When the worlds and the community I loved were treated like a line item, something to sunset, optimize, and move on from, this is the myth I built to stand against that. The dragoness doesn’t come to beg the empire to explain the cost; she comes to guard the memory of everyone who found a home there. It’s grief turned into fire, and a promise: you can rename the gates, but you cannot make the village unborn.

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
I climbed the hill with lava in my ribs
And winter in the letters they sent down
Behind me, all the lantern-built villages
Ahead, the polished empire and its crown

I knew the old name buried underneath
The first soft word they gave the dream to wear
I knew the new one forged of chrome and distance
I knew the king who learned to breathe that air

[Pre-Chorus]
So I called the hidden names
And the valley changed its sound
Because memory is a creature
And it wakes when truth is found

[Chorus]
Dragoness on the hill
Whip of fire, throat of frost
I did not come to beg the empire
To explain away the cost
I came to mark the broken promise
I came to guard the living dead
All the worlds they planned to bury
Rose like stars around my head

[Verse 2]
Below me moved the armies of abstraction
Metrics, road maps, maintenance, "for now"
Above me, old ghosts circled like witnesses
Waiting for someone to teach the sky how

To hold the names of those who found their bodies
To hold the names of those who stayed alive
To hold the names of all the tiny temples
Built in a realm they thought would not survive

[Pre-Chorus]
I was not born for empire
I was not carved for war
But every time they touched the sacred
I became a little more

[Chorus]
Dragoness on the hill
Calling emperors by name
If you build a throne from distance
Do not curse the ones who came
To strip the gold from off your language
To drag the marrow back to light
I stood where they would end the story
And turned the ending into sight

[Bridge - Spoken / Ritual]
Before the mask, there was a promise.
Before the promise, there was hunger.
Before the hunger, there were people.
And people remember.

You can rename the gates.
You can salt the fields.
You can close the road.
But you cannot make the village unborn.

[Verse 3]
Now every comment is a bell in midnight
Every witness sets another stone
And what began as grief became a border
No king can cross and call his crossing home

Because this ground is made of lived devotion
Of tears and jokes and meetings after dark
Of worlds inside of worlds inside of bodies
Of one true wound that learned to answer back

[Final Chorus]
Dragoness on the hill
Not because I wanted flame
But because the dead were speaking
And somebody had to name
The hand, the mask, the shattered covenant
The cost beneath the polished throne
If the empire fears my memory
It's because it knows what it has done

[Outro]
So let the banners tear in weather
Let the gilded chambers ring
I am not here to haunt the kingdom
I am here to guard the spring