Ashen Snow – First Paragraph

The streetlights, blank, dull grey, and broken looked like dusted metal across the town. The sand was ash, burned from the land before it. The houses, most with windows and doors broken, had a fresh coat of ashen powder covering them all, and the trees, completely barren of color and life, loomed over cracked streets. Everything was unmoving — yet unsettled. Frozen skeletons of life and order and broken monuments of a world long passed stood in this grey desert land. Nothing grew anymore. Nothing lived anymore. Nothing. Not after the war.