The Wraith of Eventide Hollow

A soul adrift, unmoored from Time’s unyielding flow,
Wanders this spectral realm where no soft blossoms grow.
Her form, a wisp of memory, her eyes two fading stars,
She treads the dust of yesteryears, scarred by spectral scars.
Her name? Long lost to echoes, her tale a fractured hymn,
Yet still she seeks the shadow of a love grown dim.

The cottages, like tombstones, lean with weary sighs,
Their windows, vacant sockets, stare through clouded skies.
A church, its spire crooked, tolls a silent bell,
For souls who once found solace where now but phantoms dwell.
She pauses by the threshold where roses once entwined,
Now thorns embrace the archway, and rot consumes the rind.

“O hearth where once I lingered! O walls that knew my breath!
Why dost thou stare in silence, like guardians of death?
The bread I baked at morning, the songs we sang at eve—
Are these but ash and echoes that Time will not reprieve?”
No answer stirs the stillness, save leaves that skirl and spin,
As twilight deepens, whispering of roads that might have been.

A spectre-child emerges, her face a moonlit trace,
Her laughter silver fragments in that forsaken place.
“Why weep you, shadow-mother?” the phantom girl inquires,
Her voice a chime of frost, her gown of ghostly fires.
“I seek what was, yet find but what relentless years efface.”
The child tilts her head, a smile on her airy face.

“Come, trace the steps you walked when flesh and bone were one,
When sunlit hours cradled you, and life was but begun.
But mark the price of wandering where Memory holds her court—
Each step shall bleed the present, each breath shall feed the fort
Of ghosts who bind your spirit to chains of endless night.”
The wraith bows low, her essence trembling in the light.

Through lanes where market stalls once brimmed with corn and song,
Past wells where lovers pledged o’er waters clear and strong,
She follows her small guide, each footfall steeped in ache,
For here, in vibrant pigments, her past begins to wake:
A door—now splintered timber—where his hand clasped hers tight,
A bench where twilight found them, entwined in soft delight.

“Behold,” the child intones, “the chamber where he dwelt,
Whose voice once stilled your tempests, whose touch made glaciers melt.
Look through the veil of decades, let Memory’s storm commence—
But know, lost soul, this vision shall sever thy last tether hence.”
The wraith, with breath unneeded, drifts through crumbling walls,
And there, in Time’s reversal, her shattered heart recalls.

A room of honeyed candle-glow, where shadows dance and yearn,
A man with ink-stained fingers, his face to her a sun.
He reads aloud from parchment, his voice a deep, warm stream,
She, mortal then, attends him, enraptured by the theme.
Their hands meet ‘midst the pages; the world dissolves to naught
Save vows exchanged in whispers, and futures dearly bought.

“O Love!” she cries, her voice a gale through cracks of stone,
“Why linger I in purgatory, while thou dost reign alone
In lands beyond this prison, where light nor pain intrudes?
Was not our bond eternal, forged in solitudes?”
The vision shifts—a fever steals his breath, his flame,
A grave beneath the willow, carved with her true name.

The child’s grip turns icy. “See how thy clinging breath
Preserves this hollow pantomime, this dance beyond true death?
Release the shards thou clutchest, let Silence claim her throne,
Else roam thou ever-dying, in this waste of bone.”
But wraiths are wrought of yearning, of might-have-been’s cruel art—
She flees the spectral maiden, though splintered grows her heart.

Through seasons phantom-laden, she haunts each ruined scene:
The brook where he first kissed her, now choked with mosses green;
The oak that bore their initials, struck low by lightning’s blade;
The inn where friends once gathered, now but a charred arcade.
Each relic rends her spirit, yet binds her all the more
To hopes as vain as footprints on a wave-devoured shore.

One eve, as mist congeals to shroud the spectral vale,
A figure cloaked in twilight stands pallid, gaunt, and frail.
His eyes, twin pools of shadow, his voice a rasping thread:
“I am the Keeper of the Chasm, where dreams of men lie dead.
I offer thee a bargain—to glimpse thy heart’s desire,
But when the vision crumbles, thou shalt feed the pyre.”

“What pyre?” the wraith demands, though dread coils in her throat.
“The flame that burns the anchors of souls who cannot float
Beyond the shores of longing. Choose, and choose with haste—
To see his face one moment, and then be Time’s erased.”
Her essence, torn asunder, yet cries with one accord:
“I’ll pay the toll of nothingness—grant me this, dark lord!”

A snap—the world upended. A cottage, warm and bright,
Where firelight paints the ceiling on a winter’s night.
There, whole in flesh and fervor, her love turns from his tome,
His smile the dawn she’d mourned in her eternal gloam.
“Beloved,” speaks the vision, “what shadows haunt thy gaze?”
She weeps, though tears are phantoms, and clasps his mortal face.

“I dwell beyond the curtain,” she murmurs, “yet I swore
To guard thee past the parting, though Life’s gates I’d ignore.”
His brow, once smooth with vigor, now creases with a thought,
As if some faintest echo of her truth his mind had caught.
“Thy voice, a distant music… Thy face, a dream half-known…
Stay, spectre—forge this moment to something more than stone!”

But hark—the Keeper’s laughter, a rattle through the void.
The vision cracks like glass where poison has been deployed.
The hearth’s glow dims to embers; the walls dissolve to air;
Her love’s form melts like snowfall, leaving but despair.
“The price is paid,” booms thunder. The wraith, now bound in chains
Of fire that lick her essence, screams through the remains

Of all she was and dreamed. The village, too, decays—
Each stone to dust, each memory to naught but hollow haze.
The child weeps silver rivulets; the Keeper’s cloak spreads wide.
“Thou’rt nought but ash and echo now,” he croons with fatal pride.
Yet as the flames consume her, one truth her scream imparts:
“To love is to be mortal, even in death’s cold arts!”

The hollow stands now emptier, its silence more profound,
A monument to phantoms in its barren, hallowed ground.
And travelers who dare tread where the willows droop and sway
Report a faint, sad murmur at the dimming of the day—
A whisper of a woman, a sigh of love’s eclipse,
And ashes borne forever on the wind’s lamenting lips.