The Bone Crown

Day 3 of the 30 Days of Fantasy

It was not made in a forge.
It was unearthed.

Bone does not shine unless polished with forgetting.
And yet, the crown gleamed
wet with the tears of a fallen god,
each jag of it honed sharp on sorrow long past naming.

The stories say it was a god’s jaw once.
A lower one.
Split clean from the skull and bound with wire
twisted from oath blood and silence.

They buried it deep
so deep even the worms turned back,
refusing the taste of it.
It should have stayed there, pulsing faintly in the loam,
like a heart no longer tethered to anything living.

But someone dug.

Always, someone digs.
With maps scrawled in madness,
with lanterns that lit the way,
with dreams they call prophecy
and hunger they name destiny.

They found the crown beneath a tree
that had never bloomed,
at the base of roots
that whispered in tongues older than wind.
They brushed it clean, and felt it take root
Not in the hand but in the heart

The child who put it on
had never known strength before.
Had never felt their bones listen.
Had never heard the ground shift
beneath their name.
But the crown did.

It heard everything.
It remembered.

It does not command.
It does not need to.

The hands that once trembled
now still themselves in reverence.
The eyes that questioned
now lower in silence.
Whatever it asks, it does not ask aloud
yet it is answered.

They do not rise against it.
They kneel.

Still, the crown sits,
not as a prize,
but as proof
that man will wear
what should have stayed buried
if it gleams enough.

It has no jewels.
It does not need them.
The weight alone is worship.

They will call it legacy.
They will call it strength.
They will call it theirs.
But the earth remembers what was taken,
and the bones remember who once ruled.
And the silence left behind
is louder than any anthem.

The crown was never meant to be worn.
But now it is.

And the cost of stolen power
is always blood,
never gold.

~by Heather Patton / The Verdant Butterfly

30 Days of Fantasy — A Writing Challenge for the Wonder-Hungry

---