The Knight of Withering Roses

No banners blaze his passage through the square,
where hollow doors moan on their splintered hinges.
A child’s kite, snared in a skeletal pear,
flaps like the ghost of unremembered cringes.
Yet in this graveyard of neglected hopes,
he sees her—Lira—through the smudged glass
of time, her hands kneading the air for ropes
to climb from wells where all her suns amass.

* * *

Her eyes were two bruised violets pressed
between the pages of a storm’s confession;
her voice, a lute-string plucked and left unblessed
by any god save sorrow’s dim profession.
She fed the crows that croaked atop the steeple,
their feathers black as unrepented sins,
and wove garlands from the thistle people
who choked the graves where no prayer begins.

“What knight errant,” she asked, “still believes
in errantry, when all the roads contract
to graves? What dragon’s left for you to slay
but your own shadow, gaunt and overfact?”
He knelt, his sword a silver scar unsheathed
upon the earth. “The beasts I chase are real
as breath—the sighs of maidens bound beneath
the weight of skies no hands but mine can heal.”

* * *

They walked the fields where wheat grew thin and spiteful,
each stalk a needle threading August’s shroud.
She showed him how the river, once delightful,
now coughed black phlegm beneath a fevered cloud.
“The blight,” she said, “began when stars forgot
their maps. Our wells drink nothing but the moon’s
wan milk, and children’s laughter rots
midair, like apples plucked too late by monsoons.”

He dreamed that night of roots that clenched the dead,
of soil that pulsed like a forbidden drum.
A voice slithered from the village’s sickbed:
*“To save her, knight, you must become the sum
of all you’ve slain. The price is not a vein
of gold, but this: your heartbeat must unlearn
its rhythm. Will you let the shadow’s chain
devour dawn, so hers may still discern
the light?”* He woke, his palms impressed with crescents,
and knew the bargain. Yet when Lira laughed—
a sound like rain on blistered parchment—
he swore he’d drain the sun to craft her raft.

* * *

They spoke of trivial things: the way the mist
clung to her shawl like a deluded lover;
how autumn’s first leaf, amber and amethyst,
had brushed her cheek before the others smothered.
He mended fences, though no sheep remained,
and charmed the elders with dead troubadours’ tunes.
But in the forge where silence was retrained
to screams, he hammered out his private runes—

a breastplate etched with herons mid-descent,
a helm adorned with jasmine’s last defiance.
Each night, the village’s malaise grew more present,
a fog that nibbled at the soul’s resilience.
Lira found him once, at the brittle copse,
staring at a rosebush’s thorny cipher.
“Why fight the dusk,” she murmured, “when it stops
all hearts?” He snapped one bloom—its petals stiffer

than hope—and tucked it in her braid. “Because
the night needs memory of what it quenches.”
She kissed his wrist, a moth-light touch that was
both thanks and elegy. Beyond the trenches
of the east, a shapeless hunger growled.

* * *

The crisis came disguised as harvest moon—
a swollen eye that glared through midnight’s blindfold.
The earth retched up its dead in macaroon
hues: chartreuse bones, a jawbone caramel-mild.
Lira’s cottage breathed a fungal hymn,
its walls perspiring vapors thick as guilt.
The knight arrived to find her, white-limbed, dim,
her veins a roadmap of the curse he’d built.

“It feeds on love,” she gasped. “The more you wage
your war, the deeper it infests my marrow.
Leave, Roland—let me be the final page
in this ill-written tale. The arrow
of your courage only wings the beast.”
He cradled her, his tears corroding steel.
“If love’s the bait, then I’ll outmatch the feast.
Let it consume me whole. Let my heart’s reel

unspool into its maw. But you’ll be free.”
She shook her head, the rose now wilted, sere.
“The village… it’s too late. No victory
can sprout from ashes. Go—preserve your dear
delusions elsewhere.” But he drew his dagger,
its edge a lightning bolt trapped in a mirror.

* * *

They found him at the cairn where twilight’s wager
was lost—a stone-chested knoll that bore
the scars of old, unspoken plagues. The stagger
of his breath fogged the air like folklore.
He’d carved her name into his shield’s last splinter,
and planted there, amidst the crow’s debate,
the rose’s corpse. The villagers (though winter
had long since pickled them) arrived too late

to see him breach the blight’s pulsating core—
a chrysalis of shadows, ripe with whispers.
He laughed as tendrils yanked him to the floor,
his armor clanking like a jester’s blisters.
“Take me!” he roared. “But let her dawns resume!”
The ground convulsed. A thousand fibrous grippers
dug trenches in his flesh, each one a loom
weaving his essence into death’s new tippers.

* * *

When Lira woke, the sky was wan but whole.
The river coughed up one clear note. The wheat
stood tentative, like convalescents. Dole-
ful bells chimed. But in the square, a sheet
of silver caught her eye: his shield, now bearing
a rosebush’s relief, its petals edged in rust.
Beneath it coiled a scroll, its ink despairing
the nib’s confession: *“Ashes are a just

currency for love. Forgive the cost.”*
She pressed the page until the letters bled,
then walked to where the copse’s lines were crossed
by sunlight, sharp as scalpels. There, she wed
her shadow to the soil, and did not rise,
her hands around the thorn’s last, bloodied prize.

* * *

Now travelers who stray where maps resign
speak of a grove that hums a knight’s refrain.
Two roses bloom where no sun dares assign
its gold: one white, one crimson as the vein
that fed it. Some swear, when the moon is veiled,
a armored sigh unstitches every thorn,
and in the hush, a dialogue ensues—half hailed,
half mourned—between the root and the unborn.
But hope, once bartered, never knits anew;
it haunts the interstices of the tale.
The village, numb, forgets the knight’s tattoo
of sacrifice. Only the wind, in gales,
recites his name to stones that cannot hear.
And love? It lingers, but as ghosts do—near, yet sere.