A fallen image

The house had frozen and thawed and frozen and thawed again a thousand times. Water had seeped between the cracks, weakening the house every winter until the cracks got bigger and bigger and bigger and then one day it all crumbled into a pile of rubble and dust.

It had hosted kings once. Presidents and Prime Ministers had walked by those corridors, empires had fallen based on the papers drawn up here. Secret conspiracies had been hatched and executed, assassinations had been committed, power had changed had gradually or abruptly, all within these very walls that had for a long time seemed impenetrable. It was the capital of the capital of the world. Yet time the greatest king rules above all.  It too had fallen.

Outside in what used to be a lush lawn with massive sculptures commemorating the nation's heroes, tall vines gripped tight the stone masonry and pillars the sole reminders of the grandeur of the land. Green and yellow moss covered every visible surface, tiny insects had hollowed out the reinforced concrete structures and made them home. Fallen heads, half-cut torsos, floating limbs. The human corpses had rotted a long time ago and now the cement corpses were done with too. Nature takes back what it gives.

The river, unencumbered by the concrete prison it had been imprisoned for centuries had broken the shackles and roamed the town much like the pack of wild dogs that colonized the surroundings. Every dozen years or so it overflowed its banks flushing it with fertile alluvial land that became a host to a variety of lush vegetables and fruits that had volunteered from the surrounding dump. As the tiny shoots turned to large adult trees they held the soil better, forcing the river to change its course again. Artifacts that would have helped a curious detective figure out the human history of the place were buried deep within the ground or swept away to the sea.