PROSE – FOWC & RDP

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Dawn unfolds like a hesitant prayer, its soft light unspooling over the bones of the hills. The stars, one by one, retreat into the folds of daylight, as though ashamed of what they bore witness to through the long, silent hours. Still, I remain at the crest of the ridge, a lone silhouette etched against the slow bloom of morning. I have not slept. I could not—not with the weight of forgotten omens pressing down on me like ancient armor.

The saddle beneath me creaks as I shift, leather complaining in a language only the wind can answer. My limbs ache, not just from the vigil, but from something deeper—an unraveling. I am more wreck than man, hollowed by longing and the quiet violence of loss. My voice, once sure, now drifts somewhere in the ether, unreachable. Even if I could summon the will to speak, I no longer trust the shape of my own words.

Below, the keepers stir. I hear the sharp clash of their voices, rising in petty squabble over rituals they no longer question. Their movements are brisk, their concerns tethered to earth and duty. I do not begrudge them this. But I cannot descend, not yet. I am no longer bound to the cadence of the living. Not while something in me still listens for a call that may never come again.

For I have lost the vision.

Once, it came to me like thunder through a cathedral—blinding, holy, terrible in its beauty. It lit my mind with purpose, set my hands aflame with creation. But that light has dimmed, flickered, vanished. Last night it sang, soft and clear through the bones of the wind. Now it is gone, and in its place: silence, vast and unrelenting.

I reach inward, desperate for a glimmer, a fragment of that divine echo, but find only echoes of my own fear. My compass is shattered. My quill is waiting in some distant place I no longer know how to reach. The path to it—if it still exists—has been swallowed by mist and regret.

And yet, there is no peace in surrender. Only the chill of a fate whispered by unseen mouths, breath like ice on the back of my neck. They murmur not of endings, but of reckonings. Of a soul unmoored of a promise made long ago beneath stranger skies.

Perhaps this is what becoming untethered feels like—not a fall, but a float. Not a silence, but a waiting breath.

The ridge hums beneath me, and I close my eyes.

If the light returns, I will know it by the way the wind shifts. I will feel it in the marrow. I will rise, not with certainty, but with faith scorched into my bones like forgotten scripture.

But until then, I remain.
A shadow made flesh.
A watcher at the edge of memory.
A ghost, listening for the sound of his own return.