The Ashes of Oaths
On temple stones where lichen writes its hymns,
A shadow stumbles—splintered, clad in rags
That once held thread-of-gold for fortune’s whims.
His breath, a ragged chorus to the wind,
Unfurls the scent of battle’s rotted wine,
While fingers clutch a locket, cold and thinned,
Where two names sleep in script now half-divine.
Here, where the pillars clutch the weeping sky
And carvings weep their erosions like tears,
He kneels—not to the gods, whose hands run dry—
But to the earth that drinks his whispered fears.
“By root and ruin,” rasps the hollowed air,
“I kept the vow. I carved it in my bones.”
The wind, a mourner, combs his blood-stiff hair
And hums the dirge of all uncharted groans.
***
Three springs have bled since last he traced these steps,
When cherry blooms fell soft as lovers’ lies
And she, whose laugh could halt the sun’s collapse,
Wove dawn’s first light between her waiting eyes.
“No war,” she pled, “shall claim what night has sworn—
This temple guards our oath past mortal breath.”
He kissed her brow—a seal, a rose, a thorn—
And marched where steel harvests its scythes of death.
***
Dawn breaks its yolk upon the crumbled arch;
A figure kneels where votive flames once danced.
Not hers—the hands that light this feeble torch
Are stranger’s hands, by time and grief entranced.
Her shawl, once dyed with twilight’s keenest blue,
Now hangs a ghost upon another’s frame.
The soldier freezes, stares—the world tilts askew
As years collapse to ash, to smoke, to shame.
“You live,” she breathes, though breath becomes a blade.
Her voice, a melody he’d saved in lead,
Now grates the air where promises decayed.
“They swore your bones fed foreign fields,” she said.
“I waited till the crows grew fat on doubt,
Till even shadows fled this cursed shrine.
He offered warmth when winter carved me out—
A crime, to starve while clutching vows like wine?”
***
The locket burns—a brand against his chest.
Her new name glints, a serpent’s polished tooth.
“You wed,” he murmurs, “where the dead find rest?”
“I buried hope,” she snaps, “yet kept its truth.
You think me faithless? Walk the path I’ve tread:
Each dusk, a dirge; each dawn, a debt to frost.
This temple chokes on vows the rain has shed—
What good are oaths when every star is lost?”
***
The stones bear witness as he draws his blade—
Not steel, but wood, half-rotted, dull with grime.
“You swore,” he growls, “to wait beneath this shade,
Though empires fell and rotted into time.
Was I but dust to scatter from your palm?
A song outlived by some cheaper tune?”
Her laugh, a shard, could flay the soul to psalm:
“You died. I lived. The moon outlasts the moon.”
***
The torchlight gutters. Shadows stretch and yearn
To knit the silence where their words once thrived.
She lifts a hand—he flinches, slow to learn
How flesh betrays the futures it’s survived.
“I kept my vow,” he croaks, though voice-cracks bleed,
“In trenches gnawed by rats and righteous men.
Each scream I choked became your name, a seed
To bloom in hell. And yet… you’d plant again?”
Her tears, when they come, salt the rot below.
“I planted lilies where your ghost once lay.
They drowned in frost. You call this treason? Know
That oaths, like men, can starve despite their clay.
Go carve your wrath in some unyielding stone—
My heart’s a script the rain has washed away.”
***
The dagger trembles—not in wrath’s sharp tone,
But as a leaf that knows its branch undone.
He turns its point where no kin’s blood is sown,
Presses the hilt to her—a final sun.
“If oaths are leaves to scatter on your stream,
Then take this last one, rooted in my spleen.
No tombstone sings where trust becomes a dream—
But here, where vows are slain, let truth be keen.”
***
She stares as crimson weaves its vulgar lace
Across the locket, down the rotted wood.
No scream—the temple’s breath stills in its place,
A silent judge that always understood.
He sinks, a statue kissed by its own shade,
While dusk’s first star pricks through the vaulted black.
Her hands, now stained with all the vows they’ve made,
Cradle his head—a sacrilege, an act.
“You fool,” she weeps to lids that seal like tombs,
“The oath I broke was mine to burn or keep.
You thought love’s fire could outlive history’s glooms?
Even the sun drowns in the depths it leaps.”
The locket snaps—one name remains inside.
She leaves it there, where shadows nurse their dead,
And walks, half-blind, where moon and earth collide,
Her footprints filling slow with rain… and lead.
***
Now ivy strangles what the stones once swore,
And owls nest where echoes choked on truth.
Two names survive: one etched by a dagger’s roar,
One drowned beneath the lies of endless youth.
Travelers claim the ruin breathes at night—
A soldier’s rasp, a woman’s fractured hymn—
While vows, like leaves, rot in the pale moonlight,
And temples fall… but shadows never dim.
