The Orphan’s Ashen Lament
A specter cloaked in tattered hope,
His shadow stitching whispers to the stones
Where once a city breathed in spires of gold.
Now ruin’s fingers claw the air,
And every brick, a tomb for vanished songs.
The orphan’s name, a relic none recall,
Echoes through alleys choked with spectral dust.
He seeks the truth his infant hands let slip—
A locket cold, its face a shattered eye,
Holding naught but strands of silver hair
And maps of scars no mirror dared repeat.
Three nights he traced the river’s ashen tongue,
Where lilies drowned in ink-black streams,
Past archways groaning under Time’s cruel weight,
To where the Weeping Tower leans—
A sentinel of rot, its crown undone
By secrets festering in mortar’s veins.
There, cloaked in ravens’ breath, an elder waits,
Her voice a rasp of parchment left to burn:
*”Child of dust, why court the serpent’s stare?
Some truths are leeches; drink, and they remain.”*
But resolve, sharpened on the whetstone of despair,
Ignites his plea: *”What blood birthed this despair?”*
Silence. Then—a sigh that parts the fog—
She leads him through a labyrinth of sighs,
Where frescoes peel to bones beneath their paint,
And stairways coil like serpents half-awake,
To chambers where the past, a caged beast,
Gnaws chains of rust with ever-weakening teeth.
A ledger, bound in skin of midnight hue,
Reveals the script of sins long turned to myth:
*Here slept the pact—a Mayor’s gilded lie,
To trade his firstborn for the rains’ return.
But storms came clawing, not with grace, but knives,
And drowned the cradle where the infant writhed.*
The orphan’s pulse—a moth trapped in a fist—
Sees now his face in every yellowed page:
The stolen child, the bargain none unmade,
The well where mothers’ wails still crystallize.
*”You are the debt,”* the crone’s cracked lips confess,
*”The city’s curse, its penance, and its breath.”*
He flees, the truth a shard in his rib’s cage,
Through streets that mock with echoes of his name.
The sky, a cauldron, brews electric spite—
First drop, then roar, the deluge’s grim ballet.
As torrents gorge on guilt and splintered prayers,
The orphan climbs the Tower’s broken spine.
Below, the cisterns yawn, their thirst now slaked
With floods that churn the graves of all he’d been.
The locket parts his palm—one final spark—
Its chain a noose, its heart a hollowed pyre.
*”Forgive the blood that built you from the dark,”*
He whispers to the storm… then steps entire.
Dawn finds the city cleansed, its stones reborn,
But in the square, a sapling claws through cracks—
Twined silver hair about its roots like veins,
And petals stained with memory’s slow bleed.
Travelers pause, though none can quite explain
Why tears arrive where no grief plants its seed.
