The Knight of Withering Roses

No sword had cleft those ivy-throttled gates,
No map confessed the labyrinth’s embrace,
Yet there the air grew heavy with the weights
Of petal-soft regrets and time’s disgrace.
He knelt—a knight sans creed, sans crown, sans cause—
And brushed a rose whose thorns drew blood like laws.

*“What knightly ghost disturbs my silent keep?”*
A voice unfurled, a silver-threaded sigh.
Before him stood a lady, not of sleep
But twilight’s essence, clad in starlit dye.
Her eyes—two pools where midnight dared to weep—
Held autumn’s grief and spring’s unkept reply.

*“I am no ghost,”* he murmured, hand on heart,
*“But flesh that bears the bruise of endless roads.
I seek the font where shattered souls restart—
A cure for wounds no mortal herb unloads.”*
She smiled, a crescent wound in parchment air,
*“The garden grants no balm… yet all is fair.”*

Through colonnades of jasmine-strangled stone,
They wandered where the lilies choked the streams,
Each step a dirge for glories overthrown,
Each breath a pact with half-remembered dreams.
Her fingers traced the scars upon his wrist—
A knight’s testament to battles missed.

*“What prince,”* she asked, *“what dragon’s fevered cry
Could etch such ruin in a warrior’s palm?”*
*“No beast,”* he sighed, *“but Time, that subtle lie,
Which steals the sword’s purpose, leaves the soul a psalm
Of might-have-beens. I fought for thrones of dust,
And found my honor in decay… and rust.”*

She led him where the willows kissed the ground,
Their leaves composing elegies in green,
And there, beneath a sundial cracked and crowned
With moss, she bared the garden’s hidden scene:
A marble tomb, its epitaph erased,
Where roses clawed the stone with thorned distaste.

*“Here sleeps,”* she breathed, *“a love no vow could chain,
A knight who sought this grove in armor bright.
He pledged his heart to shadows, wept like rain,
And carved his name in veins of failing light.
The garden took his flesh, his zeal, his breath—
Now tends his ghost where life converses… with death.”*

Sir Gareth laughed—a sound of shattered glass—
*“You paint romance in shades of wilt and woe,
Yet I’ve known tombs that wear a comelier face.
What folly binds the living here below
To court a grave’s embrace?”* Her gaze turned dire,
A storm in amber. *“Folly? Or… desire?”*

Night deepened, draping velvet on the boughs,
As fireflies lit their frail, ephemeral lamps.
She wove him tales of knights who’d made their vows
To marble breasts and dagger-cold decamps,
While somewhere, past the hedges’ serried might,
A nightingale rehearsed its lone requiem’s plight.

Dawn came—a blush of saffron, faint, forlorn—
And found them where the lilac’s scent turned sour.
His helm discarded, gauntlets earthward borne,
He kissed her palm—a petal’s final hour—
*“If gardens bloom but once, then let me be
The weed that thrives… in your eternity.”*

*“You court,”* she wept, *“a love that breathes in stone,
A silhouette that morning cannot claim.
Go, knight—before the garden claims your own
Brief pulse, and brands your soul with endless flame.”*
But Gareth, blind to warnings etched in air,
Clasped her cold form, and vowed to perish there.

What slow unmaking did the garden spin?
The vines that coiled like serpents round his throat,
The roses drinking sweat upon his skin,
The lady’s kiss—a frost-rimmed antidote.
His flesh grew pale as petals in the gloom,
His blood, a sap to feed the ravenous bloom.

At last, when moon and sun shared one pale sky,
She cradled him where shadows nursed their sting,
And watched the light dissolve in his dull eye—
A knight no more, but compost to the spring.
*“Forgive,”* she mourned, *“the curse no love withstands—
The garden’s heart… is wrought of yielding hands.”*

Now travelers who dare those gates at eve
Hear clanking steel amidst the rustling rows,
And glimpse through thorns a knight who cannot leave,
Bound to the soil where hope’s last seedling grows.
His voice, a breeze through blooms that ne’er revive—
*“All gardens perish… yet the dead… survive.”*