19/03/2026
LULLUBY FOR TANATEROS
[Verse]
Love and death entwined as one,
One heart burning, double-tongued.
Eros trembles through the night,
Thanatos keeps watch in sight.
[Chorus]
In this dance of wound and light,
We cradle shadows through the night.
Through the ache, we learn to stay,
In the twilight, love won’t sway.
[Verse]
Bound together, fate was drawn,
Echoes breathe from dusk till dawn.
Hold me close, but hold me true,
What is split still pulses through.
[Chorus]
In this dance of wound and light,
We cradle shadows through the night.
Through the ache, we learn to stay,
In the twilight, love won’t sway.
[Bridge]
Hands like whispers trace the scars,
Life and death beneath the stars.
One heart beats through fear and trance,
In this grave and tender dance.
[Chorus]
In this dance of wound and light,
We cradle shadows through the night.
Through the ache, we learn to stay,
In the twilight, love won’t sway.
Stalker did not fall asleep at once.
Even in sleep, his body still remembered the crystal, the resonance, the light that had entered not through his eyes but straight into his skull, into that depth where memory and Essence could no longer be fully told apart. Sleep did not come all at once. It circled him first, like the white sea around the bathyscaphe. Then the darkness softened. Then the cabin disappeared. Then even the sense of ordinary human boundaries was gone.
At first he thought he was falling.
But it was not a fall. Nothing was pulling him downward. He was being held.
Taman-Bi was no longer a planet. It unfolded around him as a vast living silence, and within that silence a form slowly emerged—not landscape, not sky, not crystal, but something maternal, too immense for any simple name. It was as if the white planet itself had become a body capable of holding him. Its light was no longer blinding. It was warm, milky, deep. It was not the kind of light that judges or tears memory open. It was the kind of light that lulls.
He wanted to rise, but could not.
And only then did he understand why.
He no longer possessed the familiar measure of a human body.
Beneath him lay his own weight—vast, ancient, covered not in skin but in plates of light and shadow joined in a difficult pattern. He felt the long curve of one neck, the second weight rising from his shoulder, the force of a coiled spine, the heat inside his chest, enormous forelimbs resting somewhere below, beyond ordinary perception. He lay curled as only those creatures curl whose strength is so great that even sleep must be handled with care.
A dragon.
Not a metaphor.
Not a symbol.
Not a beautiful allegory for his character.
Essence.
He wanted to turn away from that knowledge, but in dreams it was impossible to lie to himself the way one lies in waking life. Taman-Bi had already stripped away the human phrasing, leaving only the form from which it had grown.
He was two-headed.
One head felt familiar to him—the one that turned toward the world with longing, hunger for closeness, masculine tenderness, memory of light, memory of lost embraces, of women who had expected warmth and protection from him. This was the head of Eros, turned toward the world, toward breath, toward touch, toward promise.
The other was quieter.
Not dead—worse. Clear.
It did not seek love. It already knew the price of every bond. It saw the ending in the beginning, the fracture inside the kiss, the ash inside the fire, the solitude inside the embrace. It had no pity for illusion. This was the head of Thanatos—not monstrous, not bloodthirsty, but terrifyingly lucid. The one that could not be fooled by life and therefore always appeared cruel to the living.
And both were his.
Not two forces fighting over him.
Not angel and demon.
Not a choice between darkness and light.
One being.
One heart.
One dragon.
Then he understood why he had been so tired of himself for so long. The world demanded that he be one thing. Women expected Eros. His enemies sensed Thanatos. His allies wanted a leader. His lovers wanted a man. The dead wanted a son. The living wanted a guide. And all this time he had tried to live with two heads as though it were enough simply not to look at one of them.
In 6D Lucerion, he had renounced his wings. Fought with Thanateros and defeated him.
At the time, he had thought that might make his fate lighter. That if he refused to rise, refused to remember fully what he had been designed to be, he might remain closer to the human order. Almost normal. Almost safe. Almost fit for love.
But in the dream, that seemed naive.
Renouncing the wings had not erased the bloodline.
Refusing height had not changed the heart.
A gesture could be severed.
Essence could not.
And then Taman-Bi became Mother.
He did not see her face at once. First there were hands—vast, pale, not fixed in any final human form. Then came the movement of light along his scales, slow and lulling, as if the planet itself were stroking him along the spine. Then he heard a voice, though not with ears. It moved through the crystal of the world and through both his heads at once.
Do not be afraid of what you were born to be.
He wanted to answer, but words meant nothing here. One of his heads lifted—the living one, exhausted by its hunger to be loved not as a function, not as an archetype, not as a beautiful monster, but simply as a being. The other remained still, yet even in its stillness there was attention. Even Thanatos listened to the Mother.
Taman-Bi rocked him.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly. The way one rocks an infant. The way one rocks a sick animal. The way one rocks something that has gone too long without sleep.
And that was the most terrible part.
Not judgment.
Not revelation.
Not sentence.
Tenderness.
She was not cradling the human in him. She was cradling the whole dragon. She did not choose one head against the other. She did not say: this one I accept, and the other you must heal before bringing back. She held both. Eros—as a living wound. Thanatos—as an inevitable lucidity. And the heart between them—as something worthy of existence even in its division.
Love and death entwined as one.
He did not know what language the words were spoken in—whether the language of dreams, of song, or that pre-verbal tongue by which mothers speak to beings before they can understand speech. But the meaning passed through him immediately.
Love and death are not enemies.
They are interwoven.
They beat inside one being.
They do not cancel one another.
Two souls beating, hearts combined.
No, he thought in the dream. Not two souls. One—simply too large for a single face.
Eros whispers through the night,
Thanatos stands, a haunting sight.
Yes. That was how the world saw him. Eros on the outside: in the body, the voice, the attraction, the masculine grace. Thanatos within: as the dark vertical axis, as the gaze from which others want to turn away because it knows too much about endings.
In this dance of passion’s plight,
We cradle shadows in the light.
And Taman-Bi truly was cradling his shadow in the light. Not burning it away. Not exiling it. Not curing him of it. Simply holding it.
Then he saw his wings.
Not as part of his body—as memory. They were folded somewhere beyond his present form, enormous, black and gold, as if night and dawn had once learned how to grow from the same spine. He understood then that the wings had never vanished. He had only renounced the right to feel them. But the Mother remembered them.
Hands like whispers trace the scars…
Yes. Exactly that. Hands like whispers. Light touched the old scars on his draconic body, and every scar answered with a memory: Lucerion, refusal, flight, women he had not saved, women he should never have touched, father, mother, Po***ck, the wings he had cast off—not with a blade, but with the inward decision never again to be too large for the human world.
Life and death, beneath the stars.
Beneath the stars. Beneath the crystal. Beneath the Dome and beyond it. Always the same.
Our hearts beat in a rhythmic trance…
That was the strangest thing of all. Not the two heads, but the heart. It beat steadily—vast, ancient, almost unbearable in its simplicity. And both heads were subject to it. They did not fight. They did not argue. They simply existed as two directions of one will.
Then Stalker—or the dragon, or whatever being Taman-Bi had returned him to—understood not with thought but with the whole of his body:
he had not ceased to be Thanateros by renouncing his wings;
he had not ceased to be two-headed by learning how to speak with human beings;
he had not become less dangerous merely by becoming more beautiful to the world;
but neither had he become less worthy of love.
That last knowledge was the hardest to bear.
Because he knew how to war against his own darkness.
Against his own bloodline.
Against fate itself.
But against the thought that even such a dragon could be rocked to sleep by the Mother, he was defenseless.
In the twilight, love will stay.
Love remains not when darkness disappears, but when darkness is no longer denied.
He fell into deeper sleep.
And in that sleep the vast white Mother rocked him as one rocks something that had once been an infant, then become a monster, and in the deepest part of itself had never ceased to be somebody’s child.
When he wakes, he still will not know how to name this knowledge.
He will still be angry.
Dismissive.
Bitterly ironic.
He will still hide behind roughness, behind masculine fatigue, behind old habits of mockery.
But somewhere beneath all his human layers there will remain a memory:
Taman-Bi once held him not as a pilot, not as a son, not as a mistake, but as a two-headed dragon—
and did not turn away.