Frost

He looked timidly down the street. It was, like the ten previous times he’d checked, empty. Devoid of any and all human life.
But not empty, no. There were the bodies remaining still. No one had come to clean them up- or more likely, those who came had perished too, contributing generously to the rising pile.
He kept walking, stepping over silent faces, over mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Over all the faces of the innocents smited in the greens and yellows of life.
The City had died, that much was visible from a glance. Bodies were strewn over streets, park benches, in libraries and coffee shops, in cars and buses and skyscrapers and apartments. But the decay hadn’t set in yet, oh no. The butchery had ended, but the processing hadn’t yet begun. The ungodly stench was only just starting to leak out into the crisp air.
And the frost was everywhere. The white frost, they had called it. The frost that didn’t melt. Come from the sky to punish you, freeze you and whisk you away to the heavens. It had spread like wildfire, jumping frenziedly from finger to finger, hand to hand, until more the half the city had been infected within a week. And it didn’t stop there. You see, it was docile, completely harmless. It was snow, ice, ash, some freakish precipitation caused by the eruption of a far-off volcano, or a wildfire, or a random blizzard. It was just harmless frost, innocuous bits of fluff stuck to every shirt, every lamppost, every window and sidewalk. They played in it, laughed and talked about it, admired it and were intrigued by it.
But then it was triggered, and the world went to hell.
They began to die silently, peacefully and wishfully, one by one, slowly, and then faster and faster, until they figured it out. But by then it was too late. The few that lived, the ones that were stronger than the rest, they ran, tripping over the dead and the living alike, pushing others behind to get away. It was chaos, the insane exodus of a dying wish.
It was life.
Three hundred tiny flickering souls fled out of that solitary little city, sitting all alone at the top of the world. Three hundred bundles of sparks that refused to be tamed, three hundred lost, confused animals roaming a world that was no longer theirs.
The boy was among the last of them to leave, born to a family that no longer existed, in a land that no longer existed, to a destiny that no longer existed. He stood on the edge of his life, halted in the middle of a turn to look back at the past. A moment to change his life and death, a second, a fraction in which he looked back and remembered every little detail of what he was leaving behind.
And then his foot touched the earth before him and his life blossomed.
Here be dragons, his mind whispered.
Let them look, his body responded.