The Cursed Bard’s Lament in Ruin’d Veil

His name, once gilt on lips of courtly throngs,
Now whispers through the dust like rotted songs,
A poet cursed—by star-crossed fate’s decree—
To love the shadow love could never free.

The city, gaunt in time’s unyielding grip,
Lays bare its bones to winter’s ghostly script;
Each fractured arch, each tomb of shattered glass,
Mirrors the fractures in his haunted past.

One eve, as twilight donned her mournful shroud,
He found a letter ‘neath a splintered cloud,
Its parchment frail as skin of ancient snakes,
Sealed with a rose—now thorns and ash partake.

“To thee, whose quill hath carved my soul in flame,
Though years have fled since last I spoke thy name,
Know this: the heart thou vowed to claim thine own
Still beats, though choked by seeds of grief long sown.

The night we met beneath the elder tree,
When stars conspired to bind thy fate to me,
Thy words, like nectar, poisoned yet my core—
A love condemned ere it could breathe encore.

For in thy veins, the curse of Atlas flows,
To bear the weight of time’s unsparing throes;
Each kiss we stole, each tear thy lips brushed dry,
But hastened thee to realms where dreams go die.

Farewell, my bard of sorrows half-divine,
No mortal thread can mend a weave like thine.
Yet when the moon weeps silver on these stones,
Seek me in echoes—where thy shadow moans.”

The script dissolved, as if the ink had yearned
To flee the truths its brittle fibers learned,
And in its wake, a portrait softly fell—
Her face, the heaven Time had turned to hell.

Eleanor—her name a psalm he’d scorched in air,
Whose eyes outshone the cosmos’ cold despair.
He clasped the frame, as though his hands might will
Her pulse to thaw the ice of centuries still.

But lo! The curse, that serpent of the blood,
Uncoiled its venom with a vengeful flood;
His veins grew dark as storm-choked midnight’s hue,
Each breath a dirge, each step a death renewed.

Yet driven by the ghost of love’s last spark,
He traced her shadow through the corpse-like dark,
Past leafless groves where phantoms hissed her name,
To where the sea’s lamenting whispers came.

There, on a cliff that kissed the tempest’s throat,
She stood—a spectre in a tattered coat,
Her hair a river of forgotten nights,
Her voice the wind that mourns extinct delights.

“Eleanor!” he cried, the cliffs screaming reply,
“Why fleest thou the flesh that cannot die?
If thou art shade, then let my curse be thine—
To walk with thee in death’s embrace entwined!”

She turned, her visage carved by sorrow’s art,
A portrait of the ruin in his heart:
“Thou fool of time, canst thou not comprehend?
Our love was but a means to no doomed end.

The curse thou bear’st was wrought not by the stars,
But by thy own dread hand—that night, those scars.
Recall the vow thou etched in blood and spite,
To trade thy soul for verses that ignite.

The price was her—the one thy soul held dear—
To fade with each eclipse, each dying year.
*I* am that cost, my bard, thy mortal pen
That damned us both to live as ghosts of men.”

The revelation struck like lightning’s blade,
Cleaving the veil where memory had frayed.
He saw again that altar, drenched in night,
His youth’s rash pact with forces void of light.

“No!” roared the poet, cliffs recoiling wide,
“This cannot be the end for which we died!
If blood must flow to break this chain accurst,
Let mine be first—nay, let mine quench its thirst!”

But Eleanor, now fading into mist,
Her form dissolving where the moon’s fist kissed,
Murmured, “The pact is sealed in endless fire—
To crave its end is but to crave desire.

Farewell, my love. When next life’s threads are spun,
Pray we are strangers when the web’s begun.”
With that, the wind devoured her last trace,
Leaving him lone in time’s unyielding grace.

Years slithered by. The city, slower still,
Succumbed to ivy’s patient, strangling will.
One dusk, a traveler, by chance or fate,
Stumbled upon a vault near Hell’s own gate.

Within, a skeleton, its fingers curled
Around a locket holding half the world—
Her portrait, smiling through the rot’s embrace,
And verses etched in blood upon its case:

“Let no man claim he knows of love’s true scope
Till he hath kissed its shadow, lost all hope,
And borne the weight of aeons in his breast—
For only then hath love been truly test’d.”

The traveler fled, the locket left to rust,
The poet’s bones reclaimed by greedy dust.
But some swear, when the moon hangs thin and pale,
Two shades still drift through that ruin’d veil—

His voice a whisper in the ashen rain,
Her name resurgent, though it births new pain,
As time, that mock’ry of eternity,
Gnaws on the carcass of their tragedy.