Chapter Text
In the reign of Justinian I, when the empire still believed itself the final guardian of order between heaven and chaos, the first sign appeared not in the sky, but on the earth itself. A rent opened beyond the northern marches, and from it came beasts that no living Roman had ever named—vast elephants of the steppe, their hair long and dark, their tusks sweeping forward like curved lances; and with them taller, straighter-tusked giants whose shoulders rose higher than city walls. Herds moved through Thrace and the Danubian plains, shaking the ground as they passed, stripping forests and flattening fields. Veterans who had faced Persian cavalry said the sound of their movement was greater than any army.
At first, fear ruled. But the bishops who examined the creatures spoke cautiously, noting that these were not demons nor phantoms, but beasts of flesh and blood, eating grass and drinking water like all cattle of the earth. They were terrible, yes—but terrible in the same way as Leviathan is terrible in the Psalms: creations, not rivals to God.
Then came the second opening.
Where floodplains spread and warm air rose from newly formed wetlands, shapes emerged that silenced even soldiers. Great carnivores—longer than ships, heavier than siege engines—walked out of the shimmering air. Some were dark as iron, others marked with crimson and ash; some brown and earth-colored, others pale or flame-striped. They did not wander. They stood, heads low, bodies held in perfect balance, as if the land itself had summoned them.
What followed was not chaos, but dominion.
When these tyrant lizards hunted the great elephants, there was no frantic chase. The ground itself seemed to give way under the contest. Witnesses recorded that a single bite could end what a dozen men with spears could not. Necks were seized and crushed; skulls were broken where no weapon could reach; even the greatest bulls were brought low with shocking finality. The struggle was brief, overwhelming, and decisive. What had ruled the plains moments before lay still, and the predators fed in silence.
The chroniclers were shaken—not because blood was spilled (Rome had known blood for centuries), but because power itself had been redefined. These were not beasts that won by number or speed. They won by absolute strength, by a kind of physical authority that no living animal in Justinian’s world possessed.
And yet—this was the turning point—they did not turn on mankind.
The tyrant lizards ignored cities. They did not assault walls. They did not stalk men. They hunted the giants of the fields and withdrew to the wetlands and forests, ruling their own domain as kings rule borders. Fear gave way to wonder, and wonder to reflection.
Priests began preaching from Job and the Psalms again—not allegorically, but literally.
“Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook?”
“These all look to You, to give them their food in due season.”
If God had once created such creatures, and if He alone could govern them, then what was the empire by comparison? What was Justinian, crowned though he was, before the Maker of such strength?
Faith surged—not because people felt safe, but because they felt small in the right way.
The bishops taught that these creatures were not signs of the end, but signs of the beginning—that the world had always been larger, older, and more terrible than human pride allowed, and yet still governed by Christ. The tyrant lizards did not overthrow the Gospel; they confirmed it. Creation was not gentle because God was weak, but because He restrained power for mercy’s sake.
In sermons, the people began calling the great predators “the Kings of the Old Earth”, reminders of a world before Adam, before empire, before sin—and yet still under God’s command. If Christ could tame death itself, then even these rulers of flesh were not beyond Him.
And so, in the age of Justinian, amid plague and war and wonder, faith did not die. It deepened. For the people had seen with their own eyes that the God they worshipped was not a local deity of cities and laws, but the Lord of all ages, whose creations could shake the world—and still obey His word.
To Justinian, the appearance of the mammoths, the straight-tusked elephants, and finally the tyrant lizards did not signal chaos breaking into God’s order. Instead, he understood it as revelation by scale. For decades he had labored to present Christianity not merely as a personal faith, but as the cosmic truth governing all reality—law, empire, nature, and time itself. What he saw in these creatures was confirmation of something Scripture had always implied but humanity had rarely confronted directly: creation was never modest.
When Justinian was told that the great carnivores could shatter the skulls of the largest beasts alive with a single, decisive act, he reportedly returned again and again to the Book of Job. Not to justify suffering, but to recalibrate human arrogance. Leviathan, Behemoth, and the untamable powers described there were no longer poetic abstractions. They had flesh. They walked. And yet they did not rule mankind.
This mattered deeply to Justinian. If such overwhelming strength existed—and had existed long before Rome, Persia, or even humanity—then God’s sovereignty was vast beyond political theology. Christ was not merely the Lord of empires, but the Lord of epochs. The tyrant lizards were not rivals to God; they were evidence of how much God had chosen not to unleash upon the present world.
In Justinian’s mind, this sharpened rather than weakened the Gospel. The Incarnation became even more astonishing: the same God who once shaped beings capable of ending the greatest animals with ease had chosen to enter history as a suffering man. Power restrained. Strength humbled. Dominion expressed through mercy.
Politically, Justinian grasped something immediately: fear can dissolve an empire, but awe can bind it.
Had the tyrant lizards rampaged through cities, they would have been interpreted as divine judgment against Rome itself. But their behavior—dominating the megafauna, claiming territory, yet ignoring human settlements—allowed Justinian to frame the narrative carefully and powerfully. He declared that God had shown the empire a glimpse of the deep past, not to threaten Rome, but to remind it of its place.
Justinian’s proclamations emphasized three points:
1) These creatures were not sent against Christians, but against beasts—showing that God’s order still distinguished between humanity and the rest of creation.
2) Rome still stood. Walls held. Cities endured. The tyrant lizards did not challenge law, worship, or authority.
3) Only God commands such power, and Rome’s legitimacy flowed from obedience to Him, not from military might alone.
This subtly reinforced Justinian’s vision of himself not as a conqueror-king, but as God’s steward over human society. Against creatures that made elephants look fragile, even emperors appeared small—and Justinian leaned into that humility publicly, presenting himself as the emperor who knew when to bow.
Privately, however, the effect was profound.
Accounts suggest Justinian became quieter after the first confirmed kills of adult elephant bulls. Not fearful—but contemplative. He reportedly asked scholars and bishops whether Adam would have known such creatures, and whether Eden itself had once been inhabited by beings of terrifying form. The question was not idle curiosity; it reflected a deeper shift in his imagination. History no longer began with Rome, or even with Israel—it stretched into an abyss of divine creativity.
The tyrant lizard became, to Justinian, a living memento of limits. No army he commanded, no wall he built, no law he codified could rival the sheer physical authority he had witnessed. This did not weaken his resolve; it purified it. He became more insistent that the empire’s greatness lay not in domination, but in alignment with divine order.
For the people of the empire, the effect was immediate and lasting.
At first, there was terror. Soldiers fled at the sight of the great predators standing over fallen giants. Farmers abandoned lands where mammoths once roamed. But as months passed and patterns became clear—that the tyrant lizards hunted only the great beasts and withdrew—the fear transformed into reverent dread.
Art changed. Mosaics began to depict enormous beasts beneath the feet of Christ or beneath the hand of God, not as enemies, but as servants of divine will. Preachers spoke less of God as merely “protector” and more as the Architect of unimaginable power. The Gospel did not become softer; it became grander.
Children grew up knowing that the world was older and more dangerous than their ancestors had believed—and yet still governed by Christ. This produced not despair, but seriousness. Sin felt smaller. Repentance felt weightier. Worship felt more necessary.
The tyrant lizard entered the Byzantine imagination not as a monster, but as a witness: proof that creation itself once carried powers that dwarfed empires, and that God alone decides which ages receive which strengths.
In later years, Justinian would reportedly say that he had ruled during a time when God had “pulled back the veil of ages.” The tyrant lizards did not overthrow Rome. They reframed it. They reminded emperor and subject alike that all human order exists on borrowed time, under borrowed strength, within a creation far more immense than human ambition.
And in that realization, faith did not collapse. It deepened.