A Crown Of Heavy Colors by Kay Jackson
Within the high and silent tower, behind the velvet shroud,
The princess wept for every soul and every passing cloud.
For Princess Aurelia bore a gift she never asked to hold—
The sight to see the human soul in ribbons bright and bold.
She saw the baker’s purple grief, the king’s defensive red,
The suffocating, ghostly grey of plague upon the bed.
But every aura that she read became a heavy stone,
And other peoples’ bitter tears she carried as her own.
A prisoner to a sea of pain, she suffocated there,
Drowning in a tapestry of agony and care.
Until a night of swallowed moons, when candles flickered dead,
And from the pooling, frozen dark, a stranger came to tread.
She braced herself to see his soul, to feel the blinding glare,
But as she looked, she found a void—no colors vibrated there.
No echoes of a mortal heart, no agonizing noise,
And through the velvet emptiness, he spoke with silken poise.
"You drown beneath a thousand souls," the phantom stranger sighed,
His voice like rustling autumn leaves where summer hopes had died.
"I’ve watched you bear a cruel weight you were not meant to know,
But I can wash the slate ahead as white as winter snow."
He offered her a pale, gloved hand, a shadow in the room,
"Come step beyond these kingdom walls and leave behind the gloom.
A fresh beginning, clean and new, where colors cannot burn—
A perfect, everlasting peace from which you won't return."
The bait was sweet, the silence rare, to one who lived in fright,
She did not see his cruel lips twist upward in the night.
She only craved the quiet dark to make the torture cease,
And so she chased his hollow words to find her promised peace.
"Take it away," she whispered low, and reached across the space,
To press her trembling fingers down against his cold embrace.
The moment that their spirits met, the trap was neatly sprung,
And any song of future days was left forever unsung.
A paralyzing frost arose and froze her pumping veins,
As with a wide and wicked grin, he mocked her dying pains.
"A fresh beginning, little bird," he hissed into her ear,
"Deep down inside the heavy dirt, where no one else can hear."
She tried to scream, she tried to breathe, but air was turned to ice,
The clever trick was finished now, and she had paid the price.
And as her golden aura faded out into the room,
The sad princess discovered how she’d rushed into her doom.
Her life was cut so sweetly short within the tower high,
A phantom grin the only thing to watch the princess die.
