The Trial of Sir Gladius Dorn: Part II

Old Despair

by

Sister Elenara

“Grey mist settles on the hushed quay of New Hope,
where convent bells once braided dawn to prayer.
Their copper tongues lie quiet now,
cold beneath a spreading stain of iron.

A widow stands upon the tide-slick stones;
her lantern tilts, its sputtering flame
recalls a sister’s voice long drowned,
a promise pared to silence by the sea.
She names no killers, only absence,
and feeds the surf a strand of silver hair.

Within the ruined cloister, walls remember
how scholars traced forbidden circles
round a shard of bridling light.
They sang of duty, bound in wax and vellum,
yet the hymn turned sharp:
cut sister from sister, truth from breath,
left hope to bloom in candle smoke alone.

Gladius walked that corridor of echoes,
seeking verdict, seeking voice.
Few knew the hunger buried in his breast,
fewer still the shape of what was taken.
On a night of splintered rigging
pirate weapons split the dark;
Vorondil hewed the final thread,
and captain fell: no court, no plea,
only the quiet acceptance of the deep.

Now parchment drifts on hollow wind,
ink weeps, memory congeals.
The case is closed by claw and shrapnel,
witness lost to mortal rage.
Yet in the vaulted hush of the archive,
unused tomes breathe open,
revealing the sinuous path of every oath
that led to this undone day.

Let the record show:
one drowned prophetess,
one widow crowned in salt,
one knight fractured by stolen light,
one village trading vows for steel,
and in the hush between each name,
a question none may answer:
was any of it justice, or only the echo
of a covenant forsaken?

The lantern guttered; the inquest drowned;
the tale, unfinished, sinks beneath the tide.
What remains is ash upon the ledger,
and the soft insistence of the waves
that all bright things remembered
will one day wash ashore again.”

~~~

Summary: Following an attack by the pirates of Captain Blackgale, or Sir Gladius Dorn, a particular Targossian murdered the shackled man before his trial, silencing all secrets that might be revealed, forever.

Penned by My hand on the 2nd of Glacian, in the year 989 AF.