There comes a silence, heavy as an oath,
when the world tilts against a throne,
and all that was golden turns to rust.
His crown slips—just a shadow now,
heavy with the years, the battles,
the blood that pooled like ink
in the margins of his name.
He stands on the battlements, breathless,
a broken god beneath a fractured sky,
and he sees the world unravel—
his empire, a whisper in the wind,
a tale told twice, then forgotten.
The banners that once bled his colours
now fade to grey in the dimming light,
and the swords that swore by his blood
lie cold, stilled by the truths they learned
in the last gasps of war.
There are no trumpets to mark this ending,
no thunder to echo his fall.
Only the whisper of wind through barren fields,
the distant cry of a bird that cannot remember
its own song.
He traces the lines of his defeat
in the dust beneath his feet,
finds the faces of the dead staring back,
and he feels their weight settle on his shoulders,
an old friend, an old enemy.
In this quiet, he knows himself—
not as king, not as conqueror,
but as a man unmade, a shadow,
stripped of all but the bones and the truth
that bends him now, like an old reed
left too long to the sun.
And what is left, but to bow?
To let the wind take his name,
to scatter it like ashes across a field
where no one will remember
how he stood, once, and called himself
something more than this dust.
The crown falls, a circle of iron,
its echo swallowed by the earth.
The king kneels, a man made small,
and whispers to the wind, to the night,
to the nothing that waits with open arms:
"I am done. I am done. I am done."
