The Soldier’s Vesper in the Temple of Twilight

No laurel waits, nor trumpets blister air—
only the wind’s raw tongue, which licks his scars
and whispers through the columns’ splintered teeth
of faces drowned in fevered battle-fogs.
Here, memory unspools its fraying thread:
a boy who left, a man who brings no dawn.

Her footsteps bloom like violets in crypts,
a caretaker of echoes, veiled in gray.
She tends the altar where no incense curls,
her hands, twin moths, caress forgotten script.
He sees her first as pilgrims see the moon—
a silver ache, a thing that cannot stay.

(Three winters past, he carved her name in oak—
a sapling then, now clawing at the clouds.
She read it once, her thumb tracing the wound,
then buried leaves to mute the sapless bark.
Their letters, brief as sparrows trapped in glass,
spoke of the rain, but never of the storm.)

“You’ve come,” she says, the words a bridge of frost
between two shores the tide devours whole.
Her eyes, twin pools where stars go now to drown,
reflect his helm—a cage of tarnished vows.
He dares not speak the rot within his throat,
the roots of “stay” that strangle every breath.

Night’s loom weaves shadows into tapestries—
they walk where frescoes peel like ancient skin,
their figures framed by nymphs whose chipped lips sing
of Hylas lost, Adonis bound to thorns.
Her sleeve, brushing his gauntlet’s rusted edge,
ignites a spark the rain will never claim.

She shows him where the ivy strangles Mars,
its tendrils swallowing the sword’s dull gleam;
points to the niche where Cypris, once adored,
now cradles owls in her marble womb.
“They say,” she breathes, “stones dream of kinder gods—
ones who forgive the blood in every prayer.”

He counts the cracks that vein her pallid wrist,
a map of paths his blade could never guard.
Somewhere, a nightingale—its throat slit dawn—
cries for the nest no tempest left intact.
They pause beneath an arch that groans its age,
his pulse a drum, hers…hushed as falling ash.

(Recall the day he left: her palm, a ghost
against his cheek; the lie she wore as shield—
“I’ll wed the spring when swallows pierce the mist.”
He knew. Knew how her father’s debts would bind
her waist to a merchant’s purse, thick with myrrh
and deaf to whispers of a soldier’s name.)

Now moonlight bleeds through clerestory wounds,
etching her face in mercury and ache.
He names the stars—old comrades’ resting sites—
while she unravels threads from her frayed shawl.
“The well’s run dry,” she murmurs. “Even the earth
refuses tears for those who linger late.”

A pact unspoken: touch the crumbling frieze
where Theseus grips the Minotaur’s clay throat.
His finger traces the hero’s fading grin—
hers follows, dust a bridge ‘twixt flesh and fate.
The wall, cold scribe, records what lips deny:
two shadows fused into one voiceless cry.

Dawn’s blade approaches. Somewhere, a bell weeps.
She offers wine from a chalice cracked with years.
“Drink,” she implores, “the grapes were trod by feet
who prayed for sweeter wars than those we wage.”
The vintage tastes of soil and unshed words—
a sacrament no church would dare to bless.

He leaves the dagger on the altar’s flank,
its hilt still warm from where her grip had been.
“Keep it,” he grates, “to peel the rot from fruit
or carve the spiders from your wedding veil.”
She smiles—a crack in porcelain’s flawless lie—
and snaps the blade across her calloused knee.

“Steel’s too kind for the knots I must untie.
But take this”—thread, blood-rust, a petal’s rim—
“to blind the Fates who’ll watch your northward road.”
The token burns his palm like Judas’ coin.
They do not speak of how the shard now sleeps
beneath her bodice, near the heart’s dim tide.

The crows convene. Her betrothed’s cart arrives,
its wheels chewing the path to splinters.
No kiss. No clutch. Just her voice, thin as reeds—
“When the temple falls, look west. I’ll be smoke.”
He mounts his stallion (lame, from the fifth siege),
each hoofbeat sowing salt in furrowed earth.

One year. The merchant’s house swells with her silence.
She tends his brats, her laugh a cloistered bell.
The soldier, hired sword for lesser lords,
carves paychecks in the meat of bandit kings.
Some nights, he hears the pillars’ low lament
and drinks to rust the echoes she left coiled.

Plague comes—a scythe that reaps the wheat and chaff.
The merchant flees, takes sons, leaves her to dust.
She walks barefoot to where the temple leans,
her lungs two sacks of broken hymnal notes.
At the cracked altar, she folds his dagger’s corpse
into her palm, and waits for the dark to root.

He rides through death’s miasma, fevered, blind,
drawn by the dream where columns clutch her form.
Finds her hair fanned across the godless plinth,
her fist a frozen bud around the blade.
No breath. No wound. Just peace, carved deep as runes,
and in her eyes—the dusk he’d meant to share.

He builds no pyre. Lets the ivy claim
her bones to weave into its timeless plot.
The dagger’s halves he rams into the loam
where her last footprint lingers, faint as mist.
Two decades hence, travelers swear they’ve seen
a man-shaped shade who tends the flowering rust—

who prunes the thorns from vines that choke the nave,
his hands still gloved in armor long since shed.
They leave him coins. He throws them in the well,
where wishes sink like soldiers without graves.
At twilight, when the stones exhale their grief,
he leans against the space where shadows wed—

and hears, or dreams he hears, the nightingale
relearn the note they broke beneath their tongues.