(Before The Storm)

The day started off bright and sunny. A palette of light blue, blotched milk-white with puffy clouds, was set as a background for the golden, radiant sun. Below the magnificent sky laid rows and columns of houses. From above, they seemed identical: blocks of dark red bricks stacked on one another, tiled roofs covering their heads, and glass slabs sandwiched between bars of painted wood. Each house sat squarely in the middle of a grassy plot of land, and between each plot were streets of cobblestone: numerous stones of all shapes and sizes, tossed into the ground and trapped in pools of hardened cement. Between the stone paths laid brick roads, made out of semi-polished rocks that had been cut into smaller squares. In the midst of all these there had to be vegetation of some form, and there was—tall trees with thick branches stretched out their arms, their multiple green fingers providing a natural shelter from the sunlight. Flower bushes lined the edges of the plots of land, their flowers opening up their vivid and vibrant petals, letting out sweet aromas as they bloomed.

Down below, from a layman's perspective, the town was buzzing with people. Mothers coddled their infants as they waited for the father to return home; vendors at the markets traded their goods in exchange for small metal coins and wads of colored slips of paper; and children played cheerfully outdoors. The wind blew. Several kids retrieved their kites and helped them soar high in the sky. The wind blew stronger. The strings snapped and the kites flew far from reach, entangled in the trees' branches. The children looked up. The sun bade goodbye as a dull, dark grey began to engulf the sky. The puffy white clouds had merged into masses of dark stone grey, akin to the rocks found in cobblestone. The sky flashed a warning light—frayed ribbons of bone white and violent violet—and bellowed.

"Get in!" the crowds shouted. The townsfolk scurried into the nearest shelters as the storm glided over them like vines creeping up walls. The energetic town had come to a halt. There, indoors, they waited, pressing foreheads against windows and limbs huddled under warm blankets.

From a bird's eye view, the town's houses were identical: bricks upon bricks cowering under a shield of tiles, empty stone patches snaked between the buildings, and not a single man was in sight.

(After The Storm)

Mother Nature's wrath was not something to underestimate. The battle between stone and storm had been fought, and the former side had been left battered and bruised.

The sky, from a human's view, never looked the same again. Traces of slate grey laced the canvas of bright blue like stains on a colored cloth. The sun shone too much on the town, so much that it would've made any building a humungous oven, and the pavement a giant stove.

The trees had been betrayed by their own creator. Their multiple branches had been amputated, leaving some of them with barely any arms left. Mother Nature had punished the most stubborn trees by uprooting them from the soil, exposing their wooden legs. The most unfortunate were sawn in half by lightning strikes, cut in the middle of their trunks. The flower bushes were removed of their beauty, and what remained of them were wilting leaves attached weakly to wooden skeletons. Patches of grass were the most fortunate, as they were spared during the war. Not a single blade was damaged.

The houses had fallen apart. The roofs collapsed, wholly or partially, leaving a bald spot on their tiled heads. Bricks upon bricks had cascaded down the walls and fell out of their spots, leaving the buildings looking like unfinished jigsaw puzzles. Their glass eyes had either shattered or been forced out of their frames, exposing the inhabitants to the outside world. The strong winds had blown any object it came across to a random direction, whether it was a clearing or a building.

Repairing the town was not an easy task. For days, volunteers had been picking up bits and pieces from the event, but heaps of debris and rubble still remained. The storm had left the town drenched in rainwater, sweat, and tears. Puddles and pools formed on the sides, and efforts to drain them had been exhausted. Buildings still looked like they had been disassembled by multiple hands. The children dared not play outside, the vendors at the market halted their trade, but the mothers still coddled their toddlers.

From a townsperson's view, the home no longer looked the same.