The Ashen Pilgrimage

Now ruin draped the archways, ivy throttling each crest,
And Time’s unblushing fingers peeled the flesh from every breast
Of statues left to languish in the square’s unyielding cold—
Their marble eyes still pleading with the past they could not hold.

He came to name the silence, to parse the ghostly air,
To trace the phantom laughter that once rang like bells in prayer.
But the city breathed in echoes, a labyrinth of sighs,
Where every step unearthed a dirge, and every stone told lies.

A bridge, half-swallowed by the mist, stretched o’er a river’s ghost,
Its waters long departed, leaving only cracks and boast
Of currents strong as memory, now dust beneath his tread.
He paused to hear their murmur—heard his mother’s voice instead:

*“Child, the night is but a curtain; lift it, and you’ll see
The lanterns of our kinsmen dancing ’cross the endless sea…”*
Yet when he reached to grasp the sound, it frayed like threadbare lace,
Leaving him with hollow hands and time’s unflinching face.

Deeper still he wandered, where the alleys coiled and knotted,
Each turn a serpent’s whisper, every wall with shadow rotted.
There, beneath a lintel cracked like some old sorrow’s spine,
He saw her—or her semblance—in the dusk’s uncertain line.

Her hair was autumn’s absence, her gown the twilight’s tear,
A figure spun from moonmist, neither wholly here nor there.
*“You’ve come to mend the sundered,”* she said, voice like leaves in flight,
*“But the loom has snapped its tethers, and the weave rejects the light.”*

*“Then why does the heart remember,”* he cried, *“what the hands cannot reclaim?
Why stitch the shroud of yesterday with needles forged in flame?”*
Her laughter was a shiver, a wind through barren trees:
*“You seek the fire’s shadow, yet scorn the ember’s freeze.

The past is but a window—its glass both shield and blade.
To linger at its sill is to court the phantom’s trade.”*
She melted then like frost-kissed ink beneath the dawn’s first stain,
Leaving him alone with questions that gnawed like ancient rain.

He climbed the crippled tower, where the bell no longer tolled,
Its tongue rust-sealed, its message to the void forever rolled.
Below, the city sprawled—a corpse in sepia and gray,
Its veins choked with ash, its pulse a dirge of decay.

Yet as the sun bled westward, a mirage took the air:
The cobbles bloomed with petals, the fountains surged with hair
Of liquid light; the market’s din swelled rich and ripe once more,
And children’s faces flickered like flames on a distant shore.

He saw his father’s smithy, heard the anvil’s ardent song,
The clang of hope on iron, now silenced, gone, undone.
A younger self darted past, a spark in summer’s guise,
Unburdened by the weight of years, alight in his own eyes.

Madness or mercy? He could not say, but down he plunged, unbound,
Through layers of illusion, seeking what the lost had found.
His feet struck stone unyielding; the vision bled away,
And darkness, thick as centuries, swallowed the false array.

Night fell with neither candle nor a warden moon to guide,
And in the square, the traveler knelt, his soul untethered, wide.
The statues watched in silence as he scooped the dust apart,
Searching for a shard of home to press against his heart.

But the earth gave up no treasures, save a single, shattered chime—
A relic of some revelry, murdered by the crime
Of years that carve their verdicts deep in flesh and mind and stone.
He cradled it, this artifact of all he could not own.

The wind rose, sharp with prophecy, and in its hollow throat
Came whispers of the myriad souls who’d clutched the same frail hope.
Their voices wove a requiem, a chorus raw and dim:
*“To love a ghost is to drown in seas that never learned to swim.”*

Dawn came, a timid stranger, painting shadows weak and thin,
Revealing what the darkness hid: the scars beneath his skin.
Not wounds of blade or bludgeon, but the slow, devouring toll
Of chasing yesteryear’s perfume through the present’s ashen shoal.

The city, ever-patient, breathed its ruin through his veins,
Each brick a tomb, each breeze a dirge, each step a weight of chains.
He knew then, as the sun clawed up, relentless in its rise,
That some returns are prisons, and some truths are winged goodbyes.

In the end, he did not falter, nor rail against the night’s decree.
He laid the broken chime to rest beneath a blighted tree,
Where roots like gnarled fingers clasped the offering he gave—
A testament to all that yearns, and dies to stay brave.

The traveler turned, his shadow now a companion, not a wraith,
And walked into the waking world, bearing no epitaph.
For the city, in its sorrow, had taught him this stark creed:
To hold the past too tightly is to make the present bleed.

Yet as he crossed the threshold, where the ruins met the plain,
A single chime, improbable, rang soft through the terrain.
He paused, but did not look back—for echoes, once set free,
Are neither oath nor anchor, but the soul’s spent elegy.