The Knight of Shifting Sands
A knight treads dunes that coil like serpents, whispering his shame.
His armor, once a moonlit sea, now rusts to spectral red,
A carcass clanking with the weight of vows he left unsaid.
The desert breathes—a hollow gasp—through dunes that rise and fall,
Each crest a tomb for footprints lost, each trough a siren’s call.
No compass here but vultures’ wings, no water but the lie
Of mirages that stitch the air with threads of altered sky.
Three suns have scorched his shadow thin, three moons have pared his soul,
Yet still he grips a locket cold, its chain a fractured stole.
Within, a face in sepia fades—a smile half-recall’d—
Her eyes two pools where hope once swam, now drained and dry and pall’d.
*“Turn back,”* the wind intones in tongues of dead men’s final sighs,
*“No laurel grows in sand’s embrace, no truth in widows’ cries.”*
But ironclad in folly’s forge, he marches toward the veil
Where horizon bleeds to nothingness, and all directions fail.
A shape emerges—not a tree, nor stone, nor beast—but glass,
A spire splintering the light, a mirror in the pass.
Its surface writhes with visions blurred: a hearth’s extinguished glow,
A hand outstretched in parting’s ache, a voice he used to know.
*“You swore to return,”* it murmurs, *“before the swallows fled.”*
The glass reflects not what he is, but what the years have shed:
The youth who clasped her fingers tight, now bones in rotted mail,
The love that curdled into thirst, the honor turned to ale.
He shatters it with gauntlet’s blow, yet shards still cling like lice,
Each fragment scores his weathered flesh, each cut a whispered vice:
*“She waits not where the cedars sigh, nor where the rivers bend,
But deep within the scorpion’s den—where trust and traitors end.”*
Night falls, a thief with velvet touch, to steal the furnace day.
The locket glints—a phantom hearth—to guide his phantom way.
A figure cloaked in starless pitch now blocks the pilgrim’s track,
Its face a void where features twist, then snap abruptly back:
Her cheek, her chin, her brow’s soft arch—yet eyes like desert wells,
Black water swirling with the drowned, their unspun tales to tell.
*“You linger still?”* the wraith intones. *“Your heart, a stubborn coal,
Seeks embers in this barren womb? Unclench your ashen soul.”*
He stumbles, sword half-drawn, but steel holds no dominion here.
Her laughter frosts the burning air. *“You are the ghost, my dear.
I perished on your parting day—my breath became the storm
That haunts your boots, that licks your wounds, that keeps your marrow warm.”*
The locket cracks. Her portrait flakes to dust. His knees meet sand.
The dunes encircle, slow and sure—a noose without a hand.
*“Why carve your tomb in shifting earth?”* the spectre’s voice now grates,
*“When all you bury, buried twice, becomes the thing you hate?”*
Dawn bleeds. The knight, a sculpture now, stares east with sockets bare.
His armor, filled with centuries’ silt, forgets the man it bare.
The vultures, priests of final rites, descend in cassock black,
To pluck the last red morsel from the hope he can’t take back.
And far beyond the desert’s maw, where cedars clutch the sky,
A headstone wears her name in script the rains have rendered shy.
No hand lays blooms, no lips recount the knight or his disgrace—
Two shadows lost to separate voids, erased without a trace.
