The Knight’s Last Vigil by the Storm-Lashed Shore

His armor, once resplendent, now doth bear
The scars of battles fought in dark despair;
Each dent a tale of glory steeped in blood,
Each rusted joint a testament to mud.

But deeper still, a wound no eye can see—
A heart enshrined in longing’s agony,
For in this desolate and wind-swept place,
He seeks the shadow of a longed-for face.

Then, through the spray, a figure, slight and pale,
Appears where sea and sky in tumult wail—
A woman veiled in mist and sorrow’s guise,
Her eyes twin pools reflecting stormy skies.

“Thou camest,” whispers she, her voice a thread
That parts the gale to reach him, half-unsaid.
“Though fate decrees our breaths must drown in brine,
I dared to hope thy hand would cling to mine.”

The knight falls prostrate, gauntlets clawing sand,
As if the earth might heed his fierce command
To cleave and spare her from the looming hour
When waves shall rise to claim their bridal bower.

“Lady,” he cries, “the star we swore to heed
Now bleeds its light, a wound that will not bleed.
Our oath was writ on parchment of the air—
The sea, the salt, the wind shall be our heir.”

She kneels, her touch a phantom on his cheek,
A snowflake melting ere its grace can speak.
“Thy vows were never forged in mortal breath,
But in the silence where true hearts meet death.

Recall the grove where first thy sorrows slept,
Where nightingales their midnight vigil kept—
Thy sword lay drowned in dew, thy helm undone,
And I, a fool, believed thy wars were won.”

He turns, the memory a branding flame,
Her laughter once the balm no battle came.
“Aye, won—and yet the victor’s crown is thorns,
The conqueror’s march a dirge the mourner mourns.

They told me love would blunt the warrior’s steel,
That hands which clasped thy heart could never heal
The rending gashes of a kingdom’s plea…
Yet here I stand, undone by loving thee.”

The tempest swells, a beast with frothing jaws,
Its roar the sum of nature’s broken laws.
The star, their fragile witness, pales and dips
Behind a shroud of cloud, as grief eclipse

The lovers now entwined in one last grasp,
Their time a glass upended, draining fast.
“Go not,” she pleads, “into the ravenous deep—
Let angels wake where devils laugh in sleep!”

He lifts her chin, her tears like mercury,
A liquid mirror of their doomed decree.
“Thy face shall be the lantern in my night,
Thy name the spell that steers my bark aright.

But duty, cruel mistress, tolls the bell—
The cliffs of Albion remember well
The oath I swore to guard her bleeding shores,
To break would rend the chivalric core.”

A wave, colossal, hammers on the stones,
A Titan’s fist to crush their fragile bones.
They rise, two specters on the cusp of time,
Their hands still clasped, though reason screams “Unclimb!”

“Then take,” she murmurs, “this, my final token—”
A lock of hair, by storm-light turned to molten
Gold in his palm, a sun that cannot warm
The ice now settling in his mortal form.

“And take this too,” he gasps, a dagger drawn,
Its hilt a serpent coiled to meet the dawn.
“Should fate decree my corpse adorn the sand,
Let this blade sever thine from duty’s hand.”

They kiss—a union salted by the spray,
A sacrament the heavens dare not stay.
The star expires. The tempest, pleased, descends
To reap the harvest that defiance lends.

She watches as he strides into the surge,
A shadow swallowed by the ocean’s urge,
His armor gleaming once, a fleeting pyre,
Then gone, as night devours transient fire.

Three dawns the lady keeps her vigil there,
Her throat raw from the winds, her eyes stripped bare
Of tears, her soul a shell the gale has scoured—
Till fishermen find her, cold and seaweed-showered.

No tomb proclaims the knight who fought the main,
No ballads name the star-crossed lovers’ pain.
The sea, content, resumes its slumber deep,
And time, the traitor, laughs where mourners weep.

Yet some swear, when the western star grows dim,
Two phantoms wail where foaming waves meet rim—
A knight in shattered mail, a lady fair,
Whose hands still touch, though drowned in separate air.

Thus love, the moth that flies to drown in flame,
And duty, twin to honor’s hollow name,
Still duel upon that ever-eroding shore
Where one star falls, and hearts break evermore.