𝐍𝐄𝐀𝐑 𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓

He almost can’t believe his eyes.

Standing there, the tattered paper held in a careful hand, Rhysand glances at the faded map markings on its worn surface, and then looks up to what lies before him. The ruins of what he was led to believe was a museum once established by humans, and is now the crumbling remains of all that it once was.

He’s never been this lucky before.

Folding the map carefully, but quickly, Rhysand tucks it into his satchel, and scouts for the best way to enter the ruins, since the once-great doorways are nothing but piles of crumbled stone. Off to the right, he finds, is a wall where one of the magnificent marble pillars has fallen and has smashed into it, leaving him a convenient ramp upwards into the museum. He has to jump down into it, of course, and doesn’t really know how he’ll get back out, but that’s a problem that he can deal with later.

The caked dirt and grit under his hooves is bothersome, but is something that Rhysand is willing to overlook just this once. He’s never once in his life been to a place that was once human that has remained in such good condition. Most of the small ruins he’s been lucky to have found were nothing more than chunk of sun-bleached stone and earth-reclaimed wood that sprouted tiny leaves and housed multicolored lichen and moss like a rainbow of nature itself. But not here. There’s so much more.

Marveling, he stands there. He looks up, seeing the sunlight filtering down through the curved bronze ribs of a once-glass dome that towered high above the museum like a lens to the heavens itself, and all of its remains are naught byt crumbled shards on the floor around his feet, their glint near-hidden by centuries of natural flora beginning to grow again, and oh, it has. The marble floor, which was probably polished to mirrored perfection back in its day, is now a tiled mess of crackled and broken shards, with all kinds of plant life blooming from within. Where the earth had once been taken, the earth has since reclaimed. Where life could not grow, the earth has forced its way through, determined to live in a place that it was once denied. In spite of it all, nature has been, and always will be, the driving force that governs the earth. There’s something beautiful in that.

The carpet-lined paths through the broken marble, which Rhysand can only assume were once a beautiful shade of red, are now nothing more than thick blankets of every kind of flower he can think of, and then some. Despite the conditions here, so harsh, cold, and sanitized, nature has reclaimed what it lost, and now thrives here under the same sun as it saw before this place was even a gleam in its human developer’s eye.

In a way, just being here is so much more than he could have imagined, and he would be content to stay here for hours, just gazing at the overgrown beauty of it all, unbroken, virulent in its most raw form, reclaimed, and anchored.

But he isn’t here to admire the scenery.

Crimson eyes flick over to the left to what was once probably the help desk here in the museum lobby, and if he had any less desire to explore what he’s found here, he might go over and see if there are any somehow-remaining museum brochures containing maps of the place so that he might find himself an easy time of navigating. But he doesn’t want that. Much like other museums, it is sometimes just more fun to go in completely blind, find what you find, and see what you see.