The Knight of Ashen Sorrows

Through archways choked with ivy’s mournful grasp,
He ventures where the air is thick with asp,
A ruined town, its spires clawing skies
That weep in hues of amber-sickened dyes.
The cobblestones, once proud with merchants’ cries,
Now cradle silence where a realm once rose,
And windows, blind with cracks, no longer close
To bar the winds that whisper of the lost—
A dirge for loves entombed in frost’s accost.

Here Memory, that cruel and siren wraith,
Unspools her threads to bind him in their wraith:
He sees the square where banners laughed aloud,
Now strangled by the mist’s asphyxiant shroud;
The fountain, parched, where children’s laughter played,
Its basin choked with leaves that none have stayed
To sweep away; the chapel, once divine,
Now gnawed by rot, its saints in dark decline.
“O hollow grave of all I held most dear,”
He murmurs, “why dost thou persist to sear
My soul with visions of thy vanished grace?
Why haunt me still with this forsaken place?”

A flicker stirs—a shape, both frail and bright,
As moonlight spills through clouds’ dissembling night.
A maiden’s form, ethereal and pale,
Glides o’er the stones where shadows twist and wail.
Her gown, a spectral silver, seems to weave
The very air where sorrows interleave,
And in her eyes, the ghost of joys long spent
Mirrors the knight’s own shattered testament.

“Dear stranger,” speaks her voice, a breeze half-heard,
“What quest compels thee here, where hope lies blurred?
No treasure gleams beneath this cursed earth,
No glory waits, save echoes of thy dearth.”
The knight, arrested by her mournful guise,
Falls to his knees, his visage stripped of guise.
“I seek,” he gasps, “what time hath rent apart—
A heart’s redemption, torn from memory’s art.
But who art thou, who walks this dire span
Yet bears no mark of death’s unfeeling ban?”

Her laughter, soft as petals borne to pyre,
Unlocks a pang that pierces like a spire.
“I am the wraith of joys thou didst forsake,
The love thou left’st to drown in sorrow’s lake.
Look well upon these ruins, once thy home,
And know the price of errant blades that roam:
For in thy wake, the hearths grew cold and dim,
The songs once sung now plead a requiem.
Thou fled’st the vows that bound thee to this shore,
And now its ghosts shall haunt thee evermore.”

The knight, ashen, grips his rusted sword,
Its gleam long dulled by deeds he’d long ignored.
“I rode to conquer foes in distant realms,
To carve my name in war’s chaotic helms.
Yet here, the foe was never steel nor flame,
But time, which steals all save our bitter shame.
O tell me, spirit, can this curse be stayed?
Can blood atone for choices folly-made?”

Her gaze, a well of pity’s sharpest thorn,
Condemns the plea that from his lips is borne.
“No lance can pierce the veil of fate’s design,
Nor valor cleanse the stains of past decline.
The walls thou seest, crumbled to their knees,
Are but the mirror of thine own disease.
Thy heart, once fortress, now lies breached and bare,
A relic of the wounds it could not spare.”

A gust, as if the earth itself concedes,
Sweeps through the ruins where the knight now pleads.
The specter fades, her form to mist resigned,
Yet leaves behind a truth he cannot blind:
That every step from home he chose to take
But forged the chains no mortal hand can break.
The town, though dead, in silence louder cries
The cost of glory sought in distant skies.

He stumbles through the remnants of his past,
Each step a dirge, each breath a dying gasp.
The market, where his youth’s first vows were sworn,
Now cradles thorns where roses once were born.
The threshold where his mother’s tears were shed
Lies split by roots that feast upon the dead.
And there, beneath the oak where lovers pledged,
A sapling twists where hearts were once enmeshed.

At last, he reaches what was once his hall—
A carcass stripped of warmth, of life, of all.
The hearth, where flames once danced in loyal bloom,
Now cowers ‘neath the weight of endless gloom.
His shield, emblazoned with a crest now faint,
Lies buried ‘neath the ash of history’s taint.
He lifts it, trembling, to the murky light,
And sees his face—a specter of the night.

“O hubris, thou my steed and steady spur,”
He weeps, “behold the desolation stir!
The world I sought to claim with blade and blood
Hath claimed my soul in turn, a brackish flood.
What matter honor, if its price be this—
A realm of ghosts, a love reduced to mist?”

The night deepens, its jaws agape and cold,
As truths, long veiled, into his spirit fold.
No foe to slay, no dragon’s hoard to seize,
No anthem left but whispers on the breeze.
The knight, undone by sorrow’s final stroke,
Collapses where the walls around him choke.

And as the dawn, a stranger to this blight,
Begins to bleed its pallid, cheerless light,
The ruins claim him, silent in their keep—
A king of ashes, wed to endless sleep.
No ballads rise to laud his tragic fall;
The wind, alone, becomes his funeral shawl.
Thus ends the tale of pride and wandering breath,
Where glory’s crown is but the kiss of death.