The Painter’s Covenant with Frost
A lone ascendant soul pursued the spectral way,
His palette clutched like hope, all pigments drained to gray,
For inspiration’s flame had dimmed, then fled away.
The painter, gaunt and grim, with eyes of haunted fire,
Climbed slopes where jagged ice wore crowns of twisted wire,
Each step a whispered vow to claim his heart’s desire—
To trap the mountain’s ghost in hues none could acquire.
Three moons had waxed and waned since first he left the vale,
Where one fair promise bloomed, now pale as funeral veil:
“Return ere frost shall claim the last thrush’s frail tale,”
He swore to her whose voice still haunted every gale.
Yet art’s relentless god had gnawed his mortal core,
Transmuting love to ash, devotion to a chore;
Her face, once clearer than the lake’s unrippled shore,
Now blurred beneath the storm of colors he implored.
Through cataracts of snow that scoured his fevered cheeks,
He glimpsed the peak’s grim maw where light and darkness speak,
A cavern’s yawning throat, frost-limned and arabesque,
Where shadows danced like wraiths in some primeval masque.
“Enter,” the wind intoned in tongues of crackling pine,
“And kneel before the well where frozen muses pine.
But mark, frail scribe of earth, the pact these realms define—
The price to steal my grace is that you render thine.”
No tremor shook his hand as brush met virgin page,
No faltering of will, no dread of winter’s rage;
He painted with his breath, his blood, his severed age,
While deep below, the ice began its slow presage.
Oblivious to time’s decay, he wrought his trance—
The glacier’s sapphire veins, the lances of romance
That pierced the firmament, the avalanche’s dance—
Each stroke a stolen shard from fate’s unyielding hands.
Yet as his masterpiece took form in frigid air,
A vision seared his sight—not glory, nor despair,
But her, the vow-breaker’s bride, with frost-kissed hair,
Who climbed through blizzard’s wrath to seek her traitor there.
“Cease!” cried the mountain’s groan, “this folly you pursue!
The pact demands a soul—let it be hers or you.”
The painter turned, his heart a tempest torn in two,
As love and art collided in that gelid pew.
Her eyes, twin pools of grief no pigment could convey,
Met his—now hollowed shells where once passion held sway.
“You swore,” she murmured low, “to greet the spring’s first ray…
Yet here I find your oath entombed in endless gray.”
The brush slipped from his grasp, its bristles stiff with rime,
As truth, more cruel than storm, unveiled the pantomime:
In seeking heaven’s light, he’d damned their dual prime,
And both must now be claimed by winter’s hungry chime.
With hands that trembled not (for artists know their doom),
He pressed his final work into her glacial tomb—
A portrait of her face, not as she stood in gloom,
But as she’d laughed when love first burst April’s womb.
“Take this,” he breathed, “to worlds where mortal feet may tread,
And let them name it ‘Sacrifice’ when we are dead.”
Then clasped her frozen form, his tears like crystal shed,
And willed the mountain take the life he’d forfeited.
But glaciers harbor neither mercy nor reprieve;
Their justice grinds as slow as centuries conceive.
The cavern sealed its jaws ere dawn could dare perceive,
Entwining lover’s breath with shades they could not leave.
Now climbers, rare and grim, who brave the peak’s disdain,
Report twin specters bound in sorrow’s endless chain—
He, painting ceaselessly on walls of frozen pain,
She, watching silent as the ice reforms again.
Thus does the mountain keep its covenant of old:
That all who seek its heart must pay in marrow’s gold.
Yet still fools scale its face, by ambition controlled,
To learn how art and love alike are bought—and sold.
“`
