Story writing debate

Lavinia could remember a time when she was happy, if she tried hard enough. It was a distant imprint, a faint, forgotten watermark on the back of her skull. Yet sorting through the melancholy of the last four years she would sometimes stumble upon fragments of what had been a colorful and joyous life. Only flashes remained now, of a house in the foothills, of hills like mounds of gold dust in the setting sun, the heavy heads of wheat shivering in the cool autumn air. The same hills wrought in silver by an early frost just before the harvest. Lazy, droning summer days, crisp cerulean skies and the bubbles of fluorescent green which heralded the arrival of spring’s first leaves all lay scattered about, their once vibrant hues faded by the passage of time. But there were some which were sharp, perfectly preserved and excruciatingly painful to look upon: a woman and a man reclined by the fire, a little boy laughing in the snow. And herself, smiling into the mirror, honey-brown hair curled into an elaborate chiffon and interwoven with wildflowers from the surrounding fields. These were memories of people who no longer existed, and every instance of remembrance served as a sobering reminder of the fact. This even applied to herself. It especially applied to herself. Lavinia Taylor had died on that day, as surely as her mother, father, and brother had. The uprising which had raged had come to an end, and peace had begun to settle upon the Empire. This ostensible tranquility, however, came in the form of purges, of a consolidation of power, and of the elimination of undesirable agents from the new order, and for those who had supported the old order it was anything but peaceful. And so one day, while walking home from the market, a young girl of twenty years found herself captivated by the peculiarity by a sky painted deep red. For a few blessed moments she was struck with the surreal beauty of it, until it registered that the inky black lacerations which crisscrossed the field of red were plumes of smoke. The rest of that night was remembered only in flashes: the ash which had been her home, the dust which had been at once her birthright and legacy, and the corpses which had been her family. The last took the longest to penetrate the strange schism which surfaced in her mind. On one side lay her old life. A sunny life in which lived the people, places, and experiences that some part of her knew were gone forever. On the other existed her life after they were gone: the nights spent sleeping in stables, begging for scraps, the gnawing of hunger and he slow atrophy of her pride and dignity, even as she clung to them as tightly as possible. And while she lived in such horror, it seemed as if there must be a door between the two worlds, some way to step back into a life where she had purpose, where she had values to strive for and reasons to live. It seemed to her that the terror and loneliness in which she existed must be some sort of nightmare, and that if she could only find the will to do so she could sweep aside the troublesome veil which barred her way and step through. This illusion protected her for months; it kept her rising to her feet each morning to move through an increasingly gray routine. But eventually it shattered. And on the day that Lavinia lost hope, she was reborn.