the world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves

The city has been wrapped in hoar frost for an eternity. Visually stunning it's been, with those branches tinted an impossibly persistent puffy white. A week in, though, it's become almost oppressively monochromatic.

The sky, normally the painful blue of the high-plains desert, has been stained a permanent white. Shrouded branches raking the cloud cover have only allowed more white to bleed out onto the permafrost. Ice ruts lining the streets in rhyming couplets hide their jagged edges beneath the shimmer of new snow grains.

Nobody bothers to shovel anymore. It's really only frost, after all, not proper snow.

Today, the sun returned, its spewing solar plasma reminding us just who determines the seasons. Not yet time to straddle the divide between supernova and red giant, Ra breathes a tale to Helios and hurls flares at the terrestrial prison of ice.

And branch by branch, life is released.