overgrown

I was expecting the city to be a desolate, rotting place when I found it. The way everyone talked about it, how vibrant it was before the fall, how it had become a place of dread and death in the blink of an eye--how could I imagine anything but a wasteland? How could I have imagined how beautiful it would be?

The half of the city that wasn't submerged in the ocean was overgrown with trees and vines and wildflowers. The previously pristine marble streets were tangled and broken, the buildings crumbling as years of growth slowly reclaimed the space that had once belonged to the city's residents. It had been, as my former mentor was so fond of reminding me, twenty years--I think I would have guessed it had been a hundred. What was everyone so afraid of?

The answer, of course, was still standing out there, surrounded and yet untouched by the waves: a perfect white spire, the still-beating heart of the city that it destroyed. I probably should have found it more menacing, but seeing how little time it had taken for nature to reclaim what was once a thriving city, it was hard to make myself believe that destroying another edifice erected by humankind would be all that difficult a task.

I slept in the ruins that night. The enormity of my task would hit me eventually, but for the night, at least, everything was beautiful.