It didn't take long for the effects of the guard’s actions to take effect. The children scattered. The healer, the guard, and the chief went back to the village. Huge clouds gathered above the village and the surrounding areas. Maryanne held her lover on her lap, wailing as his wounds slowly coated her now dirty but intricate dress. He looked at his loving wife, grabbing her hand, trying to handle the pain in his lower abdomen.

"Please, don’t leave me," Maryanne cried, rubbing his rough hands gently. She tried to find a reason not to cry, but the tears swelled up anyway.

"I will try my best," he said, coughing profusely. Determined, Maryanne ripped ribbons of fabric from her long dress as a makeshift bandage.

"Please, take your shirt off. I can if you can’t do it," she said, looking for one of the cleaner looking ones from her pile of fabric. Her long, intricate dress was now turned into nothing but scraps. Her once tight pin curls were slowly becoming disheveled with misplaced wires on top of her head. But she was committed to saving her husband, even if it seemed futile.

"You’re so forward, aren’t you?" He chuckled, propped himself up by his elbows, and grinned through the aches seeping through his body.

"Stop talking nonsense. I'm stopping the bleeding," she wrapped the fabric around his abdomen, applying pressure to his back wound to stop the bleeding. The blood flow seemed to stop, but Leslie’s face was slowly turning more pale by the second.

"You really are an angel, like I said on our wedding day," he said, propping his head on her lap and brushing the tears from her face.

"I’m a mess," she chuckled, struggling to keep from breaking down completely right there and then. "Just look at me," she brushed her scruffy hair out of her face and looked at the remaining dress scraps she had to wear. She looked like a vagabond. She looked nothing like an angel.

"I am," he said, looking deeply into her eyes. "You have never looked more beautiful than you do right now. I’m glad that you married me."

"Stop," she said, completely breaking down once more. From small cries to full-out wailing, she held her husband and her husband held her. Both used whatever energy they had left to be there for each other.

Meanwhile, villagers gathered around the center of the village, looking at the clouds forming above them. Then the most interesting thing happened; it started snowing. It was something that the villagers had never seen before. A singular snowflake had floated down from the sky before resting and finally melting on the hand of a village man. As one became two, and three, and plenty, worried mothers released their children from their grasp to touch the foreign substance. Adults tried to catch as many snowflakes in their hands before it had the chance to melt, failing miserably.

Slowly, the snow settled on the ground, creating a soft, cold layer on the ground. It was at that time that the village chief, who was watching the villagers play, noticed that something was terribly wrong. He was concerned about how long the snow would float down, how it would affect crop production, and how it would kill the warm-water fish in their fishing pond. But also, strangely, why exactly did it only snow on just half of the village, opposite of the people who came from the sky?