The next couple of weeks were much of the same. Rat gradually increased her territory, mapping out the area and hating the neverending snow.

  It hadn't hailed again, and after the first week, the blizzards and flurries had waned into an endless, slow drift. That wouldn't have been so bad if it had followed its previous patterns, but the snow seemed to have remembered both that it was meant to be cold, and that it should pile up.

  Trips out involved running from building to building, spending as little time on the roads as possible. In practice, this meant avoiding the buildings where it snowed inside, those with locked doors, or the ones which opened onto an endless void, stretching downwards into nauseating emptiness.

  She had only found two of those, but she always checked before going into a new building now. She did not want to find out what would happen if she fell.

  Part of her wondered if she would wake up the next day, huddled in her blankets and remembering nothing of the day before, but that was a best-case scenario. Chances were she would fall forever, stuck in some sort of endless purgatory. Fantasy stories told her that she would float to the bottom, finding ground or water, discovering a civilisation that had never seen light. She would teach them the ways of the Overworld, as she did her best to make her way back.

  She thought the last one was the least likely, but she kept it in mind anyway, even as she was careful to make sure it never came to pass.

  -

  "The shop is great," she spoke to her silent god, as had become habit by this point, "and I liked the little garden you made the other day, that was cute, although kinda weird in this weather, but I need more food."

  She pushed her way across a road. The snow was up to her waist, but she had passed by here this morning and the trench hadn't yet filled back in.

  "I liked the statues -" she panted as she pushed her way into the building, only taking a moment to check the floor was there. This was a well-trodden route by now,

  "- in the garden. They were very pretty, but they looked sad, there alone in the snow."

  She shook herself off, shivering and looking forward to being home. Only two more crossings to go.

  "But I need a bakery, that's what I've decided."

  She trotted through the vast empty building, not even looking up. "A bakery with a nice big oven, so I can cook food, and so I can be warm. The shop is great, I mean it and I don't want you to be offended or nothin, but it's hard to stay warm there, and I'm almost out of beans. The ones I know how to eat, anyway."

  Another crossing, and she was into a building she had nicknamed Snows-Through, because unlike the others in this area, the windows were devoid of glass. The incoming wind blew the snow around and around until it piled up into massive walls of white. She imagined that if she saw it from above, the drifts would spell out some message, only visible on the macro scale. But she was just a little rat, that was all beyond her.

  Snows-Through wasn't much warmer than the outside, but it was easier to traverse and a much more direct route home than going around. She swore sometimes that there was some sort of non-euclidian physics going on with the wideness of the towers.

  "Or a little cottage, like in a fantasy story," she continued, "with meter thick walls and a big oven in the kitchen. That would be good too."

  She hadn't had much luck scavenging today and was returning empty-handed. The city shifted around and changed day by day, but pickings were slim when most of the buildings only seemed to half exist, and she'd seen no signs of other people, despite keeping a careful eye out.

  "We went on holiday to a cottage like that once, when I was little."

  She reached the other side of the massive room, preparing herself to head back outside, eyeing up what remained of her morning path. "I don't remember much 'bout it, except for a lot of sheep and the big thick wall, except, I could sit on the window sill and that was all just made of wall."

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She huffed, crossing the road and watching her breath freeze in the air, and then she was home, slipping through the double doors and into her very own building.

  In the distance, lit only dimly in the late-afternoon light, she could see the back of her shop, a small rectangular structure growing off the far wall like a growth. It was like a museum exhibit or an office in a warehouse. From out here, it appeared to have a first floor, but as of yet, she hadn't found any way to get into it, if there even was anything to get into. There were certainly no windows or stairs up there, that she had found anyway.

  "But yeah, a bakery, with lots of flour, and a big oven, and matches so I can work it, and wood, so I can light it, and a book, so I can work out how the fuck to make bread."

  Her voice echoed in the space, combining with the booms of her footsteps. "Maybe some chickens? I don't really know how to look after 'em, but eggs would be cool, and I know how to make pancakes. I used to make pancakes sometimes with my dad, on a Sunday before we went to church, you weren't meant to eat before you went, but we never cared, we..."

  She enjoyed the way her voice lost itself, echoing away into obscurity, but she was, she decided, going a little mad.

  -

  The next day, she decided to revisit the garden. There was a no-floor in the way, so she had to spend more time on the roads than she would like, and she had dressed up warm to compensate.

  She had found a big straw hat, which helped keep the worst of the snow out of the back of her neck, and she was wearing multiple layers of clothing and big rubber boots, which creaked and groaned as she walked.

  They were far too large for her, but she had packed them with rags and they did the job well enough.

  She had found three clothing shops in that first week of snow, and she wasn't sure if it was the god who had crafted this place looking down on her in sympathy, mockery, or confusion.

  It was hard to tell, sometimes. She just hoped that they were looking down, it was getting to be awfully lonely otherwise.

  The first shop she had found had specialised in summer dresses for, she assumed, people who were eight foot tall and built like a barn. She had felt like a mouse amongst giants, standing there and staring up at the faceless mannequins. Some of them had too many arms, or their heads were the wrong shape, and there was something decidedly alien about the whole place.

  She had checked it out, determined that there was nothing of worth for her in there, and left as soon as she got a chance.

  The second had sold clothes for children, too small even for her malnourished frame. The whole shop appeared to have been taken wholesale from elsewhere, and she had half expected to find a staff member waiting to escort her out. Young mothers with exhausted faces and arms full of newborn clothing.

  The third contained bins and bins of mixed everything. None of it had been in any sort of sensible order, and it was a bit like what she imagined the back of an airport might look like after the detonation of a suitcase bomb.

  Still, she had managed to find some useful stuff, the boots being the main thing, but it had taken her most of two days to sort through it. When she returned on the third, the whole shop was gone, replaced with faceless grey concrete.

  She had laid a hand on the building in thanks, pulled her boots up, and carried on exploring.

  She had gone back to check the other two shops, though. The one with the giants remained, but the baby one had been replaced with a small stone garden.

  It was a strange space. Where the doors to the building should have been instead there was a deep hollow, like somebody had gone at it with a hammer and chisel. Carving out space and benches and statues out of solid stone. It wasn't concrete, it was something else, but the names of stone eluded her.

  When she looked up at the building, the windows were blank, and she thought it might be solid all the way through. Wild, but why not.

  She sat now on one of the benches and stared up at the carvings. This one was a statue naked woman, holding a jug and reaching out as if to pour. She was half melded into the stone of the walls, but in a way which didn't look quite right. Closer inspection had revealed channels for water, and Rat wondered where she had been stolen from, what fountain was now missing its maiden.

  "Is this you?" She questioned the statue, kicking her legs back and forth, "is it you, you that's building this world, do I look upon the face of a god?"

  She paused, tilting her head, but no reply was forthcoming from the grey stone. "Or are you just plucked from somewhere, from another world? From somewhere in this one? From my world, but after..."

  The area was sheltered, but snow still blew in on the breeze, settling thinly on the gravel. Rat broke off her gaze and instead stared down at where her footprints had disturbed the thin layer of snow.

  She spoke quietly, her breath fogging in the air, and her stomach clenching around itself.

  "I hope you were stolen. I hope isn't the after. That I'm dreamin', that this is all just the brain tumour talking and at some point a doctor is gonna find me walking the streets and fix me. I'll go home and it'll be me and my dad and we'll make pancakes, or stupid things out of paper, we'll camp..."

  She realised she was panting for breath, hands clutching at the bench.

  Ahead of her, the statue stood unchanged, the grey blank face as lost as she was.

  "I just wanna go home."