The End of a Voyage

The sand here holds no memory
A pale dust, cold beneath the ruin of my soles
A graveyeard of gods
An echo of an ocean drunk by time.
I have arrived finally.
Or perhaps, I simply can go no further.

Maps are only prisons for those
Who fear to find themselves

The mantle pulls against my shoulders,
It's always cold, no matter how near the fire I sit;
Heavy with the weight of miles left in the dark,
Of words swallowed by the wind,
Of faces that have thinned into ghosts
Within the fog of my own mind.

I lift my gaze.
The sky is an impossible cobalt,
A bruised abyss,
And those spheres above
Dead moons or watching eyes
Stare down with gelid, indifferent lights.

There they stand.
The spires.
Skeletal fingers of buried platinum,
Ancients, gnawed by a wind that doesn't howl
But asks for forgiveness

I've walked upon a shroud of the purest snow;
Etched with veins of magma that flow slow as golden ichor;
Obsidian stone beneath rises
Like bared bones of a titan

I followed star-charts and whispers of dead prophets
To stand before this desolate grandeur,
To taste this regal solitude;
The cruelest curse is the memory of how light you used to feel
It's the empire of those who dared to dream.
There is no triumph here.
Only the knowing that the road has eaten me
More than the destination ever could.

I grip my sword, my last remaining kin,
Consumed steel against my weary palms.
A blade so sharp it can cut through time;
But cannot mend the moment I said goodbye
I remember blue.
I remember the song of living water...
I've waited through millennia for this wordless dialogue

Nostalgia is a thin blade that severs the breath.
Is this peace? This perfect, terrible stillness?
An intruder at the end of the world.
The voyage is done.
The destination is the very act
Of choosing to stray from the path
When no voice remains to tell you where to go

The sword falls,
A hollow sound that dies instantly in the air.
I crumble, a ruin among ruins,
I sink to my knees, not in prayer, but in yielding,
This is not sleep; it is a drowning in oceans I've never seen.
I did not come for answers, nor for glory,
But for the mercy of a sleep with no waking.

I claw at the dark for her face,
But the memory is a mirror shattered by time.
I cannot find her eyes;
I cannot taste her name.
A lingering warmth that feels like a hand on my shoulder,
Vanishing the moment I turn to look.
She is gone, eroded by cruel miles,
A ghost too distant to even haunt me now,
Leaving me to fade, without the mercy of her image

Here I lay,
Morning a past I was never allowed to have
The horizon demands no more steps;
The map is bled dry.
The cold is not a blanket, but a vice,
I open my mouth to scream.
But the sand rushes in to choke my prayer.
This abyss has a familiar scent

And of a sudden, the world before me shifts
The mountains I've craved through every step, arise at last
Majestic and warm, despite the snow
I see small hamlets flickering with torchlights
I can smell the drift of woodsmoke
And feel the hearth-glow of a home I have never held