The Temple of Unspoken Hours
She came—a silhouette against the stones
That clawed the clouds like ribs of some old beast,
Her shadow bruising thresholds long unseen.
The temple’s breath, a damp and throatless hymn,
Sang through the cracks where ivy choked the walls,
And all the air was thick with unborn frost,
As if the earth itself held back its tears.
Her name, once carved in birch bark and spring’s vow,
Now hung between the bells of burdened years—
A syllable half-lost, a moth’s torn wing.
She stepped where even echoes feared to tread,
Past archways stooped like mourners at a pyre,
Their keystones etched with faces time had blurred.
Her hands, still scented faintly of his hair,
Traced symbols drowned in moss, their meanings veiled.
*Memory*: A room where firelight bled
Through crystal jars of honey, comb, and thyme—
His voice, a string undone from some sad lute,
*“The world is but a bridge,”* he’d said, *“and we—*
*Its shadow on the water, brief, untrue.”*
Then came the cough, a rattle of loose pearls,
The slow descent of lids upon his eyes,
Until his breath was but a thief’s retreat.
The healers spoke in tongues of wilted herbs,
Of veins turned brackish, bones like autumn twigs.
But in the scrolls of some dead scribe’s despair,
She’d read of gates where life might be rebought—
A temple where the walls bore teeth and tongues,
And every step demanded flesh as coin.
*“What is a heart,”* she’d asked the midnight air,
*“If not a thing to barter for his dawn?”*
Now here, where roots had split the altars’ spines,
She knelt before a door no key could breach,
Its surface scarred with runes that stared like souls.
A voice emerged, not sound but pressure’s ache,
As though the stones had learned to speak in blood:
*“Who seeks the garden where the rivers freeze?*
*Who begs the hourglass to shed its glass?”*
Her answer fell like iron on silk: *“I do.”*
The door groaned open into a throat of black.
She climbed—each step a century compressed—
Past murals peeled to ghosts of ink and gold:
A queen who drowned her crown to save a dove,
A knight who melted down his sword for rain,
Their fates reduced to pigment’s fading cough.
The darkness pulsed. Her lungs grew ripe with dread,
Yet still she climbed, his name her only lamp.
At last, the chamber: vaulted, vast, and veined
With veins of quartz that throbbed a sickly blue.
A pool lay central, still as death’s clenched jaw,
Its surface strewn with petals long since drained
Of hue and scent—now parchment-thin, unnamed.
Above it hung a sphere of hollowed bone,
Its hollows humming with a captive wind.
The voice again: *“Here, life is sold in drops.*
*To wake his breath, you must unmake your own.*
*Each gasp he steals shall be your breath undone.*
*The pool will take what love dares not define—*
*A year for every ripple, drained in silence.*
*Speak, and see his eyelids stir like moths;*
*But know, with every word, your pulse grows faint.”*
She did not weep. (What use are tears to ghosts?)
Instead, she smiled—that old, half-cracked smile
That once had lit his nightmares into dawn—
And stepped into the water’s knife-edged chill.
The pool awoke. It coiled around her waist,
A liquid vise that whispered without sound:
*“Begin, before the moon outside grows bored.*
*Tell him of love, of loss, of all you’ll forfeit.*
*Each syllable a siphon. Sing him back.”*
She closed her eyes. Let the first word be born.
*“Remember…”* (Ice climbed up her throat.)
*“…the field where we found the wounded hawk?*
*Its wing, a sail torn from the storm’s grim mast—*
*You nursed it slow, though fever gnawed your joints.*
*You said, ‘All broken things deserve their sky.’”*
A gasp. The sphere above began to spin.
Somewhere, in a room stale with sickness’ reek,
His finger twitched—a leaf brushed by a breeze.
*“Recall…”* (Her ankles numbed to marble.)
*“…that night we braved the cliffs to steal moonblooms,*
*Their stems milk-white, their hearts a blaze of pollen?*
*You laughed—a sound so raw, so rare—then slipped.*
*I caught your wrist. The flowers fell. We swore*
*The sea below had swallowed none, just kept them*
*As lanterns for the mermaids’ midnight choir.”*
The sphere glowed fierce. Beneath her ribs, a stab
As if some thread, long-knotted, snapped unseen.
Yet on she poured: *“The dawn you named me ‘home’…*
*The scar you kissed where childhood’s knife had bit…*
*The vow we scribbled on a willow’s skin…*
*Your head against my chest, that final dawn…*
*The way you murmured ‘Stay’—not ‘Stay with me’—*
*But ‘Stay alive. The world needs hearts like yours.’”*
Her voice now frayed, a rope-end whipped by gales.
The pool had reached her collarbones. Its kiss
Was acid and yet frost, each syllable
A stone to sink her deeper into black.
Above, the sphere shone brighter than betrayed stars,
Its whirl a scream. She felt the current pull
The final syllables from her drowning lips:
*“Live. Forgive. Forget. I’d choose this always.*
*Now wake, my love. The light has missed your face.”*
Silence. The water swallowed her last breath.
The sphere collapsed to ash. The temple sighed.
And in a room where curtains drank the sun,
He stirred—as one might brush a cobweb off—
Sat up, blinked at the dust motes’ aimless waltz,
Then frowned, as though some half-recalled refrain
Had tugged his sleeve, then fled. Outside, the rain
Begun to fall, each drop a question mark.
But here, within the temple’s crumbling gut,
Where now the pool lay still and bland as glass,
A statue stood—a woman’s form, mid-stride,
Her face upturned, her features soft yet blurred,
As if the artist’s hand had paused, then wept.
Around her feet, a twist of petrified vines,
And in her outstretched palm, a single word
Carved by the rain’s slow tongue: *“Enough.”*
Years later, when he came (as come he must—
For who can ignore the weight of absent grief?),
He found no tomb, no epitaph’s sharp grace,
Just moss and fractured frescoes of her smile.
The statue’s eyes, though stone, seemed wet with dusk.
He touched her hand—cold as unspoken thanks—
Then left, his chest a hive of phantom stings,
And never knew the clock that bought his dawn.
The temple, patient, ate itself in rain.
The sphere’s ash fed the ivy’s stealthy climb.
And in the pool, on nights when moons turn thin,
A shape is seen—not quite a woman’s form—
Rippling the water with unsung goodbyes,
Her voice now part of every breeze’s lament,
Her choice a scar on fate’s indifferent palm,
Her love the ghost that haunts the price of breath.
