The Cathedral’s Whispering Shade

Through stained glass steeped in twilight’s ashen hue, a specter-glow descends to paint the floor,
And there, amidst the pillars, gaunt and grave, a figure stands—a child he knew before.
Her face, a porcelain mask of vanished springs, her eyes, twin pools where midnight’s sorrows brew,
She lifts a hand, translucent as the wings of moths that flit where memory leaks through.

“Stranger,” she breathes, her voice a breeze through reeds, “what phantom guides thee to this hushed domain?
These walls, once loud with laughter’s bright cascade, now hold but echoes, orphaned by the rain.”
He freezes, for her visage, pale and dire, unlocks a chest of years he’d sealed with fire—
A face that mirrors, with uncanny art, the sister-spirit lost to summer’s pyre.

“Speak, ghost or dream!” he cries, his throat constricted, “what trick of shadows taunts my fevered sight?
For she who shared my cradle’s tender keep lies buried where the willows weep at night.”
The child-smile fades; her form begins to waver, as if the air itself would disavow her,
Yet still she points beyond the chancel’s reach, where moonlight carves a path only he might follow.

Through crypts where kings in marble slumber sound, past grilles that clutch at darkness like a bride,
They glide—the man, the wraith—their breaths unbound, yet bound by threads no blade of steel can slice.
A door, oak-black and scarred by centuries, creaks wide to spill a vision long interred:
A garden, lush with blooms of bygone Junes, where two young souls once chirped like dawn’s first birds.

“Behold,” she sighs, “the orchard of our youth, where golden plums would kiss the earth in June,
Where we, as twins of mischief and of mirth, raced barefoot till our soles matched the maroon
Of sunsets stolen by the jealous west. Recall the treehouse built with splintered planks,
Our fortress ’gainst the dragons dusk would send—
Now see it sag, a crone bereft of thanks, its timbers gnawed by decades without end.”

The wanderer falls to knees that scrape the grime, his hands clutch clumps of clover, long since dead.
“Why conjure phantoms of this hallowed time? What cruel enlightenment dost thou intend?”
The child-specter kneels, her touch a chill that seeps through flesh to clutch his shuddering core:
“I am the vault where all thy joys are stored, the self thou drowned to don the mask thou wore.”

Then, like a lute’s string plucked in some far room, the scene dissolves to ash, then reconvenes—
A parlor, warm with firelight’s amber bloom, where mother’s hands, now dust, once darned torn seams.
The ghost-girl fades, her essence thinned to mist, while from the hearth (now cracked and choked with weeds),
A woman’s laugh, rich as the night’s first star, spirals—then strangles to a gasp, abrupt.

A crash—a scream—a thud—the vision mars: the father, drunk on wrath and whiskey’s dregs,
Stands monstrous in the archway, belt in hand, while young hands shield a face already bruised.
The wanderer, now boy again, withstands the storm, then flees to where the willows stand—
But lo! His sister follows, slight and frail, her ankle snared by roots that mar her flight.

The brook, engorged by spring’s tempestuous tears, devours her cry with rapids ravenous.
He claws the bank till blood bedews the years, yet finds but one small shoe, soaked through and muddied.
The scene dissolves; the cathedral’s chill returns. The specter-child, now dim, extends her palm:
“Thou fled’st from grief, yet grief became thy realm. Thy every step hath echoed her last psalm.”

“No!” he protests, “I carved a life from strife! Raised towers where the world would see my name!”
“And in their shadow,” whispers she, “didst thou not house the guilt no accolade could tame?
Each night, the river churns within thy ears. Each mirror shows thee not thine own, but hers.
This shrine,” she sweeps a hand toward vaults austere, “is but thy heart, enlarged through timeless years.”

The truth, ice-sharp, now pierces through the fog: these stones, this nave, this everlasting dark
Are but the chambers of his self-made tomb, where memory’s ivy leaves its indelible mark.
He grasps her ghostly shoulders, pleads in vain: “Release me from this labyrinth of woe!”
Her form begins to fray like smoke from coals. “I cannot, brother. Thou art all I know.”

As dawn’s first blade now licks the eastern pane, the cathedral groans—a beast bestirred from sleep.
The pillars crack; the rose window’s stained campaign shatters to blades that on the transept heap.
The child dissolves, her final utterance bare: “Weep not for bonds that death cannot untie…”
Alone, he stands amidst the crumbling aisles, her shoe clutched tight, while Time, the sly, walks by.