A/N: Inspired by a variety of influences from a meandering chat last night.
Man of La Mancha / Don Quixote
The Butterfly Effect; specifically, the Evan/Kaylee relationship
Norse epics poems

This poem is written in iambic heptameter, otherwise known as a fourteener. I was amazed to learn lines of fourteener are important in Halo canon—the Gravemind speaks only in fourteeners.

Thanks to Lex C. for the suggestion about the line breaks.

His Dulcinea wrenched away, her death he could not bear;

Yet damsel never had she been, distress she always met

With fists and fury, face to face with fate and destiny,

And chance had never had a hold upon her warrior's heart.

And if he wished to rescue her from deeds of others cruel

Her heart would have rebelled from him; submission she knew not.

Nor the devotion of his being to know her life, her heart,

Her mind, her everything. And all the deeds that he had done

Protecting and defending and adoring her so deeply

Seemed now in vain, his sacrifices wasted by that sight,

The knowledge that she'd not escaped the angry burst of flame

That wrenched a hole deep in his essence, tearing at his soul.

The actions he had taken for her rescue from the curs

Who captured her, entrapped her, tried to tame her wild heart

(Although he knew it could not be, for he had tried also)

Were all a waste, for he had not been able to defend

Her from the greater threat that came from within her own mind

Unleashéd by her body's expiration (though her spirit

Could not die, until he saw her pyre in the sky).

An intellect, a parasitic mind which fed her thoughts

After she had won the fight with symbiotic evil

Promises of retribution, judgment, and a plan

To conquer all their enemies. Her knight in tarnished armor

Whose efforts led him through the ages, trying to set all

To rights, his efforts proving only to be worthless for her

Whose choices led her back to yield to rage, spite, revenge

A chance to win, defeat their foes, renounce the prophecy.

She did not know how he would break when knowledge that her life

Was spent would bring his bitterness to full and robust flower.

And though he had done all that he had known to do to win

Her back into his life, it could not be enough for him, not now

Because his effort being wasted, his life poured out like blood,

Had done nothing, naught but proved the way his heart had failed;

His insufficiency in life to prove that he would go

To any effort, any task her safety to ensure,

And insufficient still in death his spirit to revive

The ardor of her heart, to draw her closely to his breast.

And now that all was proved in vain, his penury useless

His sacrifices worthless, and his love unrequited

There would be no indemnity, no way to recompense

Her life; t'was lost to all that she had planned and schemed

And all that she had designated worthwhile for the cause

Proving that his adulation was contemptible

And for her nothing of any great concern, alas

Still with her consciousness' cessation tore his heart in two.

And now his tertiary expression, his further resurrection

His being not extinguished, it is her life in his mind,

Her reclamation but a thought away. Oh, she will see

The candle he still holds for her when she is in his sight

And nothing sways determination like which he has grasped.