🌊🪞🌿 Echo and Narcissus – The Tragedy of Reflection and the Forgotten Voice

 🌊🪞🌿 Echo and Narcissus – The Tragedy of Reflection and the Forgotten Voice

You’ve heard the fragments:
A nymph who repeats.
A boy who loves his own reflection.
A flower by the water’s edge.

But the truth runs deeper —
It is the tale of voice and vision,
longing and isolation,
and the soul’s mirror turned against itself.

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🜄 Echo – The Voice that Could Not Begin
Echo was a nymph of the forest,
woven of laughter, wind, and song.

She could charm the trees into shivering,
rivers into rippling,
and hearts into soft opening.

But she carried a curse:

She could only repeat the last words spoken to her.
Never the first.
Never her own.

Hera, Queen of the Heavens,
in her jealousy and wrath,
bound Echo’s voice to the mouths of others.

She became a shadow of sound,
a presence unacknowledged,
a soul who could not start her own story.

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🜁 Narcissus – The Mirror of Desire
Narcissus walked the forest as if the world were his reflection.
Born of river and nymph, blessed with beauty beyond mortal measure,
he inspired desire but offered nothing in return.

No heart could reach him,
for his own was locked within a hall of mirrors.

He met Echo in the wildwood.
Her breath caught fire.
Her eyes drank him as if he were sunlight on water.

“Who is here?” he called.

“Here…” she echoed,
a ghost of her own longing.

“Come to me,” he said.

“To me…” she whispered, stepping out from the trees.

When she reached for him,
he recoiled as if love itself were poison.

“Die before you ever touch me,” he spat.

“Touch me…” she repeated,
her words dissolving into shame.
She fled,
and slowly withered into stone and memory,
leaving only voice and ache in the world.

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🌑 The Curse of the Mirror
The gods, who see balance in all things,
guided Narcissus to a still pool.

There, he saw a face —
luminous, adoring, and untouchable.

He bent to kiss it.
The water broke.
The beloved vanished.

And so he stayed,
forever trying to embrace the self that would never embrace him back.

He starved in the shadow of his own beauty,
until only a pale golden flower remained,
forever bowing its head to the water.

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🕊 The Memory in the Woods
Echo lingers still,
answering the lonely,
mirroring the lost.

Narcissus blooms every spring,
a warning and a prayer:

Love unoffered turns to hunger.
Love unreceived turns to ghost.
Love unbalanced withers into its own reflection.