dragon's keep

Each day I read a poem in the book that Caban inexplicably found for me on Merita. Perhaps I have been too long abroad, perhaps my schooling is woefully incomplete, but in all honesty I do not understand all of them. The language is too obscure, too twisted in on itself. But each verse is a gem in a trove long forgotten, and I must be the dragon hoarding what treasure I have stumbled upon.

I found these words, written of course by Shakespeare, that ancient unknown phantom who haunts my memories and taunts me with his dreamfilled quill. I feel, sometimes, as if he knows. He understands. It gives me such supreme hope that words written seven hundred years ago should so accurately describe what jangles in my heart. I am a woman floating alone in space, and so much of what I have touched is gone. Perhaps not all is lost.

Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover's eyes.


I circle restlessly on my treasure trove, wishing only that I had him back again.