The Exile’s Last Canticle
A wanderer of shadowed realms now walks alone,
His breath a whispered verse, his eyes two smoldered coals,
The curse of bleeding stanzas etched into his soul.
Here, where the moon’s pale fingers trace each cragged line,
He seeks the gods’ lost tongues in columns’ cold design,
Yet finds, amidst the ruins of some nameless creed,
A face that stills his pulse—a vision born of need.
She moves as dusk’s last sigh, her robes like twilight spun,
A keeper of this sanctum where no prayers are sung.
Her voice, a lark’s lost note above a frozen stream,
Unweaves the knotted silence of his fevered dream.
No name is traded ‘neath the vault’s unblinking stare,
Yet in her glance, the weight of all unsaid they bear.
Her hands, which cup the dusk to light the altar’s flame,
Could melt the frost that grips his ink-and-ashes name.
“What phantom treads these halls,” she asks, “with steps so slow,
As though the earth resists the path you choose to go?”
He dares not speak the truth—that fate’s unyielding vise
Has made his heart a pyre, his art its sacrifice.
“A scribe of wayward stars,” he murmurs, “bound to trace
The arc of borrowed light that fades without a trace.”
Her laughter, soft as rain on long-forgotten dust,
Awakes the temple’s echoes, kindling dormant trust.
Through days of sunlit silence and nights drenched in storm,
They chart a fragile language only outcasts form—
A tilt of head, a pause, the space ‘twixt breath and word,
The sacred script of hearts by solitude interred.
She shows him glyphs that weep when touched by mortal hands,
And tombs where ancient kings lie fused to barren lands.
He reads her tales in cracks on weather-beaten walls,
While doom, like ivy’s grasp, around their union crawls.
One eve, as saffron dusk bled into sable shroud,
She pressed a scroll to ribs where once his heart beat loud.
“These symbols,” she confessed, “hold power to unbind
The chains that leash your spirit to its grief-wracked grind.
But heed this warning well, thou weaver of the verse—
The cure demands a price far darker than the curse.”
He watched her lips, now pale as tombs’ embalmed repose,
And glimpsed the shadowed truth her eyes fought to enclose.
Three nights he paced the crypts where dead gods breathed their last,
Deciphering the runes that mocked his blasphemous past.
The remedy revealed—a lover’s heart, pure-wrought,
Must break to mend the rift his damned quill had brought.
No blade required, nor venom’s sly caress,
But sacrifice of joy to purchase soul’s redress.
He hurled the scroll to depths where no dawn’s light could pry,
And let the temple’s wails become his lullaby.
She found him at the well where nymphs were said to dwell,
His palms scored deep with quill’s revenge, his face a shell.
“What darkness gnaws thy essence?” Pleasure edged her cry,
As storm winds plucked the stars from their accustomed sky.
He spun a lie as thin as altar incense smoke—
“The moon’s gaze turns too cold; these stones my spirit choke.”
But when her fingers brushed the scars that mapped his chest,
The truth burst forth in ash and bile, a damned confess.
“I am the wound that sings, the shadow without form,
The tempest’s bastard child, the thorn that crowns the storm.
To love me is to court the scythe’s unswerving kiss,
To bind your breath to mine is to renounce all bliss.
Fly hence, while still your soul retains its silver hue—
This temple’s dust shall claim what I dare not pursue.”
Her stillness froze the air, the world reduced to naught
But pulse of moth’s frail wing and wars in silence fought.
At length, she spoke—her words as formal as a dirge—
“Think’st thou I house no ghosts, no latent storms to surge?
These hands have cradled death, these lips have tasted fear,
And still I choose to stand where light and dark cohere.
If chains be our shared lot, then let them bind us tight—
Two exiles’ mingled breath may yet outshout the night.”
He kissed her then, as ruins trembled ‘neath their feet,
And for one stolen age, the curse felt incomplete.
But gods who sleep in stone still dream of mortal pain,
And temples long bereft can hunger once again.
They met in stolen moments, brief as comet’s trail,
While columns watched in judgment, ivy clenched the rail.
Each touch a stolen scripture, every gasp a hymn,
They wove their doomed devotion on fate’s trembling rim.
Too soon, the scroll’s fell prophecy began its toll—
Her laughter dimmed, her steps grew slack, her spirit stole.
He woke to find her hair threaded with silver frost,
Her voice now but an echo of the self she’d lost.
The curse, denied its due, now fed on her essence,
Transforming ardent flesh to spectral acquiescence.
“’Tis not thy fault,” she breathed, her smile winter’s dawn,
“All fires must fade where light and darkness first are born.
My heart was never yours—’twas always destined here,
Entwined with silent gods who crave a mortal’s tear.”
He bore her to the altar where first their eyes had met,
Her weight a feather’s sigh, her cheeks with death’s dew wet.
“Speak not of ends,” he begged, “nor graves nor parting’s sting—
The poets yet unborn shall shout what we dare sing.”
But as the final star surrendered to the grey,
Her form dissolved like mist before the sword of day.
Where once her heartbeat thrummed against the temple’s bone,
A single scarlet leaf lay spinning, cold, alone.
Now through the roofless nave, the exile’s chant ascends,
A litany of loss that time cannot amend.
The curse gnaws on, his quill drips verses black as spite,
While somewhere past the dawn, a shadow tastes the light.
Two lovers’ silenced tale, in stone and star encoded,
Waits for the earth to crack, the temple’s roots exploded—
That distant day when ruins yield their long-kept trove,
And all the world may read what exile dared to love.
