The Knight of Shifting Sands
A knight in tarnished silver treads, his cloak a tattered banner
Whispering secrets to the wind—a dirge of dust and longing.
No citadel breaks the horizon’s cruel geometry, no well
Offers its throat to quench the ache that gnaws his bones to hollows.
Only the sand, relentless scribe, inscribes his fate in syllables of ash.
Three moons have waxed and waned since last he kissed her trembling hand,
Her fingers cold as twilight’s breath, her voice a faltering stream—
“Go forth,” she murmured, “not for glory, but to kneel before the veiled abyss,
And plead with Time, that fickle thief, to barter back my breath.”
He swore an oath no mortal tongue should dare to shape aloud:
To wrest her soul from Death’s clenched fist or carve his own in half.
The desert scorns such mortal vows. Its jaws are wide and patient.
It drinks his sweat, it strips his dreams, it grinds his shield to rust,
Yet still he walks, a compass needle trembling toward the north
Of memory—her laughter spun from harpstrings’ gold, her eyes
Two chalices of starlight spilled. Each night, the mirage-mongers
Weave her ghost from moonbeams, just to watch him clutch at smoke.
*“Beloved,”* cries the wind, her name a scar upon his lips,
*“What good is armor when the foe resides within the blood?”*
He stumbles, and the sand receives him like a beggar’s alms.
A scorpion, jewelled and cruel, observes with blackened gems for eyes—
A sentinel of barren law, it tails his shadow’s crawl,
A scribe recording every wound the wastes refuse to heal.
At last, the dunes part like a curtain. There, in the crucible of noon,
A spire of obsidian pierces heaven’s bleached cerulean shroud—
A temple older than regret, where silence kneels in worship.
Its gates, twin mouths of splintered onyx, groan a single word:
*“Enter, supplicant, and bear the price your trembling soul must tender.”*
The knight, now less than man, more than ghost, crosses the threshold’s blade.
Within, the air is thick with centuries. The walls breathe.
A voice, neither male nor female, hums within his marrow:
*“You seek the Chalice of Stolen Hours, whose wine can turn Fate’s tide.
But know this: what you beg to save, the vessel must first consume.
One life for another—the scales dare not tilt. Choose, mortal:
Your heart’s twin flame, or the breath that fuels your futile crusade.”*
No pause. No prayer. His sword clangs hard against the altar’s teeth.
*“Take all I am, all I could be. Let her bloom where I lie fallow.”*
The temple shudders. Shadows congeal to ink the knight’s last plea—
A contract etched in blood and sand. The chalice glows, malignant,
Its rim a crescent moon of frost. He drinks, and as the draught
Unspools his veins to threads of light, he smiles. *She will wake.*
But deserts deal in paradox. The sands, that ancient jester,
Laugh through their granular teeth. For in the town he left behind,
Her bed is empty, yes—but not as vacant as his hopes.
No grave claims her, no shroud enfolds. She vanished with the dawn
He rode away, her body borrowed by the very wind
That carried his laments. The chalice’s wine? A vintage of illusion.
Beneath the temple’s crumbling arch, the knight’s last breath ascends—
A silver moth toward a star long extinguished. Somewhere,
A woman shaped of storm and dusk stirs not in sleep, but dissolution,
Her name erased from every scroll, her face from every dream.
The scorpion, keeper of the dunes, drags his helm into the deep,
A relic for the rats of time. The sand, impartial, sings no elegies.
And still the desert stretches on, a tapestry of hunger,
Where love, that fragile blade, falls dull against the whetstone of the sky.
Travelers who dare its breast may hear, if fate allows,
Two voices woven through the gales—a vow, a sob, a hymn
To choices etched in dust, where every sacrifice begets
Not resurrection, but the echo of a shadow chasing dawn.
