There were nights that had no measure, no name
a tide folded inward and outward,
its rhythm unknown to moon or star,
its gravity stolen from the world.
From beneath the thresholds of thought,
cold fingers rose,
spun from shadow and ash,
groping at the lattice of my failing architecture,
seeking the fracture I had yet to know.

A weight grew within me,
a stone unshaped by time,
heavier than bone,
heavier than breath,
until each inhalation became a ceremony incomplete,
a flame that trembled and died before reaching the altar.

I move, though it is not movement;
it is the march of echoes,
the pilgrimage of forms abandoned mid-conjuration,
the wandering of phantoms who forgot the shape of their own eyes.
I am among them,
tracing a path that smells of Sols extinct,
bearing the residue of journeys unmade,
crossing thresholds that no one can remember.

Even in sleep, my spirit strays,
a vapor threading unseen corridors,
and I ask
did you feel it?
Did you sense the fragment that once was mine
drifting through your halls,
like the sigh of a ritual never performed,
like a bell that tolls but finds no ear?

When you summon me
as rarely as eclipses that unravel themselves
and leave the sky trembling
is it to darken the air,
or merely to confirm
that the chain you wove in absence
still binds me,
still coils around the invisible axis of your making?

The mark beneath my ribs hums,
older than thought, older than intent,
spiraling, uncoiling,
a serpent folded in on itself,
remembering a prison that no architect ever designed.

Your distance is a void
that weighs like gold unmined,
like fire contained in ashes that will not glow,
yet its shadow bends my horizon,
pulls the unformed planets of my chest
toward its cold, absent center.

So I speak to you through the silence
of a furnace long extinguished,
through the husk of a fire that remembers itself without burning.
Your summons strike like subterranean bells,
ringing in halls carved from matter unripe,
from echoes that have not yet learned to speak.

And when the next summoning stirs the dust,
will it be the whisper of a phase that was never named,
the curiosity of a hand that abandoned its own sigil,
or the quiet proof
that the creature wandering your labyrinth
remains bound to a cycle
that will never reach its final flame?