The Whispering Gallery of Shadows
Where shadows throng and light is long since flown,
There wandered Errant, draped in sable hues,
A soul adrift amid the moaning muse.
The old manoir, a vessel full of past—
Each creak and sigh a murmur long since cast
Into its walls, where time had bound and sealed
The echoes of the life no longer healed.
The floorboards, cracked as though a ghost had wept,
Bore silent witness to the dreams unkept.
High arches loomed like stoic sentinels,
Their mortar heavy with forgotten spells.
Behind the curtained windows, dusk amassed,
A dying breath that charged the air with past.
Errant moved slowly—one with shadows he,
His heart a chamber—locked, no key to free.
He sought in stillness what the world denied:
The whispered lore that in the silence cried.
For he, a solitary figure bent,
Made kin of solitude, his sole lament.
“Speak, ancient halls,” he pleaded in the gloom,
“Reveal to me your long entombed perfume.
What tales of joy, what anguish do you keep,
Between these stones where shade and memory sleep?”
A hollow voice—no tongue but time—responded:
“The plight of man is woven, deep and bonded,
To walls that watch, to shadows that embrace,
To moments lost, to beauty time can’t chase.”
He paused beneath a window’s fractured light,
Where dust danced slow like phantoms in the night.
His gaze a mirror to the waning day,
Reflecting years that slipped so far away.
The corridor stretched, a serpentine design,
Each step a note within a somber line
Of riddles learned from silence and decay,
Of loneliness that memory can’t allay.
He thought upon the human heart’s demand:
To grasp at time with trembling, empty hand,
Only to find that in the grasp, the sand—
Like quiet truths—falls ever through the land.
A portrait hung, its visage faded, worn,
A noble face with eyes forever mourned.
“Who stands as sentinel to this lost face?”
Errant spoke softly, tracing time’s embrace.
The whispers answered, low and bittersweet:
“A mortal tale of hope and swift defeat—
A life confined within these hollow walls,
Like yours, entangled in the evening calls.”
And through the darkness, murmurs twined and weaved—
Of dreams deferred, of promises deceived,
Of days when laughter filled the vaulted sky,
Now echoes faint where spectres wail and sigh.
The manoir breathed—a titan steeped in lore—
Its heart a cavern, vast, with tales of yore.
Each stone a word, each crack a yearning plea
Of mortal souls who lived, and ceased to be.
Errant’s feet found refuge near an ancient door,
Its hinges groaned with memories of yore.
He laid his palm upon the worn, cold wood,
And heard the pulse of all that once had stood.
The hours waned, the humid air grew chill,
A melancholy vast and deep and still.
He felt the burden of a thousand years,
A silent chorus of forgotten tears.
“Is this the fate to wander, lost, alone,
A soul adrift where none but ghosts have flown?”
He whispered thus, though knew the cruel reply
Lay silent in the ever-darkening sky.
No answer came save quiet, slow decline,
The manoir draped in ivy’s cold entwine.
A labyrinth of echoes, gloom, and dust—
A monument to solitude and rust.
Within his breast, a hollow cavern wide,
Where dreams like dying embers still abide.
He knew the truth that dawn would not unlock:
The sorrow of the self—a fettered rock.
The silence deepened, pierced by waning grief,
As shadows clasped in endless, cold motif.
The corridor, a vein within the stone,
Fed melancholy to the marrow’s bone.
Upon the stairs, his footsteps softly fell,
Like whispered secrets borne from ruin’s shell.
Each pace entwined with histories afar,
The lights of stars long faded to a scar.
He paused, and from the dark expanse between,
A voice arose—no sound, but felt unseen.
A breath upon the nape of human fate,
A sigh that spoke of love soon desolate.
The walls expounded tales of human care,
Of fragile bonds that fray in silent air.
The mortal coil, a play of light and shade,
A tapestry of hopes both made and unmade.
“I am the listener,” Errant softly said,
“To whispers borne from those long cold and dead.
Yet in their lament, I find my own soul’s shape—
A tethered heart that beats beyond escape.”
The night grew dense, the air a velvet shroud,
As stars withdrew behind a cloudy shroud.
Within the manoir’s ever-darkened deep,
Where time and soul in melancholy sleep,
He knew his rôle transcended mortal breath:
To bear the weight of silence, love, and death.
And yet, within that sacred, shadowed keep,
His heart was chained—its beats profound, but cheap.
A final step—the corridor’s end in sight—
He glimpsed a doorway framed in waning light.
Beyond, a garden wild with thorn and weed,
Where beauty and despair entwined, decreed.
He crossed the threshold to the waiting night,
His figure lost to darkness, void of light.
And in that garden, where the forgotten lie,
The Errant found his sorrow’s last reply.
For isolation’s hand was cold, austere,
A monolith of time’s relentless bier.
To listen to the past was to embrace,
The ceaseless ache of the human race.
Beneath the moon’s impartial, argent breath,
He vanished into silence, unto death.
The manoir, keeper of eternal shade,
Endured—its whispered tales forever laid.
