Dan Verkys

In chambers hidden beneath remembrance,
Where old grief hangs like dust in ruined halls,
Where silence pools in the hollows of the mind,
And forgotten names drift downward like ash,
There coils Grimvael,
The sleepless serpent,
The black-mouthed keeper of sorrows,
The dream-krate of anxious souls.

No cradle bore him.
No heaven suffered him to rise.
He was born in the first trembling of memory,
When fear first looked backward,
And called itself thought.

He dwells not in flesh,
Nor cavern, or sea,
But in the labyrinth of recollection,
Among wilted childhood gardens,
Half-heard confessions,
The scent of mourning rooms,
The faces long buried beneath forgetting.

There he winds himself, endless and patient,
Through corridors of our unfinished grief.

His mouth is black as a crypt abandoned to rain,
A wound without gleam,
A silence ringed in hunger.
His venomous black tongue stirs there.
Where no serpent hiss escapes.
Only the sound of memory fraying.

Its darkness opens not outward, but inward,
As though the night itself had learned to feed.
From those jaws spill whispers stolen from sleeping men:

The words never spoken,
The apologies rotted to bone,
The dread of tomorrow,
The trembling knowledge
That joy departs unnoticed.

And his eyes, if eyes they may be called,
Sealed in ancient shadow,
for Grimvael has no need of sight.
He hunts by remembrance.
He tastes regret upon the spirit
As wolves scent blood upon the snow.
Across his body, black as drowned velvet,
the scales glisten with funeral sheen,
Obsidian pressed smooth,
By centuries of forgotten terror.

He coils in impossible spirals,
A cathedral of serpent flesh,
Each curve tightening around thought itself,
Until memory bends inward and becomes a prison.

Yet it is beneath him,
Beneath that terrible body that horror flowers.
A thousand suckers line his belly.
A thousand pale mouths,
Wet and patient as grave-lilies,
Ringed in trembling circles.
They cling, oh, how they cling.
To thoughts half-born.
To shame hidden beneath laughter.
To old wounds one swore forgotten.
To the sleepless turning of the midnight mind.

Each sucker fastens softly, almost tenderly,
Drawing from memory not blood,
But heartache.
One drinks a mother’s sorrow.
One drinks the terror of silence.
Another feeds upon a lover’s absence,
Upon letters unsent,
Upon funerals replayed behind shut eyes.
And still they hunger.
They crawl unseen through dreaming,
Pressing themselves to recollection
Until joy grows thin and grief becomes familiar.

In fevered nights they gather,
Those thousand hungry mouths,
Around the trembling chambers of thought,
Draining certainty, deepening shadows,
Teaching the soul the old language of dread.

Thus men wake unrested,
Their hearts heavy with unnamed weather,
Their minds crowded by ghosts that bear no faces.
For Grimvael has passed near.
The Sleepless Serpent remembers
what mortals bury.

He keeps the inventory of wounds.
He nests in unfinished mourning.
He winds himself through forgotten corridors
where fear drinks quietly from memory.

And when the candle dims low,
When the house falls mute,
When sleep comes thin and fractured,
You may feel him.
A pressure in the dark.
A thought returning unbidden.
A sorrow without origin.

Then know,
Beneath the trembling chambers of your mind,
Grimvael stirs, sleepless, and eternal,

his black mouth open,
his thousand suckers fastening softly,
to the fragile edges of your memory,

Feeding,
Feeding,
Feeding.