The Ascent of Frozen Truths
A figure treads where ice and shadow lie,
Her breath a ghostly hymn to vanished years,
Her path etched deep by sorrow’s frozen tears.
The mountain looms, a titan clad in white,
Its peaks obscured by veils of spectral light,
And whispers weave through winds that bite and hiss—
A dirge for truths half-born, sealed with a kiss.
Oh, Eleanor! Whose heart, once warm as dawn,
Now bears the frost of hopes long withdrawn,
Ascends the slopes where silence chokes the air,
To seek the ghost of one who vanished there.
Her brother’s name, like ash upon her tongue,
A bond once bright, by time’s cold hand unstrung,
For Thomas fled to these unyielding heights,
To bury truths that stained their kinship’s rites.
“What secret carved this chasm ‘twixt our souls?”
She cries, her voice consumed by ravenous knolls,
While memory’s blade, relentless in its art,
Unsheathes the day betrayal tore apart—
A letter frayed, inked with a trembling hand,
That spoke of vows she could not understand:
“Forgive the silence where my words have fled;
Some truths are kinder left among the dead.”
Yet here she climbs, where jagged cliffs conspire
To guard the answers smothered by his pyre,
Each step a pact with agony’s embrace,
Each gasp a plea to time’s unyielding face.
The blizzard howls, a chorus of the lost,
Its tendrils weaving through the tempest-tossed,
And in its wail, she hears his voice again—
A hollow echo, steeped in ancient pain.
“Turn back,” it mourns, “lest shadows claim your breath,
For what is found here walks the line of death.
The truth you seek is but a serpent’s coil,
A venom draped in virtue’s tarnished foil.”
But onward pressed her soul, by love undone,
To clasp the heartache neither could outrun,
Till through the storm, a spectral glow arose—
A cabin crouched where final secrets froze.
Its door, ajar, creaked tales of long despair,
Of footsteps stilled mid-flight on splintered stair,
And there, beneath a shroud of rime and rue,
Lay fragments of the man she thought she knew:
A journal clutched in fingers blue as night,
Its pages screaming what he dared not write—
Not wrath, nor greed, nor passion’s fatal flaw,
But sacrifice, to shield her from the law.
For in his chest, a canker took its hold,
A sickness bought with liars’ tainted gold,
And fearing she would bear his debt alone,
He chose the ice to die, unnamed, unknown.
“Oh, sister mine, forgive this cruel deceit—
The world’s hard edge demanded our defeat.
I carve my grave where light nor love may tread,
That you might keep the sun, and I the dead.”
The script dissolved beneath her fevered gaze,
As blizzards roared their elegiac praise,
And in that crypt of selfless, ice-veiled lies,
She knelt—a statue carved from her own cries.
No wrath remained to warm her bloodless veins,
No tears to thaw the frost of endless pains,
For love, once savior, now the blade unseen,
Had severed all the futures that might’ve been.
She wrapped his bones in remnants of her cloak,
A shroud spun thin from years of unspoke hope,
Then stumbled toward the ledge’s yawning breath,
Where sky and void commingled, twin in death.
“If truth is but the wound no hand can suture,”
She whispered, “let its cold compose my future.”
One step—the wind embraced her like a prayer,
One heartbeat—stillness cradled her despair.
Beneath, the village lamps blinked unaware,
As snowflakes wove their blossoms through her hair,
And far above, the summit’s mocking face
Preserved the lie that time could not erase.
Two siblings, bound by sepulchers of snow,
Where truth’s cruel price and love’s last debt they owe—
One grave unmarked, one soul too frail to fight,
And night eternal, draped in borrowed light.
Now climbers speak of voices on the breeze,
Of twin shadows that dance where glaciers freeze,
And in the hush where dawn and dusk entwine,
A woman’s laugh—or is it Thomas’s whine?
But none dare tread that path of shattered trust,
Where brother’s love and sister’s heart combust,
For mountains keep the truths we dare not seek—
A silent requiem on the peak’s pale cheek.
