The Knight of Echoes Lost
A lone knight treads through valleys steeped in sleep.
His armor, once ablaze with honor’s sheen,
Now rusts like memory of what has been.
The wind, a dirge, intones through barren trees,
And guides him where the castle’s bones decreed
To stand as sentinel of shattered vows—
A monument to time’s unyielding plough.
Its turrets claw the heavens, gaunt and gray,
Their splendor drowned in centuries’ decay.
The drawbridge moans, a throat parched long by years,
As if to speak the weight of unshed tears.
Through archways carved with crests now stripped of name,
He steps where ghosts of firelight once aflame
Did dance with laughter, tender and profound,
Now choked by ivy, silence wraps the ground.
A hall unfolds, its tapestries undone,
Their threads the flesh of battles lost and won.
There, frayed to dust, a knight and lady fair
Embrace in threads no mortal hands repair.
His gauntlet trembles, brushing ancient stone—
A touch ignites a pulse long left alone.
The walls exhale a murmur, low and dire,
A whisper from the ashes of a pyre:
*“Remember…”*
Suddenly, the hearth’s cold maw takes light,
Not flame, but spectral glow to pierce the night.
There, limned in silver, stands a form once dear—
A face time stole, yet grief preserved here.
Her eyes, twin pools where starlight dared to drown,
Now hold the frost of death’s unyielding crown.
Her voice, a breeze through willows bent with rain:
*“Why linger where our joy was bound in chain?”*
*“Elaine,”* he rasps, the name a blade unsheathed,
*“I swore to breach the void where thou art wreathed.
Each battlefield I kissed with blood and sweat
Was but a step to pay the debt of debt.
The wars are won, the banners raised in vain—
No triumph crowns the heart that bears thy pain.”*
Her smile, a crescent moon in mist half-seen,
Unweaves the years, and paints what might have been:
*“Thy wounds were mine, each scar my soul did rue,
Yet folly’s chain doth bind thee to pursue
A shadow’s pardon from a ghostly throne.
I dwell not here, but in thy heart alone.”*
A gust intrudes—her figure fades like song,
Dissolving where the cracks of dusk prolong.
He clutches at the air, a futile grasp,
As night’s teeth gnaw the moon in hunger’s clasp.
Through labyrinthine halls he staggers, driven
By echoes of a love the stars have riven.
The chapel yawns, its altar stripped and bare,
Save one lone rose, blood-crimson, dying there.
Its petals cling, a final, fevered breath,
To thorns that crown a crucifix of death.
He kneels, and through the stained glass, fractured, dim,
The moon etches a cross on broken hymn.
*“If prayers are but the echoes of despair,
Then let the stones absolve the sins I bear.
Take back the oath that chains me to this curse,
Or let the grave our severed souls immerse.”*
No answer comes but time’s indifferent march.
The rose succumbs, its petals fall, and parch.
Ascending steps where spiders weave their lace,
He finds the tower—their once secret place.
A chessboard rests, mid-game, in dust enshrined,
Two kingdoms frozen, neither crown resigned.
Her ivory queen, mid-move, extends her hand,
His knight poised near, but never shall they land.
The dawn, a thief, now steals through eastern skies,
To gild the knight whose resolve in shadow dies.
He climbs the parapet, the winds his choir,
And stares where earth and heaven blend in fire.
*“If life’s a tale where love is but a page,
Then let the cliff write finis to my rage.”*
One step—the void sings promises of rest.
Yet, as he leans, her voice arrests his breast:
*“Wouldst thou forsake the dawn I died to spare?
Each sunrise bears the kiss I cannot share.
Live, not for conquest’s hollow, gilded lie,
But for the love that will not let thee die.”*
He halts, a statue torn twixt night and morn,
Till from his helm a single rose is torn—
The last she wove in hair now lost to mold.
It plummets, crimson, to the rocks below.
And in that fall, he hears her laughter’s toll,
A fleeting chime to shudder through his soul.
The petals scatter on the jagged shore,
As waves devour what hope remained in store.
The castle sighs, its chambers sighing too,
As shadows claim the knight in morning’s hue.
No ballads hymn his end, no dirges weep—
He fades where memory and stone both sleep.
Yet sometimes, when the moon bleeds pale and thin,
Two phantoms waltz where ivy clads the din:
A knight and lady, woven into air,
Bound not by death, but by the love they bear.
But men who dare that ruin’s throat to brave
Find only dust, and whispers of the grave.
The chessboard waits, the rose’s thorn still red,
The tower’s edge where living men dread tread.
And solitude, that ancient, cunning thief,
Grins in the dark, and feeds on mortal grief.
