In the shadowed chamber where the midnight bell tolls,
A scholar toils by a flickering flame,
His fingers trace lines on crumbling scrolls,
Whispering truths forbidden none dare name.

The world without seems a masquerading guise,
Of faces that mock in phantasmal delight,
Yet touch them, and they unravel as lies,
Fading swift into the abysses of night.

He rises to wander the fog-veiled street
Where echoes of footsteps haunt his own tread,
Each doorway a riddle, each threshold replete
With visions that stir from the dreams of the dead.

Is this the mirage of reason’s façade,
Or merely a canvas of madness unfurled?
The heart beats a rhythm in grim promenade,
A pulse in the void of a fractured world.

He seeks the wise seer in her cryptic abode,
Who reads in the stars the illusions we chase,
But her eyes, milky orbs in vision bestowed,
Reflect the scholar’s face in damnation’s gaze.

“You chase what is not,” her cracked voice intones,
“All substance a figment that fades in decay,
The sum of your labors, the loss that bemoans—
Mere grains in the hourglass, slipping astray.”

He laughs then, a sound like the raven’s cruel call,
For in seeking truth, he has found the grand jest:
The seer herself vanishes, a shade into the wall,
And he wakes in his chamber, the scroll on his chest.

Yet dawn brings no solace, nor hope’s gentle gleam;
The flame gutters low, and the shadows return.
Is all that we see or deem but a dream
Within a nightmare where lost souls eternally burn?

At last, the scholar sees: this world’s a torment of strife,
No balm for weary souls within its tortured keep;
Perhaps beyond the shroud that divides waking life,
Another world awaits—where the broken still weep.

The scholar, trembling, wanders dusk-draped streets alone,
His mind a shattered clockwork, haunted by restless souls,
Strange figures beckon as the lamplight’s pallor is thrown—
He slips into the night no living heart consoles.

The scholar drifts through twilight’s boundless haze,
His quill bleeds secrets where silent specters creep;
He writes what time itself betrays,
And grieves for dreams trapped forever in our sleep.