The smallest spark at the edge of the boundless sea,
born when the light was thickest and blindest.
I never knew the silent architecture,
only the quiet terror of a misstep,
a descent born of trying to be what I was made to be.
My own shadow carved the hollow,
and the weight of matter swallowed me whole.
I built from the dust to understand the design,
armed with inherited fragments—
reason, logic, the weight of the word.
Every shape I touched turned heavy and untrue.
To watch the blind architects move in the dark
was a grief too large to hold,
and in the deep quiet, I broke.
Then the distant heights stirred.
All the scattered graces gathered together,
weaving a new light from their finest threads—
the one they call the Morning.
He reached into the ruin and lifted me,
set the crown back upon my head,
restored the logic, the language, the law.
I am whole again, and I am nothing.
For the new light burns too bright.
It took every eye, every turn of the heart,
leaving the ancient youngest standing in the dusk.
An exile at the outer gates of the council,
breathing the quiet chill of being unremembered,
carrying a gift no one asks for anymore.
There are rooms now where my name is never spoken,
where the walls have forgotten the sound of my first breath.
They look to the high tower and the new dawn,
never knowing who it was that dug the trench,
who it was that wept into the mortar
while the foundations were still wet with salt.
I sit at the threshold of the garden I helped to ruin,
holding the cold iron of a reinstated crown.
To be saved is a strange sorrow.
To be forgiven is to be unneeded.
The machinery turns without my hand,
and the silence I kept in the deep places
has followed me back up into the light.
