//------------------------------//
// Come In out of the Rain 
// Story: Sweet Nothings 
// by Golden Tassel 
//------------------------------//

Was it all just a dream?

How long had it been? Three days? Two? Four? I couldn't tell anymore.

Maybe that was it—it was all just a bad dream. I was still sound asleep in bed, warm and comfortable, and soon I'd wake up and everything would be exactly as it always was. And it would stay that way forever.

Or maybe I actually had died the moment the stable's door closed behind me. Maybe everything since then has been my own personal hell. I was cold and alone in a barren wasteland that went on forever and sapped more of my will to continue with every step I took.

Or maybe I was alive. Somehow, that sounded worse to me. The infertile earth below me beckoned, invited me to lie down and let it claim me. Grift had been right: there was no reason that I should be alive. I didn't belong there. I didn't belong anywhere—I was a puzzle piece cast adrift in the wind, carried away from the rest of the puzzle. A piece that would never find its place again—the one and only place in all the world where it had ever fit was lost to it now.

How long had I been walking?

I stopped, stood still. Below me was the cold ground. Ahead was the sun, nearing the horizon; it set the sky ablaze in bright orange and red hues. I squinted against the light, and I raised my foreleg to block out the sun.

"Don't you feel alive?" asked a voice in my mind. It was Rake's. I imagined him out in front of me, silhouetted against the setting sun.

He's dead.

He had known how he would die, and who would kill him. He just hadn't known when. But he knew it would come eventually, and he lived every moment in the present because it was the only time he was certain he would have. More than that even, he took joy in knowing that his death was coming, because that only meant it wasn't there yet—it reminded him that he was alive.

I kept walking. I had nowhere to go, only forward, but that was enough.

I was alive.


***


I followed my vision of Rake into the slowly setting sun while clouds rolled in overhead. I followed him through the growing darkness until we reached a small village, abandoned in ruin. The rows of old, decaying houses looked to me as the carcass of some great beast that, despite all its ferociousness, had still succumbed to death in the end. The rotting wood houses were all that remained of it now—bones slowly turning to dust over the years of neglect.

And I was a vulture, there to pick over whatever meager scraps might still cling to those weathered bones.

I pushed on the door to the first house I saw that still had a roof over it. The door fell off its hinges with a loud thud, throwing up a cloud of dust around it. The hardwood floor underneath it creaked as I entered.

Inside the house, I saw the living room on my left. It had the typical amenities: plush carpet, a large sofa with matching armchairs arranged around a coffee table, and bookshelves along the walls. The carpet was black with mold. The sofa and chairs were likewise covered in fungus. And the books on the shelves had all disintegrated into piles of mush.

The kitchen was on my right, and I headed in there. The floor creaked with each step I took, and before I even reached halfway into the kitchen, I found myself falling. The floor gave out and dropped me down into the cellar. The house then buried me under its own rotting carcass as it fell in after me.


***


I could barely move. Dust stung my eyes, and I could only blink to try to flush it out. Not that there was anything for me to see; I was in darkness under the debris.

I heard movement—hoofsteps and the dull clatter of wooden planks being tossed aside.

"Help!" I called out. That one cry was all I could manage, though; the weight pressing down on my chest made it too hard to breathe in deeply enough for another yell.

"Where are you?" came a muffled reply.

I was able to move my foreleg enough to bang my hoof against the debris. I heard movement, hooves scrambling over the pile on top of me.

"I'm coming! Hold on! I'm here! I found you! I'll save you!"

I kept banging until the weight started shifting off of my chest. I sucked in a deep breath, and immediately began coughing as the dust stung at my parched throat. The debris covering my head was lifted away finally, and I looked up into a bright white light shining down on me. My eyes adjusted, and I saw that it was a small flashlight on a headband, worn around the head of a mare. She was looking down at me, her eyes fixed in a distant stare, as though in a moment of waking up from a pleasant dream only to see that dream shattered.

"Hold still," she said after clearing the expression from her face with a shake of her head. "Let me finish getting you out of there." She continued pulling rubble off me until I could finally crawl my way out from under it.

I limped over into the corner of the room and sat down there while I tried to settle my cough. The mare started toward me, and I shrieked, "What do you want from me? Leave me alone!"

"Easy . . . easy. I'm not going to hurt you," she said, holding her position. I had a better look at her then; she was a bright blue pegasus, and her mane and tail were black with white streaks running through them. She had her mane in one long braid that hung off the side of her neck by her shoulder, and she wore what looked like a uniform. It was a navy blue with polished metal buttons, and she had a silver shield pinned on it. She carried heavy saddlebags stuffed to the brim, and at her side was a rifle at the ready on a harness across her back.

She reached into one of her bags and pulled out a canteen. "You look like you need some water. Will you let me bring it to you?" she asked, holding out the canteen.

I glanced back and forth between her and the canteen. Cautiously, I limped out to meet her. I took the canteen from her and carried it back to my corner where I opened it with trembling hooves, and started sipping at it slowly.

"Thank you, ma'am," I said hoarsely.

"My name's Starry Night," she said. "What's your name?"

"Day. Lucky Day, ma'am." I finished off the water, and clutched the canteen tightly while I watched the mare—Starry—from my corner. She kept her distance.

"Are you all alone out here? Where do you come from? Are you lost? Do you need help getting home?"

I shook my head and clenched my teeth. "I can't go back. I don't have a home."

"What happened? Were you attacked?" When I didn't answer, she reached back into her bags and pulled out a small packet. "You look hungry," she said, holding it out to me.

I looked at the packet and felt my stomach groan at the promise of food. I started to reach for it, but then hesitated. Starry put the food packet on the ground and backed away from it.

I took the opportunity to reach out and grab it before quickly retreating back into my corner. I tore into it with my teeth. Inside was a dry brick of corn meal. It was completely bland, but I devoured it as the best meal of my life.

After I finished licking the crumbs out of the wrapper, I saw Starry watching me quietly. "Thank you, ma'am," I said. "I haven't eaten since . . . a long time."

"I can tell," she said. "And please, call me Starry. Are you ready to tell me what happened to you? I want to help."

I looked down at my hooves. "I was exiled."

"Did you do something wrong?"

I gritted my teeth and shook my head. "I had to do it. I didn't have a choice."

"It's okay. Just tell me what happened."

"It doesn't matter," I said, sighing. "I can't go back." I looked back up at Starry, and I could see that she wasn't about to just let it go. So I told her, "I killed . . . I killed someone."

The moment following my admission stretched on in silence. Rake had been excited to hear why I had been exiled. Everyone else I had met so far probably wouldn't have even cared; from all that I had seen up to that point, it seemed to be a given that everyone out here was a killer. But there in that dark basement, there was this mare—there was Starry, and she was different.

"You had to do it?" she asked. "Were you being attacked? Were you trying to protect someone else?"

"Please, ma'am. I don't want to talk about it. It was horrible. There was so much blood . . . everywhere . . ."

"It's okay," she said. "Where are you from? You're not from around here, are you?"

I told her about the stable—that we spent our whole lives underground, and never even saw what went on outside. "I've never been so hungry or thirsty in my life," I told her. "I'm scared. I don't know where to go or what to do. I don't even know how I'm still alive."

"You've been through a lot. Just take a minute and calm down. It's okay. You're safe with me. Think you can manage a short flight after you've rested for a bit? I know where we can get you more food and water and a warm place to sleep tonight."

Shaking, I asked, "Why are you helping me?"

"Protect and Serve," she said, pointing to the shield on her uniform. "It's what we live by back at Precinct One-Seven-Three."

"Is that where you want to take me?"

"It's not," she said hesitantly. "It's all the way out in the coastal ruins—several days from here by wing, and I . . ." She cleared her throat. "I can't go back there . . . yet. I'm on an important mission. But there's a place nearby where I've been staying. I'll take you there, okay?"

It took me a minute to consider her offer, but I nodded. Starry was the nicest person I had ever met. Somehow, that didn't make me feel completely at ease with her, but after all I'd been through, and how everyone else had treated me so far, I knew she couldn't be any worse. At the very least, I had a direction to follow. That would keep me moving forward for a while.

I was stretching out my wings to see if I could manage a short flight when a loud boom sent me diving to the ground with my forelegs drawn over my head. It was Grift, I was certain of it. She was out there, stalking me as my own personal reaper, just as she had done with Rake.

"It's alright," said Starry. "It's only thunder. It can't hurt you."

Thunder. It was a word I had only ever heard in school when learning about how the outside world used to be. But for the first time I had heard actual thunder. And I heard it again as I opened my eyes to look up through the hole in the ceiling that I had fallen in through, and I saw the dark sky flash white briefly, followed only a few seconds later by another loud rumble. As I sat up slowly, it began to rain. And then it poured.

Starry looked up at the rain and sighed. "We can't fly in this. Best we can do is to find some shelter for the night, and tomorrow we can head out."

"Don't we have enough shelter here?"

Starry shook her head. "Half this house fell in on you. The whole thing is probably still unstable. We need to find something that'll last through the night. Let's get you out of here."

"Do you need help getting up?" she asked over her shoulder as she spread her wings, poised to fly up through the hole.

I gave my wings a few test flaps. "I'm alright, ma'am."

She nodded and launched herself up through the pouring rain. I followed, and we were both soaking wet before we even set foot on solid ground. We ran up along the street, looking for somewhere safe to spend the night.

"Here!" Starry called, and she lead me over to a small alley between two houses. A wall had fallen away from one house to lean against the other. We crawled in under it hastily. "What do you think? Looks sturdy enough for tonight," Starry surmised as she looked up at the wall leaning over us.

"Well, at least if it does collapse, it won't be as bad as an entire house," I agreed as I looked it over.

Starry took off her bags and her rifle harness and piled them under the low end of our shelter while I lay down against the wall of the neighboring house. It had been a hot day, but the dark was cold, and dripping wet as I was, I began to shiver.

"Here," said Starry. I looked up to see her standing next to me, and that she was offering me a dry blanket. She was shaking nearly as much as I was.

"What about you?" I asked.

Starry only shook her head and thrust the blanket toward me. "I'll be alright. You need it more."

I thanked her and took the blanket. It was tattered and dusty, but it was soft and helped stop my shivering. I watched Starry as she returned to her bags and pulled out a metal flask in her shaky hoof. She took a long draught from it, and then breathed out a relaxed sigh. Her shivers calmed after a few moments as she lay down and continued to sip from the flask. 

There was a brief flash of light from the sky above, and I heard Starry start counting quietly, "One one-thousand . . . two one-thousand . . . three—" She was cut off by the loud boom of thunder, and was silent until the next flash when she started counting from one one-thousand again.

"Ma'am? What are you counting?" I asked.

Starry kept counting until the next crash of thunder before she answered, "I'm counting the seconds between the lightning and thunder. The longer it takes to hear the thunder, the farther away the lightning was." She glanced over at me. "It's not bothering you, is it?"

"No, ma'am. I was just curious."

She nodded slowly and took another drink from her flask. "When my son was little, the thunderstorms scared him. So I used to sit with him and we'd count together. It kept him calm and made him feel safe to know how far away it was." Starry closed her eyes and laid her head down on her forelegs. She continued to mumble to herself until eventually she slumped over onto her side and began snoring loudly.

I looked out into the darkness and waited for a flash. "One one-thousand . . ." I began counting.

I had always liked listening to the rain in the stable's atrium. The sprinkler system at the top would, on a regular basis, shower the orchard below. I loved the sounds it made: Near the top it was a slight hiss with a metallic squeal as the sprinkler blades spun to spread the water out. Halfway down it was almost silent. And at the bottom, leaves rustled, and rivulets of water dripped off them and through the grated ceramic floor into the soil underneath.

In my free time, I would sit under one of the trees and simply listen to the rain. Sometimes a leaf would fall down, and I would watch as the water collected in it drop by drop. Thinking about the rain in the stable actually brought a small smile to my face as I sat there in our little shelter, listening to the downpour. It made a sound like the hiss of static that would crackle across the stable's P.A. system just before an announcement. But this hiss was more than momentary; it droned on with no announcement to follow it. I kept waiting to hear the overseer's voice to remind me that I was a vital part of the civilization, that I had to get along with everyone else so everything would function right. But I didn't have anyone to tell me that anymore.

I felt a strange, calm sort of dissonance about my situation. Cold, bruised, soaking wet, and alone—save for the passed-out mare across from me . . . the stable was all but a distant memory . . . and I felt fine. Life as I'd known it was over, but it was only a matter of accepting that and moving on. I'd be okay.