The Knight of Whispers

A maiden met him there, her hair a shroud
Of twilight’s final breath, her face half-lost
To memory’s decay. Her voice, a cloud
Of fractured hymns, spoke soft of tempests crossed:
“Brave knight, they say you seek the Well of Years,
Where all our drowned regrets in darkness sleep.
But tread the path where even sorrow fears—
The price it claims, no mortal soul may keep.”

He knelt, his helm a cage for weary pride,
And pledged his blade to break the curse she bore:
A sickness gnawing at the land’s gray hide,
A blight that choked the wheat and stained the shore.
“Three trials await,” she sighed. “The first: a crown
Of thorns that weep the tears of fallen kings.
The second: walk where seven stars drown
In pools of shadow. Last… the wellspring sings.”

***

Through forests petrified, their branches clawed
At skies that wept no rain but ash and rust,
He bore the crown, its barbs like vipers gnawed
His brow, each drop of blood a whispered trust.
The thorns grew whispers—voices of the dead
Who’d worn this circlet once in halls of gold.
“Turn back,” they hissed. “All glory ends in lead,
In dust, in echoes too frail to behold.”

Yet onward, through the vale of drowning light,
He waded where the stars, once fierce and high,
Lay trapped in murk, their argent drowned to blight.
Their screams like shattered harps haunted the sky.
“What fool,” they mourned, “would trade his fleeting breath
To save a world that spurns its savior’s name?
Your tale will fade, outlived by worms and death—
No ballads bloom where oblivion stakes its claim.”

But still he marched, his armor flayed by winds
That carried ghosts of laughter, long undone,
Until the Well’s black maw yawned, where begins
The dirge of all who court the timeless sun.
There, at the brink, the guardian arose—
A figure wrought of smoke and shivered glass,
Its voice the rasp of tombs: “You dare propose
To steal what Death has sealed? Then pay its mass.

Not gold, nor blood, but memory’s sweet cost:
Each step redeemed by fragments of your past.
The first to fade—your mother’s lullaby,
Her face, her hands that cradled you at last.
Then comrades’ oaths, the battles roared and won,
The laurels earned, the scars you bore as hymns.
Your very name, erased like mist at dawn—
All this, to quench a light that ever dims.”

The knight stood silent, helm removed to bare
A face already fraying at the seam.
“I offer it,” he breathed. “Let none declare
I faltered where the shadows choke the dream.”
The guardian laughed—a sound like cracking ice—
And plunged him deep where liquid night devours.
He drank the Well, paid paradise’s price,
And felt his soul unravel, hour by hour.

***

Dawn came, but not for him. The village woke
To fields of gold, to skies unbruised and clear,
Their blight undone, the ancient silence broke
By children’s laughs that cost no knightly tear.
The maiden wept, though why, she could not say—
A hollow grief, a shadow on her heart.
No tombstone marked where valor sank to clay,
No chronicle preserved his rended part.

Far off, a figure staggers, nameless, wan,
Through wastes that stretch beyond the edge of days.
His tongue grasps not the ballads he began,
His hands recall no swords, no crowns, no praise.
The wind, now, sings the fragments of his tale—
A hum in rocks, a sigh in willow’s bend—
While in the Well, where light and longing fail,
The stars drink deep… and forget him in the end.