Children of the Rime by Scott Wakeling

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We burnt it straight away, and sat in front of the fire warming ourselves and feeling a mixture of worry and relief.
As we anchored there with the others, it gradually stopped raining. At first it was just not as loud, like there were just as many rain drops falling, only smaller. Then overnight it slowed to a drizzle, and the next day it stopped completely.
One day my father went onto dry land to speak to people and borrow tools. When he came back, he said there were three crystals just over the hill nearby, surrounded by military. He said they were flowering, like seeds. A bushy cluster of cobalt threads reaching up from the end of each pod, forking and stretching for the sun. The soldiers tried breaking them off, but they grew back quickly enough and never seemed to get bigger than a rosebush.
We heard on the radio that all the pods were flowering, all over the world, and breaking open. We listened, eyes wide, as they told us what was inside.
Little people.
Human to look at, boys and girls, naked and pale. All of them dead.
Crowds gathered over the hill to wait for the pods to crack. There were two boys and a girl in ours, curled up like babies. My father said they were asleep when they died. He said they looked like they had been asleep a very long time.
Some said they were aliens. In time, the scientists said they were human after all. Human in every way, but all alike with their bald heads and pale grey skin. The pods themselves, once they cracked, the flowers wilted down into piles of glittering dust, and the two main halves were taken away. They turned out to be diamond after all, but a super-strong sort nobody had seen before.
That's how it happened.
That's how they came down.