The Echoes of Forgotten Dawns
A castle stands—its bones picked clean by years,
Where ivy stitches cracks with emerald thread
And shadows kneel where laughter once took root.
Here, through the gate whose rusted hinges weep,
A boy, thin as a whisper, treads the moss,
His breath a fragile banner in the cold,
To seek what ghosts might nurse his nameless heart.
No chronicle but ash survives these halls—
The banquet rooms where silence gorges now
On crumbs of murals flaking to the floor,
Grand stairways spiraling like unanswered prayers,
Their balustrades undone by root and rain.
He climbs, each step a suture torn anew,
While through the rafters moans a dirge of wind
That once had whistled through a nurse’s song.
A nursery door, ajar on splintered hopes,
Reveals a crib where spiders spin their lace
To veil the rot of satin long unstirred.
A toy horse, one eye lost to greedy time,
Lies crippled in a drift of shattered glass—
Its mane, once gold, now gray as unmarked graves.
The boy crouches, his fingers trembling near,
But pauses… for the wood recalls no warmth.
Yet in the dust, a flash of cobalt gleams:
A locket, clasped shut by corrosion’s kiss.
He pries it loose, and there—two faces bloom,
Faint as the scent of roses pressed in vellum.
A woman’s smile, half-eaten by decay,
A man’s hand on her shoulder, now dissolved
To spectral hints of ink. The boy’s own eyes
Stare back—her eyes, his chin, his brow her gift.
*“Mother?”* The word, a moth, dies in the air.
No portrait stirs. No voice but crumbling stone
Rebukes his hope. He slips the chain around
His neck, the metal searing like a brand,
And turns where corridors in chaos yawn,
Their mouths agape with tales they dare not breathe.
Deep in the keep, a chapel’s carcass waits,
Its altar cloths the hue of mottled bruises,
Where tattered hymnals cling to rotten pews.
A stained-glass saint, his face a mosaic wound,
Drips garnet light upon a marble slab—
A tomb, its epitaph erased by moss.
The boy kneels, palms flat on the stone’s cold skin,
And begs the slab to name what lies beneath.
A whisper then—not wind, nor rat’s retreat—
A voice like parchment smoothed by weary hands:
*“You knew this place before the ivy’s reign,
When candles chased the dusk from every ledge.
You chased the lapdog through yon gallery,
You wept when storms made thunder of the towers.
Run, child. The past is no altar to cleave to—
Each memory unearthed will bury you.”*
He staggers back, the locket hot with lies,
As shadows thicken, oil-slick and alive,
Consuming frescoed saints in gulps of night.
A choice: to flee the keep’s insidious throat,
Or pry the tomb awake and claim its truth.
He chooses truth—the orphan’s fatal creed—
And heaves the slab until his tendons scream.
A hollow yawns. No bones, no casket’s gleam—
But books, their leather backs blistered with mold,
Each page a battlefield where ink once marched
Now smeared to ghosts of words he strains to read:
*“Journal of Eleanor, Year… (illegible)…*
*…my son, my light, the fever took you… (tear)…*
*…could not bear the crypt, so small a box…*
*…built this false tomb to hold my grief, unending…”*
The locket thrums. Her face, devoured, stares.
His knees give way. The chapel breathes its dust
Into his lungs, each cough a shard of glass.
*Eleanor.* The name blooms like a bruise.
*Eleanor,* the walls sigh back, then laugh—
A sound of shingles clawed from rooftops, hurled.
He claws the journal to his chest, but lo—
The pages crumble as his tears strike them.
Now chaos comes—the castle stirs, aggrieved.
Stones groan like shipwrecks torn from ocean beds;
The floorboards crack, exhumed by writhing roots.
He flees, the journal’s ashes in his fists,
Through galleries where portraits lurch and leer,
Their pigments melting into hollow eyes.
The locket flays his neck with every stride,
Yet tighter still he clutches it—*she lived.*
The nursery yawns, its doorway now a maw.
The toy horse lies in pieces, sawdust spilled
Like viscera. Beyond the shattered pane,
A cliff gnaws at the night, where moonlit waves
Gnash teeth on rocks a hundred feet below.
Here, at the edge, the boy feels memory’s leash
Snap softly. Names dissolve—his own, then hers.
The journal’s dust is salt upon the wind.
What use a truth that severs like a blade?
The locket parts, its hinge a final gasp,
And lets the portraits free to meet the tide.
He watches them—the man, the woman, him—
Cartwheeling through the void, their faces merged
With stars that neither judge nor mourn nor lie.
The castle, crumbling, hums a lullaby
As waves rise up to meet his weightless fall.
No epitaph will crown the cliff’s bald crown.
No hand inscribes the sea’s green, shifting slate.
Somewhere, a horse’s eye rolls toward the dawn,
A locket nestles deep in owl’s nest,
A journal’s spine fuels worms in feasting joy.
And in the town below, a midwife dreams
Of a babe who never cried when his first breath
Began the slow erasure of his name.
