The Bridge of Rain and Remorse

The hour gnaws its teeth into the twilight’s throat,
and shadows, like old soldiers, crouch beneath the stones.
Her hands, once deft as springtide’s tender note,
now clutch a locket cold as ash, its chain of shattered bones.

Three winters past, the drums of war had carved their rhyme
into the flesh of villages, the marrow of the land.
Her love, a flame too bold for the greedy hands of time,
had marched beneath a banner none could understand.

“Return,” he vowed, his voice a lyre strung with night,
“before the final leaf descends to kiss the frosted ground.”
But seasons rot like promises, and dawns dissolve to blight—
the locket holds his portrait, but the man was never found.

Tonight, the bridge exhales a mist that clings like ghosts,
each step a dirge, each raindrop razored through her shawl.
She hears the river murmur secrets of the lost,
and in its depths, a face—not hers—begins to call.

“Elara,” breathes the water, “grief has etched your name
in every ripple’s wrinkle, every stone’s unspoken scar.
What pact have you forged with the void, what altar of ash and flame?
The war demands no tribute but the light of your last star.”

Her throat a nest of thorns, she answers to the tide:
“I’ve fed the crows my laughter, sown my tears in barren soil.
They say he fell where cannons chew the earth’s own side,
but his shadow walks this bridge—I’ve felt his fingers coil

around my heart’s last thread. If blood must be the key
to unchain him from the silence where the battle’s breath is stored,
then let the river take what war could steal from me,
and weave our ghosts together on the loom of every sword.”

The mist contorts, a serpent crowned with fractured light,
and from its jaws emerges a figure clad in gray—
a soldier’s form, but hollow, like a moth-eaten kite,
his eyes twin voids where hope’s embers choked to clay.

“Elara,” croaks the specter, voice of rust and nettle,
“the fields where I was buried bear no roses, only nails.
They grafted me to cannon smoke, made my marrow metal—
yet your sorrow dragged me back through the veil where mercy fails.”

She staggers, yet her anguish shapes a broken creed:
“If death’s gate swings one way, let my heartbeat be the cost
to walk you through the aftermath, to plant the phantom seed
of peace your ghost might harvest where the battle’s lines were crossed.”

The soldier’s hand extends—a skeletal leaf, frost-bitten—
“The price is not your pulse, but the memory of your touch.
To free me from the war’s curse, you must let our past be riven,
and cast the locket’s face into the river’s clutch.”

The locket burns, a star against her palm’s pale snow,
its hinge a scream, its portrait stained with years of sleepless wrath.
To sever now the thread that binds his soul to woe,
she must unclasp the anchor—and condemn their love to myth.

The rain sharpens its needles; the bridge begins to hum
a hymn of crumbling empires, of choices clawed from dread.
She lifts the locket high—a sun snuffed, soon to become
another pebble in the river’s wet, unending bed.

“Forgive me,” she implores the face that war erased,
then lets the metal plunge into the ravenous below.
The water shrieks, the soldier’s form is swiftly displaced
by a whirlpool’s maw, its spiral hungry as a crow.

Yet as the ripples dance their grim, applauding ballet,
the bridge itself begins to fray—a puppet without strings.
The planks dissolve like sugar in the tea of decay,
and Elara feels the void where her sacrifice now sings.

Her feet are roots, her arms the branches of a tree
that grows not toward the heavens, but into the abyss.
The soldier’s voice, a whisper now: “You’ve set me free,
but the bridge demands a toll—no soul escapes its kiss.”

The river surges, swollen with the tears of countless years,
and drags her down into its throat of silt and shattered glass.
Her final breath, a melody that mingles with her fears,
becomes the wind’s lament, the rain’s eternal mass.

Above, the bridge stands vacant, its arches stained with night,
a monument to choices made where love and death collude.
Travelers swear they hear, in storms that claw the height,
two voices tangled—one of gratitude, one of rue.

And in the locket’s absence, in the river’s cryptic hold,
a lesson curls like smoke: that war’s arithmetic
subtracts not just the living, but the stories left untold,
and the bravest hearts are those that break to mend the rift.