The Canvas of Forgotten Skies

His cottage crouched beneath the elder trees,
Its timbers bent as backs of ancient men,
Where ivy choked the whispers of the breeze
And shadows brewed their ink in midnight’s den.

He painted not the sun’s gaudy descent,
Nor daffodils that bowed to court the spring,
But fissures in the cliffs where tempests vent,
And roots that strangle what the earth might sing.

The village spat his name like rotted fruit—
“Mad Alaric, who daubs the devil’s hue!”
They crossed themselves whene’er his boots took root
On paths where children’s laughter never grew.

Yet in his breast there burned a vow unsaid,
A pact with some dim ghost of beauty’s vein,
To trap the village’s lost soul in lead
And frame the ache no tears could ever stain.

He’d watched the blacksmith’s daughter waste to air,
Her voice a silver thread the plague had sheared.
Her final breath had woven through his hair
A promise thicker than the blood he feared.

“I’ll build a monument no worm can blight,
Where all we were might outlive failing flesh.”
But canvas gaped like graves through every night,
His brushes stiffened in their bone-dry mesh.

The well where maidens once had sung of fate
Now harbored only echoes of their feet.
He mixed his paints with rust and old heartbreak,
And tried to make the emptiness complete.

One eve, as autumn coughed her last gold leaf,
A stranger came with eyes like tarnished dimes,
Whose cloak seemed stitched from every unspun grief
That ever haunted mortal paradigms.

“They say you seek to cage what flees the light,”
The wanderer mused, his smile a sickle’s curve.
“What if I offered you the second sight—
To paint not just the wound, but how nerves swerve?”

Alaric’s throat grew tight with want and dread,
For in the dust where Lila’s shadow lay,
He saw his oath unraveling thread by thread,
A masterpiece deferred to decay.

“What price?” he asked. The stars above conspired,
Their cold gleam sharpening the stranger’s face.
“The memory of what you once desired
Before despair became your sole embrace.”

The pact was sealed with ash and midnight wine.
At once, the world peeled back its gauzy skin—
He saw the village’s slow decline
As Time’s own hand erased where it had been.

Each cottar’s hidden shame, each furtive lie,
The blacksmith’s secret taste for others’ wives,
The priest’s doubt festering beneath his tie—
All writhed like worms beneath decaying hives.

Yet deeper still, beneath the human stain,
He glimpsed the land’s raw, throbbing, primal core—
The granite’s ancient song of ceaseless pain,
The river’s dirge for shores it knew no more.

For seven nights he labored, half-possessed,
His brush now dagger, now a lover’s kiss,
Until the village wept upon his chest,
A portrait of existence’s abyss.

But when the final stroke baptized the dawn,
The canvas pulsed with unearthly lament.
No mortal eyes could bear what he had drawn—
The truth, once birthed, devours its testament.

The stranger laughed, a sound of shattering glass,
“Behold your triumph—art’s most cruel deceit!
You’ve bared the soul none dare to let amass,
Now watch your precious world kneel to defeat.”

The painting shrieked. The villagers awoke
To visions of their essence made grotesque.
They stormed his door with scythes and splintered oak,
Their faces twisted masks of the grotesque.

“Destroy the fiend who strips our souls to bone!”
They howled, as winter’s first snow choked the air.
Alaric clutched his work—his heart alone
Knew this was all he’d ever meant to share.

They burned the cottage where his dreams had nursed,
The flames licked skies no art could now retrieve.
Yet as the rafters groaned and walls dispersed,
He laughed—a sound that made the mobbers grieve.

For in the fire’s dance, he saw at last
The truth no canvas ever could contain:
That beauty’s twin is anguish equally vast,
And both must meet where all our vows are slain.

The snow next morn erased the ashen scars,
The village, numb, resumed its hushed pretense.
No trace remained of Alaric or his stars,
Just whispered rumors of a “madman’s sense.”

But sometimes when the moon is but a sliver,
And honest men pretend they do not hear,
The wind carries the scrape of brush on river,
And shadows form what daylight dare not mirror.

There in the glen where Lila’s ghost still walks,
A spectral easel bears a work half-done—
A boy who trades his soul for second sights,
A village damned by truths it could not shun.

And deep beneath the mosses’ emerald clutch,
Where roots embrace the bones they’ve slowly claimed,
There rots a palette stained with longing’s touch—
The only proof that beauty once was framed.