The Clockwork of Shattered Stars

Its turrets clawed the twilight’s bleeding hem,
Their stones half-drowned in ivy’s green lament,
While shattered glass, like tears of ancient kings,
Still clung to frames where moonlight slithered in.
He crossed the threshold where his name once rang,
Now whispered only by the rusted hinges,
And saw the hall where feasts had roared like flames
Reduced to dust that danced with mothered spiders.

But lo—a flicker in the western tower,
A candle’s sigh against the web-strewn gloom,
And there she stood, a spectre clad in gauze,
Her hair a storm of midnight’s stolen threads.
“Who tends this tomb?” he cried, his voice a crack
Through silence thicker than the battle’s pause.
She turned, and in her eyes, the stars collapsed—
“I wait,” she breathed, “for one the night betrayed.”

Her name was lost to time’s unkindled forge,
Yet in her gaze, the soldier glimpsed a hearth
That once had warmed the chambers of his youth
Before the trumpet’s blight had scourged his days.
She spoke of clocks that froze when cannons woke,
Of roses strangled by the ivy’s climb,
Of letters left unsent in drawers of oak,
Their ink dissolved by decades’ patient brine.

He traced the scars that mapped his weathered cheek,
Each trench a verse in war’s relentless psalm,
While she, with fingers light as frost’s first kiss,
Unraveled threads of pain he’d thought eternal.
“Why linger here,” he asked, “where rot prevails?”
She smiled—a crescent moon on troubled waters—
“Some souls are bound to echoes, not to flesh;
The heart’s last beat outlives the body’s fall.”

They wandered through the corpse of grandeur’s dream,
Past ballrooms where the dust performed its waltz,
And up the stairs where portraits peeled to naught,
Their subjects’ names erased by mold’s slow hunger.
In the library, where knowledge turned to ghosts,
She showed him books that moths had rewritten,
Their pages scarred with labyrinths of holes,
A testament to time’s meticulous pen.

At midnight’s peak, she led him to the roof,
Where constellations pierced the veil of years,
And there, beneath the owl’s unblinking oath,
They spun a tale of what might yet have been.
Her laughter wove with cricket serenades,
A fleeting symphony that mocked the dawn,
Until her form began to fade like mist
That flees the sun’s inexorable yawn.

“Stay!” he pleaded, clutching at her shadow,
But she dissolved like smoke from snuffed-out candles,
Leaving only frost upon his fingertips
And whispers tangled in the rusted weathervane.
Daylight clawed the sky with talons gray,
Exposing cracks in every moss-kissed wall,
And in that harsh and unforgiving glare,
The castle’s wounds gaped raw, its myth unmade.

He searched each chamber, desperate as the tide
That begs the moon to halt its cold retreat,
Yet found no trace of her but wilted petals
Arranged in patterns where her feet had lingered.
A pocket watch, its gears consumed by rust,
Lay hidden ‘neath a flagstone’s mossy shroud—
Its hands still pointed to the fatal hour
When love and war had dueled, and both were slain.

That night, he lit a fire in the grate,
Feeding flames with splinters of lost thrones,
And watched as smoke drew portraits on the air—
Her face, the castle whole, a world unborn.
The blaze grew teeth, consumed the rotting beams,
While he sat still, ensnared by memory’s snare,
As crimson tongues embraced the eastern tower
Where first her ghost had damned him to this truth.

Dawn found him kneeling in the ashen wreck,
His uniform now stitched with soot and blisters,
Clutching the watch whose frozen heartbeat mocked
The mortal curse of counting endless hours.
Some say his voice still haunts the moor’s bleak stretch,
A duel of laughter and of shattered glass,
Where twilight bleeds into the stars’ cold sweat
And hope lies buried with the final chess piece—

A marble queen, her crown kissed by the weeds,
Her eyes still fixed upon the western tower,
While ivy, ever patient, ever kind,
Weaves shroud and cradle from the ruins’ bones.