2004 now 2023

THREADCUTTER-

(C) 2004, 2023 Kyrinn S. Eis  All Rights Reserved

A poem about Lthrus X'a

All in the moulden gloom

  Full stealthily we glide;

For all our oars, with practised skill

  By armoured arms are plied,

While silent hands do speak long sentence

  Of our incursion thus to guide.

 

Ah, sweet Three!  In such an hour,

  Beneath the silvery moons,

To beg command of breath to still

  My agents of ready doom.

Yet what can one commander do

  Against three weaving looms?

 

Insidious Alvia rushes forth

  Her gesture, "Let's begin it!"

In subtler signs Vekundra notes

  "There'll be bloodshed in it!"

Wise Terizha adds naught to tell

  But dashes forth to win it.

 

Anon, to sudden screaming won,

  In frenzy they pursue

The traitor-kin moving through a land

  Of dangers odd and new,

In friendly chat with brute and thief--

  And dark-sired ties renewed.

 

And ever, as the veins drained

  The wells of living dry,

And faintly strove the wounded ones

  To pull their broken bodies by,

'To rest for a while, to regain my breath...'

  The dying voices cry.

 

Thus the tales of sanguine deeds did run

  Thus slowly, drop by drop,

Many throbbing brains were hammered out--

  And now those lives are done,

And home we row, a merry band,

  Before the rising sun.

 

Lthrus... A waking dream did take,

  And with strangler's hand,

Pried it from where Childhood's fears were mired

  In Memory's shifting sand.

Like the villans' withered sheathes in pallor 

  Cured in that arid land.

 

A boat beneath the fading sky,

  Meandering onward dreamily

In an evening fleet and spry--

 

Killers three nestled near

  Lifeless eye; unhearing ear

Upon a current bourn here--

 

Long has dawned the fiery sky

  Glories fade and flesh does fry

Thus three killers in a boat arrived

 

Still she haunts me, shadow-wise,

  Lthrus stalking under skies

Never seen by sane men's eyes.

 

A killer yet, her tale to bear,

  With anxious eye and priq'd-up ear

Watchingly I shall settle near.

 

In wonderment -- the fourth -- I die,

  Dying as the moons fly by,

Dying as my lovers' cry:

 

Ever drifting down in scream--

  Lingering in the silver gleam--

My life, what was it but a dream?