The Ballad of Broken Strings
A wanderer of twilight plucks his fraying lyre,
His cloak, a tapestry of dusk and borrowed thread,
Sweeps o’er the cathedral’s bones where silence wed.
No hymn ascends these arches, no censer’s breath takes flight,
Yet here he kneels, a pilgrim bound to starless night,
For in this tomb of marble, where the moon’s pale eye
Drifts through stained glass sorrows, a captive soul doth lie.
Her name was but a whisper, a chord he dared not play,
A melody imprisoned where daylight turned to grey.
They called her fate a specter, her breath a fleeting spark,
Bound by chains unseen, entombed within the dark.
He found her in the cloister, where ivy choked the grille,
Her voice a shard of silver, her heart a frozen rill.
“What phantom grips thy spirit?” his trembling words implored,
“What seraph bars thy freedom?” Her answer spilled, a sword:
“The price of life’s sweet nectar, the toll this spire demands,
Is paid in dreams forsaken, in shackled hands.
Yet thou, whose fingers dance where wild winds dare to sing,
Might break the seal of shadows… if thou wouldst rend the string.”
No oath he swore in thunder, no tear betrayed his creed,
But deep within his lute’s breast, a dirge began to bleed.
For every note he bartered, a filament unwound,
Each chord a step descending to fate’s unyielding ground.
Three nights he played the requiem, three dawns he drank the pain,
As specters wove their whispers through the fractured pane.
The first night spun her laughter, a relic sweet and frail,
The second bore her heartbeat, a ghost beneath the veil.
The third night’s moon hung heavy, a scythe of spectral light,
Her form, a wisp of vapor, dissolved into the night.
“One string remains,” she murmured, “to sever or to save—
The final thread that binds thee… or breaks the tyrant’s grave.”
His hands, once deft as starlight, now faltered, raw and torn,
The lute, his soul’s last vessel, lay shattered, spent, forlorn.
Yet in her eyes, the glimmer of dawn’s forbidden hue
Unleashed the tempest raging—one breath, one chord, he drew.
The note pierced heaven’s ribcage, a cry of ruptured chains,
The walls, like ancient sentinels, shuddered in their pains.
Her form, ethereal vapor, dissolved in freedom’s gust,
While he, the nameless minstrel, embraced the vengeful dust.
The cathedral’s spine collapsed then, a symphony of woe,
Each stone a mournful echo of what he dared to owe.
And where the altar crumbled, two shadows linger still—
One bound to silent rapture, one chained to mortal will.
Now travelers swear in whispers, when midnight’s veil grows thin,
They hear a fractured ballad where ruins choke the din.
A lute’s last gasp of glory, a woman’s fleeting sigh—
The cost of love’s bold currency… the tune that let her fly.
