This Is Not My Foundation

I have built towers that claw at the sky.
I have carved cathedrals from the ribs of the earth.
I have paved roads that stretch beyond the horizon, veins pulsing with the weight of a thousand wandering souls.

Every stone I have laid has meaning. Every beam, a purpose. Every creation, an echo of my hands, my mind, my intent.

But this?

This is an insult.
A wound made of brick and mortar.
An abomination stitched together by incompetence and apathy.

Who dared to place this here?
Who defiled my name, my craft, my legacy?

I drag my fingers across its surface, feel its crude texture.
The brickwork is uneven, the mortar is sickly, brittle—like something desperate, something barely holding itself together.
A crack slithers through the center, jagged and gaping like an old scar split open again.

The weight of it offends me. The shape of it disgusts me.

This is not my work.

I sculpt perfection. I forge permanence.
I do not make things that tremble in the wind, that rot in the rain, that beg for collapse.
Even my failures, I have rebuilt with my own flesh, stitched their wounds with my sinew, breathed life into their hollow ribs.

But this?

This is worse than ruin.
This is worse than nothing.

I clench my fists. My teeth grind like stone against stone.

No. I refuse this.
I refuse to let something so broken bear even a shadow of my name.

And yet, it stands.

Despite its flaws. Despite its weakness. Despite my disgust—it stands.

It should not exist.
It should have crumbled under its own mediocrity, turned to dust like the things unworthy of memory.
But it does not.

It stays. It breathes. It endures.

And that terrifies me more than anything I have ever built.

Because if something this grotesque, this wrong, can survive—

Then maybe my hands were never as precise as I thought.
Maybe my monuments were never as eternal as I dreamed.
Maybe the perfect things I built, the things I bled for, will fall before this wretched mistake does.

Maybe the gods do not favor the strong.
Maybe they do not care for beauty.
Maybe they only care for what refuses to die.