What I see: A boy sitting alone in a set of bubbles while broken glass and debris rains down all around
What I feel: What it would be like to be trapped in safety, alone … sort of gives me Covid-19 vibes
My story:
His parents did what they had to do, but there is always a price to the magic.
War had come suddenly, too suddenly to be prevented by even two experienced sorcerers.
They had snow globes at the home, however – they fused them with bubbles and shrank their only son all the way down to put him inside the life sphere they had made with all the things he would need, a life sphere that was a winter world for him to live in until the war was over, a winter world impervious to the breaking of things until spring – peace – returned to their world. Then the bubbles would all pop, and he and all things preserved with him would return to normal size – but he would be an orphan, for such an expenditure of power so quickly dematerialized his parents even before their home was destroyed.
The home was bombed just after the parents' last work, leaving only a strange film of persistent bubbles off of which broken glass and shrapnel bounced harmlessly … and yet inside, trapped in safety that would not end for years, a shattered child cried and cried in a world without his family.
Yet there was warmth because the sun shined, and the other living beings his parents had preserved came to him and led him to stores of food for all of them. So, he would live, and care for the animals and himself, and live and grow with the seasons as they came, though still, somehow, in winter.
This is the origin story of the man later known as Winternoah, who emerged a young man in the first late winter after the war, and led the restoration of his region's natural flora and fauna from all that had been preserved with him.
Winternoah knew no sorcery, for his parents had never taught him, and he never learned, for he and the creatures of his region knew each other and the turning of the seasons and of the tides of war and peace so well that there was never a need.
Thus it was that magic was transmuted into a miracle: the nation that Winternoah re-founded became a place of peace and tranquility, safe for those in need to find shelter from war and trouble all around.