Rite of the Next Sovereign

More about Rite of the Next Sovereign

Long before the eldest chronicles were set to script, before the first kings of dwarves
and men shaped language into law, there was a moment—unmeasured now,
unrecoverable—when the deep places of the earth were not yet hollowed by time,
but opened by intention. In those vanished ages, when the world still held its first
warmth close, the Matriarch of Fire descended into the stone-womb beneath the
mountains and arrayed her treasure not as hoard, but as hallowing. Gold was her
altar, gems her vigil-lights, and the cavern itself bowed beneath the burden of what it
was asked to witness.

There, in a circle carved by no mortal hand, she set the unbroken egg of her lineage
—the ember that was to become the next Sovereign, though no tongue of that era
had yet shaped the word. Light fell upon it in a shaft as narrow as prophecy, and the
Mother, encircling it with her coil, kept the vigil that only dragons know: the long,
unblinking watch in which time is held still until destiny gathers enough weight to
move again.

It is said that on that day the mountains rose a fraction higher, as though to stand
guard. Rivers altered their young courses, bending unknowingly toward the cavern’s
hidden heart. Even the air in distant valleys stirred with heat it could not name, for
the world itself recognized the moment set before it: the passing of sovereignty from
what had ruled to what would rule after all thrones of mortals had turned to dust.

No record speaks of the hatching; none could. For when the shell finally broke and
the new Sovereign’s fire touched the cavern roof, ages collapsed like brittle leaves,
and all lesser memories were burned clean from history. Only the Rite remains—
carved not in stone nor story, but in the quiet certainty that the age now lived is not
the first, and will not be the last shaped by a dragon’s birth.

And though the cavern has long since fallen to ash and silence, some say that on
nights when the stars shift in their long wanderings, the gold of forgotten hoards
glimmers faintly underground, as if recalling the day the world itself knelt to witness
the rise of its next Sovereign.