The Cathedral’s Whispering Stones

The curse he bore was writ in sighs—a poet’s price, a bard’s lament—
To carve his heart in verses stark, each stanza payment, each line rent,
For every word that fled his quill, a fragment of his pulse decayed,
Till naught remained but parchment veins and whispers love could not persuade.

Yet in that crypt of marble throats, where even silence seemed to weep,
A memory bloomed—a face half-seen, a voice that haunted sleep:
A maiden with the dawn’s own hair, her laughter spun from spring’s first thread,
Whose fingers traced his fevered brow when all his world lay cold and dead.

“I’ll barter breath for one last rhyme,” he vowed to saints who dared not hear,
“To gift her dawn where I’ll know night, to trade my soul for her clear year.”
The altar loomed—a jaw of stone—its teeth all candled flames that hissed,
As down the nave, her footfalls wove through shafts of moonlight amethyst.

“You came,” he breathed. The air turned glass. Her name hung shivering, unspoke,
For in her arms, death’s chrysalis—her frame too frail, her spirit broke.
The plague had gnawed her roseate hues, left ashen petals in its wake,
Yet still her smile outshone the gloom, a star too steadfast to forsake.

“I’ll mend this,” trembled his reply, though every syllable drew blood,
“The curse demands a poet’s heart—let mine be split, let yours be flood.”
Her protest died a fledgling bird, for in his gaze she saw the truth:
That love, when stripped to bone, becomes the only scripture none refute.

He pressed his palm to frozen stone. The cathedral groaned a low decree.
From rafters rained a bitter dust—old psalms, perhaps, or dead men’s plea.
The quill emerged, a splintered thorn, its nib a dagger’s sharpened tip,
To carve the runes across his chest, to let the sacred contract drip.

“Not life,” she wept, “but you I’d keep! Let fate’s hand strike its brutal chord.”
He kissed her brow, a poet’s last and only lie: “I cannot afford
To watch the light leave your dear eyes while mine, unworthy, still persist.
Take every year I’ll never see—here, in this ink, I thee insist.”

The final verse bled sapphire smoke, his veins unstitched by spectral fire,
As through his ribs, a ghostly wind extinguished what the stars inspire.
Her cheeks flushed with stolen sunrise, his own grew pale as moon-scorched sand,
Two vessels passing—one filled, one drained—by love’s inexorable hand.

The candles gasped. The stained glass screamed in hues no mortal tongue could name.
Her hands reached out to clutch the air where moments past, his form had lain.
But poets, when their tales conclude, dissolve to echoes, faint and thin,
Leaving naught but vellum ghosts and wounds that hymns cannot begin.

Now pilgrims kneel where shadows dance, sensing a presence not quite gone,
A draft that hums a broken tune, a line that lingers before dawn:
“I loved you more than breath or art”—a whisper through the vaulted void—
While somewhere, dawn-kissed and unaware, she lives, still spared, still destroyed.