By Owen Button, Y12
The city was quiet, and the two travellers observed the growing rain as it began to fall on grass-covered cobbles. The darkening sky hung low over the great industrial skeleton, a towering expanse of concrete pillars whose purpose had long since been fulfilled. All remaining semblances of civilization had vanished in the last exhales of society, and not even memories remained to haunt its peaceful ruins. In their abscence came the earth, which like the tide had enveloped the bones of the old collossus within its chissled valley tomb, until even the highest masts of the towering structures had become one with the ground.
The travellers trekked the labrynth, down roads carpeted in moss and covered by a canopy of leaves, while on every side, vast curtains of ivy and vines hung heavily from aging iron beams, gently swaying in the quiet shower. Brick walls gave way to babbling streams, forging their way among tap root mazes of pipes and conduit, down to abandoned tunnels blanketed in a glowing plethora of fungi and plantlife.
The muted patter of the rain grew backlit by distant flashes of thunder, and the travellers found themselves suddenly in a great clearing, an enclosed grove surrounded on all sides by walls of forested ruins. At its center lay a single, great tree that defied the imagination. Its vines hung low like a vast veil over the entire courtyard, their glowing fruit piercing the rainy mist with thousands of flickering halos that glimmered like fireflies over a bed of mossy roots. To one side of it lay a squat, dilapidated structure, whose slanted roof had been broken and replaced with a mane of waving fronds. To the other sat the shattered visage of a far larger edifice, a lush facade beneath which lay the storied echoes of daily routine, done away by time. The walls had decayed, the books had become history, and even the dust on the desk-frames had been cast to the winds. Only nature’s quiet indifference remained; rain fell through holes in the empty coffin onto a blossoming bed of flowers. A forest rose from the stage of an ancient theater, towering above a gurgling brook which ran across a grassy pitch, and ivy was draped in curtains over a carved, granite gate.
The travellers lay beneath the tree and listened. Wet leaves rustled against the hanging vines, and everywhere the hushed calls of life echoed to the muted rhythm of distant wind and thunder throughout the rain-soaked enclave, an ancient font of knowledge, breathing anew.
