The Ballad of Broken Strings and Silent Gardens
Where ivy choked the stones in green despair,
A vagrant minstrel wandered, lute in hand,
His shadow long as guilt, his face half-masked
By winds that whispered of forgotten paths.
The village spat his name like sour wine—
*Elias*, once a comet’s fleeting blaze,
Now dimmed to embers by a fickle world.
He found the gate by accident or fate—
Iron vines entwined, rusted shut by years,
Yet yielded to his touch as though they knew
The weight of secrets buried in his chest.
Beyond, a garden slept in spectral mist,
Its roses black as midnight’s widowed heart,
Their petals trembling with unsung laments.
And there she stood—a specter clad in dusk,
Her hair a storm of silver down her back,
Eyes like twin pools where starlight dared to drown.
*Liora* of the House of Withering Oaks,
A name the hedges murmured to the moon.
No smile she wore, but in her pallid palm
A single bloom, blood-crimson, pulsed alive—
A flower born where all else choked on thorns.
“Play,” she commanded, voice a frozen stream,
“For I have heard your sorrows in the earth—
The soil here drinks the tears of buried things.”
He strummed a chord that shook the stagnant air,
A note like daggers drawn from velvet sheaths,
And as his lute wept tales of roads unwalked,
The garden woke in gasps of gasping hues—
Violets bled indigo, willows wept gold,
And all the shadows hummed in low accord.
Three nights he came, each dusk a stolen page
From time’s own ledger, frayed at every edge.
They spoke no vows, yet in the space between
The fall of notes and breath before a kiss,
A fragile thing took root—not love, but need,
A vine that climbs a tower bound to fall.
She gave him blooms that wilted at first light,
He gave her songs that etched her name in smoke.
But gardens nurtured on clandestine sighs
Bear fruit more poisonous than winter’s spleen.
Her kinsmen, hawks in human finery,
Had traced her absences to moonlit walls.
A locket—proof—clutched in her brother’s fist,
Carved with the minstrel’s face in jaded stone.
“You’ll lure him here,” they hissed. “This blight must end.
Or watch your thorns eclipse what’s left of him.”
The fourth night came, a wound in heaven’s veil.
Elias bore a flute he’d shaped from bone—
A swan’s last wing, hollowed to hold his breath.
The gate stood wide, a grin of twisted iron.
No rustling silk greeted his eager step,
Only the clink of chains, the scrape of steel.
Twenty hands seized him, twenty more held her,
Her eyes twin graves where hope lay newly dead.
“You think us blind?” they crowed. “This plot of dirt
Shelters no art but rot and rats’ deceit.
You’ll play your final tune in deeper dark—”
A boot crushed fingers meant for fretting chords,
A blade split lute-strings with a butcher’s joy.
But Liora, statue-cold, spoke not a word,
Her silence louder than the mob’s cruel psalm.
Yet as they dragged him past the blighted thorn,
He glimpsed her hand unclench—a petal’s fall—
The crimson bloom she’d nursed now crushed to pulp,
Its juice like accusation down her wrist.
No curse he hurled, no plea, no last rebuke—
Just locked his gaze to hers, where all truths drown,
And let them carve his tongue out with their hate.
Dawn found the garden stripped of stolen charms.
Where roses drank the dark, now dust prevailed.
The gate, re-chained, grew teeth to bite the sky,
And children’s tales soon swore the very soil
Would shriek when trod by souls who knew deceit.
Of Liora? Some say she walks the maze,
Her hair gone white as ash, her throat sans voice,
Still clutching dead roots in her marble hands.
But vagrants swear on frostbite nights they hear
A broken flute’s lament through crumbling walls—
Two notes, then silence, like a heart halved twice.
And scholars scoff, yet none can quite explain
Why roses bloomed one spring in sudden red
Where Elias’ blood had pooled, now long erased—
A fleeting stain, then swallowed by the earth,
As love and betrayal share the selfsame grave.
