The Ballad of the Forgotten Minstrel

He crossed the threshold where the ivy wept,
Each step a whisper on the rotted floor,
And in the hall, where moth-eaten tapestries kept
Their vigil, something stirred—a ghostly score.
A tune half-remembered, notes that coiled like smoke,
A requiem for joys the walls once bore.
He plucked a string; the silence tore, awoke,
And spectral echoes hummed what came before.

“Who treads where time has barred its iron gate?”
A voice like wind through cracks in ancient tombs.
“A beggar of songs,” he murmured, “destined too late
To seek what crumbles faster than it blooms.”
The air grew thick with memories unspooled,
A thousand faces flickered in the gloom—
Lords whose laughter once the rafters ruled,
Now ash in urns, their triumphs sealed in doom.

He climbed the stair where cobwebs clasped the rail,
Each chamber colder than the breath of graves,
Till in a room where moonlight pierced the veil,
He found it—the source that every pilgrim craves:
A harp of bone, its strings still taut with grief,
A relic of the art that madness saves.
He touched a chord; the room exhaled relief,
And time itself seemed frayed, a yellowed leaf.

But as he played, the castle breathed its curse,
The walls absorbed each note like sponges drowned.
His fingers blurred, a blessing and a hearse,
While melodies he forged became unbound
From memory’s grasp. The air grew dense with sound,
Yet emptier still—each bar he’d ever learned
Dissolved like salt in rain, until the ground
Beneath him shook, and one stark truth he discerned:

The castle fed on song as crows on eyes,
Its stones alive with vampiric delight.
Each chord he struck drained color from the skies,
Each hymn he hummed devoured his inner light.
Yet still he played, ensnared by siren lies,
Compelled to chase the phantom of his craft,
Till fingers bled and vision blurred to white,
And every strain became a fractured raft

On which his sanity began to drift.
The harp’s neck curved, a vulture’s hungry beak,
Its strings now fetters, cunningly adrift
To bind him where the past and present shriek.
He felt his name unravel, thread by thread,
The face he wore in mirrors grown antique,
Until he stood—a shadow, poorly fed
On echoes—where the self and stranger meet.

At last, he faltered. Silence fell like lead.
The castle sighed, replete with stolen song.
His lute lay shattered, its voice forever dead,
His hands, twin husks that knew where they belonged
No more. The moon retreated, pale and chaste,
As dawn’s grey fingers prodded all things wrong.
He stumbled out, a void where once was graced
With passion’s fire, now just a hollowed waste.

They found him days later, miles from those stones,
Mute as the earth, eyes vacant as the moor.
No trace of music in his bloodless bones,
No spark of kin or craft to reassure.
He digs now in the dirt with naked hands,
Seeking a tune buried too deep to lure,
While in the castle, where eternity stands,
New shadows dance to songs he can’t endure.

And sometimes, when the west wind keens just so,
A whimper threads through ruins’ gaping maw—
Not quite a note, not quite a name we know,
But something lost between the is and was.
The minstrel’s curse: to hunger for the art
That drinks the artist whole, sans pause or clause,
To trade one’s soul to mend a broken heart,
And find, too late, the price was every part.