The Wizard’s Table Codex
Curiosities & Threads In The Fog
— Entry 002 —
This is not a tree. It is a sentinel. A keeper of blood and story. To cut them is to silence a language older than time.
Within these pages are stories of the world’s more subtle anomalies—actual occurrences, unusual patterns, and historical remnants that are hard to explain.
“When the gods gave trees blood, they were asking us to remember they were once alive like us.”
—Ancient Socotri proverb (oral tradition)
Title: The Dragon’s Blood Tree
Location: Socotra Island, Yemen Scientific Name: Dracaena cinnabari
They say it bleeds. Cut into its bark, and a crimson resin flows—thick, dark, ancient. Not sap. Not merely protection. It is blood. And for thousands of years, people have believed it to be the blood of dragons.
The Dragon’s Blood Tree grows nowhere else in the wild but on the island of Socotra, a remote fragment of land adrift in the Arabian Sea. There, the landscape appears otherworldly, unmoored from time: bottle trees with swollen trunks, frankincense shrubs clinging to rock, and these—giant inverted umbrellas, branches stretched to the sky like ribs turned outward, collecting what little rain falls in a place where clouds often forget to linger.
The blood—this deep red resin—has been used since antiquity. Roman soldiers painted their shields with it, believing it gave strength. Apothecaries used it as wound salve, pigment, incense, elixir. Alchemists believed it amplified transformation. Mystics said it burned away lies.
The tree is not myth. But it lives like one.
Its growth is slow. Its reproduction fragile. And now, under the pressure of overgrazing, climate collapse, and human indifference, it is vanishing.
But there are those who remember. Conservationists, islanders, watchers of wind and stone. They are planting new saplings, building fences against the goats, keeping vigil. Some say the trees are responding. Slowly. Tentatively. As if they, too, are waiting to see if we are still worthy of their shade.
To bleed and still reach for the sky— this is the Dragon’s Blood Tree. Rooted in silence. Crowned in story. And holding, in each droplet of red, the memory of a world that once believed all things were alive.
Let it live again. Here, in the Codex. Here, in the fog. Where truth sometimes hides, and myths remember us.
What If?
In a world rushing to forget,
you were one of the few who chose to remember the bleeding trees?
What if you became the keeper of their stories,
their sap,
their silence?
Would that be enough
to keep them alive
a little longer?
“Bleeding does not mean broken.”
There are no answers here.
Only sap in the soil.
And a question still whispering through the branches:
Will we remember in time?
“Trees exhale for us so that we can inhale them to stay alive. Can we ever forget that? Let us love trees with every breath we take until we perish.”
― Munia Khan
Thought
We started with fact. But we end with questions—because wonder doesn’t need conclusions, only permission.
Entry 002