Desolation

I looked around the streets and trembled with sorrow. A whirl of leaves blew by in front of me as I started up the empty streets of my hometown. The wind, my only companion, tugged at my clothes and hair, urging me down the street. My body trembled as I strode down the desolate street, feeling lonelier than I have ever before. I touched everything I passed, feeling the coldness of the smooth wood of the fence, the cold bark of the trees, the wooden roughness of sign posts. Stopping beside the boarded-up window of an abandoned store, I felt the tears gathering in my eyes and with a heavy sigh, I let myself collapse onto the sidewalk and –

I fell out of my seat with a startled thump at the reality of the vision, my eyes opening. “You all right?” a voice asked me.

Blinking in the bright light, I was slowly aware of a rattling movement around me. Then my vision cleared and Jem, my best and only friend, appeared in my vision, his beautiful blue eyes anxious.

Under his worried gaze, I pulled myself back onto the hard bench of the stagecoach and straightened my skirts. "Aye," I sighed and leaned against the window again. Bandits had come through my hometown a few weeks ago and they had caused so much terror in the town, that it ended up chasing everyone away. They had killed people - massacred them more like - among them, my own parents. After they left, they left behind a ghost town - a town completely reduced in its former glory. And they had also left me behind.