Dragon’s Garden

The ruins were scorched with fire. Great swaths of black soot covered the city. Stopping dead as I rounded the corner of a fallen building, I stood gaping at the forgotten corpses. Blackened bones; a bed of ashes; nameless. Muttering silent prayers for the three or so souls there, I walked on, feeling their eyeless gazes following my every step. There would come, I knew, the march of vines, thorny tendrils of single-minded nature. The Dragon’s Garden, I’d heard it called. Something in the breath of those dread serpents bred beauty out of death, and already I’d seen the buds with their blood red tips sprouting. Even here, where the dead lay unburied, the wild roses had already taken root, and the empty rib cages where hearts once beat were but the trellises of the invisible gardener who tended the places deserted by man.