The Silent Bells of Evermere
There lies a hamlet, veiled in mist and dread,
Its cottages like spectres, slumped and gray,
Where ivy chokes the hearths that once held sway.
No laughter stirs the air, nor children’s cries—
Just whispers of the wind through splintered skies.
A figure treads the path, though none remain
To mark his steps, this patriarch of pain:
Old Alaric, whose bones bear winters’ weight,
Whose soul still lingers at love’s rusted gate.
His eyes, two pools where moonlight drowned its fire,
Seek phantoms in the ruins of desire.
Each dusk, he climbs the hill where church bells sleep,
Their tongues struck mute by grief too vast to keep.
Here, ‘neath the yew’s embrace, a stone declares
The name that haunts his blood, the name he bears:
*Elara*—carved in script the rains have blurred,
A testament to vows no longer heard.
Three decades past, when autumn gowned the trees,
She came, a storm of grace, to Stillborne Lees.
Her father’s house, a fortress cold and grand,
Loomed o’er the village like a tyrant’s hand.
Yet in its shadow, ’neath the hawthorn’s screen,
Her eyes met his—two worlds colliding, unseen.
“What folly binds thee here?” she once had asked,
When twilight donned its amber, half-unmasked.
“Thy hands are made for more than plough and strain—
They shape the very stars into a chain.”
He, trembling, pressed a poppy to her palm:
“Such stars would pale where’er thy presence calm.”
O secret trysts! O whispers stol’n and sweet!
Where brook and birch became their sole retreat.
She read him verses writ in passion’s throes—
Of Orpheus’ lute, of Daphne’s laureled woes—
While he, in turn, wove crowns of meadow rue
To crown a queen no realm but his heart knew.
But Fortune’s wheel, relentless in its spin,
Ground hope to dust the day her sire strode in.
“Thou darest dream,” he thundered, “to aspire
To taint my blood with peasant’s base desire?
By morn, she weds Lord Eryndor’s third son—
This dalliance dies ere yonder sun is done.”
No farewells graced their final, fractured hour;
No tears could breach the tower of her power.
He watched her carriage vanish down the lane,
Its wheels like scythes that reaped his golden grain.
That night, the chuch bells rang in wild despair—
Then fell to silence, as if choked by air.
Years draped their sorrow on the listless town.
The manor crumbled; frost-weed claimed its crown.
Her bridegroom perished, rumor tells, in war,
Yet still she dwelt behind some distant door.
Old Alaric, now gaunt as winter’s breath,
Kept vigil till his love outwaltzed her death.
One eve, as fog embraced the churchyard’s stones,
A melody escaped the mute bell’s bones—
A single note, half-joy and half-lament,
That drew him where her scent still clung, unbent.
There, by the grave, a shape in silver veiled
Turned slowly… and the very cosmos paled.
“Thou liv’st?” he gasped, his voice a shattered thing.
She smiled—that smile which once could halt the spring.
“In dreams,” she sighed, “where walls nor fathers part
Two souls entwined ere either owned a heart.
But wake, my love, for this is phantoms’ air—
Thy true Elara lies forever there.”
Her finger, pale as moth-wing, grazed the stone,
Then she, like dawn’s first sigh, was fled and gone.
He knelt, his palms pressed raw on epitaphs,
While through the yew, the wind sang epitaphs.
At sunrise, villagers (those few who stayed)
Found ice where life had ceased its frail crusade.
Now travelers claim, when midnight’s cloak is drawn,
A knell resounds o’er Evermere’s dead lawn—
One stroke, one cry from depths no man can sound,
Where love and loss in marble chains are bound.
And shadows say two forms there linger, woven
Of moonlight and the dust of vows unspoken.
But truth? It sleeps with Alaric’s ashen lips,
Beneath a cross that daily leans and slips.
The poppy, pressed in some long-moldered tome,
Has bled its crimson into vellum loam,
While high above, the bells no tongue may move
Keep silent guard o’er graves of those who loved.
