The Weeping Stones of Evermere
A painter came where shattered turrets scrape the sky,
His palette drained of hues, his soul a barren well,
To seek in crumbling stones what words could never tell.
Evermere, they named it—castle of the lost,
Where time’s teeth gnawed the bones of tempest-tossed,
Its halls once hummed with harps, its hearths with flame,
Now whispered only to the wind a nameless shame.
He crossed the threshold where the ivy wept,
And shadows, like old sins, in corners crept.
A fresco peeled—a knight, a lady fair,
Their faces blurred as ghosts in thinning air.
“Who treads where echoes choke on silent screams?”
A voice like rusted chains in frozen streams.
He turned; a figure stood, half-air, half-stain,
A woman shaped from dust and windowpane.
“I am the breath between the mortar’s cracks,
The memory of hands that never came back.
What brings you, wanderer, to this cursed keep,
Where even shadows dare not walk but weep?”
“I seek,” he said, “the face of true despair,
The ache no color names, the grief too rare.
They say these stones hold tears in every groove—
Teach me their language, phantom, let me prove.”
She laughed—a sound like dead leaves down a spire,
“You court a madness older than your fire.
Come then, and see what binds me to this earth,
But mark: some truths are tombs before their birth.”
Through archways where the spiders spun their looms,
They passed into a chamber vaulted with gloom.
There, on the wall, a portrait screamed in rust—
Two lovers clasped, their fingers trails of dust.
“Here stood Lord Alaric, his bride Lysandra,
Whose vows outshone the stars’ most silver candor.
‘Not death,’ they swore, ‘nor time shall break this bond,’
Yet fate had knives to which their flesh responded.”
The painter watched as spectral scenes unfurled—
A warhorn’s snarl that shook the waking world,
The lord’s last kiss, her lips a winter rose,
“Return,” she pled, “before the ivy grows.”
Years gnawed the calendar of hope to shreds,
While in the west, men spoke of crimson beds.
She walked the battlements in moon-bleached gown,
Her tears the only rain the drought allowed.
“One autumn night, when fog choked every breath,
A stranger came, cloaked in the mask of death.
‘Your lord lies cold,’ he hissed, ‘beneath foreign clay.
Why guard a ghost? Let warmer hands hold sway.’”
The phantom’s voice now cracked like aging ice,
“Despair’s a wine that poisons in a trice.
She took his lie for truth, that bitter cup,
And let her heart believe love’s light was up.”
The painter glimpsed—a flash of blade, a cry,
A new-made widow veiled in midnight sky.
Her oath undone, she fled to tower’s crown,
And leapt where thorns would never let her drown.
“But here’s the jest,” the specter’s whisper burned,
“The lord returned next dawn, his banner earned.
He found her letter first, then still-warm lace,
And kissed her corpse amidst the mocking grace.”
A hollow clang—the vision fell to shards,
Leaving the painter’s soul in splintered shards.
“So now,” she sighed, “we haunt what might have been,
Two fools who loved too late, too fierce, too keen.”
He woke at dawn, the castle stark and still,
His brushes trembling with a newfound will.
For weeks he worked, possessed by dual ghosts,
Translating sorrow into oil and posts.
The phantom watched, her form now less than mist,
As grief took shape in every pigment’s twist.
“You paint,” she mourned, “what words can never bear—
The second death of those already bare.”
At last he stepped back from the finished scene—
A lord knelt screaming in a field of green,
His arms outstretched to catch a falling bride
Whose face dissolved where brush and anguish vied.
“Why leave her features blurred?” the spirit pressed.
He stared at empty hands, his art confessed:
“To name true sorrow is to break its spell—
The deepest wounds are those no tongue can tell.”
She smiled then, a crack in twilight’s veil,
“At last you grasp what made this castle pale.
Now go—before you join our endless night—
And paint the world its own forgotten light.”
But as he turned to leave with weighted tread,
A sound of tearing canvas filled his head.
The lord’s painted eyes began to bleed,
And Lysandra’s voice rose like a need.
“You think it done?” the walls themselves implored,
“This castle’s curse is yours now, self-imposed.
Each artist who unveils our secret core
Must stay till time itself is but a scar.”
The ground groaned. Stones wept. The air turned thick.
His brushes crumbled. Palettes turned sick.
He screamed for mercy to the gaping sky,
But turrets leaned closer, whispering “Why try?”
Now travelers speak of shadows that still paint
By window’s where the moon pours silver plaint.
A lord and lady? No—a newer shade,
Who mixes tears with hues of choices made.
And in the town below, they frame their fears—
A masterpiece that none dare hang appears:
A castle weeping colors never seen,
And eyes that haunt where love and lies convene.
Thus Evermere claims all who dare to trace
The contours of a heart’s forbidden space.
For melancholy’s truest portrait lies
Not in the grief, but what we sacrifice.
