Into Dream Valley

Chapters

Chapter 1: Racing
Chapter 2: Falling
Chapter 3: Following
Chapter 4: Frustrating

Chapter 1: Racing

Boston looked out at the pond; its otherwise flat surface was wrinkled by a faint breeze blowing down the hole it was in.

He was standing next to a willow tree, which was blocking most of the light coming from the morning sun. The rays of light that penetrated through the leaves swirled and danced like they do on a sandy sea bottom snorkeling in the Caribbean.

The pond wasn’t big, and it was rimmed all along its shores by reeds and grass swaying too and forth in that breeze.

Boston, a teenage boy with long disheveled brown hair, looked over the scene, taking note of all the small details.

He saw the beads of pollen that moved up and down on the ripples of the water, seeing them float together almost like a tiny armada sailing across the sea of pond. Boston wondered if the tiny breeze-blown ripples were like the vast crashing waves of the open ocean to those tiny specks of pollen.

If he looked close enough, he could see little dots poking out of the water, they were bigger and more defined than the specks of pollen that littered the sunlit portions of the pond. And if you ever moved your arm to sneeze they would quickly disappear leaving behind a small disturbance radiating out from its epicenter, the nose of a turtle.

Boston looked up into to abstract painting known as the sky. Even if the artist was not a person but simply the rising air and wind that kept the clouds afloat way up high.

What never ceased to amaze Boston about the clouds was the varying patterns and the ways they ceaselessly integrated together to form a single whole. One portion of the cloud was almost like a chess pattern of fluffy pillows and another like just a broad stroke across that familiar painting few looked too. These two patterns at first glance might seem like they could never be together in the same universe and look good, but there they were, together on the same cloud, but Boston looked anyway.

Intruding through those ethereal clouds was the daylight moon, its intrusion was welcome though. It was in the west and currently in its second to last quarter, but was still rounded out instead of in as would get to be in the next few days.

To Boston, during day it looked all the more like another world than it might of at night if you didn’t have a telescope. Although it might be dimmer in the day, the day is like a blanket, that a child may hide under. The blanket may hide out the nightlight of the stars, but the moon is bright enough to pierce through that impenetrable barrier created by the sun. Enough so that when you see it through that thick woolen sheet, you can see that there is still a world outside of what you can immediately sense right in front of you.

Instead of looking down or up, Boston was now looking forwards and seeing the scene laid out before him. If his friends or family stumbled on this pristine area would merely say “hmmm, pretty” and then move on. But Boston continued to ponder the little things, like the school of minnows darting about in the reeds of the pond.

This happened for other things too. He would bring his 6-inch reflector telescope out on a perfect night and look up at Saturn or Jupiter. He would bring others out to see the things he pointed at with the telescope. Instead of the majesty that he saw though, they would chastise him for bringing them out into the cold.

Boston could, however, stare at the same ‘dots’ for hours on end, having to stop only to readjust the telescope so that he could keep them in the eyepiece.

On Saturn he would see the rings protruding out and into the vast void of space, he would also see Saturn’s largest moon Titan, either behind or in front of the planet. On Jupiter he looked at the bands laid out on the tan plate, looking, looking for that fabled red spot. His telescope was probably too small to be able to see it, but he would look for hours as the cold night air chilled his arms trying to hold the telescope steady.

And those moons! Those wonderful moons! Some nights there would be two or three or none or four out, they all looked the same except for one, Io, the volcanic pizza orange moon that orbited the closest of the four. He could never be sure if they were either behind or in front of the planet.

That dilemma! Like the electronic mask that spins and you can never tell if you were putting the strap around your head or watching someone play a part in a play. He could look at the moons for hours trying to figure either behind or in front of the planet. He could!...

“Hey Bossy you still with us!” a kid up and behind him yelled down.

Boston snickered softly.

And so he turned around, heaved up a 24 pack of water bottles, and trudged his way up out of the hole away from the pond.

Boston was a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school, he had on his back a black backpack and in his right hand was a red closed zipper binder which contained all of his homework that would be due next Monday. In his left hand he carried a smaller string pack which contained his now dirty clothes as well as other commodities like shampoo and deodorant. He had on colorful tiny shorts and a tank top for the upcoming race.

Boston, who lived in Oklahoma, was currently in Arkansas walking his way over to the start line. The Bus ride here from Oklahoma had been a long one, forced into a crowded school bus with uncomfortable seats for four grueling hours. The only thing to look out to during the whole experience was a sea of grass and hills with red clay poking out from underneath, which was interesting to look at for an hour or so, but it got kind of boring for the next three.

He had to then cramp into a two bed hotel room with three other boys. The room had two queen-sized beds, but Boston had opted to sleep in a chair with an ottoman, finding sleeping in a bed with another person a tad bit unnerving.

The next morning Boston got up from his back-aching sleep at five-forty-five, showered while the other boys lined up outside the bathroom, and ate a single blue berry muffin for breakfast. The group of sixty or so boys and girls then made their way out of their hotel on the fringes of town and stumbled their way three miles to the start line of their meet.

Boston had opted to carry a large pack of water bottles the entire three miles along with all his belongings, and while he was heaving and shifting around with the water bottles in his grasp he had noticed the pond. He had then decided that it would be a great as time as any to rest his sore arms.

It had been a beautiful pond, but now it was time to continue his journey.

Coming out of the depression, Boston could see the grassy path that lay ahead of him. The path was flanked with a field of corn on the left, and a field of wheat on the right. his school was clustered together in a group, a group that Boston was now behind, due to his stop at the pond. He could also see other schools in their own wandering bands behind and ahead of his own. They were all headed in the same direction, towards the start line.

Some of the male members of his team were shouldering and carrying tarps, stand up tents, coolers, and an assortment of other items. Boston, strolling along with them, was constantly shifting position in an attempt to find the perfect spot and relieve the pressure on his arms. The girls, chatting amongst themselves, were carrying nothing.

The school, along with Boston, made their way over a drainage ditch which was bridged together by a small plastic board. As he made his way over the ditch, Boston tried to distract himself from the load he was hauling.

He thought to last night where he had tried to eat some lasagna for dinner, a dish which he had never eaten before in his life. He had always been a picky eater, he could have none of the various dishes like pizza, spaghetti, broccoli, and sauce covered rice, just to name a few.

A week ago Boston had not thought he would have been able to come here to Arkansas, to come to this specific meet he had to have been to all of the practices beforehand. He had missed one when he had to come after school to retake a test he had to have missed, because he had gone to another cross country meet.

Just as Boston had been willing to say that his fate was a blessing in disguise (after all, free time wasn’t something that he had a lot of these days), his coach had come to tell him that he would be welcome to come.

As it was only a few days before the weekend, Boston immediately had thought ‘Well there goes my weekend ‘

Now Boston was stuck in Arkansas where he would spend only about twenty-three minutes running for the entire two days and then spend the rest getting here and back. To Boston it felt kind of like a waste.

After spending some time in his thoughts, he and his group had finally come to set up camp where they would be waiting around for a few hours.

With practiced ease a group of about four boys laid out a large tarp one of them had been carrying on the spot announced by the coaches to be their spot.

Next another group of boys brought down two tents that would provide shade and advertise the schools name. For each tent four boys pulled each of the four sides of the tent away until it was fully deployed.

Other boys hung small hammocks from two nearby trees right next to the tarp, tying the ends around the trunks so as to keep themselves from falling.

All Boston did was gently set the water bottles on the ground, and with that action setup was complete.

With a collective sigh of relief everyone had taken their bags and belongings off of their sore shoulders and placed them down on to the tarp while simultaneously going to sit or lay down.

Quite a few kids used their backpacks and jackets as makeshift pillows and blankets while others used literal pillows and pulled out literal blankets (of which you could see fly in the air before gently falling back down on their occupants).

You could tell that most of them were in for the long haul. Most, in this case, did not include the twelve varsity girls who had already started their warm ups.

Boston was going to be in for the really long haul as he would be among those who would be last to run for the day. JV boys were always the last and largest group.

Boston looked around the chosen spot where his school would be waiting and took note of the area.

In the opposite direction that Boston was sitting in, the terrible smell of the porta-potties wafted by.

To Boston’s right side were the kids with and in the hammocks, they were all dangling from the same two willows. Looking behind and through them one would see the direction in which the start line was lined out. You wouldn’t be able to actually see it though as Boston’s school was at the back of a large congregation of over fifty schools. The colorful other forty-nine tents got a bit in the way it seemed.

To Boston’s left was only one other crimson tent, standing out in the landscape of green (with hints of orange) that was Arkansas. And behind that last tent and tarp were two series of stakes that were connected by a bright orange nylon rope that marked the track.

The track evidenced by the stakes encompassed most of his vision. Boston turned his head to follow the track, it was only when he looked behind it that…

“Is that a cave?” his thoughts had apparently grew too loud.

At that moment runners from the Varsity girls team came sprinting and stomping to Boston’s left and up the track. The multitude of different colors from all the different teams seemed to blur together into a single congealed blob that quickly turned and obscured Boston’s view of the cave.

Boston just shrugged and turned around to unzip his backpack. He scrummaged around in it until he pulled out a small, relatively thin book. On the book’s cover was an illustration of a burning tome, and inscribed on the top were the numbers and words “Fahrenheit 451”.

He was almost done with the book, he had been forced to labor over every word in it for the last half a month and now he had to read the last part of the book. The book was definitely tiny and Boston was a good reader, but he had held off from finishing it as per his teacher’s instructions.

Now that the last week was over he would be able to read the last part of the book and get one step closer to finally finishing this god forsaken novella! No doubt though he would have to scour through this part again to find every single personification, or simile, or something or the other. It would be nice to just read it and absorb the actual information found in the book before he did all that though.

It was weird, the closer he scrutinized at these books he was forced to read, the less of the actual information and meaning he picked up. Funny how that works.

He skimmed his fingers over the worn book (many others had used it before him) and opened it to a heading that stated “Part Three Burning Bright”.

Lying down with his head on his backpack and bottom on the tarp, he buried his head in the book, reading through as the tension in the story increased with every passing paragraph. After a long chase with the mechanical hound, Montag was swept away by a river away from the dreary and doomed city and into a world not of his own.

And there out in the new world Montag found a group of people very different from the ones he had known for all his life. Old writers, English professors, and readers that talked and when they talked words and meaning came out and Montag had known where he might now belong.

Boston looked out to all his fellow classmates as he read this. He saw their mouths move and their heads bob but no words seemed to come out. They all talked but Boston heard nothing. Mass-produced jokes labeled ‘made online’ were thrown around and passing remarks made, but it sometimes felt very little of actual substance was said between the other kids.

Boston sometimes felt like he was a miniscule song bird among a plump of ducks. All of them were trying to make the loudest sound so that they could be noticed by all the others, even if only for a second. The song bird tried to sing its song, but none of the ducks bothered to listen. So the song bird remained quiet.

After finishing the book, he had been reading for the past two hours, Boston dropped it in his lap and stared again at the cave in front of him.

The cave protruded into the side of a large steep hill that the cross-country course went along and was placed firmly at that hill’s base. The grass near the edge of the cave slowly gave way to rough and vector like rock which formed the entire inside perimeter of the cave.

A little light from the morning sun beamed into the cavern, but it barely penetrated into the very inky, hanging black of the cave. Past that penetrating parabola there would have seemed to be nothing but that darkness.

Boston looked closer though, and he could have to sworn to have seen a fainting luminescent glow of green far back reflecting off a wall. Boston wasn’t entirely sure if he was just seeing things or not though.

He pushed himself off the tarp and on to his feet, he then took a step to maybe have a closer look when suddenly a deep voice intruded into his ears.

“JV boys time to warm up!”

That was the queue from his coaches that it was time to prepare for the race. That cave, for some reason, seemed to oddly draw him in, but he had a race to compete and a time to beat. He could look into this cave after he was done.

After all the boys jogged, stretched, and did their drills (which included stepping on their tippy toes) they all briskly walked over to the start line of the race.

Boston felt like water being held back by a dam, all the JV boys from half a century’s worth of schools were all packed behind a line maybe three-hundred feet long. The lake of boys held back by the dam was ready to burst.

Just about a dozen minutes before the starting gun would fire, Boston’s team made their way out and in front of the writhing mass of boys.

They all then formed in a tightly packed circle, and with their arms intertwined, they started to chant their school’s cross-country moto.

Officially the school’s mascot was a rapping raptor, but no one ever used that symbol to represent the school. In its place they went for the school’s older mascot, a clownfish.

Their chant may or may not have resembled a certain other chant, from a certain popular children’s movie.

“Shark bait, hoo ha ha.” They all whipped

“Shark bait! Hoo Ha Ha!” They all yelled.

“SHARK BAIT! HOO HA HA!” They all proclaimed to the sky.

And with that they all dispersed and made their way back to behind the start line. Even Boston, usually a quiet kid, had thrown out his lungs to the chant, and now his unpracticed vocal chords were raspy.

Boston’s newly invigorated group heaved and pushed their ways through the crowd of some thousand or so other kids. As they did so, a fight nearly broke out between a teen in his party and one from another after one of them had tried to make their way through the other.

Boston would’ve put himself into the running start position, but there just wasn’t room in the space they were allotted to do so. In fact, there was so little space that he was forced to stand straight up while he waited.

When a loud speaker suddenly blared, as if by magic, the sounds made by over a thousand kids suddenly went silent.

Boston couldn’t see what was happening, but he could definitely hear it.

“Runners set!” the assumed starter shouted.

Boston tuned out the noises around and focused solely on himself and the words from the starter, they almost seemed to echo in his head as time slowed. The adrenaline he felt seemed to almost super chill his muscles and his mind as he prepared for that one single moment.

“GO!”

And the flood gates of that dam burst open, and then as more kids got out of the way of the others, the dam itself cracked and then burst open in a flood upon the unsuspecting worn and trodden ground.

for the first few seconds Boston didn’t go very fast, the boys in front forced him to keep his stride tiny. He even resorted to essentially running in place to relieve the excitement he had built up.

When the group of kids dispersed further, giving Boston more space, he quickly sped up to his normal racing pace. Many kids passed in front of him, but he knew that it wouldn’t last. Most of these kids were only caught up in the excitement of being around a thousand others of their kind and would not far ahead slow themselves down.

Boston mostly didn’t worry about the other kids around him, he made sure to keep his pace and his breathing steady. As the race went on, like he predicted, Boston started becoming a passer instead of a passé when other kids had spent all their energy sprinting at the beginning of the race and began slowing down.

After what felt like not so long a time, he spied in the not so far distance a plastic sign signifying the mile way point (despite the fact it was a 5k). At this Boston felt a sudden mystical elation. The first stretch of the race had felt like nothing! So as he flew down the hill the sign was located on, he picked up his pace to make up for this perceived opportunity.

Boston went on, but the soil and track were dry, and the grass loose. All of the stomping and treading from kids ahead lifted the muck up into the air and into his face, mouth, and lungs. Combined with the strain of running for so long, his lungs were not happy.

Luckily though, as the race went on, the runner’s differences in speed slowly caused them to move apart from each other. This thereby decreased the amount of pollutants swirling about in the air, even if only by a little.

The intensity of the race was slowly starting to wear away at Boston, and by the two mile mark his body was really starting to strain. His lungs were languished, and his legs were lined with lead. It was through force of will and practiced composure that he pushed his legs forwards and kept his breathing steady. It seemed to him that that push at the first mile point had been a bad idea. He felt he had pushed himself too hard and was now paying the consequences.

Not knowing that he was close to the finish line, Boston in despair had almost slowed down. He reveled in his mistake, berating his every move in the race so far, even thinking about his own life outside of the race.

It was only then, when he rounded a new corner, that he saw the cave once again. The green light he hadn’t even been sure was there in the first place was now filling up the entire back of the cave.

He turned again, but his head eyes stayed fixated in the same direction, towards the cave which captured his attention once again. He didn’t notice that while his attention was elsewhere, he had passed a kid from his school who in other races was usually a minute ahead of him.

The cave had diverted Boston’s thoughts from the race and he had unwittingly sped up.

Long after that event Boston thought back to when he was visiting his cousin’s place in Arizona. He and his older cousin were in the cool pool water attempting to escape from the scorching rays of the desert sun when they had decided to see who could hold their breath underwater the longest.

Boston had won the first couple of matches before his uncle had decided to come and give his cousin some advice for winning. He had told them, “Stop thinking so much. Just imagine Hailey or some other girl and you’ll forget to breath. Worked with your mom.”

Boston, being the little kid he was, ignored the adult’s advice and instead stayed with what had worked before, which was bellowing in his head over and over again don’t breathe, don’t breathe, don’t breathe.

Before he could do this however, he saw that his cousin’s features were softer than they had been before. He shrugged it off though and they both counted to three before plunging their heads below the surface of the water.

Not long after Boston came up for air and started gasping. He was surprised to still see his cousin under the water sitting there with a bored look. After what felt like an eternity, the cousin slowly lifted his head above the water and smirked.

He had bragged “I came up because I was bored.”

From that moment on Boston learned to listen to his uncle.

Boston finally returned to the waking world to see the finish line barely two-hundred meters away. Hanging from the checkered pole was a large electronic timer. When he had regained awareness the first thing he saw was the timer, it had said twenty-two thirty.

Over a minute faster than his personal record. A minute.

Boston wasted no time (for he had none to waste) and sped up to a bolting sprint. He finally understood what people meant when they said they were flying. For the world around him seemed to blur past, and he seemed to swoop up and down like a bird with every push.

It wouldn’t be the last time today that Boston would feel like he was flying

He pushed and heaved and breathed, until finally, after twenty-two minutes and fifty seconds he broke the finish line. He had beaten his previous record by nearly forty seconds.

As he slid to a stop he silently cheered himself before immediately expelling his tiny breakfast all over the grass.

Boston came back to base camp to see the tent and tarp missing. the JV boys race was the last race of the day after all and they had a long journey back to the bus and back to Oklahoma. The site where they had once sat was now covered in garbage of all sorts lying about.

With a whistle the wind picked up.

He looked over to the mysterious cave once again, for what he thought, would be the last time. When he looked though he saw that the neon light was now even brighter, and pulsating.

He was tired of speculating what was there, so he flung his regular backpack and his string one over his shoulders and positioned his binder firmly within his grasp.

Behind him he heard the sound of the other boys either bragging about new personal records, or sulking after having gone a significantly longer time. Boston paid them no attention though, his eyes and his feet stayed pointed to the cave. His mind was transfixed on that mysterious cavern.

Summoning his courage, he took a step closer to the cave and then another. He ducked slightly and used his one free hand to lift the crowd control barrier so that he could pass under it and onto the track. Then he did it again on the other side, his head and his eyes staying focused on the same point the entire time, the cave.

He stepped on the rugged stones leading up to the cave but then paused. He lost his focus for a second, and looked out behind him. His relatively long hair blew with the breathing of the wind, and behind him he saw all the kids he had raced with over the past two years.

And for some reason, he felt a twinge of sadness.

And with that, he finally turned to continue his trek

As soon as he made his way into the cave the wind blowing his hair stopped, and the sound slowly died out. The change was unnervingly swift for Boston, but the light still shown as bright as ever in front of him.

As he tried to keep himself from slipping and falling in the dark on the hard rock of the cave, he noticed how much more chipper it was inside the cave than it was in the noon sun outside, the air on his sweat made him shiver. It was damp too, he could hear the drops falling from the ceiling, he even felt one land on his head as he slowly plodded through to his destination.

His steps were slow, deliberate, and wide, like that of a stork on the water’s edge. As he inched closer he saw that gradually the apparent brightness and size of the blinking light increased.

He eventually came to a bend in the cave, where he turned and saw what it was he was looking for, the source of the light. It looked like a Chinese New Year lantern like he had seen in videos and books. That is, instead of being a warm white or yellow, the color of the lantern was a neon green.

He was very apprehensive just looking at it from around the corner, it looked like a really big firefly suspended in air, pulsing on and off.

Boston came out from the corner where he had been hiding to take a look at whatever it was that right before him. When he came out the ambient glow from the source turned Boston’s face a dim green.

Then, as if noticing that he had come out of the corner, the ball of light came straight at Boston’s face. Any other person would have immediately shit their pants at that point, as an unknown mysterious force headed straight towards your face tends to freak most people out.

Boston was among the title of ‘most people’.

The sudden movement caused Boston to lurch and fall back on to his backpack, impulsively he semi-whispered “Shit.” He moved his arms to cover his face from whatever was about to happen to him, but nothing did.

Slowly he moved his arms out of the way of his vision and then put them back as whatever it was really bright and right above his face.

As if noticing his discomfort, the light dimmed itself and Boston moved his arms to see what it was that had enticed him so much. His eyes moved up to study whatever the light was, and saw that the light seemed to be doing the same.

Boston saw that it circled around him, like it was trying to size him up, and then it came back to hovering straight over him. It seemed to tilt its head in curiosity, although how a homogenous sphere of light without a head could seem to tilt it was beyond him.

Suddenly it zoomed off and flew down further into the cave and out of Boston’s sight. “Wait!” Boston yelled out, not sure if whatever it was could even understand what he said.

He wasn’t going to just let whatever it was leave him hanging like that. He had no idea what it was, it could be an undiscovered creature or alien. Then again, that could mean something dangerous.

He swiftly put his hands down and pushed himself back up to his feet and tried to sprint to catch up before he landed flat on his face. Spitting out a pebble that got in his mouth, he got back up again and this time walked in the direction that the thing had moved off too.

As he made his way deeper through the cave, Boston’s anxieties slowly crept up to him.

What if it is some kind of mythological creature that will lure me to my death? He worried.

Boston wanted to turn back while he still could, but back to what?

To distract himself from these thoughts he looked around the cave, he actually couldn’t see anything though, so he looked with his ears.

He occasionally heard the drip drop of water falling from the stalactites in the ceiling, but most of all he heard the silence, the deafening silence that permeated the whole cavern. Boston actually liked the silence, it was a nice contrast to the world of distraction and noise he had known. The stagnant silence kept him company.

He took in a breath of the cool moist air which blew into his lungs and cooled them significantly, bringing in a satisfying pleasure that shivered his up his spine.

The endorphins from his run had made him a lot more relaxed for what would usually be a stressful situation. Before he had started running, Boston was a nervous and anxiety ridden kid. He had what the adults would tell him were ‘anger issues’.

With them he would get angry at even the tiniest transgressions maybe pointed in his direction. Like another kid cutting in line, or a slight misplay in a game of four-square. In the heat of the moment he would snap and take justice into his own hands, pushing and shoving and yelling at all who got in his way.

He would spend hours at a time calming down locked inside a room, only during that time would he reflect on his actions, and take note of his mistakes. He would feel immensely guiltier and stressed after all of it was said and done.

The stress kept him up all night at times, he would see a trailer to a potentially scary movie on the television and not get any sleep the next night. He would keep the blanket just up to his neck, but he wouldn’t completely cover himself. For if he did he felt that the Carbon Dioxide produced from his breath would stay there and suffocate him. So, he stayed there looking out into the dark hallway beyond his room, constantly scanning for whatever he thought was there.

He would visit a therapist, he would chew out his shirts, and he would, at times, be taking six pills every night as part of a way to keep his emotions from overpowering him.

He found solace in his books and his hobbies however. He knew everything about dinosaurs and the other prehistoric creatures that used to roam the planet. He loved to learn about the planets and one day imagined that he could go to one (other than his own). And human history, the courses of civilizations and peoples fascinated him just as much.

Regardless, his many issues continued to haunt him throughout his childhood.

That was until he came to middle school and discovered the joyous wonders of cross-country. At first he was very bad at it, having to stop every hundred meters due to his inexperience. He kept at it though, and slowly got better.

When he came home after a long day and a long run he could seem to come home more refreshed than he was when he left. At school he became an easier person to be around, he actually started hanging around the other kids (albeit only loosely) and he enjoyed his time at school a lot more. Most importantly, he just enjoyed his running. All the time he just felt better.

He had breezed through middle school, finding it much more enjoyable then he had elementary. Afterwards he enrolled into high school. Boston felt like he could finally see the light past the dreary days of elementary.

He could also see light seeping into the cave right in front of him.

He quickly picked up his pace to see what the light was, he could tell it wasn’t the same kind of light that had permeated from the orb he had seen.

The bright light halted him. He squinted out of his arm shielding his eyes and saw the forested Arkansas hills laid out before him, and a green valley strewn below him.

He could see dark clouds in the distance.

And right in the middle of his vision was a tree, a large oaken tree standing on the ledge at the end of the cave.

Although oak trees in Arkansas are very common, this one seemed out of place. Boston noticed the roots seemed to splay out around the dirt-less rock and then spill over down below it. Its trunk was wide and tall and it seemed to reach up into the open sky.

Boston didn’t need to know basic botany to realize that a tree should not exist here, let alone one this big.

He looked up and saw that the leaves were full and… Purple? He looked down again and saw a large hollow in the tree. The lines in the bark deflected around the hollow and then resumed their journey to the roots.

The center of the hollow glowed a bright green, the same neon green of the cave that had drawn Boston in earlier. It seemed to draw him in once again, and somehow, the anxiety of earlier evaporated away, leaving only wonder. The same kind he saw in his telescope and in his books.

He put out his arm and slowly started moving it forward into the hollow. The wind picked up on the rocky slope and the clouds above him grew close, but the light on his fingers felt warm and inviting.

As his hand got closer the world around him turned from a bright sunny day into a dark and violent storm, but Boston took no notice of the events around him.

A loud Crack sounded above him, but in his vision, it was only on the peripheral.

He could’ve sworn he heard words yelled out behind him, but It was with one last breath that he made contact with the light.

Suddenly the tree disappeared and the clouds withered away and the rocky slope below him de-materialized. Now underneath Boston were trees. He was high. Really high in fact, and in that moment he felt a twinge of nostalgia.

About a year ago before this point Boston had gone scuba diving in Grand Cayman. He was following his divemaster through a deep ravine. As he inhaled he went up, and when he exhaled he went down. The world seemed to move as he did, cheesily, he felt as though he was one with the ocean.

The rocky ravine stretched on, sea fans were spayed out above the group of divers as they slowly swam through the narrow rocky passes. Small fish rushed into tiny crevasses as they swam by.

Suddenly they came about at another narrowing, Boston slowly made his way through it. When he reached the other side all he saw was blue, down below him a rocky cliff descended down into the depths below.

This feeling was different from regular diving, looking down and around the blue. Although the blue was far away, it felt as though it was right next to Boston, as if it were a cage. He was not scared though, in fact he was euphoric.

The closest thing to this experience he could compare it to was floating in the endless void of space. That is, if space were a dark blue. Boston was merely suspended there, in the great unending nothingness.

He was not here nor there, and he finally understood the vast expanse that was the ocean.

That experience was the closest to what Boston would have felt suspended in the air like that. While he was there hovering, he had no cues other than his eyes to tell him he was high up. He did not feel the high winds on his face, and it did not feel as though he was dangling, more as though he was just floating there.

The land he looked over had an almost glossy glow to it, and it was changing fast. Almost as soon as he touched the oak tree, the leaves on the trees beneath changed into a beautiful array of colors including red, orange, and yellow. Then with the same swiftness they all shriveled and disappeared. So, the world became brown and grey, the glory of a southern winter.

Again, the trees and plants changed, now into a world of a lush light green, and the world was reborn. The leaves and branches jerked back and forth like a glitching enemy in a game, and ‘slowly’ the light lush green turned into a darker basil color.

And then the cycle repeated, over and over, the pace of time accelerating beyond what was comprehendible for Boston still suspended in mid-air. The land around him turned from a landscape into a blur. The outlines of the hills he saw seemed to change as well, and seemed to move and change faster as time itself did.

Then suddenly and without warning, it all stopped. Suddenly gravity resumed its hold over Boston. His breath caught in his throat and his blood rushed to his head. For he was still far above the dirty, rocky ground.

Author's Note

Feel free to be brutally honest.

Chapter 2: Falling

For a person who spent all their life more or less without any real surprises, suddenly being who knows how high up sure was a shocker.

Boston had before this had thought a lot about what he would do if he fell from a plane without a parachute and just for fun. The silly plans he made in his head usually revolved around taking his shirt off and turning it into a makeshift parachute. He did however admit that a better plan would probably involve him keeping his body steady and splayed out so as to increase drag.

However, suddenly being thrust from a near dream state to a near death state made Boston slightly less able to enact his plan.

In fact, it made it impossible to enact almost any plan.

Immediately the blood to his head and lack of control made Boston experience an adrenaline explosion. The air in his lungs escaped in an unholy scream and his arms and legs flailed around at unnatural speeds trying to find some form of ground or leverage to hold onto.

Despite being fully awake, as one would be in such a situation, he was barely conscious in any matter. Pure unadulterated terror made it impossible to think about the situation around him and Boston lost all semblance of sentient thought as he plummeted to the ground below.

The sun above him didn’t help, its bright light made him nearly blind and made assessing his situation even harder.

Nearly all of his senses were dulled, the world around him was a blurry streak of confusion and despair. Probably to be the second most dramatic and important in his life.

He didn’t know how but he could sense the ground getting closer and closer. He knew he was going to die wherever he was now, being merely a pile of mush on the hard ground. Who knew who or what would find his tangled and wretched body.

The moment for his reckoning had come. Boston had never wondered or worried that much about death, as a kid it had always felt so far away. Things were different now that he could see its maw.

He closed his eyes, stopped his screaming and waving, and relaxed. Beforehand he had spent all his time on YouTube browsing through mindless videos that had satiated his boredom and distracted him from doing the things that he loved to do, he had started countless projects but never finished one. He rarely ever felt the satisfaction of a job well done or a masterpiece of art complete. He wanted to just look back at some masterpiece and sigh in contentment. Instead, he had only leached off of others work, using it to distract himself from the problems that doing so created.

He would not die now.

He could not die now, he had too much to left to do. He had always sat in his chair at his computer berating himself, technology was at his fingertips that would make creating all sorts of works possible with ease. He knew how much he truly could accomplish if he tried, but he merely sat there, and because of that he had been and always would be powerless. Knowledge without action was meaningless. From this moment on he would no longer be an observer of his own life. Today he would not die.

Acting upon instincts forged in him from an age long now forgotten and trained to the bone by his dreams and nightmares, Boston made his move. He started in a position where his legs and arms were in random uncomfortable positions, and from there he forced them all rigid. From their irregular positions his limbs seemed to naturally go to their desired position splayed out as far and as straight as possible. He also simultaneously tensed the muscles in his abdomen, causing his body to be straightened so as to increase drag.

Immediately as he did this he could feel the sudden intense push back from the deacceleration, almost like he had just opened a parachute. The G’s didn’t stay for long however as his new more drag friendly state reached its more tempest, but still likely fatal terminal velocity.

Now that his body was facing down and his vision unobscured by the sun, the aerial teenager could look around, albeit with some difficulty as there was still air rushing by his face at a few hundred miles per hour. He saw the forested landscape of green and brown below, but in all that he only saw rocks and trees. His best friend deep thick snow was nowhere to be seen. However, he spotted something in his desperate flight that might just help him, a speck of orange flying below. He could tell from its parallax that it was probably halfway from the ground to him, and it was moving fast.

With a seemingly out of nowhere elegance, almost as if he had done this before, he angled his body in the direction of where the speck was going like he was an expert marksman hurling a dodgeball at a running kid on the other side of a school gym.

Over the course of the next few seconds the speck grew to a dot and then to a figure. The small but ever-growing figure that morphed into his vision would’ve made little sense if the situation had been any different, but Boston had limited time before he was little more than mush on the forest floor.

The aforementioned figure was orange with two spots of a deep red. In the next few seconds features would pop into view, first four legs along with a body, and then eyes and hair and a tail. He also saw that the flying creature had noticed the down-bound delinquent and had flared its wings (which it apparently had) almost like it had floored its brakes to get out of the way. Even its legs were moving as if it was stopping on a solid surface.

“Oh no you don’t!” Boston shrieked. He shocked himself with the force of his voice.

Simultaneously he performed a sudden and sharp roll to the side and rammed the surprised target at an angle. He landed in the thing’s front arms and ended up sending them both spinning like two astronauts at the end of a good movie. The creature’s equine face with its gigantic brown eyes stared into the also brown but much smaller eyes of Boston. Both their mouths were locked open in shocked surprise at this chance encounter, and the world Boston saw around both of them alternated between the forest below and the blue sky above.

Only now did he actually register what he was seeing and almost simultaneously both their eyebrows scrunched up in curiosity. The horse creature, which just from the last few moments had undergone a series of rapid changes of emotion, somehow seemed to be female to him. He had no idea how he could tell, maybe the hair, maybe the eyes, but the hard-wired algorithms in his head told him for sure that it was a girl.

The she’s eyebrows then snapped back up as it seemed she realized that they were both spinning and plummeting towards the ground. Her feathery but worryingly miniscule wings then flapped with all their might and the force sent Boston who was previously up by her face to fall down and hang by both of his hands on her front legs. Soon their rotation had stopped and they were coming down at a more leisurely pace. As she flapped her wings the creature’s face scrunched up as she clearly strained to keep both of their weights in the air, and they slowly descended, bobbing up and down with the flapping of wings. The ground got closer and closer until just a few feet above the pine-needle covered and quite grassless forest floor Boston let go of the Orange legs and then with a thump he made contact with the ground.

The creature instead of proceeding to step on the ground instead hovered over it. Boston then noticed that she huffed out a large breath and seemingly wiped some sweat off her brow with her ‘arm’. Right then however it regained its focus and started hovering in a circle around the confused teenager, staring and scrutinizing every square inch of his appearance.

Boston now that he was in no immediate threat of death now allowed himself to ponder the mythical beast before him. Obviously the first thing that came to mind was ‘Wow, an actual Pegasus’. Then he noticed just how colorful she was, she had a pumpkin orange coat and her ‘hair’ was a deep red along with her tail. Her brown eyes didn’t seem to go all that well with her complexion, but who was he to judge? He had no idea if to her it went well or not, he was just avoiding the major elephant in the room. She was obviously sentient; the Pegasus had already shown very human expressions on its face like curiosity and was now thoroughly investigating him. If she was an animal there would be no way it would look at him for this long and this in depth he thought.

In fact, she seemed way too human to even make sense. Her eyebrows, mouth, and just general movements communicated the same emotions in almost the exact same way as a person like him would. She was even wearing brown leather shoes over her hooves! He had never heard of a place on Earth containing real pegasi, so he might need to ask someone (or something) for directions. Luckily this would hopefully make communication a lot easier than if it were like an alien or even an animal, after all, even after tens of thousands of years of co-evolution with dogs and we can still only tell the basic emotions of each other. Then he realized that maybe if their facial expressions were similar maybe their languages were too, worth a try at least.

“Hello,” Boston greeted. He then slowly pronounced the rest of his sentence “Can. You. Understand. Me?”

No luck, the Pegasus just tilted her head and just stared with a confused expression. Then she made a snort and a quick whinny in a manner that had the same tone as Boston’s. For a second, he contemplated what to do before it hit him, maybe he could try hand signals. He had seen her wipe the sweat off her brow just now, a distinctly human expression, maybe that would be how he communicated with her.

First, he tested whether or not she would understand pointing or not, so he pointed right at her. In response she put on a quizzing look and put her… He had to think a second before it came to him, hoof over her chest. He silently cheered at his luck. It seemed that she had understood that the finger pointed at her had been meant to convey something about her.

Next, he brought his finger up and tapped the top of his head softly; making care that she saw what he was doing. And finally after that he brought his hand down and splayed it out on his chest. He then repeated the mannerism but faster this time to make sure that she got everything. Her first emotion was contemplative, but then she just started look confused. Honestly, Boston didn’t know what the heck he was trying to communicate either.

Well, it was a start. Not being able to directly talk with the Pegasus would be annoying, but hand signals and facial expressions would still communicate quite a lot. He was already much closer to actually speaking with another species than professional scientists who recorded dolphin whistles off a boat. However, it would also give a much more short-term and practical use of being able to ask and answer very simple questions. If he could figure out how to do that.

Suddenly the Pegasus’s eyebrows fell back and she gained an anxious look. Even more unexpectantly to Boston, she tilted her head up and then bounced into the air above the trees. Now silently panicking, Boston could only stand there and hope as she looked out and blocked the glaring sun from her eyes. Just when he morbidly imagined her flying off, she plopped back down with a still nervous but also optimistic giddy about her.

She then threw her whole front leg over her body to signal Boston to follow her. The Pegasus then merrily trotted forward in a seemingly random direction from the clearing. He happily obliged her call to companionship and made haste behind her.

The pegasus’s visual optimism in front of him made his sudden fear of abandonment vanish. Instead of fear or mistrust he too went with a prep in his steps over the pine needle covered forest floor. It seemed that she had even started humming a kind of musical tune, with whinnying, neighing, and even some (surprisingly) melodical snorts. Music was dumb, Boston had always avoided it at all costs, doing only the bare minimum in his first-grade music class. The stupid symbols and lines on the standard musical notation confused him.

He walked through the woods merrily humming to the tune of the imperial march.

While they walked along the forest floor Boston mentally took inventory of his items he had with him. Somehow, he had managed to still hold onto both his regular and his string backpacks, however, unsurprisingly he had lost his binder in the confusion. He probably would’ve left it behind anyway as it contained nothing of practical value and was only a dead weight out wherever he was. Luckily, he still had a snack in his backpack and one more pair of clean clothes to put on.

They weren’t on any kind of established path as they had just landed in a random spot in the forest, so they had to scuffle their way through bushes and rocks, which was annoying in Boston’s shorts. He let his mind wander over his situation, this forest was clearly a lot different than the one he had seen in Arkansas. It consisted almost entirely of pines while the Arkansas flora consisted mostly of flat-leaved deciduous trees. The trees acid that they released made the ground a lot clearer of vegetation than the forest floor in Arkansas was, here it was almost completely void of grass. The prickly bushes more than made up in the regard of traversability though, they scratched and bloodied Boston’s exposed legs.

At that moment Boston remembered that he had long sweat pants in his string bag. He whistled to the Pegasus in front of him to get her attention and then eventually he was able to communicate that they needed to stop for a little bit. He then went behind a tree leaned against it and took off his tiny blue shorts to put on his grey sweatpants. The air was noticeably cooler and drier than the mid-autumn of Arkansas, his exhaustion from today’s events had made this more noticeable than it would have been otherwise.

Truth be told he was sapped from today’s events, running a 5k and then falling from a few kilometers in the air along with a terrible night’s sleep in a chair had emptied his mental and physical batteries. Now he was hiking behind a technicolor Pegasus who he couldn’t understand through an untamed wilderness, possibly in some distant land he had never heard of, maybe even planet.

If it was an alien planet, the forest around him seemed oddly Earth-like. Although it was nothing like Arkansas, it was almost exactly like the forests he had seen up north in Montana. The brown and pale red ground sloped upwards erratically, the roots forming their own little ledges. The bushes and some of the littler pine trees were quite annoying to him and his new friend.

After shooing an overly inquisitive horse, Boston finished changing and they made their way again through the forest. The golden sunlight streaming through canopy above came in at a slanted angle and the pine needles cracked and bent under his shoes and her hooves covered in leather shoes. They looked almost like little bags that went up her legs and hugged her ‘ankles’. He could tell the day was expiring, it seemed it was still autumn wherever he was, and the dry air was slowly getting darker as time went by. They would probably have to make some kind of camp soon.

Suddenly Boston noticed a stream up ahead in front of him. The flowing water formed a thin sheen over the rounded stones on its bottom, and the wrinkly liquid shimmered in the late afternoon sun. Looking at it Boston was reminded of his thirst; his white and blue water bottle had been emptied right after the race and right before he had gone on a freefall, and now the running, clear, and cold water made his throat purse.

With a thud his backpacks hit the mossy ground and he fell to his knees at the bank of the creek. He then bent his whole body down and tilted his head so that one side of it was submerged in the chilling water. He then relaxed the muscles in his jaw and the newly melted, nearly freezing water poured down his barren throat and his heart throbbed in his chest as the sound in his right ear was muffled by the ever-moving stream.

When his head lifted, the water that had accumulated in his scraggly hair first dripped back down into the stream and then flowed down into his latex cross-country tank top. Suddenly he heard laughter behind him, first it was a relatively soft chuckle. The Pegasus was actually giggling, a horse actually giggling. So he started chuckling himself. This only made her chuckle increase in volume to a laugh, and the escalation of laughter continued until they were both on their backs choking in their own levity.

Their chortles finally quieted down until they were both just sitting there laying on the pine needles. The Pegasus with a steady smile then looked to the sky along with Boston and saw the sunlight reflecting off the bottoms of the clouds. Now instead of the rusty and chalky yellow, the color coming from the sun was a deep crimson red. The Pegasus then weirdly signaled to Boston by moving her ‘forearms’ to form kind of a triangle shape. He assumed that meant they were settling down here for the night.

They both scavenged for sticks and tinder material they might use for a fire, and they scraped up some pine needles and leaves to use for bedding that would keep them off the cold ground. Boston even set up a little circle of stones where a fire would be. They were in a little clearing by the stream, he didn’t notice it until he glanced in that direction, but Boston saw that there was a little-used path on the opposite side of the stream from them. No wonder he hadn’t noticed it, it was overgrown by bushes and shrubs, and no one would be able to walk side by side on it.

Just when he wondered how they were going to start any kind of fire, from seemingly out of nowhere the Pegasus pulled out a piece of flint and flecked it with a stone she had pulled from the stream. A spark flew onto a piece of dead dry grass they had found. The dry environment around them made it so the sparks lit the kindling up like a bolt of lightening in a summer storm. In no time they had their own little fire going on. The whole scene reminded him of his camping trips in Montana with his Grandparents.

When they were done setting up camp the light of dusk had finally been whipped away and the sky above them was black. The Pegasus it seemed was down and dead on her makeshift needle-bed, nearly silent in the night. Lying down on her side, her body moved up whenever she breathed in, and to Boston it felt like she started sleeping the moment she laid down.

He figured he might be able to tell where he was on Earth if he would be able to find the stars, but no luck tonight. Thick cumulus clouds stretched from horizon to horizon, enshrouding the entire world below in an eerie darkness. This was not your average every day darkness (at least not to Boston), it was advanced darkness. Living in the city like he had, Boston had been used to the grey overglow that usually covered the bottom of clouds and coldly radiated out into space on clear nights. Now when he looked up he saw nothing but a complete and utter void of black peering down at him.

The only thing still holding him to the Earth below was the crackling sound and light of the fire and the water falling over rocks in the now darkened stream. One of the ways he thought he might find a way back to civilization was by looking for the tell-tale signs of day during night that humans created wherever they went. Even when he went out to dark zones to observe the band of the milky way in the far far countryside he could still see the faintest glimmers of light shimmering from under the horizon, there to remind him that he was never free from the grasp of human civilization. Here there was nothing, he couldn’t see the shinning lights in a sign of a motel, or the streetlights that beckoned to space. He couldn’t even see evidence for the tiniest porch light shining up above into the emptiness.

A nefarious realization slithered and slided through his head, the synapses slowly came together, and the feeling shook him to his very bone. He was alone. The darkness around him shone brighter and blacker than at any time in his life, and the only thing keeping it at bay was the orange light emanating from their tiny little fire they had both constructed. Just when he felt more alone and isolated than he had at any other time in his life, he heard a snort. The snort went up in volume like a leaf thrown into the sky, and then it fell slowly down to a whistle before rocketing up again. The Pegasus was snoring.

Like a pendulum, Boston’s emotions swung from one extreme to the other. While earlier he had felt the most isolated, the most cut-off, and the most alone he had ever felt in his life, looking at the sleeping body he felt the most connected and understood. Ironic, he couldn’t even understand anything she ‘said’, and yet he felt he already knew her better than he had known anyone else in his life. He had seen the curiosity in her eyes, the real interest she had shown towards him after they came nearly crashing to the ground. Despite not knowing who he was or where he came from (for all he knew at least) she hadn’t flown off on those tiny wings, she had instead lead him through the empty wilderness of the forest.

The black invisible clouds above then ceased to be the harbingers of doom to him and instead now acted like a warm comforting blanket, keeping the ground below them warm and cozy. Although luckily since he still had hold of his string backpack he retained a real blanket. He would find out what was above those hovering masses of water, but not tonight. For his eyelids became heavy and his mind quieted and his blood cooled from the hormones built over the long and strenuous day. Then finally, his thoughts fell to oblivion.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading this far. I've already written the next two chapters, but I plan on editing them up a little bit before release. So expect the next one in a few days. Again, I am open to any criticism as I am still new and improving.

Chapter 3: Following

When Boston awoke, his feet felt cold. He had a dream where he had had his feet stuck in an iceberg, he could still feel the cold permeating to his ankle.

His thin blanket apparently hadn’t been enough to protect him from the cold. The outer layers of his body felt numb, and the lack of heat made its way up from his nose and into the deep recesses of his brain. All of this made him feel lethargic.

Regardless, he pushed right up through it like he did every morning. Whether he had pine needles in his pants or not.

He looked over and saw that the orange Pegasus, still unaware of his waking, was picking at some berry bushes outside of their little clearing. After some deliberation, Boston went into his backpack, rummaged through some garbage in it, and found the last snack he had. It was a mini bag of Cheetos.

His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t had anything since his meager breakfast yesterday, and despite Cheetos not being the healthiest thing for breakfast it was all he had. When he opened the bag, it made such a resonating sound in the empty wilderness that the Pegasus immediately looked back in surprise. Just like in Montana it seemed that every little noise echoed for miles.

She made her way towards him at an alarming pace on her tiny wings and stopped right before she hit him outright. She made a confused and then interested expression at the small orange packet he was carrying, a slightly lighter tone than that of her own fur.

Boston decided then to pull a Cheeto out of the bag and make a sly expression that just says ‘You want it?’ She hesitantly put her hoof down on the hand he was displaying it on and seemingly defying the laws of physics picked it up. Instead of eating it she studied it in her hooves. He imagined her wondering what such a deformed and weird looking thing would ever be useful for.

To prompt her on, Boston acted like a mime and pretended he had a cheeto in his hand. He then motioned the imaginary Cheeto into his mouth and bit down. He made sure to emphasize the crunch. The Pegasus, understanding the gesture, looked at him with a disgusted but still interested expression.

Boston watched as she reluctantly put the cheeto in her mouth and took a long slow bite out of it. At that moment he worried whether he had given her some kind of poison and that the Pegasus would die if exposed to a product of his modern world. However as soon as she had taken that first bite Boston could see the large grin creep onto her face. In less than a second it was gone and she held out her hoof as if asking for more.

Somehow, nonverbally they were able to communicate to each other a 50-50 compromise in which they both took half of the orange snacks. Her eyes narrowed when he tried to take more than his share.

Since she loved those cheetos so much, Boston decided he would mentally call her Cheeto from now on. Her fur color was just icing on the cake. Her real name was probably something like a weird assortment of horse noises, but Cheeto would work for now. Despite being kind of silly, he figured it would be a bit wieldier than ‘orange pegasus’.

After they both finished, ‘Cheeto’ led Boston down the trail along the stream. The stream’s refreshing water made a great source for his water bottle and the trail meant they could travel a lot further than yesterday.

Beneath the surface Boston was a mix of worry and excitement thinking about what was going to happen next. Cheeto likely didn’t make those shoes herself. The specific design of the shoes with those laces along with the leather indicated some kind of specialization of labor, however they also brought up more questions. For instance, did the leather mean this world had cows? And did that mean these ponies killed them for their skin like on Earth?

Just when it seemed like walking behind an alien creature was getting boring the landscape shifted. Almost like coming out of a cave, the dense northern forest gave way to flat rolling hills planted with what at first seemed to be corn. The border land between these two worlds was only marked only by a few stumps poking out of the ground. To Boston they looked just like the fields of Oklahoma did during the fall, with large areas of the corn fields already harvested but others not.

When they got closer to it though Boston could tell it was not corn. Even from far away he could see that the stalks were a lot less green than he remembered, more like a golden brown, like another plant he knew. It was amazing how tall they were, wheat usually at its highest was only to his waist, but here it was only slightly less soaring than he was.

He remembered from some history books that ancient and medieval wheat was a great deal taller than the modern-day plant. This was because of unintended selection by ancient farmers. In the old fields, wheat had to compete with other wheat for light by growing taller than its competitors. By Boston’s day though, the farmers hoped to get higher yields from their plants by intentionally breeding them to be shorter.

That was what he had read anyway.

And so Boston figured quite early on that they might be in some kind of medieval society by Earth standards. His notions were confirmed when he saw more horses like Cheeto at the border of the cut and uncut wheat.

While Cheeto was mostly in the nude except for her shoes, the ponies cutting away at the crops of wheat were dressed in sack clothing that looked a lot like the attire worn by peasants and serfs in medieval Europe (they seemed smaller than horses, so the name pony seemed to fit). The clothes themselves looked like they had been specifically adapted from the European peasants to fit the ponies. They didn’t even have any holes for their wings to come out of. Maybe these ones didn’t have any? Boston sensed that something was going on in those differences between Cheeto and the ponies, he would just have to wait and see.

Cheeto let out a loud ‘Neigh!’ to the working ponies. They all turned around and looked at the pair. Before Boston could read their reactions, they were on him.

Boston read a lot about early modern Europe. One interesting tidbit was how over 50,000 ‘witches’ were burned, hanged, and tortured over the course of 400 years.

Luckily, Boston wasn’t stabbed through by a pitchfork or otherwise brutally murdered. He was surrounded by the ponies who were bowing in his presence and others who were literally jumping for joy just looking at him. A cacophony of horse noises streamed into his ears.

As if this new world wasn’t confusing enough.

In all the confusion, Boston noticed one… He forgot the word for male horse.

Oh right! Stallion.

One stallion stood more stoic among the rest. He was pale green with only a straw hat and just stood there looking inquisitively at Boston before smiling softly and putting out his hoof. Despite his bewilderment at the whole situation, Boston grabbed the hoof and shook it. The stallion’s smile grew larger when he did.

After a little while, Cheeto whooped a rallying whistle, somehow using both her hooves to increase the volume of the sound, and made a motion over her ‘shoulder’ much like she had done with Boston yesterday. It seems that the rag-worn ponies forgot all about their harvest and started following Cheeto along the path on the bank of the stream.

While they walked along it seemed from context to Boston that they were all talking about him, but the nerving attention caused him to casually slip to the back of the crowd. Despite having been so enraptured with him earlier they didn’t seem to notice. That was, except for the pale green stallion. His body seemed more scruff and worn than the rest of the ponies, but his sharp blue eyes shined through it. Funnily enough, the stallion was among the tallest in the group but still only stood to Boston’s shoulders.

The large yet also small Stallion lagged behind with Boston and seemed to make some of the same noises that the rest of the ‘herd’ was making except slower and somehow more understandable, even if the interested human still couldn’t understand a word of it. Then he slowly phrased out what Boston could by some mysterious instinct tell was a question, this place was weird in so many ways to him. The Stallion finished with a point from his hoof to Boston’s two backpacks. Maybe he was asking what was inside them?

Not sure what to say, Boston decided to just joke “Lo siento, solo hablo un poco español.”

They both just shrugged.

As they walked through the cut fields it became clear to Boston that the peasant ponies were almost done with their harvest, as they had already passed most of the uncut fields. Along the way, more and more ponies seemed to join the procession when they saw it pass them by.

The stream turned up ahead and the path morphed into a small bridge to cross it. Across, Boston could see a village that reminded him of the illustrations of medieval manors he had seen.

Knowing what he knew about medieval villages he was glad that he had a terrible sense of smell.

When the group entered into the village the bystanders appeared to initially look confused at the large group. However, when Boston saw their eyes lock with his they all had the same unknown revelation. Their confusion just evaporated. It was almost always replaced with a star-struck grin and excitement.

That was, except when his eyes locked with the other pegasi. Apparently Cheeto wasn’t unique amongst her race. There weren’t as many of them, but Boston saw them doing a variety of different things, like operating as a blacksmith or making shoes, most wearing no clothes. All of them looked nervous at the sight of the crowd and their expressions worsened when they saw Boston. One pegasus mare who was wearing an ornate dress with a cone hat even ran away at first sight of him.

Walking through an alien and medieval manor, time seemed to slow as Boston took in all the sights and sounds flying about. This was the kind of stuff he had dreamed about throughout his life, looking around at the wattle and daub housing, seeing strange people (errr… ponies), and the thrill of not knowing what lies next. Up ahead of them was a surprisingly large mansion. Its three stories seemed to tower over the all the other buildings, you could tell who owned this town.

It seemed like that was the direction the crowd was heading.

When they got closer Cheeto, who was still triumphantly leading at the front of the pack, was intercepted by a dull purple mare without wings. When Cheeto stopped, so did the rest of the crowd. Boston could see the concern in the mare’s eyes, they looked sympathetically at Cheeto but also showed some worry which doubled when she noticed Boston.

Both of them ‘talked’ back and forth for a few moments in whatever horse language they had. To Boston, it looked like the mare was trying to warn Cheeto of something, but she only grew louder and looked more convinced as their conversation drew on.

The mare finally seemed to let off, letting Cheeto rally the crowd once again.

When the crowd finally got to the wooden doors of the mansion, they all started yelling and hollering at the building. Cheeto made her way to the back to drag Boston by the hand right up to the doors.

Seeing Boston right at the steps to the entrance, the crowd silenced. He had no idea what they wanted him to do.

Sensing his confusion, Cheeto smirked and made a motion imitating a knock on the door.

Ok then, he thought.

Boston gave a single light knock on the door. His fist shaking too hard to make a real loud sound.

Expecting a long and drawn out wait before anyone answered, he tried to go knock again, but was startled when the door immediately flew open. Right there was an imposing rose colored mare with a death in her eyes.

With her elegantly embroidered dress Boston could only wilt to the side while she stared right through him and into the large crowd gathered outside of her home. Her hair was so grey it shined. He could still see the crowd’s fury and anger from earlier, but it was now lace with a trace of fear.

Nobody said anything.

Time came to a standstill as the crowd glared at the mare and she right back at them. It was like the time as a kid when Boston tried to blow up a balloon by slowly pumping in air. He could see it was about to burst when suddenly a bee, mistaking Cheeto’s nose for a flower, softly landed on it, and thereby caused her to sneeze.

When the dam broke, it broke hard.

Boston panicked as he heard screaming explode from the crowd, and he got stuck in a fearful flight or fight paralysis. The shouting was not directed at him but they would still likely rip him to pieces just to get at the mare.

Luckily for him, a loud commanding shout drew above all the others. It came from the angry mare.

It was just enough that the ponies of the crowd all went silent. After only a moment, the mare then let out a long series of noises that Boston had long since identified as the pony’s language, and despite the language barrier, by the tone and cadence he could tell that this speech was a very eloquent one. The tone of her voice resonated down and then burst up with the power of an exploding sun. Boston had always wanted to see the speeches of the great orators like Cicero, and even though he couldn’t understand anything she said, those were the kinds of words he imagined coming out of her mouth.

At the end of whatever was said, the crowd murmured and begrudgingly dispersed. One of the peasant ponies shook one of his hooves at the mare as he walked away. Boston was speechless.

After not too long only three ponies remained at the scene, Cheeto, the purple mare who had talked to her before the whole fiasco, and pony cicero. Only now did Boston notice that she was actually a pegasus as the wings that splayed to the side were the exact same color as the fabric that surrounded them.

The pale purple pony was talking to the steely eyed and aged mare, who listened and nodded as the mare continued on. Meanwhile to the side the Cheeto just looked down in a weird mixture of shame and anger. She fiddled with her hoof and occasionally turned her head.

After a little bit of talking, the mares nodded to each other, and the purple one made her way into the mansion. The crowd pleaser then turned to Cheeto and made flailed her arms in a way that reminded Boston of whenever he got scolded by his own parents. The whole time Cheeto just continued sulking, but with anger still visible on her face. After she was done, the older pegasus wacked the orange one across the head and then pointed her inside. It kind of hurt Boston seeing his new friend get hit like that.

Much to his anxiety, the mare then made her way to him with a just as ever determined look on her face. He imagined she had made a mental checklist of people to talk to, and now his name was the last one on the list and circled with blood red ink. He imagined that she might fly up and crack his skull, and seeing her face it took a lot of mental steeling not to immediately run off into the woods. Amazing how a creature only slightly more than half his height could make his heart pump at twice the speed.

Instead of immediately killing him though, she threw on a smile and flew up to him. Boston could still the hostility in her eyes though. Under that grin she held out a hoof asking for him shake it like that one stallion from earlier. He never trusted what he crassly called lady smiles, most of the time they screamed fake to him. For now though he would have to accept it. So he took the hoof and shook it; he figured at least she did bad in store for him, not right now atleast.

She led him through the towering doors into the mansion, which itself was on a small hill overlooking the entire town. When he got inside he looked up into a large space which went up three floors, and hanging from the ceiling were two ornate, but small chandeliers. It looked like one of those tall expensive hotels where when you came out of your room you could see down into the lobby 35 floors below you, except a lot smaller.

Some parts of the overhang that looked out into the open space didn’t have railings for some reason. What was really neat were the bridges that crossed over the room, both on the second and third floors.

His curiosity as to the missing sections of railing was immediately blown away in a sudden realization when he saw the rose mare fly up to and land in one of those spots above him. It seems that she had forgot he didn’t have wings and left him behind, but Boston was too amazed at the design and use of the building that he didn’t even notice.

She let out an exasperated sigh before coming back down and leading him to the stairwell in one of the side rooms. He had worried he wouldn’t be able to fit into any of these ponies’ houses, but luckily for him, the rooms here were tall enough that he wouldn’t have to slouch over. Maybe that was so that the pegasi had room to fly?

He just remained in awe at the idea of the building. They could just hover up to wherever was convenient, and for some reason that just blew Boston’s mind. Why they even have stairs then though?

While they walked up the stairs, a pony dressed in servant attire and without wings went down right next to them. So that was why. When she passed them, the pony looked at Boston weird.

They went up two floors to the very top of the building and Boston was then directed to two large doors by the mare. The door had some of those knocking things on them.

With half closed eyes and a small frown, the mare knocked a couple times.

For some reason at this moment, Boston seemed to not be able to recall what those things are on the door are that you use to knock with.

This time the mare seemed to get angry and knocked even louder and in quicker succession.

What was wrong with just regular knocking? What are those things even useful for anyway?

Now the mare was actually trying to open the doors, but they wouldn’t budge.

Seriously though what were those things called again? Sucks he didn’t bring a dictiona…

Suddenly Boston was drawn away from his mind mumblings when the insanely ‘frustrated’ (his parents insisted that there was no such thing as angry, only frustrated) mare landed on her front hooves and gave a kick with her back ones that completely annihilated whatever lock was there and sent the doors flying open.

When he looked into the room he saw a wide king-sized bed decorated with ivory white blankets and an ornate canopy. Other than the fancy bed, by modern standards it was a pretty normal room. It had a mirror, drawers for clothes, some shelves with random stuff sitting, and a closet. The mare made her way over to that closet and quickly threw it open.

Boston was usually reluctant to judge people off of looks, but the nude stallion hiding in the closet was the most pathetic looking sight of all time. He had a yellow coat and purple hair(or whatever the fur on the top their head is called), and he was shivering in the corner with his front legs up covering his eyes. Pathetic whimpering actually made Boston wonder how someone like this could actually exist, it was straight out of a cartoon caricature.

Naturally, the mare whacked the guy just like she had done to Cheeto earlier. Instead of holding back a cringe, now he had to hold back a laugh.

The stallion shot up like a cat out of the closet, and before he could fly away on his tiny yellow wings the mare grabbed ahold of him and explained something to him in a manner much like she would to a child. She then went to the side and made movements that Boston recognized as some kind of introduction.

She pointed at the Stallion, whinnied out something, and then pointed to Boston with her head tilted. Getting the memo, he looked towards the stallion and introduced himself as “Boston.” Seeing the teen’s outstretched arm and hunched down posture the stallion unsteadily put up his hoof and blurted out what was probably his name in the weird mixture of horse and almost human noises. Hopefully he would never have to learn this language.

It wasn’t a second after that that the rosy mare essentially pushed him out of the room and made him follow her to an empty one down on the second floor.

The rectangular room was only about half the size of the one he had just seen. It had a twin-sized bed and a few bookshelves lining the walls. At least these ponies had invented the codex book already. There was a small but openable window on the wall opposite of the door, but he could only see trees through it. For some reason there was also a wooden bucket. He sure hoped that this wasn’t just a prison cell.

With an uncountable few alien words the mare slammed the thick wood door behind him. He threw his backpacks down and watched them bounce on the bed. He thought about going to read the books, but he knew the horse words would also be unknown to him. So he just sat down on the bed and let his tired body fall on its back, letting whatever material that was in the bed envelop him while his feet hung off the bottom. Of course the bed wasn’t even large enough for him. At least he had a bed though, he remembered reading that beds in medieval Europe were rare enough that whole families were usually lucky to have even one.

The room was completely silent. There were probably bugs chirping in the mid-afternoon sun outside, but their noises couldn’t penetrate into Boston’s room. With all that had happened, like encountering his first alien civilization and almost being killed in a riot, the silence was nice bit of respite.

He wasn’t going to just be able to just sit there forever though, boredom had already taken hold and he realized that if they left him in here until it was dark he was going to have to find a way to light the candles that were scattered throughout his room.

So he got up figuring he had nothing else to do.

He had a nightstand by his bed, but it didn’t have a drawer where any fire-starting equipment could be stored. What did they use back then to start fires? There was nothing in the mysterious bucket, and they had given him a small closet, but when he looked in there he saw it was filled to the brim with absolutely nothing.

He then tried to open the door and leave to maybe find someone to help, but he quickly noticed the guard standing outside of the door. The guard was dressed in some leather armor that was decorated across by red stripes. He did not look happy when Boston peaked open the door, so he turned and pointed his pike straight towards him before Boston slinked away. So that was how this was going to be then? At least the fear on the guard’s face was kind of funny

He would have to somehow ask about candles later as he now saw a much more urgent and deadly problem, he finally understood what the bucket was there for.

After having been in the room for a quite a few hours and having not been able to find any fire lighting tool, Boston started to grow impatient of waiting. His stomach was tying itself in knots. He had barely ate anything over the last two days and he was thinking of ways he might be able to sneak past the guard and steal their food, or at least escape into the woods to find something edible.

It was then that he heard a knock on the door, and when he heard it he quickly stuffed his bags in the closet. He knew that this probably wouldn’t do anything to keep them from stealing or snooping in it, but he wanted at least some peace of mind.

Just as he had shut the door to the closet, the one into his room opened. It was the same grey-haired mare from earlier. She signaled for him to come out and having now learned that he was being kept against his will, he shot her a deadly look.

They made their way down the stairwell again to the bottom floor, where he was then seated across an oversized table from the bright yellow stallion he had met earlier. He seemed to have regained his composure from when Boston had last seen him. Instead of being nude like when they had first met, the stallion now had on a black shirt with a white undershirt, it did not go well at all. Sitting to his sides were the grey-haired mare, and surprisingly, Cheeto as well. The hardened rose mare still had on the same large flowing dress.

Surprisingly Cheeto was wearing one too.

The orange pegasus did not seem as happy or as joyful as when Boston had known her in the woods. It looked like the red dress she was wearing was made of osmium (the densest and heaviest material known to human kind) with how much she was slumping down. Her nose was constantly pointed down into her plate. She smiled a bit when she saw Boston sit down.

Some servants, including the pale purple pony from earlier, brought some bread, cheeses, weird looking carrots, onions, and a few other foods. What surprised him most were the trout they brought out, apparently these ponies were omnivorous? Once they were all done, the servants sat down on the table between Boston and what was apparently the noble family. He was a bit overwhelmed by all the food they served. His diet beforehand had consisted of fifty percent chips, thirty percent fries, and twenty percent burgers. The all-American diet.

He looked at all the food apprehensively, and he was torn both by his sense of disgust and by a hunger that he had rarely experienced in his modern upbringing. He decided that he would try the milk that they had given him, it tasted like almonds.

Naturally his history-based paranoia took over and he mentally yelled ‘holy shit! They poisoned me!’

but then he thought back to his history books and remembered that cyanide wasn’t used for killing people until the Nazis tested zyklon B on Soviet POWs. He doubted that these ponies were on the same technological level as 1940s humanity, although there was no way to be sure.

Eventually his hunger overruled his nervous brain, and the teen scarfed down the dish he liked the most, the bread. Cheeto giggled from across the table, but the mare who was maybe her mother gave her an angry snort. With his hunger a little bit satisfied, he only took tiny, painfully slow bites of everything else. The servants chatted amongst themselves, but relations in the noble family were not quite as friendly.

It wasn’t until they were almost done with their meal that the rose mare said anything to Boston’s first friend in this weird new world. He felt left out since he couldn’t understand anything, but that wasn’t a new feeling for him.

The gist that he got from their conversation was this.

“Hey you want to do this thing?” the rose mare suggested

Instead of saying no like he expected , her features lit up in a face that screamed “Yes! Yes please, please, please, pleaaasseeeeee!” She almost got down to begging over whatever it was.

So her ever benevolent grey haired mother nodded her head in approval, and those little orange wings fluttered up in absolute delight. It was kind of cute. Now if only he could riddle out what the thing was that she was going to do. Afterwards Cheeto seemed a lot less sulky.

After they finished eating, Boston was escorted back up to his room. It would figure that it was as dark as a joke about the Nazis, specifically one about how they made candles. Sucks he hadn’t found anyway to light them. It didn’t matter though, in fact it was great, as he was tired beyond belief from today. He was asleep before he hit the bed.

Author's Note

I put a lot more effort into redoing this chapter so that it hopefully reads a bit easier. I'll probably go back and more extensively rewrite the first two chapters at some point too. Again, any and all criticism is welcome.

Chapter 4: Frustrating

While he was sleeping, Boston felt a tap on his shoulder.

Immediately he flew up. His heart felt like it would blow out of his chest.

He tried to scream, but a hoof to the mouth and a shush shut him up.

The little bit of moonlight seeping through his window created a familiar silhouette. The hair was what gave it away. It was Cheeto!

He tried to ask her what she was doing here, but before he could she slammed him in the chest with something heavy. The sudden impact blew all the air out of his lungs and stunned him.

Having done her best to confuse and disorient Boston (intentionally or not), Cheeto stealthed her way out of the room. By the time she had quietly shut the door, Boston was still stuck paralyzed on the bed.

After a few seconds, he finally pulled up his hands to feel the object she had callously thrown onto him. His fingers went around its edges and felt all the grooves until a small piece of paper fell off. It was a book apparently.

This reminded him too much of something his little sister would do as a prank.

His head ached, so he decided to just go back to sleep.

Light beams streamed into Boston’s room and into his eyes.

Ugh, it’s not even seven yet, he thought.

What? Boston had an excellent internal clock; it seemed there was no time difference between Oklahoma and here.

When he shifted to get the light out of his eyes, an object fell off of his chest. The surprise jolted him awake.

So suddenly Boston found himself again in a position with adrenaline coursing through him, and a mysterious book on his bed.

What he saw next was an even bigger surprise.

The book had English on its cover. Right there in fancy cursive were the words ‘Megan’s Diary’. The mystery of it actually annoyed him, and slowly remembering that Cheeto had brought it to him last night didn’t help either.

It was then that he heard a knock on the door followed by a quick entry. Unexplainably, he rushed to put the book under the bed before whoever it was could see it. It was the same rose mare who had toured him through the mansion yesterday. Knowing now he was not staying by choice, her sight made him give a slight scowl. She just ignored it.

Instead of going up or down the staircase like before, they simply walked across the bridge spanning the large interior space. They entered a new room directly opposite of his own, and the first thing Boston saw was books. It was like a mini-library with its raggedy bookshelves sticking out from the walls.

At the far end of the room was a small theater. It reminded Boston of the one his rich relative had in their basement. This theater had no screen (obviously), it did however have wooden chairs lined up at its front, and a stage with plenty of room for walking on.

Arriving at the stage area he found Cheeto busy looking at a piece of paper she was holding in her hooves… somehow.

The rose mare loudly cleared her throat, causing Cheeto to yelp.

When she turned to see the noise, the first thing Boston saw were the bags under her eyes and all the loose strands of hair poking out. Despite that though, the inner determination still pierced through her.

Boston was happy to see her; the rose mare was not. Upon seeing Cheeto her face twisted into a weird mixture of concern and anger. She actually spit on her hoof and tried to run it along Cheeto’s hair. Cheeto just flicked away her hoof with an annoyed glare.

They started arguing. As they did, Boston paid close attention to what they were saying. The language had lots of whinnies, neighs, and snorts, but Boston was also starting to pick out more human-ish sounds. Those sounds (some were similar to H’s or N’s) were often used between the more horse like noises. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long to learn it, but starting from basically nothing made things challenging.

Whatever it was they were arguing about, the older one, who Boston figured might be Cheeto’s mom, finally relented. She left with an exasperated sigh.

Afterwards, Cheeto made her way onto the stage unphased. On it she paced back and forth like a commanding officer in front of his troops. She was blabbering on about something he couldn’t understand, but all he could focus on was the smug grin she had.

The weird bravado of it all made him laugh.

She just ignored him and kept at it.

She then said a word straight in his direction. Boston just stared right at her causing repeat herself, this time more agitated.

Boston could sometimes be a bit slow, but he finally realized what she wanted.

He tried his best to make the beginning sound, but whenever he tried to make it the pegasus stopped him, said a few things, and then prompted him to do it again. He was starting to get annoyed with her, how was he supposed to understand her instructions? Did she expect him to understand the language she had just started teaching him? He kept trying over and over again, until Cheeto just gave a scowl and continued talking like nothing had happened.

Boston was confused by what he saw next, she brought out a blackboard. From what he knew blackboards weren’t invented until 19th century, and here she had one with wheels and a holder for chalk. He could understand though, it was a pretty simple invention after all as it was just a board made from slate. What confounded him more was about how she was able to hold the tiny piece of chalk in her hooves. Did their hooves have magnets in them that attracted every substance, or were they some kind of weird Velcro?

So many questions…

Of course, to ask them he would have to learn the language.

He then truly realized the challenge he was taking on. Not only would he have to learn an entirely new language, but he would have to learn it from people who couldn’t even speak English to translate for him. Would he even be able to make the sounds necessary? In fact, his monkey brain might not even have the right neural wiring to understand horse grammar and sentence structure.

He did have a few advantages though, if he succeeded, he would be the very first human in history to speak an alien language. If he ever found his way home he would gain major bragging rights and that was one motivation, but also just the idea of being able to understand and see things from another point of view fascinated him.

There was also the hope that he would be able to physically understand them at some point. He already knew both their species used the same facial expressions and gestures to communicate, maybe it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say their language could be compatible with the human mind?

He was brought back to reality with a cough, a very forceful one.

When he looked up Cheeto was glaring at him. Now that he thought about it, Boston realized that she had been talking to him this entire time and he hadn’t been listening. She had given up trying repetition and had just starting lecturing him in her own language. They both had a lot to learn.

She made the same phrase again, her voice sounding even more impatient this time. He tried saying it again. He didn’t know if he said it right, and honestly, he was starting not to care.

She did not seem happy with his pronunciation.

She said it again. He repeated it again.

Upon hearing it, Cheeto’s face turned a deep crimson, she jumped off stage, and stomped out of the room. From the sound of it he thought she was trying to break the floor. After a few seconds, he heard the door slam behind him.

Boston just sighed. This was going to be difficult.

He just waited in his seat for quite a while after the little incident. He wasn’t sure what it was that he should do now, so he just sat there.

He had hard time saying he didn’t sympathize with Cheeto. As a little kid he had always blown up whenever things didn’t go his way. He just exploded whenever he felt an obvious injustice had been perpetrated against him, but those days had long since passed.

He almost kind of felt bad for not taking it as seriously as he should have, but what else was he supposed to do with her methods? She was going to have to inevitably reevaluate her teaching at some point. Didn’t make Boston feel any better about it though.

After impatiently sitting for a while, the Rose mare came and brought him back across the bridge to his room.

By now it was only just before noon and he still had all day ahead of him, presumably with nothing scheduled. Instead of bringing him anywhere to eat that lunch, the ponies of the mansion had left bread and some of the milk on his woody nightstand. After finishing it, he realized that he was probably going to be within the grasp of boredom for the rest of the day.

He thought about reading Fahrenheit 451 again, but didn’t feel like reading the same book twice now that he didn’t have to. For some time, he contented himself thinking about what stories or mythologies might lie in those books on the shelf, but then he finally realized how stupid he was. There was a readable book right under him.

For the second time that day he read the words “Megan’s Diary”. They were drawled in black Ink across a cover that looked like it had spent an hour in his backpack (Stuffing 50 things in one place doesn't do wonders for durability). In fact, some of the pages were torn at the seam and seemed about to fall out. When he opened it, it audibly cracked a little bit, making him worry that it would fall apart if breathed on too hard.

As with any new book, when Boston stared at its cover it felt like he was starting a new project, just like you would start creating a momentous painting, except progress was more easily shown by the number at the top of the page.

He wanted to think about the implications that finding a book in English here had, but he was tired of waiting to read it. When he opened to the first page, he saw writing in black ink. It said

“Dear diary, Day 200-ish

The experiment went horribly, terribly, absolutely wrong.”

Boston didn’t even see the next letter before he slammed the book shut. It’s not that he was scared of what he was about to read, but he had to take a breather to think about what that sentence really meant. He didn’t even know who Megan was, but already his brain was coming up with sci-fi explanations as to its connections to this new land he found himself in. The thing that scared him the most was Megan’s ‘date’.

He also had a hard time trying to figure out why Cheeto would’ve given him this book. How did she know this was his language?

He put the book down on his lap.

Only 11 words into the journal and he was already pacing throughout his room. This was like Sci-fi except with some very real implications. Did that experiment create this whole world or did it just bring her here? Did it have anything to with the green light he had seen earlier?

Was he about to read the Silmarillion of this place?

He went through all the possibilities in his head, coming up with elaborate stories with all kinds of characters. His mind kept coming up with images of destroyed planets or rips in the fabric of time that changed whole laws of physics. All of it just to let horses fly!

This whole experience was so exciting yet so frustrating at the same time. It was like looking at a huge jig-saw puzzle with so many pieces splayed out in front of him, but he just couldn’t find out how they all fit together.

Due to his overactive brain however, he was going to have to wait to get all the pieces.

After who knows how long and sore legs he tried sitting down to finally read the dairy. It was that exact moment that the door decided to open again too. Great.

Looking over at the other end of the table, Cheeto looked despondent. She had barely eaten anything and decided instead to just stare down at her plate.

The pale purple mare gave her a look of sympathy and talked to her calmly.

In contrast, the rose mare chastised Cheeto. In a scene now routine to Boston, the argument escalated until the sounds were ringing in his ears. By now Boston had decided to call the mare Thorn, because she would cut you if you weren’t careful.

The supposed patriarch of the house just kept eating uselessly. The stallion who yesterday had hid in his closet shivering now had such an oblivious and almost child-like smile. It made Boston feel bad for him in a way.

Boston had no idea about the specifics of the argument, but it reminded him of home. He hadn’t seen his family for quite a few days now, and before he had seen ‘day 200-ish’ in the diary he hadn’t even really thought about it. He hoped he wouldn’t have to hear trumpets sound before he saw them again.

He almost kind of missed being yelled at for not cleaning his room.

When the yelling stopped, even the servants had all stopped talking. It was a quiet meal from then on.

Boston arrived back at his room a bit fuller than yesterday. It had been weird seeing the pegasi eat fish, but he had figured that if a horse could do it then so could he. The ravenous grumbling from his stomach had only strengthened that case.

He crept slowly toward his bed; the darkness made him feel like he was swimming through the abyss. Despite his caution, he still tripped on himself. Luckily, he landed on his bed instead of his head.

His descent into unconsciousness was not as fast as yesterday’s was.

The lack of exercise was what got to him. He hadn’t even been allowed outside! The lack of the endorphins he was used to made his head feel like it was full of toxic waste all stewing about. With his eyes closed all he could think about was how much he hated himself for not just reading the damn diary while he had the chance!

Not just that, but he stewed over the incompetent head of the house hold with his ugly purple hair who had just watched while his family ate itself out. He didn’t even know why he cared so much.

He tossed and turned through his sheets. He just couldn't find a comfortable spot, it was probably these stupid ponies who didn't know how to make real beds!

His frayed neurons made him angry at Thorn who thought that she could keep him locked up in here and away from the world! And Cheeto could've atleast...

He heard a bump from outside his room.

Glad for something to distract him, he creeped over to the door.

He pulled it open to see that there was no guard there.

While he moved around, he noticed his footsteps felt like they had at the end of the race. It was all so… ethereal.

When he got to the edge of the balcony, he was just in time to hear the front doors shut. He looked down to see the silhouette of a pony on their way out, but he wasn’t able to make out any features.

Realizing he wouldn’t have time to catch up if he went down the stairs, he went over to the part of the overhang without the guard rails that the pegasi launched themselves from. There he crouched over, hopped off the side, and then caught himself. For a second, he hung there like he had from the monkey bars in pre-K.

When he let go, he fell only a few feet. Nothing he hadn’t experienced jumping fences back in his home town.

What? Boston wasn’t going to let fences stop his ornithology.

Cracking the door open, he was just in time to see the figure turn at a corner up ahead.

Tip-toeing to the corner, the darkness from the overcast sky made it hard to see the medieval architecture he had admired the other day. Turning the corner, he saw one of the buildings whose door was cracked open and letting orange light flicker out.

Whoever it was could have gone into any one of the buildings, but something told him they would be in there.

He stopped just before he got to the door. Ever since the noise had woken him up, he hadn’t really taken the time to consider his actions. What had that pony even been doing in the mansion? Were they a robber? Boston doubted that they would be very happy that he had followed them.

Another possibility entered his mind though, what if it was Cheeto sneaking out of the house? Why would she go to this place though?

Only one way to find out.

The first things he noticed were the splintery tables and the cozy hearth. It was a real living tavern. He had always wanted to go to Europe to see historical places like this, but his parents always had other ideas. Now he was living in real history and seeing a real place in real use. Did he mention it was for real?

There were only a few ponies siting at one table, and among them was his red-headed culprit.

Cheeto was sitting with two other ponies. One was the pale-green stallion he had shook hooves with who still only had his hat on. He was sitting next to an azure blue mare who had on a plain brown dress. It didn’t take long for Boston to notice the bulge on her belly.

It also didn’t take long for all of them to notice Boston.

He saw their eyebrows jump up in surprise all at the same time, but from there their reactions split off in emotion. The green stallion’s smile grew and the blue mare shared the same awe-struck look he had seen in the all the other ponies the other day.

Boston expected Cheeto to either get angry at him after today’s class, or for her shock to stay longer than it did. Instead, she turned away from him, her posture and her ears falling.

Seeing all the emotion from everyone made him want to just slink out and forget this ever happened, but before he could, the stallion motioned him over. He reluctantly plopped down just opposite of everyone. The stiff chair made him twist and turn to get comfortable.

Being closer to Cheeto now, the look on her face made his stomach turn. She looked just defeated. There was uncertainty and self-pity there that he knew all too well in himself, but never thought he would see in his endlessly passionate friend that had led him to revolution yesterday.

She had been so excited about their lesson when he got there. She had looked like she had stayed up all night just to prepare it and Boston had barely even listened to her.

Between Cheeto’s sulking, the stallion’s stoicism, and the wide-eyed mare, not much was said between them. That was, until two more pegasi walked into the room. One male, one female, both looked kind of young.

The mare was carrying a tray with black mugs; they matched her black hair and white fur quite well. Other than the color, she actually looked kind of like Cheeto.

The tan stallion that flanked her was quite similar. Boston had a hard time telling if his hair was black or brown.

Both of them were completely nude. It let him see that they both had tattoos on their butts, the mare's was a mug with a heart over it, and the stallion's was a piece of paper with some of the alien writing on it.

Not giving him time to think about the social implications of only some ponies wearing clothes or the tattoos, they both rushed over and surrounded him in his seat while the other three took their drinks. The two bombarded him with noises that sounded like questions, and they didn’t hesitate to brush up against him. Boston just shrunk in his seat to avoid the contact.

Before he knew it this little corner of the universe filled with motion, laughter, and noise. Everyone but him and Cheeto were taking part in the fun.

They wouldn’t leave him out of it forever though.

For whatever reason the white barista nudged him and then said something to the group, causing them all to go silent. He zoomed through his head trying to think of something to do as they all stared at him expectantly.

He mouthed out the word Cheeto had tried to teach him earlier that day, causing the whole group to snort, clearly trying to hold back their laughter. Even Cheeto cracked a grin.

He hoped the word meant hello.

The barista mare tested him out again by pointing at one of the mugs and laboriously pronouncing a different word. Before trying to repeat what she said, he picked it up and felt it. Just like seeing Cheeto’s shoes, the smooth leather conjured up images of ponies killing cows.

With that in his head, he repeated what the mare had said. Clearly his hesitation before saying the word had acted like a hook, line, and sinker because everyone exploded into laughter.

While they all stomped their hooves on the table, Boston remembered the Serbian exchange student from 6th grade. One day, the teacher had left class for whatever reason with no substitute, so the class decided to have fun with the new kid. They pointed at all kinds of objects just to hear his accent. They all burst out just like this when he omitted the ‘L’ in clock.

By the time they had all died down (which took surprisingly long) Boston now for sure had two horse words stuck in his mental filing cabinet. Cheeto also started talking more with everyone and lost the frown, so that was another win.

As the night carried on, he paid close attention to the way they talked. He realized that he was starting to parse the conversations and was able to decipher individual words, even if he didn’t know what they meant. Their phrases weren’t all just amorphous blobs of noise anymore. It also help him the get the meaning a little when they gestured over to him while talking to each other.

When the barista mare left to bring another round of drinks for the group, there was an extra mug on the tray. She tried offering it to Boston. When he shook his head she just snorted and put it right in front of him anyway. When he looked down it was just milk. It was nice of her, but he almost felt excluded now seeing the fizz in everyone's drinks.

As the night went on things incrementally got quieter. The laughs grew softer, but the conversations became more intimate in a way. All their words grew hushed when the tan stallion with the paper tattoo just fell asleep on the table, his drool making a little puddle.

Boston yawned. Not long after Cheeto did too.

He had had fun and learned a lot, but he decided it would probably be best to get some rest. Cheeto gave a silent motion to the door, and Boston nodded in agreement. The dark bags under her eyes had only grown since this morning.

They both waved goodbye and got up to leave, and those still awake waved back and went back to their little conversations. Boston didn’t understand how they could go for so long.

The air felt cold on the way back, but he felt a little bit warmer on the inside.

Author's Note

Sorry this took so long. I had about half this chapter done when I came to it, but it was kind of a mess. I do plan on continuing the story from here, I estimate the next chapter may take 2 or 3 weeks.

As always, all criticism is welcome.