On that bright world beneath the unbroken shield,
cities glowed like embers cupped in a giant’s hand.
The sky was glass, the seas were tame,
and men wrote laws upon the stars and called it wisdom.
Deep under mountains, the fountains slept,
chained in stone, humming old forbidden songs.
A hairline crack in heavens dome, a shiver in the deep—
no one heard it over the music of their own praise.
Then the shield rang like a wounded bell,
and the first star fell screaming through the sky.
The fountains broke their cages,
silver knives of water tearing roots from the bones of the world.
Towers folded like paper in a furnace wind,
crowns rolled empty through halls of drowning kings.
The sky came down in sheets of fire and flood,
and the golden age sank without a grave.
All that remained were fragments:
a tale of giants, a garden lost, a flood that climbed the mountains.
We call it myth so we can sleep,
yet the ruined stones still lean toward heaven, trying to speak.
When thunder walks the ribs of the earth,
and oceans rise like a thought we tried to forget,
something older than our history stirs,
whispering, “Remember the shield, and how it fell.
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