The Dirge of the Moonborne Marquis

In a manor drowned in velvet rot where every portrait weeps

Lived a marquis turned immortal by the curse no god keeps

His halls were lined with wilted time his footsteps thin as prayer

A silhouette in mourning tailored from despair

By candelabra fever-light he studied his decline

A noble heart embalmed in grief embalmed in ancient wine

He fed on London's lamplit streets on sinners unaware

Yet felt the phantom pulse of guilt claw through his frozen stare

And the moon a spectral governess looked through his fractured dome

"Thy tragedy is endless childyet thou art not at home."

So he knelt in ruined parlors crying "Break me break me through

For eternity's a coffin lined with memories I outgrew."

And the sky in solemn judgment bled a crimson chandelier

As the wolf inside his marrow stirred and whispered "I am here."

Oh bleak metamorphosis where blood and shadow war

A vampire seeking solace in a werewolf's grieving roar

He crawled through fog-choked graveyards where the mourners seldom tread

Where epitaphs of vanished years lay whispering to the dead

Among the cracked sarcophagi he found the ancient creed

A ritual of ruin for the damned who dare be freed

Its scriptures penned in fever by a saint who lost her mind

Its sigils carved in lunacy no breathing soul could bind

He pressed his throat against itfelt its hunger drink him cold

A sacrament of suffering no mortal voice had told

And the moon in pallid coldness sang with cruel delight:

"Thy death shall birth a heresya beast to mar the night."

So he offered up his centuries to be devoured whole

As his fangs turned dust and bitterness abandoned his control

His spine split like a requiem his ribs sang open wide

As the wolf tore through the marquis that had withered deep inside

Oh ruin-wrought deliverance a torment to adore

When a vampire's fate unravels in a wolf's lamenting roar

Now he wanders narrow alleyways where gaslights drown in haze

A haunted troubadour of sins from his unliving days

His voicea cracked cathedral bell that tolls for who he was

Each song a mourning sermon for the night he dared oppose

He sings of love he murdered songs of warmth he can't recall

Of humanity he bartered for a noble hollow fall

And though the beast has freed him it has marked him evermore

A poet bound in melancholy to the wolf's eternal lore

So he howls toward the heavens "I am neither damned nor pure

I am grief made flesh and music I am sorrow's signature."

In the fog-clad Victorian dusk beneath the mourning moon he swore

To wander as a ballad broken by the curse he once bore

Oh tragic transformation oh lament forevermore

A vampire carved to nothingness in a werewolf bard's dark roar