The Temple of Unanswered Echoes
A traveler trod the fractured path where no green thing took stand.
His cloak, a shroud of twilight’s breath, clung damp with weary miles,
And in his eyes, the hollow gleam of one who long defied the trials
That carve the soul to splintered bone. Before him, rising stark,
A temple loomed—its arches cracked like ribs of some primordial ark,
Its stones once white as martyrs’ vows now stained with lichen’s rust,
A mausoleum of lost tongues, of wisdom ground to dust.
He crossed the threshold, cold as graves, where ivy choked the door,
And shadows pooled like liquid night on mosaics cracked and poor.
The air hung thick with incense ghosts, with echoes of a choir
Whose hymns had long been swallowed by the void’s unquenchable fire.
Yet still, the pilgrim pressed ahead, his lantern’s frail embrace
Revealing frescoes peeled to myths no mortal could retrace:
A king whose crown dissolved to snakes, a dove with scorched wings spread,
And stars that wept crystalline tears for all the secrets dead.
Then—there, within the inner vault, where moonlight dared not tread,
A figure stood, or seemed to stand, where living men feared to tread.
No flesh, but light in semblance shaped, a spectral, shifting form,
Her hair a cascade of silver smoke, her eyes the eye of the storm.
“Turn back,” she sighed, her voice the sound of reeds in a frozen stream,
“For I am Keeper of the Veil, and you walk the edge of a dream
Where truths lie coiled like serpents’ tongues, their venom swift and sure.
What wisdom seeks your desperate heart that death could not endure?”
The traveler knelt, his hands upturned—a supplicant’s worn pose—
“I’ve crossed the seas where sirens drown the hearts they cannot chose,
Climbed peaks where eagles freeze mid-flight, their talons clutching naught,
And bargained with the midnight winds for answers never bought.
They say this place holds locked away the root of all things known,
The seed from which both love and ruin alike have blindly grown.
Grant me the key, O guardian ghost, though it scour my spirit bare.”
Her laughter rang, a hollow chime, like bells in empty air.
“Fool,” she murmured, “have you not learned that light alone deceives?
The truth you crave is but a blade that cleaves the hand it grieves.
Three seekers came with fire’s pride—a sage, a knight, a maid—
Their bones now dust beneath these stones, their courage all betrayed.
The first sought laws to bind the stars, and found them limitless;
The second craved a name to give the faceless void’s caress;
The third, a cure for mortal ache, distilled to poisoned wine.
Choose now: depart with breath intact, or rend the last divine?”
He rose, resolve etched in the lines that grief and years had drawn,
“I’ll not be stayed by phantoms’ threats or portents of the dawn.
If truth demands a pound of flesh, let it claim all I own.
To die unshriven, yet knowing—that death shall be my throne.”
The Keeper’s form began to blur, a vortex of ember and rue,
“Then drink,” she hissed, “from Lethe’s cup reversed. May it undo you.”
A chalice materialized, its rim with runes entwined,
Filled not with liquid, but with light—the raw, undying kind.
He drank. The world dissolved to ash, to threads of time unwound,
And in that void, he saw the Wheel, heard its eternal sound:
A billion hearts that beat in vain, a billion more that ceased,
Each life a note in dissonance, a cry that never ceased.
He saw the cosmos, blind and vast, indifferent as the tide,
And love, that fragile, flickering spark, by chaos crucified.
No grand design, no sacred verse—just accident’s cold hand
Guiding the dance of dust and flame across the barren land.
When consciousness returned, he lay upon the temple’s floor,
The Keeper gone, the chalice cracked, its radiance no more.
The dawn bled through the broken dome in streaks of wounded gold,
And in his chest, a yawning chill no mortal warmth could hold.
He crawled, a wretch, to the temple’s edge, his mind a shattered glass,
Each shard reflecting what he’d seen—the void that none surpass.
Beneath a gnarled and leafless tree, he drew his final breath,
His lips a rictus of the smile that greets the kiss of death.
The Keeper watched from shadows deep, her spectral face inclined,
As centuries of seekers’ ghosts wailed in the keening wind.
Another soul had paid the price, another page turned dry,
And in the temple’s silent heart, the truth—that truth’s a lie—
Lay coiled, eternal, in the dark, where neither sun nor rain
Could stir the dust of those who sought what only breeds disdain.
The pilgrim’s bones, now blanched and still, beneath the tree remain,
A monument to all who chase the light that rends the vein.
