The Skeleton Men (“The Skeleton Men: The Bonesetter’s Revenge, Book 3”, Epilogue)

I came upon the yard
Amidst a slothy and sinister mist
Settled down away from grave sounds
And drifted into sweet twilight trysts

I dreamt that I fell away
To greet a dawn of darkness
Lost on roads of nomadness
And of obscurious loneliness

Escape became my orientation
The union of storms my guide
Martyr became my shelter
From xenomorphous skies

Away, I wandered
To learn how to heal.
Myself.
This world.
A people in peril.

’til a scrape on stone
Startled me afraid
I rose to my wobbly feet
And dodged a rusted spade

“If you can mend the dead
What you seek shall be yours”
Their cursed keeper said
And exiled me to grim horrors

A bleak black ill-fated mission
To bind the broken living souls
Back together through contrition
To a time when they were whole

Conscripts to a wicked decree
Shadowsewn forgotten beings
Slaves of twenty and three
Puppets of a spineless cyng

There, in the depths of the nightmare
I mastered reanimation of self
Fractured hope fused by fallen hells
And the shadow’s careful help

This is a tale of life
Bending backwards through the end
Of lessons taught by the dead and
The fell telling fate of the
Skeleton men