The Orphan’s Lantern

The villagers, their faces carved from frost,
Spoke half-truths in syllables half-lost,
Of how his mother fled through winter’s throat,
Of how his father sank with one last note
Into the mire where willows weep their roots—
A tale of shadows, frayed at all its brutes.
Yet Elias kept a locket, cold and bare,
Its hollow heart outliving every heir.

One eve, as dusk unspooled its violet thread,
Old Marlow, blind and bent by years of lead,
Grasped the boy’s wrist with fingers like cracked clay:
“Beyond the crag where ravens chart decay,
A cottage rots ‘neath ivy’s stranglehold,
Its threshold crossed by ghosts the moon consoled.
There lies the ledger of your sundered line—
But truth, once tasted, poisons like old wine.”

No dawn had bled when Elias trod the trail,
His lantern’s gasp a frail, gold-feathered veil
Against the dark that pressed its raven beak
To glass, as if the night itself might speak.
The forest breathed in creaks and sighs, a choir
Of pines that hummed with neither hope nor ire,
While ferns, like fingers, brushed his trembling hand,
As though the earth might finally understand.

Three leagues he walked, till stone gave way to bone—
A cottage, slumped where ivy veins had grown,
Its windows cataracted webs of gray,
Its door ajar like some unhealed dismay.
Within, the air hung thick with decades’ musk,
Each step a plunge into oblivion’s dusk,
Till there, beneath a shawl of mold and rue,
A trunk yawned wide—its contents half-chewed through.

Letters, brittle as a sparrow’s spine,
Revealed a script of sorrow’s strict design:
“My son, forgive the silence we have sown—
The plague that took us was not ours alone.
We chose the marsh, its quicksilver embrace,
To spare the village from our blackened grace.
The elder tree, where crows now pitch their cries,
Guards bones that dared to love without goodbyes.”

The lantern shuddered. Shadows, sharp and lean,
Danced on the walls like things unseen, unseen,
As Elias clutched the pages to his chest,
Their edges sharper than a widow’s rest.
Outside, the wind took up a keening song,
A dirge for rights dissolved to ancient wrong,
While somewhere in the dark, a twiglet snapped—
The world, it seemed, had quietly collapsed.

He ran—past thicket, thorn, and brooding mere,
His breath a ragged flag, his pulse a spear,
To where the elder tree spread arms of woe,
Its roots sunk deep in secrets far below.
There, ‘neath the bark’s black scab, his fingers found
A hollow filled with whispers without sound:
Two rings, a lock of hair like midnight spun,
And one small shoe, outgrown by life undone.

The village, when he returned with proof in hand,
Met truth with faces turned to barren land.
“What use,” they croaked, “to dig old graves anew?
Some sleep is best left to the buried crew.”
Even the children, quick with summer’s mirth,
Avoided him as one returned from earth,
Till Elias stood alone ‘neath skies of lead,
His truth a millstone strapped beneath his head.

That night, he climbed the bell tower’s crooked stair,
Where owls surveyed realms of empty air,
And rang a single knell—so raw, so vast—
It shook the stars loose from their silver cast.
The villagers, like ants stirred from their nest,
Swarmed forth in robes of indignation dressed,
But found no flame, no wreckage, no lament—
Just ropes still humming with the boy’s intent.

They followed footprints through the frosted plain
To where the marsh exhaled its sickly chain,
And there, beside the elder’s gnawed embrace,
Lay Elias, pale as memory’s erased,
The locket open on his stillborn breast,
Its void now filled with all he’d suppressed—
A portrait, traced in mud and brackish tears,
Of three souls joined beyond the veil of years.

The villagers, struck mute by this crude art,
Felt something shift within each stony heart,
But turned away before the feeling grew,
And left the truth to rot beneath the dew.
Now travelers swear, when mist ascends its throne,
A lantern glints where marsh and tree are sown,
And shadows dance—a boy, a man, a wife—
Bound not by death, but by the love that’s rife.

Yet still the hamlet keeps its lips sealed tight,
Its streets paved thick with layers of polite night,
Forgetting how a child, slight and forlorn,
Once lit a blaze too bright for hearts that mourn.
The elder tree still weeps its resin slow—
Sweet amber tombs for truths we dare not know.