The Canvas of Forsaken Light
There stood a temple, carved from time’s own bones,
Its pillars cracked like ribs of buried gods,
And silence pooled where hymns had once been sown.
A painter came, his palette drained of hues,
His brushes stiff with dust of roads untrod,
To seek the muse that fled his weary hands
And left his art a sepulcher of stone.
The air hung thick with whispers of the lost,
Each step awoke the echoes of the dead,
Yet in that gloom, a flicker caught his eye—
A maiden’s form, where moon and shadow wed.
Her eyes were twin eclipses, deep and dire,
Her hair a storm of onyx, unconfined,
She moved as twilight dances on the waves,
A wraith of grace, yet flesh to bind the mind.
“What specter haunts these halls?” he dared to ask,
His voice a tremor in the vaulted dark.
“No specter,” sighed the shade, “but prisoner
To vows etched deeper than the temple’s mark.”
She spoke of curses spun from ancient threads,
A pact to keep the crumbling walls alive,
Her life the ink that fed the sacred script,
Her soul the wax that seals the tomb’s archive.
The painter knelt, his fingers tracing cracks
That webbed the floor like veins of some great beast.
“What if my art could mend what gods have split?
What if these hands could barter with the priest?”
She laughed—a sound like bells submerged in brine—
“No mortar binds what destiny has cleft.
Yet stay, and paint the twilight ere I fade;
Let one last light behold what love has left.”
Through fevered nights, he strove to cage her flame,
His brushes darting, falcon-winged and fierce,
Each stroke a plea, each pigment a vow sworn,
To freeze the hour before the stars reverse.
He painted not her face, but all she was—
The way the shadows knelt beneath her glance,
The rustle of her pulse in temple winds,
The dying sun’s last waltz across her hands.
But as the mural bloomed, the walls awoke,
Greedy roots that craved the artist’s breath.
The temple groaned, a leviathan starved,
And drank the hues that painted life from death.
“Begone!” she cried, “lest you become the feast!”
Yet still he pressed his palms to bleeding stone,
“If art demands a heart, let mine be drained—
Take all, but spare the soul I’ve made your throne.”
The vaults inhaled. His essence bled like wax,
Each color sucked from veins to feed the shrine,
Till canvas fused with flesh, and flesh with wall,
And every stroke became a living vine.
She watched him stiffen into gilded cracks,
His final sigh a pigment on her lips,
The temple thrummed, reborn in savage gold,
While dawn outside dissolved in pale eclipse.
Now pilgrims kneel where lover’s blood still dries,
To trace the tale that seeps from every vein—
A face half-lost, a hand outstretched to void,
And shadows shaped like tears that never came.
The maiden walks, unbound by stone or script,
Her freedom bought with brushes dipped in night,
But in her wake, the whispers coil and rise—
“What is a soul, when love becomes its pyre?”
And high above, where frescoed angels weep,
Two hollow eyes stare from the vault’s cruel height,
Their gaze the shade of solitude’s first hour,
Their silence—the masterpiece of sacrifice.
