The Ballad of Ashen Vows
A city kneels in rot and rust, its breath a whisper lost to dust.
Here, where shadows chew the light, a poet walks the plague-struck night,
His cloak a shroud of cobweb grey, his quill the thorn that won’t obey.
The cobblestones, like broken teeth, sing dirges underneath his feet,
While windowless facades conspire to smother every stolen fire.
Young Lysander was his name, when laurels bloomed and bells proclaimed
Him heir to words that kings would crave—now poison drips from what he gave.
Three winters past, beneath this vault, he knelt where Lethe’s whispers fault,
The Foundry of Forgotten Oaths, where air itself turns thick with both
The weight of promises unborn and ash of those betrayal-torn.
A pact he made with iron tongue, to chain his art till time was done:
“No hand but Death’s shall still my verse, no grief nor glory lift this curse—
My ink shall flow like vital blood till earth reclaims me as her mud.”
But lo! The Fates, who spin and sneer, sent phantoms through his fourth-year sphere.
A maiden (pale as vellum’s sheet) emerged where alleyways compete,
Her voice a lute’s last trembling string, her eyes two wells of poisoned spring.
“Dear bard,” she sighed, “thy ballads sweet have drawn me from my starless seat—
One stanza more, one line refined, and thou shalt know what poets find
When muses cross from shadow’s brink…” Her lips, blue roses, dared him drink.
Through fevered nights he fought her pull, his parchment stained with waxen skull,
But rhymes began to twist and seethe like serpents in a laurel wreath.
The oath-rune etched above his hearth wept rust upon the frozen earth,
While in the square, the townsfolk spat at ravens fat from feasting fat—
“’Tis Lysander’s verse,” they’d hiss, “that summons blight and births abyss!
Each metaphor’s a coffin nail, each couplet lets another fail.”
Yet still he wrote, though quills would snap like bones within a thunderclap,
His hands now claws, his hair like moss, his inkwell filled with albatross.
The maiden came when moon was cleft, her fingers through his quill-hand cleft—
“Thy magnum opus waits,” she breathed, “where living breath has never seethed.
Deny thy vow, embrace thy art—what’s one oath sundered, one rent heart?”
Dawn found him at the Foundry’s maw, where oath-smoke coils like justice’s claw.
The anvil (cold since Atlas fell) drank tears no mortal tongue could tell
As Lysander raised his mangled right—the hand that penned both love and blight—
“I break what gods themselves admired, for art’s sweet venom I’ve acquired.”
The hammer fell. The echo rang. The city gasped. The black bells sang.
Now witness, wanderer, this curse: the ground convulsed to write his verse.
Granite split in iambs raw, while hell-spawned rhymes etched every law.
His flesh became a living page, each vein a stanza’s gilded cage,
His eyes two pools of India ink, his voice the sound of contracts’ sink.
The maiden laughed her glassy laugh—then crumbled to epitaph:
“Here lies the fool who thought to wed his soul to art—now art is dead.”
The ruins sag beneath their load of ballads turned to serpents’ code.
No lyre plays where Lysander walks—his shadow writes while real ink talks.
Each dawn, he claws at petrified vows; each dusk, the Foundry’s mouth allows
One scream to pierce the sulfurous air…and somewhere, always, someone hears.
Thus ends the tale (but never grief) of poet and his stolen leaf—
For those who seek to chain the sublime shall find their chains are made of time,
And every oath sworn to transcend becomes the means, the foe, the end.
The ruins stand as testament: No art survives what poets meant.
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