A castle crowned the mountain’s jagged peak,
Where torchlight bled and died on ice-grey floor,
And something old moved through the stones to speak—
A presence that had not been there before.

One whisper branded him with a hidden mark,
A name half-formed that only he could hear—
No face. No proof. No shadow. Just the dark.
But kings are built of nothing else but fear.

He watched him kneel, this man he’d shared the sun,
Who’d bled beside him, forged this kingdom’s name—
The king said nothing. When the thing was done,
The castle walls absorbed his blood like shame.

He built as haughty men have always built,
Each tower reaching farther than the last,
The kingdom’s coffers stripped to feed his guilt—
Each wall a door he’d locked against the past.

The children learned the taste of winter bark,
The fields lay fallow, stripped of grain and rye—
He heard their hollow coughing, cold and stark—
And named it treason, watched his people die.

He held his court for ghosts in ember glow,
And spoke to one who’d kneeled and lost his name—
The candles guttered, bending, burning low,
As if the dark itself had learned his shame.

The gates gave way—not armed siege, but starved hands,
His own gaunt people, hollow-eyed as he—
He watched them surge across his castle’s lands,
And smiled the smile of men who finally see.

The castle stands: his monument, his grave,
The archives note one courtier’s whispered lie—
No enemy had ever been so brave.
The walls stand perfect, clawing at the sky.