Desolation

The wind howls across the emptiness of the void, creating a hollow note, the one the universe plays to usher in the end. The few stunted trees that remain here have been scorchfrozenscorchfrozen so many times that their bark is black and their leaves are scarce and thin, useless things when they actually are present. It does not matter to the trees that their leaves are useless, they are too dead to care.

Before your eyes, a few more leaves break their ties to their trees and escape into the world. You can almost hear them laughing with abandon at their new-found freedom. You envy them.

The dirt beneath your feet is a blood-red-brown, not quit soil or sand or clay, but something of a hostile, infertile thing lodged somewhere in the gaps between the three.

The wind claws at your hair, tugs as your clothes, slaps your skin. The sky is a thin, clear, cruel blue, as unkind and unwelcoming as the ground below it and the hateful wind that blows between them.

The air is cold, bitterly, freezing cold, and it burns your eyes. Tears well up, but they are useless against the biting, angry wind that nothing can withstand.

There is nothing here. It is a lonely, vicious place. Nothing lives here, nothing can. It is a place best forgotten; a cursed, mourning land that howls for the vitality it once relished in.