Old wooden walls, rotted by water and salt, barely held themselves together, and seemed to hang off the roof above them more than to support its weight. It looked like any push, even one not intended to be violent, would be enough to break a plank in half, and in doing so would drag along the rest of the building until it was a pile of rubble on the ground. Yet despite its flimsy looks, the small shed stood, and continued to stand undisturbed on the beach.
Its green paint had chipped and rolled away, leaving only faded patches that hinted at what it had looked like when first built. The wood underneath had gone to a sickly grey, and the only remaining note of colour were dark green and muddy brown clumps of drying algae that lined the bottom of the walls. Occasionally, the tide and waves rose enough to carry those there, and there they remained, sustained at most by moisture and occasional rain as they slowly withered and dried and began to rot.
There had once been a padlock holding the door closed. The salt in the air and the sprays of water that flowed up from the sea had rusted it quicker than they'd consumed the wood, and it had fallen off, its shackle turned to reddish dust. What remained of it was half buried in the sand in front of the door, too heavy to be carried away by the waves. Its keyhole had filled up, and had at various points been home to a few small animals that wandered the beach, insects for the most part. It was only because the hinges were wood and not metal that they'd held and the shed still had a door, not merely a hollow opening in its side wall.
The inside was not clean. Sand got in pushed by the wind through cracks in the walls, water got in when the tide rose and left the pavement a mess of salt and algae, rain poured in through the ceiling when falling down. But on sunny days, when it was dry, it wasn't particularly dirty. It wasn't the most pleasant place, built out of decaying wood it could hardly be, but it was no worse than the beach outside its walls, and maybe even a little better in some things. Though its original floor had long been buried, wood that had broken apart and sunk into the ground, what had been put there as a replacement was proving far sturdier.
Celestia hardly bothered to sweep the stone slabs she'd placed there to walk on, only doing so enough to check they were still in position. She didn't mind walking over sand in there, and she'd find all her work undone the morning after anyway. She wondered at times about replacing the shed's walls with something sturdier, but then would it still be the same shed? She liked it better that way, even knowing it could one day collapse.