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.