Dragon Between Past and Future

Where the Wing Remembers Both Shores The dragon does not choose a century. It is the century choosing itself through a body made of postponement and afterglow. One wing trails the last unburned page of a library that fell before paper learned its own name. The other combs holographic rain from towers that have not yet decided whether they will stand or become rumor. Between them the air keeps two calendars and forgets which one is running. Its scales are older than the word for scale. They remember the heat of forges that have not been lit, and the cold of stars that have already gone out in some other telling. Runes surface and sink like thoughts a city has not earned the right to think. Each pulse of light is both relic and prototype. Below, the streets are wet with what has happened and what is still negotiating its arrival. Neon writes on water that was once a glacier’s patience and will be, later, only a rumor of thirst. Foundations rest on the quiet of forests that still dream they are standing. Billboards advertise tomorrows already homesick for the dusk that has not come. The creature’s eyes hold the only honest weather: one the green of a memory that does not yet know it is finished, the other the blue of a question that has not found the mouth that will ask it. They look at us the way time looks at itself when no one is watching without pity, without verdict, only the long courtesy of attention. We live in the brief downdraft of its passing, that strange, merciful interval where the past is still unfinished with us and the future has already begun to miss what we have not yet lost. Nothing is promised except the turning: the slow, luminous hinge of a wing that belongs to every hour at once and to none of them completely. The mist it leaves is neither ending nor beginning. It is the place they briefly recognize each other before the next uncertainty opens its quiet, necessary hand.