The Orphan’s Requiem in the Valley of Unspoken Shadows

Beneath the ashen cloak of twilight’s sigh,
Where cobbled roads dissolve to thorn and stone,
A village sleeps—its name erased from maps,
Its breath a dirge through willows bent with years.
Here, moss devours thresholds, ivy strangles spires,
And every window wears a cataract of dust—
A sepulcher of whispers, this: Weeping Hollow’s curse.

Into this graveyard of unnumbered days
Came Elias, the orphaned wraith, whose feet
Had worn the sinews of a thousand trails,
His satchel light but for a locket’s rust—
A woman’s face, half-scorched by fire’s tongue,
Her eyes two embers in a portrait’s ash.
*“Return to where the brook forgets its song,”*
A nurse had gasped, her deathbed vow half-spun,
*“There lies your mother’s shadow, there your truth.”*

The brook—he found it serpentine and thin,
A silver scar through peat and rot’s embrace,
Its voice a shiver beneath the bridge’s ribs
Where planks, like broken teeth, refused to mend.
A child’s laugh once carved these banks, they said,
But now the reeds clutch secrets to their throats,
And minnows dart like blades through liquid dusk.

The villagers, eyeless in their curtained huts,
Spoke through shutters cracked like grudging lips:
*“Begone, rootless one—our soil rejects your tread.
No hearth here burns for those who come unbidden.
The Hollow keeps its wounds, and you, your ghosts.”*
Yet Elias knelt where wild thyme breached the cracks,
Pressing his palm to earth’s unyielding cheek—
*“I am the sapling from a felled oak’s core,
The echo trapped where silence choked the cry.
Deny me bread, but grant me but one name:
Who was the woman in the locket’s flame?”*

Wind stirred the yew trees into sermon-shapes,
Their branches tracing sigils on the sky.
Then came a crone, her spine a question mark,
Her shawl the gray of long-extinguished stars.
*“Boy,”* she croaked, *“the brook’s third bend conceals
A cottage where the floorboards sing at dawn.
Ask not the spiders in their ceiling courts—
The west wall weeps a portrait into mold.
Peel back the rot, and meet your mother’s ghost.”*

Dawn found him wading through nettle and regret,
The cottage sagging like a beggar’s plea,
Its door ajar—a jawbone loose with time.
Within, the air was parchment, thick with scrawls
Of mildew’s ink, of smoke’s expired lament.
And there, beneath the west wall’s pallid skin,
A face emerged—not from the locket’s trance,
But younger, fiercer, framed in brushstroke gold:
A woman crowned with rowan, eyes unblinking,
Her hand outstretched as though to clutch the years.

*“Marlowe’s work,”* a voice creaked from the gloom.
An ancient hunched where embers coughed their last,
His fingers knotted like a hangman’s rope.
*“I painted her the night the fever came—
She vowed to return ere the cuckoo’s first call.
Left you swaddled in the almshouse crib,
Your fist clenched round that locket’s hollow heart.
‘Tell him,’ she said, ‘the soil here drinks regret.
When he is grown, we’ll plant new seeds together.’
But spring birthed only frost. She never came.”*

The orphan’s throat grew raw with silent storms.
*“Where sleeps she now? Beneath what nameless stone?”*
The painter’s laugh was phlegm and bitterness:
*“Sleep? She weds a lord beyond the sea,
Her womb now heavy with a truer son.
You, boy, are but the scar she chose to hide—
The Hollow’s brook your only lullaby.”*

Elias fled—through thickets clawing flesh,
Past the brook’s cold and ever-turning tongue,
Back to the bridge where first his hope had perched.
The locket, flung, kissed currents deep and black,
Yet surfaced once—her face a fleeting moon—
Then sank where eels write ballads in the mud.

Night fell, a raven’s wing on Weeping Hollow.
They found him curled where wild thyme touched the stream,
His cheek against the earth’s unlistening ear,
A sapling’s root entwined with his left hand—
As though the soil, at last, had claimed its own.
No mourners came. No stone bears Elias’ name.
The brook, indifferent, stitches rhyme to reed,
While in some sunlit court beyond the waves,
A woman startles at a cuckoo’s cry—
Her milk sours, though she knows not why.

Thus ends the tale of roots that sought the sky,
Of exiles bound to whispers never heard.
The Hollow keeps its symphony of loss:
A bridge that groans, a locket’s drowned refrain,
And earth that drinks the tears of things unseen—
Where every orphan’s shadow learns to fade.