Chapter 469

The cold bit at Rohan's cheeks, a sensation entirely foreign. He was used to the suffocating heat of Rajasthan, the relentless sun baking the earth a dusty brown.

But here, atop the Aravalli Hills, a thick, white blanket covered everything. It wasn't the familiar cotton of his mother's sari, but something colder, something that felt alive.

Rohan, all of ten years old, watched, captivated, as another flake landed on his outstretched palm. He'd heard the stories, of course.

His grandmother, her voice like crackling embers, spoke of "the white skyfall," a phenomenon that came and went like a vengeful god. But stories were stories. This was real, tangible, a small miracle.

The other children, normally so boisterous, stood transfixed. There was no laughter, no pushing, only a stunned silence broken only by the soft, almost ghostly, rustle of the snowfall.

Their small village below looked like a scene from a fable, roofs buried beneath a mound of the alien white substance. It looked serene, even innocent, a deceptive cover for the events to follow.

He took his eyes from his hand, looking ahead to see his mother slowly walking forward in wonder. She walked a bit in front of Rohan, her eyes searching as if in disbelief as they filled with joy, but it soon would shift.

The snow continued to fall, thicker now. It obscured the sun, casting a dull gray light over the landscape.

An unnatural quiet descended. The dogs, usually barking with ferocious loyalty, were huddled and still by their owners, whimpering with terror. Even the usually boisterous crows were quiet.

"Mother?" Rohan called out, his breath misting in the freezing temperature. Her smile soon dropped from her face.

She reached down, grabbing his small hand. Her eyes moved with growing trepidation.

The beauty of it, he was slowly beginning to learn, was a mere guise. It concealed something deep.

There was a pressure building that Rohan could feel in the base of his throat. There was an intensity to this falling ice.

A woman from a home below appeared, screaming unintelligible words before she fell onto the ground. Rohan's mother's face changed instantly.

Her eyes became wider as a look of dreadful comprehension grew. Rohan pulled on his mother's sari for guidance, but she seemed lost, in her own world.

The village below descended into chaos as people emerged from their homes. Not with joy, not even with fear, but with abject, unadulterated panic.

A cacophony of screams started filling the valley. Some tried to make it into their homes, and others, in the street, lay dead on the ground with a weird blue tinge to them.

It did not look like the color of someone naturally gone from the world. "What's going on, Amma?" Rohan spoke out.

She did not respond; she stared ahead at the scene below as if she knew everything about to come, each detail, down to the painful end. It looked like more than knowledge; she knew and hated this experience she was currently in.

Her lips quivered and shook. She picked him up into her arms.

Rohan had never felt his mother act like this before; it was as if someone had swapped his caring, brave mother for someone else, someone filled with terror. "We must leave." she spoke.

"Quickly, Rohan." Her voice, devoid of her typical lilt, was harsh with an urgency that pushed at his ear drums. She grabbed Rohan's hand as she ran back the direction that they had came from with a startling speed, her legs taking her through the cold.

As they began moving, there were others following closely behind. The families scrambled toward an old shrine nestled high in the mountain's peaks.

The hope of divine salvation could be their only solution in a world slowly succumbing to terror. But this day, god would not care for them, not a single bit.

Rohan looked behind him and witnessed the full scale of the horror, he saw men frozen in place like they were posed statues, children lay blue and still where they played and women turned pale, cold blue as if they'd had a slow drawn-out death, their eyes looking blank into the cold.

All the colour was being leeched out of his village. His mother kept on moving, her feet thudding heavily onto the ground as her breath became harder, she took him higher onto the mountains.

He was not sure of how much time was passing, nor how much time they even had left before they would be taken into this unknown blue. He noticed there was nothing but snow here now, no plants or dirt as before.

He could hear a terrible crunch from the ground that would accompany each step that everyone took as they travelled, like stepping on hundreds of bones. His ears soon started aching.

There was a tall man, perhaps around his mid-50s, with gray hairs sprouting from his beard; the top of his head was bald, shining in the blue haze that filled the sky, and the man held up his hands as he reached up high to god, hoping to be answered with mercy, a tear dropping slowly down his eye.

But this man slowly shifted into a terrifying pale color, and after two more silent steps, his hands began moving on his sides, and then, with an awful thud, fell dead, landing face first in the new layer of frozen ice on the ground. This was unlike anything Rohan had ever seen.

This was like an invisible monster picking the population one by one. As the few surviving members moved on, each one became quiet, waiting their turn.

Each silent death of the men, the children, and the mothers around him became too much to handle. The weight of every single corpse grew in Rohan's chest, a sickness spreading up his throat.

He turned to see a large group of men on horses riding fast, as if in an effort to take down this horrible phenomena. Their faces looked dark and full of malice as they yelled their rage to the world and to whomever brought the evil.

It seemed that they were from the wealthier neighboring town. As they travelled toward the snow, there were cries before silence, then silence, as their horses slowly collapsed, the men now dead as they became the same pale shade as the others.

There were too many dying; far too many to comprehend, much less deal with. Each moment now felt like another world from the previous one, moving and fading so quickly like an old photograph being crumpled up, only this was real and much too cold.

The reality felt completely changed; time began distorting to something new, no longer of his understanding. His life before felt too far. It was too far.

Rohan began noticing the weird change; it wasn't only color, the snow, the people's skin and hair; it was everything around them. The small details.

There were trees that felt oddly plastic like they'd been pulled and made from another material; everything else moved without meaning, lacking soul, in some unnatural rhythm as the silence grew.

The feeling of this place was being corrupted; it was cold, very cold, not only by temperature, but something else… deeper…older… evil.

As they entered the shrine, a group of about twenty other survivors came too. Inside there was an odd glow; the small lanterns provided not a single sliver of warmth to the cold bodies and frozen hearts inside.

But still, hope filled everyone, their hope filling up their tired, drawn, tearful faces. The elders gathered with his mother into a tight huddle.

They spoke of an offering they should give to some other "ancient ones," gods from forgotten eras that the people hadn't looked to in decades, now the last line of hope against the end. Rohan watched closely at their solemn and hushed exchange of words.

He didn't feel hope, just terror at how far they would fall to do anything against this. He began looking around and then at the ceiling.

He realized it wasn't the same place; the ceiling looked unnatural like something fake that was pushed into an odd corner; it did not make sense how the walls aligned either. They had come so far that the place seemed warped and wrong to all sense, to all logical conclusion, like another dimension from their previous one, one made of terror.

His mother walked to him, grabbed him and told him a final goodbye in an unnaturally monotone voice, "Rohan, be safe," she looked to the others, "It is time."

His eyes followed them closely. They had a mission, but it seemed like the wrong one; everything had fallen down to become this, and it would not change.

Rohan hid under an old rug, terrified at what would happen next as a chant filled the small room from those adults in charge of offering. Rohan's body stiffened and then slowly collapsed into himself.

He felt more pain, more fear, then a strange release into calmness. There was a low-frequency droning in the room, as their voices fell on his eardrums.

He could now tell where he was, in this new strange area. This whole situation became more than some force of nature that had occurred without an evil purpose.

Rohan started realizing who was behind it all; he understood everything all at once. His body had become ice, now one of them.

In a hidden lab, nestled within the cold peaks of the Aravallis, a man watched with eyes alight as they observed the snow fall on his advanced machinery; Dr. Veer was pleased at his new world of white. He typed out on his keyboard another sequence to fully solidify this world into a new winter.

This snow, created by him and fueled with a complex, nano-based poison, was now blanketing India, an act of calculated genocide he considered a necessary step in his warped vision of human purification, an act done in cold hard reason.

The deaths were fast, nearly instantaneous, his way of cutting into the dead population he so heavily despised with brutal perfection. Dr. Veer leaned back into his chair with an unblinking stare, a cold, almost beautiful madness playing across his twisted features.

His only concern, his only feeling that was real to him now, was to build up this new world that was far better, and purer, and he'd make it in all white. The world he would then build over it.