Guardians of Fire and Stone

The dragon’s wings carve the scorched air, each beat synced to the pulse beneath us—that slow, molten churn I can feel in my bones. Down there, the earth splits its skin, bleeding light. The mantle is hungry, devouring devours itself to birth this fire. Convection’s endless dance: stone flowing like water, continents adrift on currents older than bones. This isn’t destruction. It’s the planet’s heartbeat.

Invisible, there are microbes down in the cracks where water meets magma: feasting on hydrogen, breathing sulfur, thriving in the dark. They don’t need sun or solace. They need only the Earth’s whispered secrets, the chemistry of chaos. The dragon banks, and for a moment, we hover above a river of fire. I think of the core, that molten engine, its heat a relic of collisions from before time had a name. I close my eyes and feel it: the mantle’s breath, the microbes’ silent hymn. We are all guests here, riding the back of something vast and restless and alive.