It mutes everything else, smothering everything like a frozen fluffy blanket, drops hitting pavement and bouncing back, melancholic impacts that recoil in apathy. The streets are covered with water, ripples rolling and flowing towards the obscurity of a stormdrain, disintegrated rain making flows and mist that hinders passage and halos the light. There is no sound, simply noise and the absence of.

A grey rainbow filters through the mists, illuminating an entrance as if ordained for significance. The flow is dammed by a young woman's bare feet, going blue from cold but white as innocence. Alert and anxiously looking for something, someone, to come towards her, ignoring the the pain, or not knowing it. A glimmer of colour in her cheeks, her clenched hand, her simple yellow dress. She is completely our of her element, meadows and sunflowers and warm sunshine are nowhere in evidence, the cold is sapping her, her ignorance of it heightening its danger. Rivulets of hair drip down her shoulders, marking territory and darkening the dress. It clings to her like dedication in the rain.

The grey rainbow is gone, the rain pours hard. Belatedly taking shelter in the doorway up the steps, she sits to one side for a better view of the street. Alternately hugging her still clenched hand and opening it to rapturous eyes filled with sunshine, imported wholesale just for her. The downpour slows, and the hand stays clenched, hugged, silence is still loud enough to hear. Her head bows in fatigue, cold has wrapped its slender fingers through her hair and eveloped her being.

Starched white cloth and crisp fatigues garb her rousers. Eyes wide and frightend, the rain has stopped and ceased to mute the sounds of life. A gentle word is cold comfort for the terrible knowledge that the newcomers bring. She knows before it is said. Eyes brimming with the rain just past, and shivering from the cold piercing her heart, her body fails, and slumps, her hand unfolds. The sunshine bounces and rolls down the steps, pealing notes and glowing hard on each bounce.

The rain starts, softly this time, filling the center of the now still ring, overflowing, and filling again with boundless sorrow. The warm sunshine is forever gone now, the meadows empty and the flowers dont grow. The simple golden band of sunshine turned to grey lead. Her element is this world now.

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