Dragonborn (an ode to Elder Scrolls Skyrim)

I. The wind names me, though I did not ask. It carves my title into stone, into sky, into songs sung by men who do not understand what it means to bear a voice that breaks the world.

II. I was not born in fire, but in forgetting. A soul split— man and more. The dragons call me brother. The mortals call me savior. Neither are wrong. Neither are right.

I have killed gods and warmed my hands by common hearths. Both acts required the same breath.

III. They see the blade, the Thu’um, the crown. But I see the dreams. The old ones. Waking beneath High Hrothgar, where silence is a language older than time.

I spoke to the sky, and it answered. Not with mercy— but with recognition.

That is worse.

IV. What is the cost of destiny? It is solitude. Not loneliness— but the vast, cold knowledge that no one else hears what I hear when the snow falls sideways and the earth remembers its bones.

V. I will not be remembered. The scrolls will lose me, as they have before. The Wheel turns. The names fade.

But let this be said: I stood when the voice returned. I did not look away when Alduin opened the sky. And I chose— not power, but burden.

For in the end, to be Dragonborn is not to conquer the world— but to carry its weight until it no longer needs carrying.