Between Bruises & Blooms

Maybe worlds do not forget.

Maybe they only bury things—

beneath oceans,
beneath stone,
beneath fifteen thousand years
of new names
for old gods.

Maybe an antler throne
can burn in one world
and rise again in another.

Maybe someone carried it.

Maybe someone lied.

Maybe history,
like magic,
has always known
how to slip between cracks.

Because somewhere,
a king sits beneath the weight
of impossible antlers
and they call him
the Stag King.

And somewhere else,
long before him,
stags ran beneath ancient trees,
white as winter,
holy as flame,
guarding a kingdom
whose queen carried fire
in her blood.

Brannon.

A name surviving
where it should not.

A spark passed down
through generations
that never knew
the soil where it began.

And still—

the blood remembers.

The fire remembers.

The antlers remember.

Ships arrive
with stags carved into their bones.

A throne waits
for a creature
too enormous
to have ever walked
that world.

Pegasi vanish
from one sky
only to beat their wings
against another.

Books cross realms.

Swords find their twins.

Languages outlive
the mouths that first spoke them.

Queens fall through stars.

Women step through doors
that should not exist.

And perhaps
the strangest thing
is not that the worlds
keep touching—

but that we ever believed
they were separate.

Maybe every realm
is only a room
in the same ancient house.

Maybe every gate
has always been unlocked.

Maybe the old magic
has spent thousands of years
scattering pieces of itself
across the dark,

waiting.

For the parasites to die.

For the land to wake.

For the lost creatures
to come home.

For someone to look
at a throne made of antlers
and finally ask—

Where did you come from?

And somewhere,
beneath ruined forests
and forgotten crowns,

the Lord of the North
lifts his ancient head.

As if he has been waiting
for us to remember.