The boy Forcibly takes his mind off of the conversation, continuing through the kitchen with intent to prepare ingredients for cooking. Before he can start however, he’s interrupted by a howling wind that suddenly swirls over the exterior of the apartment. A whirling gust it slams into the porch so hard the vertical slats that make up the blinds begin clacking together violently. The wind ceases suddenly, leaving the slats to clack for a few more seconds in the otherwise ominously empty room. Eerie silence having taken over the room, he begins slowly walking to the porch. The underlying anxiety inside him manifests again, bubbling to the surface, this time tenfold as if it is trying to manifest through his chest and boil through his blood. The boy's bare feet carry themselves slowly across the wood laminate before his arm reaches the sliding glass door handle separating himself from the outside. Between the slats and the outside, it is impossible to quite tell what is going on through light in the narrow gaps. He grabs hold of the handle and tugs the door open to the left, his eyes unwavering on the landscape before him. 

His body visibly recoils in despair as his heart wrenches even before he can process what he is seeing. Holy shit, Is the only immediate thought that comes to his mind. In front of him is the incarnation of the dream. “...Everything is gone.”

He stares in awe for a moment as his brain tries, and fails, to process what has happened to the landscape in front of him. Not even an hour earlier he was outside in the bustling city, now it is in ruin without a trace of what caused this destruction. The sky is still a bright baby blue with light clouds, the city flattened to rubble with smokeless fire coursing over the land like fluid waves, glistening like amber. In the distance, there are streaks of light through the air but no detail can be made out of them. The boy shuffles his feet, not even letting him catch his balance he turns around, sprinting for the door. Running down the hallway to the stairs, he nearly trips but catches his hand on the ground and pushes back up with his adrenal flared muscles and continues his sprint down the building to the outside. 

Unbelievably, there is no dust, no smoke. If he were blind he probably wouldn’t notice any changes except the strange absence of sound in the city. The boy begins his trek over the rubble, although a strangely thin layer for a landscape that once held millions of tonnes of concrete, glass and steel. 

Climbing a small mound, he continues walking through the hardened plains in front of him, further in. His immediate thoughts are jumbled, with a strange lack of thought for his own wellbeing and neither that of anyone else. He walks straight and true as if guided by a compass, navigating foot by foot through the jagged slabs of concrete and over mangled beams of steel.

As he walks, he observes the wonder of various textures of grey out in front of him, a spring sun highlighting their details. He climbs a small hill that has been obstructing his view of the rest of the city and continues the descent, walking over to what is now just a one story building, but was once likely an entire hotel building. Its height is in line with that of the hill behind it, nothing in the area going any higher, as if it has been cut down.

At the first floor, the boy notices that it is pristinely intact. He continues walking up the front of the building, the only noise audible being his own shoes compressing gravel like debris under foot. Walking through the front door, he processes how clean everything still is. It’s like someone chopped off the top of the building but somehow there isn’t dust anywhere… This must be a dream. There’s no one out here, nothing is matching up, I mean, how could this even happen? He walks around the tables laid out for hungry residents, passing his hand over everything and verifying it is, indeed, real. 

“Hello, may I help you?”

The boy visibly jumps as he snaps his head to the left where he heard a voice.