The Ballad of Frost and Fading Strings

His coat, a tapestry of storms, hangs threadbare as his years,
Yet strapped against his hollow chest, a violin adheres—
Its scroll, a carved and yellowed skull; its strings, four rusted veins
That thrum with all the whispered grief of ice-locked, dormant plains.

Three winters since he last beheld a hearth’s consoling blush,
Three winters since the village lamps dissolved to distant hush.
He plays not for the world’s cold ear, nor gold, nor brief acclaim,
But lest the void between the stars should snuff his fragile name.

One twilight, as the winds conspired to drown his trembling strain,
A figure emerged from the lashing white—a specter born of pain.
A woman, cloaked in tattered gray, her face a moonlit scar,
Stood motionless as ancient pines that guard the gates of far.

Her eyes, twin pools of midnight thaw, held tales no tongue could dare,
And in her hands, a splintered lute, its wood as cracked as care.
No words were cast into the gale; their silence was the bridge
Where two lost souls, by chance aligned, now trod its splintered ridge.

She knelt beside his meager fire (a blush of ghosts, not heat)
And plucked a note so desolate it made the blizzards weep.
The fiddler, with a bow’s slow arc, answered her wordless cry—
Their melodies entwined like roots beneath a bleeding sky.

Days blurred—or was it years?—as they ascended frost-veined trails,
Their music stitching ragged wounds where sunlight seldom pale.
She spoke of halls where laughter once cascaded warm as wine,
Of kin now ash in marble urns, of love’s collapsed shrine.

He told of roads that coiled like snakes, of faces turned to stone,
Of how his strings had wept the day the earth reclaimed his own.
Yet in this dance of shared lament, a fragile warmth took seed—
A bloom of kinship, rare and wild, where loneliness might bleed.

But mountains know no mercy; they are keepers of the brink.
One night, as stars blinked cold assent, she paused upon a brink.
“The storm inside outchants my breath,” she murmured to the gale,
“My lute’s last chord must fade tonight—yet you must climb, prevail.”

He gripped her hand—a parchment leaf—and pled with eyes gone wild,
“Abandon not the song we’ve spun! The peak’s but air, beguiled!”
Her smile, a crescent knife, replied, “You’ll bear our anthem still—
For every note I leave in snow will haunt your strings until…”

The avalanche’s roar began where her last whisper died.
The mountain claimed its tithe of flesh; he clutched her lute and cried.
Now, on the crag where no birds soar, his violin still keens—
A dual voice, both hers and his, in endless winter’s sheen.

Beneath the moon’s pale argent eye, two shadows twist and climb,
One flesh, one ghost, their symphony outlasting stars and time.
The villagers below still hush when distant notes descend—
A requiem for borrowed warmth, too bright not to transcend.