The Sands of Unfulfilled Dawn

A locket, cold and tarnished, hangs against his breast,
Its rusted hinge encloses vows now laid to rest:
A portrait frayed to shadows, half-remembered eyes,
A voice that swore through tempests, *“Child, arise, arise—
Beyond the dunes’ dominion, where the east wind flies,
A land of boundless morning waits, our promised prize.”*
Thus bound by phantom oaths, he marched through years of sun,
Each step a whispered question: *“When? Where? How soon?”*

The sun, a tyrant’s pupil, glared from skies of brass,
His throat, a parchment river, choked on dunes of glass.
Yet visions nursed his reason—groves of jade and rain,
A spire piercing heavens, breaking sorrow’s chain.
He fed on dreams of waters where the fig trees grow,
On figs like ember-globes that burst with honey’s glow.
But time, the sly deceiver, stretched its hollow grin,
And dunes, like ashen sentinels, closed their ranks within.

One night, when stars were ash and moons wore shrouds of gray,
A shape emerged from nothingness to bar his way—
A crone, her face a canyon, robes of sandstorm spun,
Her voice, the creak of stone gates shutting out the sun:
*“Turn back, forsaken wanderer, lest your heart betray,
For lies are all that flourish where the mad obey.
The one who pledged you Eden dwells in splendor’s keep,
His throne raised high on bones of fools who dared to weep.”*

The boy, though fear’s cold fingers clutched his trembling core,
Stood firm as oaks in tempests, cried, *“I thirst for more
Than truths half-spoke in shadows! If he broke his vow,
I’ll face the serpent’s whisper, wrench the answer now.”*
The hag dissolved to sirocco, laughter scorching air,
While dawn, a pale illusion, bled through despair’s lair.

Three suns he crossed in torment, three moons of phantom guide,
Till spires, gold and cruel, rose from the desert’s side.
A citadel of opulence, where fountains mock the dead,
Its towers kissed by clouds that wept no rain, but lead.
Before its gates, adorned with jewels that leeched the light,
A figure robed in splendor met the orphan’s sight—
The face from locket’s prison, now flushed with power’s hue,
His eyes, once warm as hearth-smoke, cold as hoarfrost grew.

*“You live?”* The man recoiled, his goblet’s wine aflush,
*“I left you but a token to tame the orphan’s rush.
Yet here you stand, a specter from a trivial vow—
What fool would chase a mirage with such furrowed brow?”*
The boy, his heart a fissure, staggered in the heat,
*“You swore the desert’s ending held meadows, sweet, complete!”*
The tyrant’s laugh uprooted the pillars of the sky,
*“Sweet boy, the desert has no end. All freedom is a lie.”*

The locket’s chain snapped silent, its lie plunged in sand,
As towers loomed like tombstones o’er the boy’s unmanned
And broken form. The vultures, pious in their wait,
Sang dirges for the fallen, while dusk, the traitor, sate
Its thirst with stolen twilight. Somewhere, frail and far,
A shadow ceased its crawling ’neath the uncaring star.
The desert, vast and voiceless, swallowed every trace
Of footsteps, hopes, and questions lost in time’s embrace.

Thus ends the tale of one who sought the truer dawn—
His truth, a grain of sandstone; his freedom, never born.
Let wanderers heed whispers from the ageless waste:
Some promises are pyres where trust is laid to waste.
The dunes endure as empires, their law both stark and plain:
To hunger is the compass; to perish, the only gain.