The Starveling’s Last Canvas

Here walks the Starveling, brush in hand, his palette bleak as winter’s breath,
A man of ash and whispered hues, whose soul the world deemed too oblique.
The critics sneered, “A madman’s smears!”; his patrons fled from truths he’d drawn—
So now he paints where none dare tread, where stone weeps lichen down its cheek.

The temple’s heart, a roofless nave, cradles night’s cold astral wine—
A single star pricks through the vault, its light a needle’s silver sting.
“Old sentinel,” he rasps, upturned, “you’ve watched empires kneel and crawl,
Yet burn untouched by mortal grief… Tell me: does art mean *anything*?”

No answer comes but wind’s low moan through fissures in the sanctum’s bones.
He dips his brush in moonlight now, in shadow’s ink and dust’s gray grime—
On broken walls, his fingers dance, conjuring forms no eye shall see:
A mother’s face, half-eaten by years; hands, clasped, then wrenched by time;

A child’s laugh trapped in amber dusk; a love letter the sea refused—
Each stroke a dirge, each hue a wound, each line a nerve laid bare, exposed.
The star glints hard, a diamond drill boring through the black’s thick hide,
As though it sought to pierce his chest where hope, long parched, lies comatose.

Three nights he toils, knees grinding dust, lips cracked to hymns no throat could sing,
While spiders spin their looms between his ribs and Death, that tactless guest,
Begins to sketch his portrait in the air—a wraith with charcoal breath—
Yet still the Starveling swats him off: “Not yet… One star must see the rest.”

On the fourth dusk, a girl appears—a scrap of life wrapped in moth-eaten shawl—
Her eyes, twin pools where sorrow swims, her hair a nest of autumn’s grief.
“They say you paint the soul’s raw meat,” she murmurs, voice a frayed lute string,
“My brother lies in fever’s grip… Might your art grant a blind relief?”

The Starveling stills. For decades, scorn had been his bread, derision wine.
Yet here stands truth in tattered shoes—not gold nor fame, but need laid plain.
He takes her hand (so small, so cold!), leads her past the crumbling shrine
To where his final fresco looms—a life’s work drenched in starless rain.

“What’s *that*?” she breathes. He tracks her gaze across his labyrinth of pain:
A sunburst pinned beneath a boot; a dove mid-fall, its wings splayed wide;
An hourglass choked with blackened sand; a crown of thorns, sans king, sans head…
“The world,” he croaks. “As fools won’t see it.” She tilts her head. “But where’s the light?”

“Light?” Laughter scrapes his throat like gravel. “Child, look closer—there, in seams:
That thread of gold beneath the chains; that ember in the vulture’s eye…
They call me grim, but I paint *fight*—the scream before the jaws snap shut,
The bloom that cracks a tomb’s slab… Light’s a spark. The dark’s what makes it bright.”

She leans in, till her breath fogs the wall. “It hurts,” she whispers. “Yes. But… *true*.”
And in her pause, the Starveling feels a thing long dead within him stir—
Not praise, not understanding’s balm, but kinship raw as unset bone.
He turns—too fast!—and she is gone. Was she ever there? The doubt’s a burr.

But on the fresco, fresh and wet, a single print glows where she stood—
A smudge of palm, five comet trails, right where his hellscape cradles dawn.
The star above chooses this hour to plunge through stained and stagnant air,
A lance of argent striking earth, igniting prints to liquid sun…

The Starveling staggers, hands outstretched, as all his decades-darkened work
Is seared, dissolved, remade by light—the girl’s touch was the keystone’s nudge!
Where once hung despair’s tapestry, now blazes hope’s ferocious psalm—
Each scar a river singing; each chain, a bridge; each thorns, a bud’s first surge…

But temples old resent such change. The columns groan. The roof, though gone,
Somehow collapses further as the star’s beam drills into the core.
The Starveling, laughing through cracked teeth, spreads arms as stones begin to rain—
“At last!” he cries. “A critic honest!” Dust floods his lungs. The girl’s no more.

When dawn’s gray tendrils pry the ruins, villagers arrive to stare:
A tomb of marble slabs, bizarrely… *painted*… though with what, none knows.
Yet some swear on still nights, a star—the kind that pierces like a vow—
Brushes the wreck with phantom hues… And faint, faint laughter rings below.

But art, like truth, is often crushed. By noon, the priest (all froth and frock)
Declares the site “a den of fiends!” and sends his hounds with hammers raised.
They smash the shards that dared to shine, they spit upon the nameless grave,
And history, that harlot, grins—another light snuffed, unamazed.

Yet in the rubble, if you kneel and sift the dirt through careful palms,
You’ll find them—flecks of stubborn gold no chisel can reduce to dross.
And high above, through centuries’ smog, that star still stabs the firmament—
A brushstroke left by some mad ghost… Or maybe just a speck of loss.