Falling Dust, Rising Ashes

Prologue

So this is my first novel from a high school class. Interesting concept but the follow through is... eh. Enter at your own risk lol. I may edit it one day.

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live. ~Norman Cousins

The air bled dirt into the sky, their intimate embrace birthing a child of dust and agony. Once-proud buildings sagged under the weight of despair and neglect while the humans who once patronized them huddled in groups of fearful and feared. Remarkably enough, it was the weak who were regarded with the undying suspicion of cowards, the weak who held such power over life and death.

Packs of feral children roamed the streets, alternately begging and fighting, though neither often lent the sustenance the waifs so desperately sought. They were dirty and thin, their eyes sunken and aged by woeful experience. The parents of these children had often perished as the result of the epidemic which had jovially stolen the souls of men and had harbored them in a collection of thousands. Others were the result of abandonment, when the choice of precedence descended, and they were not found worthy.

It was shameful, how quickly man discarded his thin veneer of civility, how eagerly he descended upon the mannerisms of a beast. The lies which were perpetrated through technology and generational dysfunction, lies of inner betterment and holiness, fell apart like the rags they always were, cloth hastily woven to hide their nakedness.

But God had entered the garden. He had demanded for his creations to heed his call and to show themselves. But they hid in their shame, and he withdrew his hand from their heads, removing his protection against the wildfire of destruction which now entered their bodies, scorning the rags they had thrust upon themselves in the semblance of the power they had so willfully discarded.