You line the road with candles and call it courage.
You whisper their names as though sound were a shroud
that could soften iron wounds or hush the crack of marrow.
Grief, in your keeping, is ceremony: tidy, perfumed, brief.

I have carried those same lights, but mine hiss in seawater;
they scorch the hand that dares to cradle them too long.
Their smoke recalls a dawn where steel first learned to sing
and virtue left its white robe drying on a rack of bones.

You count coffins; I remember the living pulse inside each lid,
how it slowed beneath a sermon of arrows you helped compose.
You gather tombstones like beads for a rosary,
yet every prayer you mouth drips rust from its hinge.

You mourn a realm you never walked,
a shoreline where pity is tide-bound and never returns with teeth.
I have seen mercy drowned in its own reflection,
watched saints weigh justice on scales already tipped with lead.

So keep your candles. I will scatter salt instead,
let the wind decide what burns and what endures.
And when the sun bleeds out beyond Anost's ruined walls,
you will know which light was honest by the colour of the ash.

Penned by my hand on the 4th of Chronos, in the year 981 AF.