The Specter’s Veil of Ashen Hours
Beneath a moon that wept its pallid light,
A city crumbled, gnawed by time’s mute teeth—
Its towers, skeletal and bleached of pride,
Stood sentinel where shadows choked the streets.
No breath of life stirred in the hollowed air,
Save one—a wraith, a flicker half-conceived,
Whose form dissolved like smoke beneath the stare
Of stars that watched, indifferent and deceived.
*Oblivion’s bride*, the winds once named her,
A soul unmoored from memory’s frail chain,
Who wandered realms where neither sun nor saber
Could carve the ghostly script of joy or pain.
Yet in her breast (if breast such phantoms own)
There pulsed a whisper—raw, relentless, stark—
A name half-lost, a voice once dearly known,
A face erased by night’s consuming ark.
She drifted past the arch of shattered gates,
Where ivy clutched the stones in green despair,
And heard the echoes of a thousand dates
When laughter rang where now there crouched the air.
A market square, now gaunt with rot and rust,
Once bore the weight of dancers’ fervent feet;
The well, where lovers pledged their futile trust,
Gaped dry and deep, a throat sans song or sweet.
There, in the dust, a glint—a locket’s gleam,
Its hinge corroded, clasped against the grime.
She pried it loose (or did it pry her dream?),
And there—two faces, frozen out of time.
One hers (or not?), though blurred by tarnish’s veil,
The other… *His*. The name surged like a flood—
*Orion*—torn from where the past grew pale,
A spark struck sudden in the ash of blood.
—
The vision came—unbidden, sharp, and cruel:
A man who walked these ruins ere they fell,
Whose hands had raised the groves where now the mule
Of drought had left but thorns to mark the dell.
His voice, a cello’s hum in twilight’s ear,
Had vowed to her beneath the walnut tree,
“No dawn shall part us, though the heavens sear—
Not death, nor time’s slow theft, shall sunder thee.”
But war’s black seed had sprouted in the east,
A harvest reaped in cannon-fire and screams.
He’d kissed her brow (a relic now, deceased),
And marched to fields where glory drowned in streams.
She waited, counting hours like beads of frost,
Until the day the crows returned alone—
Their beaks still red with deeds the sky had lost—
To crown the clocktower with a silent groan.
—
Now, phantom-bound, she clutched the locket’s ache,
And willed the past to bleed into the void.
The air grew dense, a stage for shadows’ sake,
And there—a shape, from fog and longing toyed—
*Orion* stood, or some sly trick of grief,
His smile the sunbeam through a storm’s eclipse,
His arms outstretched in fleeting, sweet relief—
A figment spun from starved, deluded lips.
“You live,” she breathed (though breath she did not own),
And pressed her palm to his—a mimic’s touch.
The illusion hummed, a harp’s precarious tone,
Its warmth a lie, its substance not as such.
Yet when he spoke, the timbre matched her ache:
“Beloved, why linger in this charnel sphere?
The world we knew is ash, and for love’s sake—
Release the locket. Let me draw you near.”
—
Oh, cruel the heart of hope when fed by ghosts!
She wept (if tears can haunt the ocular mist)
And felt the locket throb like ancient posts
That guard the gates where truth and dream coexist.
“Stay,” she implored, “though all but faith decay—
What binds us is not flesh, nor stone, nor star,
But this: the vow no void can rend away.”
He smiled—a wound—and dimmed beneath the scar
Of moonlight. Then the city groaned, unsealed,
As centuries of silence cracked their spine.
The ground convulsed, the specter’s frame revealed
The cost of clinging to a love’s dead vine.
The locket burned, its metal now a brand,
And through her essence roared a keening gale—
For in her grasp, she held not Orion’s hand,
But dust, enrobed in memory’s frail veil.
—
The dawn crept in—a gray, ungentle thief—
To find the ruins still, the phantom gone.
Where two had stood, enmeshed in false belief,
There lay the locket, its visage cracked and wan.
The winds resumed their hymn of endless rue,
The stars withdrew their cold, conspiring gaze,
And somewhere, past the veil where shadows brew,
A soul, unmade, dissolved in time’s blind haze.
But in the locket’s scar, a truth stayed clenched:
The face of him no art could resurrect,
The name that night and distance had drenched
In Lethe’s draft, till even grief grew wrecked.
And thus the city, tomb and testament,
Holds fast this lore in every crumbling bone:
*The heart, when starved for light, will bend and rent
The world to house a dream it dare not own.*
A city crumbled, gnawed by time’s mute teeth—
Its towers, skeletal and bleached of pride,
Stood sentinel where shadows choked the streets.
No breath of life stirred in the hollowed air,
Save one—a wraith, a flicker half-conceived,
Whose form dissolved like smoke beneath the stare
Of stars that watched, indifferent and deceived.
*Oblivion’s bride*, the winds once named her,
A soul unmoored from memory’s frail chain,
Who wandered realms where neither sun nor saber
Could carve the ghostly script of joy or pain.
Yet in her breast (if breast such phantoms own)
There pulsed a whisper—raw, relentless, stark—
A name half-lost, a voice once dearly known,
A face erased by night’s consuming ark.
She drifted past the arch of shattered gates,
Where ivy clutched the stones in green despair,
And heard the echoes of a thousand dates
When laughter rang where now there crouched the air.
A market square, now gaunt with rot and rust,
Once bore the weight of dancers’ fervent feet;
The well, where lovers pledged their futile trust,
Gaped dry and deep, a throat sans song or sweet.
There, in the dust, a glint—a locket’s gleam,
Its hinge corroded, clasped against the grime.
She pried it loose (or did it pry her dream?),
And there—two faces, frozen out of time.
One hers (or not?), though blurred by tarnish’s veil,
The other… *His*. The name surged like a flood—
*Orion*—torn from where the past grew pale,
A spark struck sudden in the ash of blood.
—
The vision came—unbidden, sharp, and cruel:
A man who walked these ruins ere they fell,
Whose hands had raised the groves where now the mule
Of drought had left but thorns to mark the dell.
His voice, a cello’s hum in twilight’s ear,
Had vowed to her beneath the walnut tree,
“No dawn shall part us, though the heavens sear—
Not death, nor time’s slow theft, shall sunder thee.”
But war’s black seed had sprouted in the east,
A harvest reaped in cannon-fire and screams.
He’d kissed her brow (a relic now, deceased),
And marched to fields where glory drowned in streams.
She waited, counting hours like beads of frost,
Until the day the crows returned alone—
Their beaks still red with deeds the sky had lost—
To crown the clocktower with a silent groan.
—
Now, phantom-bound, she clutched the locket’s ache,
And willed the past to bleed into the void.
The air grew dense, a stage for shadows’ sake,
And there—a shape, from fog and longing toyed—
*Orion* stood, or some sly trick of grief,
His smile the sunbeam through a storm’s eclipse,
His arms outstretched in fleeting, sweet relief—
A figment spun from starved, deluded lips.
“You live,” she breathed (though breath she did not own),
And pressed her palm to his—a mimic’s touch.
The illusion hummed, a harp’s precarious tone,
Its warmth a lie, its substance not as such.
Yet when he spoke, the timbre matched her ache:
“Beloved, why linger in this charnel sphere?
The world we knew is ash, and for love’s sake—
Release the locket. Let me draw you near.”
—
Oh, cruel the heart of hope when fed by ghosts!
She wept (if tears can haunt the ocular mist)
And felt the locket throb like ancient posts
That guard the gates where truth and dream coexist.
“Stay,” she implored, “though all but faith decay—
What binds us is not flesh, nor stone, nor star,
But this: the vow no void can rend away.”
He smiled—a wound—and dimmed beneath the scar
Of moonlight. Then the city groaned, unsealed,
As centuries of silence cracked their spine.
The ground convulsed, the specter’s frame revealed
The cost of clinging to a love’s dead vine.
The locket burned, its metal now a brand,
And through her essence roared a keening gale—
For in her grasp, she held not Orion’s hand,
But dust, enrobed in memory’s frail veil.
—
The dawn crept in—a gray, ungentle thief—
To find the ruins still, the phantom gone.
Where two had stood, enmeshed in false belief,
There lay the locket, its visage cracked and wan.
The winds resumed their hymn of endless rue,
The stars withdrew their cold, conspiring gaze,
And somewhere, past the veil where shadows brew,
A soul, unmade, dissolved in time’s blind haze.
But in the locket’s scar, a truth stayed clenched:
The face of him no art could resurrect,
The name that night and distance had drenched
In Lethe’s draft, till even grief grew wrecked.
And thus the city, tomb and testament,
Holds fast this lore in every crumbling bone:
*The heart, when starved for light, will bend and rent
The world to house a dream it dare not own.*
“`
