All hail, Man, born from silence and destined for silence, yet forever reaching toward something greater than himself. He builds towers against the heavens, names the stars, carves his memories into stone, and still wonders whether anyone will remember his name, the stone.
Sort of chic which cannot be purchased wholesale or replicated by imitation; it is cultivated in solitude, refined through discernment, and worn as naturally as his own skin. Ostentatious nor austere, but exquisitely intermediate, a gentleman of cultivated eccentricity.
His manner, an heirloom grace untouched by the vulgarity of haste, where every gesture feels deliberate and every glance carries the weight of an unspoken aphorism. His wardrobe speaks in a restrained lexicon of tailoring immaculate lines, burnished leather.
Only the dark remains, minute and solemn, like a final word beneath the breath. Hymn of vermeil, what remains when splendour has departed? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the echo of beauty, still warm upon the fingertips, refusing to become forgotten, the gold withdraws.
Passes beneath the chandelier, things become almost holy beneath the hand. Somewhere, a bell forgets its hour. Somewhere, dust ascends like incense from forgotten parquet. The room inhales, the room remembers. And memory, that strange little miser, every beautiful ruin.
Where the garnet hour gathers beneath the tongue, my hands wander through the vestige of gold. Saffron dusk, you gild the silence of old corridors, every lacquered door keeping its little reliquary of light. A carmine wind, silk-thin velvet sepulchral.
My mind drifts through the sylvan air, languorously, like a thought half-remembered, moss beneath my feet, coniferous shadows. Viridian hush permeates the woodland, where the trees stand sentinel beneath a pallid afternoon and every leaf seems steeped in some ancient verdure.
Velvet hour permeates the room, curtains breathe where no wind exists, chandeliers sway like languid constellations above a body half-drowned in amber. My mind wanders through a silken delirium, tinctures of desire, palimpsests perfume, violets steeped in nocturne, candlewax.
Something feral stirs beneath the ribs, not quite grief, not quite hunger, but an unnamed malady with teeth, it coil around the spine and threads its cold filaments between the vertebrae, grows loud. Tinctures of sin, wilted peonies, candlewax trembling beneath an apostate flame.
Mercurial light seeps through the blinds, turning the room into a fractured reliquary where every shadow wears a different face. The ceiling tilts inward, breathing with the walls, while my thoughts descend through an obsidian current of brine.