There was passion in her eyes
From behind the frigid bars
Encrusted, they lay, in rust, mold, and misery.
There was yearning in her step
Hopeless paces across an empty cell, empty years, empty consciousness
Longing in the pulse against her fingertips
Drumming listlessly through millennia
Embedded in each perpetual second.
He came in the shadows
An apparition
Spindly fingers trickling down her frame.
With pupils ablaze he brushed a palm across her marble cheek
And she retreated
Recoiled, retracted.
He came in the silence,
Shattered it with her name.
Her title, her desperate, ultimate bid for love,
Her final wager.
Inscribed in blazing flames, in searing ice, in apathetic stone,
Concubine.
And she gazes after
Now, as he disappears to better worlds
And she whispers in a distant monotone
Of the instant, the pinpoint in the twisting thread of time
When the silent man grasped her hand
And told her it was all over.