear the last desperate river-song:
Do not wake.
Do not wake.
Do not wake.
Because if he stirs —
there won’t be darkness,
there won’t be ending,
there won’t even be forgetting.
There will only be the blank, perfect scream of never-having-been.
There is a moment in the desert, an endless stretch of heat and sand, where a man walks alone. He is wrapped in linen, moving against the wind, the weight of revelation pressing down on his shoulders. He does not question the voice he hears—it is God, it must be God. A thousand years from now, they will kill in his name. A thousand years from now, they will bow five times a day, press their foreheads to the earth, and call it submission. He will not see it, but it will happen.
History moves in whispers, in the slow-turning wheels of empires and the careful scripting of holy books. It is a fragile thing, belief, made real only by the sheer force of repetition. A thing spoken enough times, written in ink and carved into stone, takes on the illusion of permanence. And so it was with Islam.
It began with a man and a vision. And in that moment, it was real.
But history is not kind to those who freeze time.
The Weight of the Word
It is no small thing to build a world with words. It is no small thing to stand in the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, under an unforgiving sun, and speak of an unseen God. But where there is faith, there is always something else—power. And the line between the two is thin, the space between worship and control measured only by how tightly one holds the reins.
Islam, from its first breath, was never just a religion. It was law. It was politics. It was a nation before it was a scripture. And it was unyielding. The Prophet did not simply offer a path to God; he built a system that demanded obedience. There would be no negotiation. The words were final. The book was closed. And when the book is closed, the mind is too.
There is a flaw in this, a crack in the foundation. A book cannot evolve. A book does not learn. And yet, the world does. The world shifts beneath the weight of certainty, and when it does, those who cling to the past must either loosen their grip or be buried with it.
But Islam does not loosen.
The Hand of the Clock
There was a time, long before the minarets stretched into the sky, when the Muslim world burned bright with knowledge. In the libraries of Baghdad, scholars wrote of numbers and stars, of medicine and philosophy. They translated Aristotle, debated the structure of the cosmos, built the engines of modern science.
And then they stopped.
Or rather, they were stopped.
Somewhere along the line, the gates of reason were shut, locked with a key that fit neatly between the pages of holy text. The world had moved too fast, too far, and so the scholars were silenced. Innovation gave way to imitation. Discovery gave way to dogma. The light dimmed, and what remained was law, rigid and unchanging.
A system that cannot evolve is a system that will collapse.
It is a strange thing, to watch a great civilization retreat into its own shadow. And yet, here we are. The Quran remains. The hadith remains. The laws remain. But the mind does not move.
In the West, the church was broken long ago. The Enlightenment shattered the chains, tore apart the pulpits, replaced divine right with reason. The battle was fought, and though the scars remain, the ground was won. But Islam has not yet had its reformation. It stands now as it stood then—unyielding, absolute, unwilling to bend to the tide of history.
And what does not bend, breaks.
The Prophets and the Puppets
They say there will be no more prophets. Muhammad was the last. The final seal, the last word. But this is the greatest illusion of all—there is always another prophet. They rise in every age, whisper new truths, carve new paths. Some are real. Most are frauds.
To claim that no more will come is to claim that God has finished speaking. And if God has finished speaking, then the world is abandoned.
But the problem is not prophecy. The problem is power.
For when prophecy is used to build a throne, it is no longer prophecy.
To call Muhammad the final prophet is not a theological argument—it is a political one. It locks the door. It prevents challenge. It ensures control. If the gates are sealed, no new revelations can threaten the old ones. If the book is closed, no new voices can rewrite it. And so, the world of Islam remains frozen, its people chained to the past, its laws written in the ink of an empire that no longer exists.
The Last Man in the Desert
Imagine him again, the man in the sand. Alone, before the empire, before the armies, before the cities built in his name. He was not yet a legend. He was not yet a ruler. He was just a man. And in that moment, before the weight of history settled upon him, perhaps he still had doubt.
Perhaps he still wondered if the voice he heard was real.
Perhaps he still had the chance to be something else.
But history is not kind. And words, once spoken, cannot be unsaid.
