The Remains of the Fog

Amid the haze, where mist is not sky but mourning, a stone tower leans like the last pillar of a vanished world. Roots coil, climbing a ruin’s leg—ivy’s frail revenge— as nature attempts a kindness for the ghosts left behind. Beneath, the earth spills out its dust and half-lit secrets; a whisper, faint, rises from the ground’s brittle breath, tracing the empty arches of forgotten passage. No flesh remains to tread the bridge of old sorrows, no murmur to echo within these ashen halls— only the weight of silence, wrapped in fog’s dim cloth. Columns bend like tall specters in their grief, each shadow-shape a slow and solemn sigh. The trees, too, weep in their stillness, their limbs raised as though to hold up a heaven too cold for hope. It is a place for the unseen, for the waning hour’s chill. Here, where all is but trace and fading— a world paused, or passed, its ancient song withering on the air like a regret unspoken for centuries, its only language now the echoes that linger when nothing else will.