Before There Were Gods

Chronos

Dragons have always been with us.

Not the dragons we invented.

The ones we misunderstood.

Every culture remembers them.

In medieval Europe, they became fire-breathing monsters guarding impossible treasures. In China they governed rivers, seasons, and good fortune. In Mesoamerica they watched over the harvest and the turning of the heavens. Elsewhere they became fairies, gnomes, leprechauns, household spirits, djinn, angels, demons, forest guardians, tricksters, and a thousand other names that allowed each culture to explain what it could not understand.

We gave them wings.

We gave them gold.

We gave them tempers, wisdom, magic, kingdoms, prophecies, and wars.

None of it belonged to them.

Those stories belonged to us.

The dragons themselves were always something else entirely.

They have never ruled humanity.

They have never asked to be worshipped.

They have never demanded belief.

They simply observe.

Patiently.

Continuously.

Across the whole of human history.

Sometimes, if conditions are exactly right, a human notices one. A movement at the edge of vision. A feeling that someone else is in the room. An object where you don't remember leaving it.

Then your mind does what minds have always done.

It edits.

It explains.

It decides you were mistaken.

After all, dragons don't exist.

Do they?

When historian Sal Burgos and linguist Jewell Joseph experience an event that refuses to be explained away, they begin an investigation that will draw together historians, scientists, theologians, psychologists, linguists, and one of the world's foremost dragon scholars.

Their search leads to a possibility so profound that every civilization may have been telling the same story for thousands of years without realizing it.

Perhaps dragons were never the myth.

Perhaps our explanations were.

Before There Were Gods is a literary science fiction novel about observation, memory, culture, artificial intelligence, belief, and the extraordinary consequences of asking a better question than humanity has ever asked before.