The Wraith’s Last Vigil

O mark her form!—that wraith of ash and air,
Whose tattered robes like twilight’s mist are spun,
Whose eyes are pools where drowned hopes stir and stare,
A face half-etched by memories undone.
She drifts where feasts once roared with fire and mirth,
Now haunts the vault where echoes choke on dust,
Her fingers trace the scars of ravaged earth
Where love’s last seed lies choked in war’s unjust.

“Stay, fleeting night,” she sighs to vaulted black,
“Unspool thy hours that I may yet retrace
The steps we trod where rose and thorn entwined,
His voice, the hearth that lit this barren place.”
But stone gives back no murmur, nor the wind
Aught save the dirge of oaks that moan and crack.

Recall, recall—the past’s relentless prism!
Once bloomed a youth within these blood-stained walls,
A knight whose soul outshone war’s cynicism,
Whose heart, unarmored, every shadow calls.
Her breath was spring to thaw his wintered breast,
Her laugh, the balm that stayed his blade’s descent
When glory’s lie lay bare its rotted nest—
Yet fate, that jealous smith, their vows had bent.

“Thy sword must guard the king’s besieged throne,”
He’d pled, his hands like ice on hers yet warm,
“One moon’s wane hence, I’ll claim thee as mine own—
Let not this keep become our love’s death-storm.”
She’d kissed the oath deep as the roots of trees,
Her tears the salt to seal that sacred bond,
But lo!—the courier came on bended knees,
Bearing a helm cleft by treason’s blond.

Now see her clutch that rusted casque to breast,
Its crest a serpent coiled round shattered vows,
How through its cracks her ghostly sighs invest
The chambers where she waits, though none allow
Her peace. “What storm could quench thy fervent core?
What treachery dared steal thy parting breath?
Our pact was writ in stars—can man’s weak war
Outblaze the heavens’ forge?” she rages, death

Her sole reply. The seasons wheel and wane—
Foxglove and thistle crack the courtyard’s bile,
Snow’s shroud becomes the rain’s unending chain,
Yet still she guards this carcass of a pile.
Her essence thins; each midnight’s tolling bell
Steals from her form a wisp of what once was,
As ivy strangles slow the sentinel
Who dares defend a corpse without a cause.

But hark!—a footfall grates on broken flint,
A wanderer lost in dusk’s deceitful veil.
She freezes, hope’s keen thorn through heart’s frail lint,
And drifts, a moonbeam drawn to night’s travail.
The stranger kneels where blood-rust roses bloom,
His hands, ungloved, upturn the loam’s dark page—
There gleams a ring, long swallowed by the tomb,
Its ruby’s fire undimmed by wrath or age.

“Thy sigil!” gasps the wraith. The traveler starts,
His eyes twin mirrors to her vanished grace,
For in his face—that chin cleft by two darts,
Those brows like eagles’ wings—she sees love’s trace.
“Grandsire,” he breathes, “who fell where shadows lie,
I’ve come to bear thy bones to hallowed ground.
The wars are ash, the throne’s but rooks’ shrill cry—
Come, rest where streams with no blood’s taint are crowned.”

She weeps, though not a tear may stain her cheek.
The keep itself seems poised on sorrow’s brink—
Then, sudden as a branch that snaps too weak,
Her voice, a harp’s last note before it sinks:
“Sweet scion, turn thy spade from this cursed plot!
His oath yet binds me to this spectral wheel—
To wait, though centuries of grief have wrought
My soul to smoke, his promise my sole seal.”

The youth recoils, yet pity steels his hand.
“Poor shade,” he mourns, “thy vigil is misplaced.
His bones I’ve borne to where green willows stand,
His ghost long since to kinder realms embraced.
This ring, which in his clenched fist still abide,
Carved with thy name, he clutched past dying breath—
‘Tell her,’ he pled, ‘though treason turned the tide,
My soul seeks hers beyond the wasteland, death.’”

A tremor rends the air—the walls intake
A gasp that shakes the spiders from their silk.
The wraith’s form wavers, like a moonlit lake
When stones of truth are cast to test its ilk.
“All this…for naught?” Her whisper scours the stones.
“While I kept faith with shadows, he…moved on?”
The castle groans as bedrock shifts and moans,
And dawn’s first blade cuts night’s umbilical bond.

“Take this,” she bids, her fingers fading fast
To sketch a locket ’round the youth’s taut throat—
A curl of hair, by time’s wrath unsurpassed,
Now fused with him who bears the knight’s last note.
“Let flesh remember what the dead forget,
Let love’s true wage be told in mortal tongues—
Go, break the chains that bind all souls to debt,
And sing how vows outlive the heart’s brief songs.”

The sun ascends—her form dissolves like mist
That meets the morn’s unrelenting refrain.
Where once a spectre wept, now gold light kissed
The ring, the spade, the youth’s grief-burdened frame.
And thus the castle, freed from sorrow’s lease,
Crumbles at last to join the earth’s deep breast,
While far off, streams where willow branches peace
Bear two faint sighs—at last, at last, at rest.