shitty octascratch might delete later idk

Vinyl Scratch was in a house.

There’s nowhere to go.

The house was a small stone cottage by the sea. Vinyl had lived here when she had been a very small foal. So had her parents, and so had her brother.

Nothing lived there now.

Least of all her.

She trailed, floated, glided like a ghost through her old home. Through abandoned rooms and neglected halls she paced in an endless circle.

She could hear the shorebreak echoing back to her, filling the otherwise empty ruins with a surreal ambience. It didn’t sound like the ocean so much as it sounded like she was trapped in some conch shell, entombed in a never-ending and ever-growing spiderweb of sound.

Almost soothing.

Nowhere to go.

The ocean had risen nearly a half foot since she was a foal. It didn’t sound like much, but the gradient of the sand rising from the shorebreak was only about five inches maximum. The cottage was situated in the dunes, which of course rose up to sometimes a full ten feet above the waterline—but the few inches of rise the ocean had gained was enough for high tide to flood the sand valleys between the dunes, transforming where Vinyl’s family had once lived by the sea into the very shorebreak itself.

The tide washed into the house. It went up to Vinyl’s fetlocks. The fur became damp, itchy, knotted and uncomfortable.

She stumbled through the rising water. Her ethereal presence was gone. She was grounded to the world once again, as clumsy as she’d been as a foal.

She was in their old parlor. She could remember being here all those years ago as if nothing had changed, empty and salt-soaked as it was now.

In the center of the room, suspiciously untouched by time, was her family’s old phonograph. It glittered and gleamed with an unnatural brightness, an unspoken and deathly comedy, an unreal veneer. It was just as old and beaten as it had been the last she saw it, and not a day older.

Vinyl slumped over the old phonograph on the table. Hoof fiddling with the record.

Nowhere.

“The music will drag the storm from the sea,” Vinyl mumbled to herself softly. Rain lashed at the house. The desiccated shutters clattered and clacked off one another. Moth-eaten tatters of what drapes were left either whipped into twisting wraiths or were torn from the windows altogether. “But it won’t take the hurricane from me.”

There was a roar that took her breath away, and the cellar door collapsed inward, the water rushing in a terrifying and unnatural cascade down the old steps.

Why had they left the house to begin with, again?

It wasn’t safe. That’s right. The rising water had made the basement unsafe to be in when they’d moved in, and they’d had to move away from the cottage all together when—

The house creaked on its foundations. The endless rush of water down the stairs into the old, abandoned cellar crashing in her ears made Vinyl feel as if she were down there, drowning in the silty tumult and torn to shreds by fragments of wood and mortar.

The wind shrieked through the house, piercing blasts of sand and small shells peppering the walls with shotgun force. What little was left of the thatched roof was blown off into nothing. The house creaked and whined, giving another ominous shudder.

And like this place, this ruin in the waves, Vinyl realized:
wasn’t just the one thing.
it takes time, and it
takes dedication
to fall apart piece by piece.

The waves roared in her ears.

Wasn’t just one mistake, it was one mistake too many.

The house by the sea collapsed in on itself into a great sandy and stoney sinkhole.

And nothing remained, not even the phonograph.