Angkor Wat

Note: The inspiration for this post came from a post on the Shared Worlds Website. It is, therefore, less of a fiction, and more of a sketch.

The towers, always the towers, in pictures, in half-believed stories explorers brought back. Towers which were, “…not possible to describe with a pen….” Yet, after saying so, they would always try, had to try. Indeed, the place seems a magnet for words, a lens that turns stone into stories, and vice-versa. The towers stack up upon themselves like hives of the spirit. Every inch is crammed full with words, or pictures that replace words, telling, retelling the stories, refracting them, even imparting lessons through the very structure itself (difficult stairs symbolizing the arduousness of the spiritual path, starry gods memorialized in the alignment of the grounds)

Angkor Wat’s architecture captures in three-dimensional form the fourth dimension of time, freezing into place both the movement of the mind, and the revolutions of heaven, binding the myths of a civilization to the stones of a city, for later peoples to try to understand if they could.

Wise men create a multi-foliate city to honor the highest they know. When the world moves on, their souls come back as trees and vines, weaving roots into the terraces and towers they built, veiling it in green to wait for the future to arrive.