The Ashes of Unspoken Dawns

Here, once, the world was amber—lively, warm—
When cobblestones rang with her laughter’s chime,
When twilight pooled like wine in every storm,
And her eyes held the pulse of summer’s prime.
They met where lilacs choked the rusted gate,
Two moths drawn to a flame they dared not name,
While fate, that weaver of invisible hate,
Spun silken chains to smother what became.

Her voice, a hymn half-lost to autumn’s sigh,
Would thaw the frost that gripped his ribcage tight.
“Look,” she’d whisper, “how the swallows ply
The wind—like secrets fleeing into night.”
They spoke in pauses, glances, borrowed books,
In petals pressed where words could not take root,
While in the square, the townsfolk’s judging looks
Cut deeper than the winter’s sharpest flute.

For she was betrothed to the clocktower’s heir,
Whose coins had greased the palms that sealed her fate,
And he, the scholar with his threadbare chair,
Whose hands held maps of stars, but came too late.
Yet still, they dared to meet where thistles grew,
Behind the chapel’s skeletal remains,
To trade the tales their hearts already knew—
A language spelled in pulses, not in chains.

One dusk, she pressed a locket in his palm,
Cold as the tears she’d never let him see.
“Inside,” she breathed, “the dawn we could not claim—
A curl of birch, a shard of what might be.”
He vowed to wait till every star turned dust,
Till rivers climbed the cliffs to kiss the moon.
She smiled—a curve of sorrow, not of trust—
And vanished with the last notes of the loon.

The war came then, on wings of raven’s ore,
To melt the clocks and shatter every vow.
The tower heir, with fists of molten law,
Fed rumors to the pyres’ gaping maw.
“A traitor’s plot,” they hissed, “beneath the streets!”
And pointed at the scholar’s ink-stained hands.
They came for him as winter claimed the wheat,
But she, they said, had fled to safer lands.

Decades, now, he’s scoured each crumbled lane,
Piecing mosaics from the ash’s hymn,
Till in a crypt where rats gnawed love’s remains,
He found the truth wrapped in a seraph’s whim—
Her final letter, sealed but never sent,
Beneath a brick where ivy’s fingers pried:
“They told me you’d renounced, had fled, content…
Yet still, I wear the locket’s weight inside.”

The words, like knives, unstitch his weathered years—
For in the margins, scripted small and neat,
The tower heir’s hand sneers through salted tears:
“She waits beneath the willows, bitter-sweet.”
He stumbles where the river’s ghost now crawls,
Past mounds where willows droop like broken lyres,
And there, half-sunk in mud, a locket falls
To meet his palm—still cold, still clasped, still fire.

The dawn breaks not. The stars refuse to fade.
He lies where roots embrace her silent frame,
Two shadows merged where light and dark persuade
The earth to hold what life could never claim.
Above, the spires hum a shattered tune—
Of moths that flew too close, of locks unkept—
While in the ruins, where the world’s undone,
The wind exhales the names the stones have wept.