Shine
Chapter 2: 2. Out of Time
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The room was full of noises: the breeze rattling the window, the sound of her own breathing, the thumping of her heart against her chest. “Why can’t Ah sleeeep?” Apple Bloom whispered before burying her face into her pillow. With her ears pressed so hard against the fabric, her heart seemed louder than ever before. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Rattle. Rattle.
With a sigh, Apple Bloom abandoned all hope of falling asleep and instead sat up in bed. Surely dawn was approaching—what was the time, anyway? Five o’clock? Six? Closing her eyelids, she pointed her head in the direction of the clock, changing her guess to four o’clock just to be on the safe side. She opened her eyes.
“Five past one?!”
Rubbing her disbelieving eyes didn’t make the slightest shred of difference. After all, the cold gears of the clockwork were incapable of lying: five past one they said and so five past one it was, five, long, noisy minutes since she had woken up. And now the clock taunted her further still by seemingly slowing down, each tick of the second hand feeling like a minute, every tock of the minute hand feeling like an hour. Supposing Apple Bloom hadn’t known better then she would’ve sworn that the clock was doing this on purpose. “Is this ‘cos of that time Ah gone kicked the wall and ya fell off?” she asked. “‘Cos that was only once, honest! Ain’t Ah taken good care of ya since?”
It responded with an indignant tock. Apple Bloom, stop talking to the clock, said a voice in her head. Go to sleep.
Groaning, she fell back down on the mattress, facing the ceiling. And she shivered. It was so chilly that even her radiator couldn’t save her breath from misting in the moonlight, and she cursed her thin sheets, wished that, for once, she could be the one with the thick, woolly blanket and not Granny Smith. “It ain’t fair,” she said under her breath. “Ah’m only little. Why can’t Ah have a nice blanket?”
Just then, the moonlight dimmed. Though Apple Bloom couldn’t recall any snowfall being scheduled for tonight, nevertheless the clouds acted like nopony had told them, creeping over the disc of the moon, long, thin tendrils of cloud followed by bigger, thicker brothers; and then the moon was gone, eaten up, leaving behind nothing but a bright white lining around the edges of the clouds; and even that too vanished in time, and then the snow began to fall in earnest. It was only now that Apple Bloom finally turned her lamp back on so as to watch the snow gather up on her windowsill—anything to distract from the dread building in her chest.
“Apple Bloom, ya already gone through this tonight. There ain’t nothin’ to be scared by.”
Saying it and believing it weren’t one and the same, and the truth was that she was worried to her bones. There was something else, too, which couldn’t be explained: it was all around in the air itself, the sensation of being caught in the quiet minutes before a mighty storm. Something was going to happen. Something big. Apple Bloom knew it, and she also knew as surely as the sun, the moon and the stars shined above her that this was no ordinary night—though her head told her that it was the tiredness talking, her heart, on the other hoof, said otherwise: trust your gut, it whispered.
Running a hoof through her mane (this had become a habit since her bow had gone missing), Apple Bloom thought of her nightmares: deep shadows, starless skies, running, running, and running; and there had been snow everywhere, snow up to her chin, and she’d screamed for the blizzard to stop before it buried her, then—
And then her stomach lurched. Something happened...
It was the clock: it read five past one. Common sense said to Apple Bloom that it went without saying that time was moving slowly tonight, yet for as loudly as her mind screamed this, proclaimed that it was the truth and that there was no other explanation, her guts were adamant that ten minutes, at least, had passed since she had last checked the clock. There was a difference between time going slowly and stopping completely...
“It’s just outta battery, is all. Stop being so darn silly.”
But no amount of excuses could account for the absence of any tick, tock, tick, tock—not when the batteries had been replaced two days beforehoof. The window wasn’t rattling either, nor was the snow patting against the glass or the roof. The pipes weren’t groaning. The floorboards weren’t moaning. The wind wasn’t howling through the trees, and where once her bedroom had been overflowing with a hundred little noises, the only ones she could hear now were that of her own shallow breathing and the pounding of her heart as imagined terrors swarmed in her imagination, visions of monsters with sharp, clever claws waiting to drag her under the bed or into the back of the wardrobe. Apple Bloom shook her head. There was no denying it now: the clock had ticked its last tock.
“You’re being thick on purpose,” she said, voice shaking. “Just replace the batteries.”
And so she would’ve, except when at last she gathered the courage to place her hooves on the floor, Apple Bloom found herself drawn over the window instead, feeling incredibly small, a tiny foal lost in the night. She opened the window. The lamp lit up the snowflakes, along with Apple Bloom’s gaping jaw and her astonished eyes.
The snowflakes were all suspended in mid-air, frozen in place; none were falling. There was no wind either. There were no signs of life at all, and she knew then that though what she was seeing was surely impossible, her guts had been right all along.
Time had stopped. Next Chapter: 3. Sliver of Starlight Estimated time remaining: 5 Minutes