The Canticle of Forgotten Ink

A letter, frail as spider’s breath, sealed with a tear’s eclipse,
Lay cradled in a crevice where the wall had let it slip.
The script, a dance of midnight’s quill, of ink that bled despair,
Unfurled the tale of Alaric—the poet cursed to care.
“To whoever finds this parchment pale,” it whispered to the gloom,
“I’ll sing the hymn that broke my heart inside this vaulted tomb.”

* * *

Three decades prior, when autumn’s rust had gilded every thorn,
Young Alaric crossed the threshold where his fate would be reborn.
A youth whose eyes held summer storms, whose hands could spin the stars
To verses sharp as winter’s teeth or soft as lunar scars.
He sought asylum from the world’s cacophonous decay,
To craft a canticle so pure it’d outlive mortal clay.

But stones have tongues, and rafters hum with ancestral lament—
The castle nursed a secret plague no mortar could prevent.
A curse, they said, on those who dared to court the muse too well,
That every stanza born here’d weave a labyrinthine hell.
For every rhyme would siphon breath, each metaphor drain blood,
Till art became a vampire’s kiss in this creative flood.

* * *

He wrote by candle-gasping light, his desk a splintered shrine,
While drafts snaked ‘cross the flagstones like a cursive serpentine.
The quill, a splinter from Yggdrasil, dipped in his veins’ red wine,
Scrawled sonnets that made specters weep and constellations pine.
But as his opus swelled, his flesh grew spectral, thin, undone—
Each couplet carved a fragment from the poet’s setting sun.

His masterpiece—a thousand lines etched on a scroll of skin—
Bore titles only phantoms read as dusk and dawn grew thin.
“The Ode to Unseen Constellations,” “Elegy for Rain,”
Each verse a thread in Fortuny’s cloak, each stanza sweet with pain.
Yet shadows pooled beneath his door, a liquid, listless night,
That crept to steal the endings from his feverish candlelight.

* * *

One eve, as frost engraved the panes with filigrees of death,
A figure gloved in twilight came, her voice a zephyr’s breath.
“Dear bard,” she mourned, “your epitaphs have stirred the sleeping walls—
The curse demands a final rhyme before your essence falls.”
Her face, a mirror tarnished by the centuries’ cruel tread,
Was Lady Moira—muse and jailer of the artful dead.

“You’ve bartered breath for beauty, lad; the ledger must be sealed.
One last poem writ with your soul, and then…to fate you’ll yield.”
He laughed—a sound of shattered glass—and gripped his splintered chair.
“I’ll pen such lines, the stars themselves will fray in jealous prayer!”
But as he reached for parchment, blood bloomed ‘cross his trembling wrist—
The quill had pierced his pulse’s song, a crimson paradox kissed.

* * *

The final page he scribbled in a frenzy of despair,
As life leaked into adjectives too vivid to declare.
“Let this be my requiem—a psalm the night will hoard—
A testament to beauty’s cost,” he pled to no accord.
The castle drank his final sigh, his ink now turned to rust,
And sealed his chamber with a sigh of mortar, dust, and trust.

* * *

The traveler reads the letter, feels the chill of Alaric’s plea,
As moonlight traces verses that the walls refuse to free.
The curse still hums in cobwebbed vaults, a hymn without reprieve,
For art demands both heart and breath from those who dare believe.
He flees, but in his satchel rests the poet’s last confession—
A dirge that turns to ashes when exposed to mortal possession.

* * *

Now winds recite the fragments through the castle’s crumbling teeth,
A canticle of fragments where the damned and divine seethe.
And travelers who wander near swear, when the night grows thin,
They hear a quill’s eternal scratch…and know the price of hymn.