Browtober

Sterling doesn’t live very many floors up in his apartment complex - just three, really - so he usually finds it in himself to take the stairs. It’s not a long trek, and not a particularly difficult one, unless he had a long night at the bar and he’s having trouble remembering how to walk straight. Tonight isn’t one of those times, though, which is why he’s a little confused as to why the stairwell feels so long.

He takes it one at a time, his hooves connecting with each old wooden step, but each time he reaches a landing he feels the strangest sense of deja vu, like he’s been here before. He has, of course. He must have taken the stairs a hundred times - a thousand. He’s lived in Harara for long enough. He climbs up three flights, and yet.

There is no door. His apartment and the hallway to it simply isn’t there. At first he thinks he’s confused. He must have zoned out on autopilot and missed his landing, stopped counting. When he starts to go back down a flight, though, a dread like nothing else starts creeping up his spine. He trusts his instincts well enough to decide he’d best not climb back down, and instead keeps climbing the stairs. 

Again and again he returns to the same landing, each flight a strange and disorienting loop, but every time he considers trying to go back down, something squeezes his heart. The Wolf’s instincts raise their hackles, perhaps. He decides resolutely that he won’t turn back at all after the third time, and that seems to be enough to quell the fear that keeps trying to rise in his heart. He climbs perhaps twenty flights before he considers that he should have at least come out on the roof by now, and then, just like that, there’s a door.

He takes it, mouth pressed into a thin line, and heaves a sigh of relief when he finally comes out on the roof of his building. “Get it together, Sterling,” he mutters to himself, feeling a little ridiculous, and this time when he heads back downstairs that miasma of fear is gone.