The Wilted Rose of Everthorne
there lies a garden veiled from prying eyes—
a labyrinth of whispers, thorn and vine,
where sorrow’s roots drink deep from salted tides.
Its keeper walks alone, her steps a hymn
to joys entombed in memory’s brittle crypt,
her hands, like autumn leaves, both frail and grim,
caress the blooms that grief has tightly gripped.
She is Eleanor, the dusk’s forsaken bride,
whose heart once pulsed with spring’s unbridled flame,
now shackled to a vow no tongue can name,
her laughter drowned where silent rivers glide.
The garden breathes her anguish, stem by stem,
each petal stained with requiems for him.
Beneath the ash-gray dome of brooding skies,
she tends a rose—her ward, her mirrored soul—
its crimson choked by blight no balm defies,
a fading echo of a love made whole.
“Grow,” she implores, “though death would claim your breath,
for in your veins his fleeting life resides.
Let not the frost unmake what time bequeaths—
this fragile pact where beauty coincides.”
But roots, like memories, twist where shadows creep,
and whispers coil like serpents ‘round her spine:
“What good are thorns if hands refuse to weep?
What good are vows if fate will not align?”
The rose, as though it hears, lets fall a leaf—
a parchment scrawled with prophecies of grief.
***
Recall the days when Eden’s warmth still clung
to every breeze that swept through Everthorne,
when Edmund walked, his voice a golden tongue
that turned the very stones to living song.
His eyes held constellations, bright, unmapped,
his touch a language only she could parse—
two souls enmeshed where time itself collapsed,
bound by a love no geometry could clasp.
Yet fate, that jealous smith, forged darker schemes:
a cough, at first—a flicker in the night—
then fever’s blaze devouring Edmund’s dreams,
his breath a ragged tempest, frail and white.
“The garden’s heart,” he gasped, “holds ancient power…
its roots can mend the flesh… but at what cost?
Beware, my Eleanor—its bloom may tower,
yet pluck one stem, and all the rest are lost.”
She laughed then, wild with hope’s delusive fire,
“What cost could outweigh losing half my soul?
If thorns must pierce my palms, let them conspire
to barter life for life, and make me whole.”
But Edmund’s plea dissolved in autumn’s throat,
his fingers cold as petals in her coat.
***
Now, in the garden’s core, a well resides,
its waters black as guilt, as unspent tears.
Eleanor kneels, her reflection derides:
“You, who would trade your years to spare his years—
dare you drink deep of Lethe’s bitter wine?
Dare you unmake the clock’s unyielding march?”
Her voice, a blade, cuts through the dark’s design:
“For him, I’ll rend the veil. For him, I’ll parch.”
She plunges her cupped hands into the void,
the liquid night alive, a writhing hymn,
and drinks—a searing ache, a star destroyed—
her skin now parchment, light and life grown dim.
The garden shudders, roots erupt like veins,
the blighted rose drinks deep and blooms again.
***
Edmund awakes to sunlight’s tentative kiss,
his lungs unbound, his blood a coursing stream.
But where is she, whose sacrifice wrought this?
The house breathes cold, a labyrinth of dream.
He stumbles through the halls, her name a prayer,
each room an epitaph to her retreat,
until he finds her, prone in moonlit air,
her form entwined with jasmine, bitter-sweet.
“Eleanor,” he cries, “what shadow-play is this?”
Her eyes, twin embers guttering low, reply:
“The garden’s price was never just a kiss—
to save one soul, another soul must die.
Go now, and live—let dawn reclaim your skies.
But promise… tend the rose… where my heart lies.”
Her breath dissolves—a moth’s wing brushed by frost—
her body ash, the wind her funeral pyre.
The roses surge, their scarlet tongues embossed
with glyphs of loss, of love, of endless fire.
Edmund, unmoored, collapses in the dew,
his rebirth but a wound he cannot suture—
for what is life when rendered not by two?
A hollow hymn, a leaf without its tether.
***
Now, when the moon hangs pallid, bruised, and near,
the garden hums with ghosts of what once grew.
A figure kneels where thorns and petals leer,
his hands, like hers, now weathered, trembling too.
He whispers to the blooms she left behind,
their fragrance laced with echoes of her name,
while deep within the well’s consuming mind,
her voice endures—a flicker, faint as flame.
The rose, eternal, drinks his twilight tears,
its roots a web no scalpel can untie.
And thus they dwell, entwined across the years—
he, bound to earth; she, to the boundless sky.
Two lovers halved, yet fused by sorrow’s creed:
the wilted rose, the thorn, the broken seed.
