The Wanderer’s Farewell Beneath the Ashen Star
A shadow treads, its edges frayed by time—
The traveler, whose palms bear cartography of wounds,
Whose cloak is woven from the dusk’s own sigh.
He pauses where the cobbled veins of streets,
Now cracked and blanched as bones beneath the moon,
Echo the dirge of market squares long stilled,
Of laughter petrified in amber stone.
A spire, finger of some fallen god,
Points where the heavens bleed their argent light—
There, in the smoldering ash of midnight’s core,
A single star persists. It pulses low,
A widow’s lantern hung in vacant halls,
Its gleam the shade of pearls drowned deep in wine.
He names it *Amaranth*—this flickering ghost,
For in its gaze he sees the unkept vow,
The hands he clasped, now dust in foreign soil,
The voice that once had thawed his wintered name.
Three nights he’d walked, a pilgrim of the void,
Through colonnades where specters tread in pairs,
Their whispers curling like the smoke of snuffed candles,
Their faces blurred as portraits left in rain.
Yet now, beneath the star’s narcotic glow,
He kneels as if to drink its meager milk,
And from his throat there crawls a rasping hymn—
A lullaby she’d hummed to banish fears,
When walls were warm and hearths held living flames.
*”O Amaranth,”* he calls, *”you knew her face—*
*The curve her brow could carve from empty air,*
*The way her silence nursed the fractured hours.*
*Speak, though your tongue be wrought of ancient frost;*
*Tell me her shadow lingers in your rays.”*
The star, in answer, bleeds a softer light,
And in its wake there coils a silver thread—
A path unspooling toward the western rim,
Where crumbled ramparts kiss the starving sky.
He follows, led by this celestial seam,
Past fountains choked with roots like sable veins,
Through gardens where the roses claw the dark,
Their petals glazed with rime of final breaths.
The thread now thickens, trembles, burns his palm—
A leash of radiance, a chain of dawns—
Until he stands where seven oaks contort,
Their branches braided into fractured doors.
And here, the thread dissolves. The star grows dim,
Its light dissolving into shards of mist.
*”Is this your jest?”* he cries. *”O cold conspirator—*
*You, who wore her eyes to bait my tread,*
*Who dressed the void in garments of her scent!*
*What oracle resides in barren air?*
*What truth in stars that suckle on despair?”*
But silence, thick as resin, grips the scene—
Until the oaks begin to creak and yawn,
Their splintered mouths exhaling motes of green,
And from the grove there steps a shade… yet not.
No ghost, but memory made incarnate flesh—
A woman formed of starlight and erased years,
Her hair a storm of extinguished suns,
Her hands the pale of rivers never traced.
She smiles, and in that curve of vanished warmth,
He tastes the honeyed hours of yesterlife—
The attic where their breaths drew maps on glass,
The attic where her tears had etched his name.
*”You lingered,”* she begins, her voice the ache
Of willow branches strummed by listless winds.
*”You lingered where the road forked into dust,*
*And bore my absence as the sea bears salt—*
*Yet I am not the dust beneath your soles,*
*Nor the echo that haunts your shadow’s edge.*
*I am the rift no pilgrimage can mend,*
*The unsung verse that ends your hollow psalm.”*
He moves to touch her, but his fingers plunge
Through luminescence into stagnant dark.
*”Then why,”* he pleads, *”does Amaranth decree*
*This rendezvous of hope and quicksand? Speak—*
*If you are mercy, let it pierce my chest;*
*If cruelty, let it gnaw my heart to naught.”*
Her form begins to fray, a wisp of song—
*”The star you chased was but my farewell breath,*
*A sigh I left to guide you past the veil,*
*Where all who clutch at ghosts must finally gaze*
*Upon the chasm love cannot transcend.*
*Now watch, dear wanderer, as I dissolve—*
*The final gift my absence can bestow.”*
And as her figure fades to poisoned air,
The star above exhales its parting beam—
A single drop of radiance, distilled,
That strikes his brow like liquid absinthe poured.
He falls, not as a tree by tempests felled,
But slow, as autumn’s gold submits to snow,
His body cradled by the roots’ embrace,
His eyes still chained to where the star had burned.
Dawn comes, a thief with fingers steeped in rose,
To find the grove devoid of spectral light—
Just seven oaks, their branches stripped of green,
And at their feet, a cloak of ashen gray,
Its fabric stiff with frost’s crystalline teeth.
No tombstone rises, no epitaph is carved,
For ruins, like the heart, inscribe their dead
In silent alphabets of shadowed dust.
Yet when the twilight dons its indigo shroud,
And stars emerge like needles stitching fate,
A faint new light is glimpsed by crumbling towers—
Two stars, now wed where none may chart their course,
Their dance a waltz of reconciled despair,
Their glow the shade of scars that cease to sting.
And somewhere, in the labyrinth of winds,
A traveler’s sigh melds with the eternal dark—
No dirge, no psalm… but something nearer peace,
The quietude of bridges never crossed.
