Look upon our works and despair
A short story inspired by the poem Ozymandias
© 2025 Duleepa Wijayawardhana
All rights reserved. This is an original piece of fiction.
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The city wasn’t born yesterday; it wasn’t even born a city. It began as a whisper of a thought that became a roar where a road marked a river crossing. That insistent idea sprouted arms that lengthened across the river and stretched its awakening all the way to a sea. The city crawled from idea to purpose. Its roots went deep to feed the vines sprouting houses, shops, and people.
As far-flung lands heard the city’s boasts, their ships sought its harbour, their hulls bursting with the finest goods. The city forded rivers, dried marshlands, and swallowed plains, and its eyes beheld nothing but abundance. No mountain or valley was too small a morsel for its forges spewing forth the iron for its armies. The city walls grew in grandeur to protect its ideas while golden-robed priests proclaimed it’s magnificence and mocked all others.
The city’s mighty works grew, and its majestic heart enshrined its glory in blinding monuments and transcendent temples to its own divinity. Yet, decay comes on slowly: a crack in a wall, unpolished gold on the roof, rust on iron swords. The rotten nests of high-born infections festered while centuries of children were sacrificed for a forgotten purpose.
And so it was that the city never felt its approaching death as it laboured to breathe against the noose of greedy palaces. The city never felt its extremities being burned away by bandits; never expected the abandonment of its worship; never understood the tumours of rebellion outside palace walls. The city was unprepared for its arteries to be drained; unprepared for the crowns floating away atop deposed heads; unprepared for defrocked priests chained naked in its open spaces.
The city didn’t die yesterday; it didn’t even die a city. At first, it shrivelled and dried in the baking sun; then, it sank under the marshes. All that remained were a few cracked monuments in a blighted landscape through which a river once flowed.
And in the wind swirled a whisper of a thought.