Thoughts of a Loner.

Crownless Monarch. (By Sapphirus)

He rode through dust baptised by the bones of men,
Through valleys once kissed by prophets now drowned in ash,
The stallion bore him like revelations on hooves,
He wore his grief like ermine,
Soft as a sigh,
Heavy as his crown,
Glinting with gold that wept tarnish in the firelight,
He rode through the sky guttered with Psalmist's ash,
Where Orion's belt rattled like chains freed too late,
Mars pulsed a dirge beneath his booted heel.

His warhorse cloaked in night's crimson silk,
Snorted the stench of Eden's fall,
Scent of brimstone and boudoir roses,
They called this field "victory."
Yet all his gaze witnessed was marble tears trickling down carved faces,

"Let their towers topple in whispered ruins,"

He murmured beneath the haze of his breath,
Palming the hilt of a gem inlaid blade etched with Leviathan's lament,
Blood silver runes glimmered,

"No mercy for the architects of ash."

He remembered Sodom in it's opulent decay,
The salt wives weeping pillars for daughters undone,
And felt the cost of crimson dominion,
A ledger written in the currency of orphaned breath,
Above him a supernova flickered,
Not in welcome,
But sapphire warning,

Even a star can't outshine the shadow of its own death.

He spat into the plaque with rage unseen,

"I am both plaque and psalms."

The enemy rose like Nebuchadnezzar's dream,
A colossus swollen with hubris,
Its laughter cruel,
A brittle lattice of broken idols,
He charged as silhouette carved by lighting's grace,
Each strike a chapter inked with Genesis' vengeance,
And yet beneath the roar of collapse,
His heart groaned in Hebrew meter,
A lament older than David's harp,
A pleading,

"Is this the covenant I signed in blood?"

A traitors blade is silver tongued and velvet toned,
Found the King's spine in a kiss colder than Gethsemane's air,
He turned as his eyes could swallow black voids without mercy,

"Even God bleeds upon the clay He made."

He fell into the scorched dais of his grandeur,
The ermine mantle weary with grief and gore,
Neck bent in baroque acquiescence to Fate's final aria,
Above the constellations weaved a requiem,
Requiem for the crownless King,
In that gilded silence the heaven's wrote their verdict,

"His empire was but a fleeting mote of splendour,"
"Against the infinite ledger of our wrath."

And so the crownless King died,
Not in peace,
But in the sumptuous court of ruin,
Drunk of regrets distilled like dark wine,
His last breath a psalms to a lost promise,
Echoing through the cathedral of an unforgiving sky.

~Sapphirus