The horizon had disappeared, ice gray sky and earth painted together under one brushstroke, a dull light creeping through the paint’s edges to illuminate the day.

Old, faded snow, shadows of the passing days collecting as ashes in mirrors of its icicles, reached with forgiving hands up to catch the new flakes from the sky, touching down from the sea of silvery clouds to kiss the earth below.

The roar of their silent dissent exploded through the crisp air, the sound of the world igniting listening ears, cleansing them of their impurities to possibly catch the rush of the tears of moonlight laminating the earth.

All was still.

All had been hushed.

Not a howl had been proclaimed to the moon.

Not a hoof had kneaded through the freezing ground, crushing the snow beneath.

Not a footprint had been imprinted into the piles of frozen cotton.

Not a chirp had been uttered through the bare trees, stripped of their bark coatings as their wood was bitten with the piercing fangs of the chilled breeze.

Nature stopped and marveled in peace.

Watching as the snowflakes twirled and pirouetted around them.

They fell in their silent flurry, dusting the ground with the beauty and daintiness of fallen feathers of great angels from the heavens above.

All the while, the atmosphere held its breath, the reticence of the fresh snow echoing with the ferocity of detonations, too scared to release the noise, the tension, the fury of the world around it and disturb the immaculate, and almost supernatural, silence that had befallen the white-crested land as she beheld the shower of diamonds that continued to adorn her.