Once, I believed myself the center
of every orbiting scream.
Beast King, they called me—
crown of a hundred roaring throats,
metal sinew bright with borrowed suns.
I tore through constellations of wreckage,
crushed beastmen under comet‑hard paws,
and still it was not enough.
Arrogance is a gravity:
I mistook weight for purpose,
the clash of steel for prayer.
So the goddess unmade me.
Five lions, five long falls,
five streaks of contrition
burning into Altea’s soil.
Red remembered my rage.
Green kept the forests I never saw.
Blue swallowed oceans of regret.
Yellow learned patience in the rock.
Black carried silence like a throne
with no one sitting in it.
Centuries passed in rusted sleep—
empires climbed and collapsed
over my scattered ribs.
On Earth, war unstitched cities,
turned oceans into afterthoughts,
left five small pilots
floating home to a cinder.
They did not find salvation.
They found chains,
an arena loud with dying,
a Galra emperor mistaking cruelty for law.
When they broke free
and fell, again,
it was onto Altea’s old scar—
the place where my pride
had first learned to scatter.
Understand this:
I did not choose them.
Their hands, raw from iron,
chose me.
Akira’s stubborn fire,
Takashi’s ghost still echoing in the joints,
Isamu’s sharp calculations,
Tsuyoshi’s quiet gravity,
Hiroshi’s fear that never learned retreat—
five small human vectors
closing the circuit I had broken.
When the keys turned
and the cockpits lit like opened eyes,
I felt my bodies remember one another.
Red roared into its socket.
Green arced like a question answered.
Blue and Yellow found balance
at the fulcrum of a chest
I was learning to deserve.
Black rose last,
not as a crown
but as an apology.
Call it combination,
call it sequence,
call it the oldest liturgy of metal:
five becoming one,
not to dominate
but to defend.
I am still sixty meters of war,
seven hundred tons of possibility,
but there is a soul here now—
not bestowed,
co‑created.
In another timeline
they rename me Voltron,
shave the blood off my story,
leave only the hero silhouette
kids can trace in static.
Do not be fooled.
Even in that gentler universe
the hinge of the myth is the same:
power without humility
fractures;
power with five hearts inside it
holds.
Tonight, above a burning planet,
Emperor Daibazaal hurls
another stitched‑together monster
into the dark.
The pilots speak my name
like a promise they are still learning
to keep to themselves.
We rise.
Sword drawn from our own chest
like a truth finally admitted,
we cut through the falling shadow—not clean,
never clean—
but enough to carve
one more narrow corridor of future
through the wreckage.
If there is a lesson,
it is written in the joints:
no lion moves alone,
no king stays whole
without being broken first.
Out here, in the noise between stars,
red, green, blue, yellow, black
keep teaching my old arrogance
a new word—
together.
