The Knight’s Forgotten Vow

The forest breathes in whispers, a labyrinth of sighs,
Where specters weave their tapestries of half-remembered lies.
Each step disturbs the silence, each breath a sacrilege,
As oaks, like gnarled sentinels, guard the brooding edge.

A parchment, pale as moonlit snow, he finds beneath a thorn,
Its edges kissed by decades’ frost, its message long outworn.
The seal, a crest of withered rose, still clings with desperate pride—
A lover’s plea, encased in wax, from years his heart denied.

*”To thee, my valiant wanderer, whose soul the stars once knew,
I pen this final testament in ink of midnight dew.
The vows we swore ‘neath August’s fire, now choked by winter’s breath,
Lie buried ‘neath this cursed grove, where love embraced its death.

Recall the night we parted, when duty’s clarion call
Compelled thy sword to distant wars, while I remained in thrall.
Yet in this silent chamber, where hope and shadows blend,
I wait—no more a maiden, but time’s forsaken friend.

The woods, they whisper warnings of deeds best left undone,
Of paths that lead to phantoms where living light is shunned.
Return, ere twilight’s final gasp, to where our fates were spun—
Or let the moss reclaim my bones, and darkness claim the sun.”*

The knight, now trembling, grips the page as memories unfold—
A face once fair as dawning spring, now spectral, gaunt, and cold.
Her voice, a melody enshrined in chambers sealed by years,
Eclipses reason’s feeble flame, and drowns his eyes in tears.

Through thickets veiled in sorrow’s mist, he stumbles, wild and blind,
Pursuing echoes of a dream the forest’s heart confined.
The trees, like judges robed in black, condemn his wayward tread,
As thorns, the executioners, ensnare his helm and head.

A clearing parts the murk—a glade where time itself suspires,
And there, beneath a monolith engraved with dying fires,
A figure cloaked in tattered gray, her hair a silver stream,
Turns slowly, and her hollowed eyes extinguish hope’s last gleam.

*”Thou camest,”* sighs the wraith-like form, her voice a dirge’s strain,
*”Though decades’ dust hath settled on the tomb of our domain.
Thy sword hath carved a thousand fates, yet mine was writ in vain—
Behold the wage of promises that rot in autumn’s rain.”*

She lifts a hand, translucent, where moonlight bleeds to blue,
Revealing rings of ivy coiled where living flesh once grew.
*”Thy letters ceased, thy oaths grew faint, as winds that stray from shore—
And I, bound by a pledge unkept, am kin to death’s cold lore.”*

The knight, undone by grief’s abyss, falls prostrate at her feet,
His tongue a prisoner of shame, his pulse a storm unmeet.
*”Forgive,”* he gasps, *”the cowardice that veiled my truest vow—
I sought to shield thy heart from war’s defilement… Yet see now:

The wars are done; the banners fell; the trumpets lost their song.
But guilt, a canker in the breast, festers where I belong.
I dared not face the wreckage of the future we had planned—
And thus, in deserting thee, I fed the shadow’s hand.”*

The specter smiles—a rictus grin that chills the stagnant air—
*”Thy truth arrives too late, dear fool, to salve a soul laid bare.
For I, by grief’s unyielding scourge, became the forest’s bride,
And in these woods, where time decays, my mortal shell hath died.

Yet linger I, a revenant of love’s betrayed accord,
To greet thee at the threshold of the grave’s unyielding ford.
The letter, which thy hand now holds, was never meant to find—
‘Twas penned in desperation’s throes, then cast to fate’s blind wind.”*

A gust, as from the underworld, reclaims the brittle scroll,
Reducing vows to ashes in its ravenous control.
The knight, outstretching empty hands, beholds his crumbling past,
As dawn’s first light, a traitor’s blade, pierces the gloam at last.

The specter fades, her form dissolved to mist the morn discards,
While through the knight’s unarmored chest, a spectral pain imparts
No wound, yet deeper than the spear that felled his pride of yore—
For loss, not steel, hath cleft his heart, and left it beating sore.

He staggers through the waking wood, now lush with life’s deceit,
Where birdsong mocks his solitude, and blooms his steps entreat.
The glade, once stark with truth’s cruel glare, now veils itself in green,
As though the night’s revelations were but phantoms in a dream.

Yet in his breast, the letter’s ghost, though ash, still brands its tale—
A testament to choices made where love and duty fail.
And as he kneels, a broken man, beneath the sun’s disdain,
The forest drinks his whispered rue, and grants him naught but pain.

Three days he roams, a hollow shell, sustained by naught but throes,
Until the ancient monolith, now crowned with carrion crows,
Receives his final breath—a sigh that mingles with the loam,
Where roots, in time, shall weave his bones with hers, beneath the stone.

The seasons turn; the legend fades; the glade succumbs to thorn,
Where lovers’ names, once carved in bark, are weathered, cracked, and torn.
Yet on the chillest eves, they say, when mist ascends to mourn,
Two shades, in silent vigil, guard the vows the world hath borne.

Thus ends the tale of hearts ensnared by time’s illusioned chain,
Where honor’s light, though fiercely vowed, could not transcend the pain.
And still the forest keeps their cry, in depths no sun may tread—
A dirge for love’s eternal cost, and vows that stay unsaid.