Author: Pacifique
Title: Ozymandias
Date: February 11, 2006
Description: A little perspective. One-shot.

(Sigur Ros - Agaetis Byrjun)

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias



I

Hogsmeade burned brightly.

Too brightly.

It was not the warm glow of fires burning upon hearths and in hearts on that cold February night, but the light and flame of a thousand buildings set alight with hatred and fear. They toppled over and fell as their roofs caved in, rafters crumbling to ash and walls flashing to dust in the light and heat and noise. Black things flitted through town, obscuring the fires momentarily and dodging feeble silver blasts coming from alleyways as the screams of the townspeople intermingled with the wind that had brought death upon them so swiftly from the hills. Spells rocketed through the air, a multitude of green and red and purple, a hideous rainbow against the fall of the light side.

For as the Three Broomsticks crumbled, its windows filled with fire and smoke, the wind rose to a crescendo of grief, and Harry Potter fell to the Dark Lord, defeated.



II

It was a mysterious land. The mist seemed to shroud the hills in secrets and the wind whispered of things that had come, and gone, and would one day come again. But within this land of mystery, there was a place where no man had ventured for years uncounted and uncountable, and no man would ever wander again, for all knowledge of its location had been lost and forgotten, an unimportant side detail in the history of time. Within this lost enclave, a face was visible, cold and triumphant, its empty eyes seeming like vast, cold gulfs in the antiquity of the world.

The face, a monumental thing of stone and cold, lay on its side, surrounded by the shattered remnants of a proud body, tall and strong and magnificent as a king's, for this was indeed the monument of a ruler, a king of kings, a legacy to and the magnum opus of Voldemort, Lord of the Wizarding World.

His eyes were empty, the ruby-inlaid gold having been torn away long ago as the hills flashed and flamed in the night of war, and the dark that remained gave the impression of remoteness and banishment, betraying the waning look of triumph that still remained upon the face, even against the pull of time. The beautifully carved pieces of stone that had formed the tall, regal body of the greatest wizard to ever live were scattered, weather-beaten and broken, on the ground about the face, themselves a monument to the ferocity of war and the power of time, and cold, and death. Where once there had been robes inlaid with gold and silver and gems, there now was only stone with edges sharp as knives and furrows in the ground where they had fallen, sliding, and cracking apart.

A pedestal still remained near the face, bearing the weight of some broken fragments of the statue, its base still reading the words that had been carved so long ago, when the statue was built upon the ruins of a castle more ancient still, the words that had once glowed with the ferocity and vim of power, and shined brightly under the light of a thousand snows and a million sunrises, and now served as a monument to a different thing that resided far above the pedestal in the stars, where the broken face could only gaze and see what it meant to die and be forgotten, for all things must pass:

I am Voldemort, King of Kings
Look upon my works, and despair
For there is only Power, and I who wield it.

And beside this shattered god, there were hills, and valleys, and oceans, and they were green and blue and alive.