The Echoes of the Forsaken Spire
Beneath the sigh of fading ember-glow,
There stood a spire, long silenced, standing by
The quiet moor where trembling wild winds blow.
No bells had rung within its hollow breast—
Its marrow carved by centuries of dust—
A relic robed in ruin’s tumbled vest,
Where Memory and Time engage their trust.
Into this realm of shadows veiled and deep,
There came a soul, by whispered longing led;
Mystique, the seeker of what secrets keep
The ancient stones where countless tales are dead.
Her steps were soft, a murmur through the gloom,
A breath upon the past’s forgotten face;
Her eyes like twilight shrouded in a bloom,
Searching the silence of that once bright place.
The air was thick with histories unspun,
Each shard of light a fleeting ghost recalled,
As walls, like poets, waited to be sung—
Their tongues bereft, their stories tightly walled.
Yet Mystique felt the pulse beneath the stone,
A heartbeat held beneath abandoned grace,
A melancholy ache, a plaintive moan,
That stirred within this desolate embrace.
“Oh, Memory,” she breathed, “thy fragile thread
Winds through the hollows of my anguished mind.
Do you not linger where the lost have fled?
Do you not keep the promises resigned?”
Her voice fell soft, a murmur in the void,
A question cast upon the drifting air;
Yet silence, like a cloak, around her toyed—
No answer stirred, no answer to declare.
Within the nave where moonlight dared to creep,
She paused amid the broken serried rows
Of pews where silence sat in solemn keep,
And dust like powdered stars in darkness rose.
Her fingers traced the hollow carvings old,
The remnants of a once-beloved name;
Whose whispers once in radiant warmth were told,
Their meaning lost in Time’s forgetful flame.
In that forsaken place, isolation dwelt,
As if the world had never dared to come;
Where every breath, with loneliness was felt—
A silent cry within a heavy drum.
Her heart, a fragile vessel set adrift,
Was tempest-tossed in Memory’s vast sea,
A captive ship deprived of any gift,
Seeking the shore of deeper mystery.
“Who were you, voices veiled beneath this dust?
What stories rest within your quiet tomb?
Ich liebe dich,” she whispered with a trust,
Yet found no echo in the shadowed gloom.
She sat upon the cold mosaic stones,
And closed her eyes to fathom time’s expanse.
Her thoughts, like scattered leaves in autumn’s tones,
Were swept away upon a dreamlike dance.
She saw a boy with eyes like dawn’s clear light,
A maiden fair with laughter bright as spring,
Two souls entwined beneath the waning night,
Their hopes aloft upon imagination’s wing.
But soon the winter’s frost had turned their cheer,
And cast them out into the wild unknown;
Their voices fading, vanishing from here—
Like fragile roses crushed by tempest’s moan.
Mystique’s heart trembled with what might have been,
Had fate allowed their stories to unfold;
She felt their presence as a whispered wind,
A gentle warmth amid the ruin’s cold.
Then, suddenly, a shadow brushed her cheek,
Not cold, but soft—a breath from ages past;
And in that moment, time seemed not unique—
The present folded with the shadows cast.
The moon withdrew behind a veil of cloud,
And left the night in silence deep and stark.
Yet in the darkness, voices soft and proud
Recalled a litany of hope and hark.
The silence broke, though no form met her gaze—
Only the pulse beneath the ancient floor;
A long-lost chorus, sung in twilight’s haze,
Echoes of footsteps passing through the door.
“Do you hear us?” came a voice, faint and thin—
Or was it but the wind in sorrow’s dress?
Mystique’s soul surged from her depths within,
Caught between belief and doubt’s distress.
“Aye, I hear,” she whispered to the gloom,
“Your echoes shape the silence into song.
Though lost you seem within this timeless tomb,
In Memory’s embrace you still belong.”
She rose, a flicker of resolve alight,
To leave not without offering a name—
Her own—etched softly on the canvas night,
A sign that she had ventured through the same.
For in the stillness, isolation breaks,
When one seeks truth beyond the veiled past;
And though the heart in solitude awakes,
Its journey is a circle, folded vast.
Then, turning from the spire’s cold embrace,
Mystique departed with the dawn’s first gleam,
Leaving behind no single trace nor face,
But carrying the weight of half-formed dream.
For answers sought in shadows oft remain
As whispers caught between the dusk and day—
An open door, a never-ending chain,
Where Memory and Silence softly play.
And thus the spire waits in patient keep,
A guardian of fragments and of time,
Where lives once lived now wander and now sleep,
In isolation’s melancholy rhyme.
The question lingers in the fading air—
What truths lie hidden ‘neath the ash and stone?
The seeker leaves the echoes to declare—
A story unfinished, and her own.
