Omenclad
A Prophecy in Four Tolls
They gathered where the treeline split like ribs
beneath the sky’s bruised and blistered lip—
a hollow ground the old maps never drew,
where stars hung heavy with unfinished truths.
The wind arrived before the sound,
a hush so sharp it carved the trees,
and in its breath, the watchers heard
a rustle stitched with centuries.
A child in black, with eyes like soot,
drew circles where the frost had stood.
Their breath hung still. They scratched a rune.
Then, gently, spoke a haunting tune:
“When the mirror bites the moon,
shadows stir and silence swoons.”
No voice had spoken, yet all heard the line,
etched in marrow, not in air.
A child wept salt though they hadn’t cried—
just blinked once, and the night grew bare.
The elders knelt with splintered grace,
their prayers unsaid, their mouths sewn tight,
for in the lore of fractured days,
to name the dark was to feed its bite.
A sparrow spun above the field,
then faltered, spiraled, screaming steel—
its wings like pages torn mid-sentence,
its feathers black with time unkind.
A second child, with bloodied thread,
hung feathers from a branch long dead.
They kissed the bark and faced the wind,
and chanted low, with lifted chin:
“When the sparrow’s eye goes blind,
wicked winds are close behind.”
The sky began to boil inward.
Flesh forgot how warmth was spelled.
And even fire, in its arrogance,
shivered like a child compelled.
A widow’s ring cracked on her hand.
A prophet drowned in blessed wine.
And in the chapel built on ash,
the choir sang in reverse time.
Candles bloomed, then cracked and spat,
like vipers tasting bitter blame,
and from their lips of wax and flaque
came a whisper drenched in shame—
A third child knelt by melted wick,
and smeared their tongue with ashes thick.
They clutched a flame with hands ungloved,
and through the pain, they softly shoved:
“When the candle spits its flame,
cruel will speak your name.”
Each name uncoiled like a serpent’s lie,
etched on bones not yet decayed.
The air took notes in funeral tones,
the soil confessed the sins it weighed.
Then came the toll, the final chime—
not metal, but a breathless groan,
as if the world itself had sighed,
and found its house no longer home.
Children dreamt in stranger tongues.
Time split open at the seams.
And every truth the blood had held
leaked into ancestral dreams.
The seers shook, the mountains knelt,
the wolves held sermons in the snow.
Then every door unlatched itself
and whispered to the dark below:
A fourth child stood on fractured stone,
and chewed the rind of bone unknown.
With hollow breath, they raised one thumb,
and sang as if the end had come:
“When the thirteenth bell has rung,
death will taste the sinner’s tongue.”
And when the fourth child’s voice fell still,
the wind forgot the shape of will.
The watchers turned—but saw no sky,
just endless dusk where stars don’t die.
The mirrors cracked in every home.
The fields grew salt. The roots grew bone.
No name remained that wasn’t burned.
No prayer returned. No hour turned.
The thirteenth chime now haunts the air—
a silent mark on all who dare.
And far beneath the world they tread,
four children sit… and dream the dead.
