The Withering of Forgotten Vows

He found it where the willows wept,
Their silver tresses dusk had swept
To brush the stones of a crumbling gate,
Its iron thorns entwined with fate.
There, through the arch, the garden lay—
A tapestry of decayed display:
Roses, once crimson, now ashen and frail,
Their petals adrift like a ghost’s exhaled tale;
Vines, like skeletal fingers, clung
To statues whose voices the wind had unsung.
A fountain, parched, its basin cracked,
Held echoes of waters that never came back.

“Here,” he breathed, “she vowed to wait,
Where the lilies drink from twilight’s plate.
‘When the clocktower’s chime hath tolled twelve years,
I’ll meet you, love, where no world hears.’”
Twelve harvests fled since her fingers, light
As moth-wing sighs, had clasped his tight.
Her eyes—twin pools of September’s dusk—
Had brimmed with oaths in the garden’s musk.
“Go,” she’d said, “but return to me
When the stars align our destiny.
Seek no other hearth, no other name—
This soil shall guard our sacred flame.”

He left, as men must, for war’s crude hymn,
His pockets lined with her tears, still warm.
Through battles that razed both flesh and farm,
He clutched her vow like a priest’s last psalm.
But cannon smoke dims the purest vow,
And years, like vultures, pick clean the now.
The clocktower fell to a rival’s flame,
Yet still he counted each phantom chime—
Twelve winters gnawed, twelve springs’ false prime,
Till his boots clawed back to love’s last claim.

Now here he stood where promise once bloomed,
His hope a rose in a catacomb entombed.
“Aurelia!” he called to the listless air,
But only the ivy replied with a stare.
He traced the paths they’d carved as youths,
Now choked with weeds of uncanny truth.
Beneath the oak where they’d carved their names,
He found her shawl, half-devoured by flames—
Or was it frost? The fabric, thin
As a widow’s breath, clung to its sin.

Night deepened its ink. The traveler knelt
Where the fountain’s tongue had once sorrows melt.
A glint in the dust—a locket, unclasped,
Held portraits time had slyly unmasked.
His own face stared, worn but true,
Hers—ah, hers was a stranger’s hue.
Gone the softness of apricot dawn,
In its place, a cut-cold diamond drawn,
Her smile now a dagger’s edge,
Her gaze a map where no stars pledge.

“She lives,” he gasped, “but not as before—
The garden’s curse, or some richer lore?”
Then, a rustle—not wind, nor leaf’s deceit,
But a figure emerging where shadows meet.
Not Aurelia, no—this wraith bore
A crown of thorns and a dress of spore.
Her voice, when it came, was the creak of boughs
In a storm’s last gasp: “Why stir you now?

“Twelve years, you say? The earth counts twice.
I died when the tower fell in a trice—
Not by steel, but by word’s sharper blade:
A lord’s proposal, a dowry paid.
They told me you’d fallen where ravens feast;
I wed the crypt to bury my grief.
But here, each night, my ghost must tread
Where vows, like roots, strangle the dead.”

The traveler reached, but his hand passed through
Her form, as moonlight through fog might do.
“You broke your oath!” he wept. “You fled—”
“And you,” she sighed, “believed the dead
Could keep their vows? Men carve their lies
In women’s flesh, then name it wise.
I waited, love, till my lungs turned frost,
Till the garden itself mourned what we lost.
You came too late. Now witness, dear,
The harvest of hope sown in tears.”

Her fingers brushed (though he felt no touch)
The locket’s chain he’d clutched so much.
It crumbled, as did the shawl’s last thread,
While roses hissed where her tears had fed.
“Go,” she murmured, “the dawn nears near—
This garden’s grace was never here,
But in the faith that we both betrayed.
Now leave me to the dark I’ve made.”

He rose, his bones like glass annealed,
Each step a dirge the earth concealed.
The gate groaned shut behind his tread,
Sealing the garden’s feast of the dead.
Some say he wanders, still, the wastes,
A hollowed man whom time erases,
Or that on moonless nights, there sighs
A duet of ghosts where the fountain lies.
But the garden? Oh, it blooms anew
Each spring—with lilies of blackest hue,
Their roots coiled tight round a locket’s chain
And a shawl that weeps an endless rain.