The Cathedral’s Sigh: An Elegy for the Cursed Bard

The cathedral slept—its gargoyles’ lidded gaze
held centuries of dust within their throats.
No choir’s whisper disturbed the clinging dark,
yet through the nave’s cadaverous expanse,
a footfall chimed—a silver note, unplanned—
and there she stood, where moonbeams dared to drown:
a figure draped in twilight’s tattered lace,
her face a palimpsest of vanished years.

“What seek you here,” she murmured, “child of thorns,
whose hands have cradled embers till they froze?”
Her voice was autumn’s last leaf clinging fast,
a melody that hollowed out his chest.
He answered not, but raised his quill—a splinter
plucked from the crossbeams of some fallen star—
and traced her silhouette in liquid shadow
upon the floor where saints had cracked to bone.

“Ah,” sighed the wraith, “you paint what cannot stay.
Your art is but a shroud for living breath.
Each line you ink devours what it saves—
the moth that seeks the flame but names it ‘home’.”
Her fingers, spectral threads of silken frost,
brushed his wrist—a touch like shattered vows—
and suddenly the walls began to breathe,
exhaling hymns from tombs beneath their feet.

Pale frescoes bloomed where her gaze alighted:
angels wept rubies from their blinded eyes,
saints twisted into vines that choked the pillars,
and through the rose window’s fractured heart,
a cataract of stars poured down, unspooling
threads of light that bound his pulse to hers.
He felt the curse within him stir and wake—
a serpent coiled around his father’s name.

“Three generations have your bloodline scribbled
truths too fierce for mortal tongues to bear,”
she whispered, lips a breath from his own,
“each poet slain by what their pen birthed forth.
Your grandfather drew down the lightning’s tongue,
your father coaxed the sea from its stone bed—
now you, last scion of this fatal gift,
would make the silence scream? Poor, reckless boy.”

The air grew thick with incense never burned,
each step she took unspooling tapestries
that showed his life in threads of ash and gold:
a mother’s coffin swallowed by the earth,
a father’s hands gone still mid-scribed confession,
the attic where he’d wept his voice to gravel
beneath the weight of ballads never sung.
Her laughter was a harpsichord’s last chord.

“They called it madness—this compulsion
to wrestle angels till your fingers bled.
But I know better: you are hunger incarnate,
starving for the feast just past your reach.
Write my name,” she breathed, “and I’ll become
the requiem your lineage deserves.”
His quill dipped itself in his heartbeat’s ink
as letters formed like scars across the stone—

*Eurydice*—the crypt sighed back her name.
The ground dissolved to liquid onyx waves.
Pillars cracked like spines of ancient kings,
and from the chasm rose a choir of shades
whose song was every word he’d never written,
every hope he’d caged beneath his ribs.
She smiled—a blade unsheathed in velvet night—
“Now sing, little Orpheus, and we shall see.”

He sang. Oh, how the cursed poet sang—
of dawns that perished in their cradle,
of love that curled like smoke from dying pyres,
of all the yesteryears that crumbled
to salt upon tomorrow’s barren shore.
The cathedral groaned, its ribs contracting,
as every note he wove became a chain,
a latticework of sound that bound her form.

But as the final verse tore from his throat,
she laughed—the sound of mirrors shattering—
and clutched his face between her shadowed hands.
“Foolish bard, to think your fragile art
could cage what was already caged by time.
Your curse was never words—it’s this:
to glimpse eternity, then watch it fade.”
Her kiss was winter swallowing the sun.

The world collapsed to one suspended moment—
his quill, mid-arc, etching light to dark;
her form dissolving into motes of glimmer;
the cathedral holding its stony breath.
Then—

Silence.

No grand cataclysm, no thunderous roar—
just a boy alone with empty air,
his masterpiece reduced to phantom strokes
on pavement where no ghostly feet remained.
The curse pulsed once—a dying viper’s strike—
and in his chest, the poems turned to stone.

Dawn’s first blade sliced through the fractured glass,
revealing what the night had cloaked in grief:
every word he’d written now erased,
every verse dissolved like mist in light.
Only his final work stayed etched in ash—
a single line that smoldered on the stones:
*“I loved the world too well, and it loved none.”*

The cathedral watched, indifferent and vast,
as the poet crumbled into scattered leaves—
each one inscribed with fragments of his soul,
blown through the doorless arch into the void.
Some say the stones still hum his lost refrain
when moonlight strikes the rose window’s wound—
a hymn for those who grasp at fading light,
whose hands find only shadows in the end.