The Temple of Ashen Dreams
He came—a specter clad in tattered gray,
His boots still caked with soils of foreign wars,
His eyes two hollows where the stars had died.
The road behind him whispered of the slain,
Of flames that licked the sky like serpents’ tongues,
Of comrades’ voices, now but ash and wind,
And promises he’d buried in the mud.
Before him loomed the temple, old as grief,
Its columns cracked like ribs of fallen beasts,
Its arches crowned with ivy’s choking grasp,
A monument to time’s unyielding theft.
He crossed the threshold where the shadows pooled,
Their tendrils cold against his fevered skin,
And felt the weight of centuries descend—
A breath, a sigh, the echo of a dirge.
“Who treads where gods and mortals once conspired?”
A voice arose, not sound but shiver born,
As from the gloom emerged a figure draped
In robes the hue of storm-veiled midnight skies.
Her face—a mask of silvered scars and grace—
Seemed both a youth’s first blush and death’s repose,
Her eyes twin voids where galaxies might drown,
Her hands, pale moths, clasped tight a rusted key.
“I seek,” he rasped, “an end to waking dreams.
The battlefield persists behind my lids—
Each blink a cannon’s flash, each breath a dirge.
They say this place untangles truth from veil.”
She smiled, a curve like moonlight on a blade,
And turned the key within the stagnant air.
A door unseen groaned open, deep and low,
A sound that trembled in the marrow’s core.
“Walk where the veils are thin,” she murmured soft,
“But mark this well, O bearer of the wound:
The dreamer who forgets he dreams at all
Shall wear the chains of slumber’s sweet decay.
What’s woven here no mortal thread may mend.”
He stepped into a hall of mirrors vast,
Each glass not glass but liquid, shifting smoke,
Reflecting not his form but fragments lost—
A child’s laugh amidst the apple boughs,
His mother’s hands, rough-knuckled, kind, and warm,
A lover’s letter never sent nor read,
The friend who fell mid-syllable, mid-sky.
He reached, and ripples tore the visions’ skin—
The orchard burned, the hands grew cold as stone,
The parchment curled to dust, the friend’s last gasp
Became his own. He staggered, blind, undone.
Yet forward pressed, through corridors that breathed,
Where frescoes writhed with figures half-alive—
Kings crowned in thorns, maidens with daggered smiles,
And children holding masks of their own faces.
The walls pulsed like a throat mid-lullaby,
And whispers coiled around his aching skull:
“What worth the crown if forged in others’ blood?”
“What love survives the rot beneath the rose?”
At last, a chamber where no shadows danced,
But one pure flame atop an obsidian slab.
Beside it stood a boy—or ghost of boy—
Translucent, trembling, clad in soldier’s garb.
The man froze, breath a knife within his chest,
For in those eyes, untouched by time’s decay,
He saw himself before the first shot rang—
The self that prayed, that wept, that hoped, that *knew*.
“You’ve come to kill me again,” spoke the boy,
A voice like wind through autumn’s final leaves.
“Each night you load your gun with phantom lead,
Each dawn you mourn the corpse you cannot find.
Here, in this place where memory is flesh,
Let’s end what war began.” The child raised
A pistol wrought from smoke and shattered glass,
Its barrel aimed where twin heartbeats once thrummed.
The man fell to his knees, the world a blur
Of flame and frost, of futures never born.
“I did not choose the blade, the blood, the oath!”
“Nor I,” the boy replied, “yet here we are—
Two halves of one soul split by cannon’s roar.
You wear your scars like medals; I wear mine
As silence.” Through the chamber surged a cry
Of countless lost ones, chorus of the damned.
A shot. A crack. A shattering of spheres.
The mirrors wept their quicksilver to dust,
The temple groaned as though its bones were snapped,
And from the flame erupted ravens—swarms
That blotted out the remnants of the light.
The figure in the doorway watched, her key
Now molten, dripping through her ghostly grasp.
“So falls the dreamer who mistakes his chains,”
She breathed, and turned to shadows once again.
The soldier woke—or thought he woke—to dawn
That spread its wings above the temple’s wreck.
No wound adorned his chest, no pistol near,
Yet in his palm, a feather, black as guilt.
He rose, each step a labor unto death,
And traced the path back to the living world,
But found the road now choked with briar and thorn.
The village that had once brimmed warm with life
Lay skeletal, its chimneys bare of smoke,
Its wells gone dry, its clocks stripped of their hands.
In every face he saw the boy’s last gaze,
In every voice, the echo of that shot.
He knelt beside the river’s ashen bank
To drink, but found his lips could grasp no stream—
The water fled his touch like living things.
At night, the temple calls him in his dreams,
Its key now fused within his clenched right fist,
Its halls alive with whispers of the boy
Who walks eternal, stitching mirrors whole.
By day, he wanders roads that twist and fade,
A stranger to the sun, to sleep, to time,
His shadow growing thinner with each mile,
Until one dusk, he simply ceases…
…and the temple, ever patient, breathes anew.
“`
