The Ballad of the Dragon's Envy and the Water Bear's Grin

Canto I: The Apex and the Annoyance

The Dragons reigned. Their scales were night,

Their breath, the sun's forgotten light.

They hoarded gold and fear and flame,

And carved the world to speak their name.

They were the Lords of Scale and Wing,

The final, fearsome, perfect thing.

Yet in their cavern, vast and deep,

A bitter, petty secret slept.

It was the Water Bear, the Moss Piglet,

The microscopic, humble threat.

The Tardigrade, a name they spat,

A creature smaller than a gnat.

For dragons, though they burned the sky,

Knew fear of death, knew how to die.

A poisoned spear, a frozen peak,

Could make the mightiest dragon weak.

But the Bear? The Bear would simply wait.

It laughed at fire, it scorned all fate.

It dried to dust, it froze to glass,

It watched the eons slowly pass.

A vacuum's pull, a crushing weight,

A dose of cosmic, killing hate—

The Tardigrade would shrug and crawl,

Indifferent to the rise and fall.

And this, this tiny, silent grace,

Was an insult to the Dragon Race.

"We are the fire, the final word!"

The Great King Ignis roared and stirred.

"Yet these small lumps of cellular sin,

Can laugh at where our power ends and theirs begin!

They mock our might, they stain our pride!

They must be purged! They must be dried!"

Canto II: The Grand, Absurd Decree

The Council met in smoke and dread,

With parchment made of heroes dead.

The plan was simple, brutal, vast:

To make the Water Bear the past.

No gentle flame, no common blight,

But total, absolute, dark night.

They gathered tools of ancient dread,

And weapons forged in worlds long dead.

First came the Searing Breath, a wave

Of plasma heat, a fiery grave.

A thousand dragons, wing to wing,

Unleashed the hell their lungs could bring.

The oceans boiled, the mountains bled,

The surface world was rendered dead.

They burned the soil to sterile glass,

And watched the molten rivers pass.

Surely, they thought, no life can cling

To such a scorched and ruined thing.

But when the smoke began to clear,

And Ignis landed, filled with cheer,

He saw a patch of cooling stone,

Where a Water Bear had simply grown

A thicker cuticle, a tougher shell,

And woke up from its fiery spell.

It stretched its legs, eight stubby claws,

And paused, indifferent to the cause.

Canto III: The Escalation of the Futile

The dragons wept with rage and shame,

And doubled down upon the flame.

"If heat won't work, then Cold we'll try!

We'll freeze the water from the sky!"

They flew to where the void was thin,

And let the cosmic chill rush in.

They dropped the temperature to zero-K,

And stole the warmth of every day.

The world became a diamond sphere,

A monument to draconic fear.

They chipped away the frozen crust,

Expecting only cellular dust.

But deep within the glacial core,

The Tardigrade was simply more.

It had suspended all its life,

Ignoring the thermodynamic strife.

A Tun of perfect, glassy grace,

A tiny, frozen, empty space.

They thawed a piece, a single grain,

And watched the creature live again.

Then came the Radiation Storm,

To break the very cellular form.

They cracked the atom, split the core,

And bathed the planet in a roar

Of gamma rays and killing light,

A thousand suns condensed to night.

The air grew thick with toxic haze,

A consequence of desperate days.

The dragons, armored, watched the show,

And felt their own life-force run low.

Canto IV: The Great Silence and the Tiny Heirs

The war was won, the dragons cried,

As every other creature died.

The forests charred, the cities dust,

The rivers poisoned, filled with rust.

The air was thin, the pressure gone,

The world was broken, all alone.

The dragons, gasping, weak, and frail,

Had spent their power, failed their trail.

They looked upon the silent sphere,

And felt the crushing weight of fear.

"The Water Bears! They must be gone!"

King Ignis croaked, before the dawn.

He landed on a blasted plain,

A landscape of eternal pain.

He scraped the dust, the irradiated grit,

And found a million of them, fit

And fine, and simply waiting there,

Indifferent to the poisoned air.

They hadn't fought, they hadn't fled,

They simply were, when all was dead.

They crawled upon the dragon's claw,

Ignoring every natural law.

They were the masters of the void,

The only life that was not destroyed.

The dragons, weakened, saw the jest,

The failure of their final test.

Canto V: The Gritty, Comical End

The King, defeated, coughed a sigh,

A plume of smoke against the sky.

His mighty breath, a feeble spark,

Lost in the universal dark.

He saw the truth, the bitter sting:

They'd killed the world to kill a thing

That couldn't die, a cosmic joke,

A tiny life that would not choke.

The dragons starved, their food was gone,

Their fiery reign was now withdrawn.

They couldn't eat the toxic dust,

Their scales began to crack and rust.

They died in heaps, magnificent and grand,

The largest corpses in the land.

Their gold lay scattered, cold and deep,

While the tiny Water Bears did creep.

They climbed the mountains of the dead,

And made their homes in dragon's head.

They colonized the vacant eye,

And watched the ruined planet lie.

They did not cheer, they did not mourn,

They simply waited for the morn,

A billion years, or just a day,

Indifferent to the Dragon's way.And so the world, a barren tomb,

Was left to face its final doom,

Inhabited by microscopic kings,

And the pathetic, broken wings

Of dragons, who, in jealous pride,

Had killed the world, but could not hide

The simple fact, the final, dark decree:

The Water Bear was better than they.