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To have a reprieve from the struggles of life was a truly beautiful thing.

Gloria, despite all of the troubles she'd gone through in her young life of sixteen years, was lucky enough to have a place that she considered her own little hideaway, and no matter what life threw at her, she could always find solace within it.

Her parents passed away when she was of such a young age that she couldn't possibly fend for herself, and though being adopted in by her aunt and uncle seemed like a blessing in the interim, the years that followed weren't quite so nice.

The initial sympathy over the loss of her parents eventually faded, and Gloria, despite how kind she tried to be to her relatives, often found herself at odds with them. They didn't see eye to eye on anything, it seemed, and as she grew older and developed her own opinions about the world around her, the distance between herself and her aunt and uncle widened from a tiny creek to a massive, spanning ocean.

Most nights, when she was done fighting with her adoptive parents, she would hide away in her tree house in their backyard; it was her home away from home, and although it was no greater than fifty feet away from the siding on the back end of the house, Gloria felt like she was on another planet entirely when she took up residence there. The small blades of grass rose up in her imagination like redwood trees, and slowly, as her mind sunk into the illusion, the dissenting voices of hatred were swallowed up by the void between Gloria, and the world she wished to escape.

In that way, she was like so many other teenagers, and her relatives, in their apathy, refused to ever chase her when she went outside.

"I swear...they've known me my whole life," Gloria muttered, as she thumbed through the pages of one of her favorite books, "And it's like they know nothing about me! They only remember the things I hate...and they never let me forget about them!"

Perhaps, on some level, Gloria was being melodramatic, but hers hadn't been an easy life, and sadly, her relatives never gave her the strength to build herself back up; they only ever tore her down, once they, themselves, were done grieving about her fallen parents.

It created a darkness inside of Gloria, who was otherwise a kind, free-spirited individual. None of her friends could ever find and unkind word to say about her, and despite the poor treatment from her relatives, everyone else treated her with the kind of respect that could only be earned by being a genuinely nice, loving person.

It pained Gloria to not have anyone to share her love with, and most nights, she sat in the tree house until the wee hours of the morning, reading through story after story of star-crossed lovers and forlorn adventurers, searching for something that would fill the void in their empty lives.

She identified with them so heavily that some nights, the pages would carry her to sleep, and she would drift right into her dreams, finding them populated with the fantastical lands and characters that granted her the comfort to fall asleep in the first place.

Though she often found this to be the greatest of blessings, she didn't realize that it was hiding what might end up being her greatest curse.

**

Another night had passed, and Gloria was wrapped up in a mountain of blankets, book clutched to her chest, her head just barely poking out of the masses of fabric so that she could breathe. She'd fallen asleep in the tree house again, and this time, it wasn't rays of sunlight that brought her back to consciousness.

It was something much worse, when the proper circumstances came to light.

A cold sensation gathered on Gloria's forehead, and then dripped down over the side of her cheek as it melted away. In her dreams, she felt the tears of a desperate lover crying over her body, and the magic of their romance revived her.

Instead, she awoke to feel another cold flake on her forehead, and slowly, it melted as well, leaving a pair of streams down the side of her face.

"...Snow...?"

There was no snow in the forecast, when Gloria fell asleep that night. A free spirit, but also a wise one, Gloria was the kind of bovine who stayed aware of her surroundings, especially after her parents passed. She knew the risks of sleeping in an open tree house in the wrong kind of weather, and with windows literally cut out of the wood, there was nothing to keep the elements from coming into her hiding place.

Snow was already filling the small tree house, and as she struggled back into consciousness, Gloria shivered, even wrapped up in her mountain of blankets. The night before, she'd only trudged out to the tree house in only a light jacket and a long skirt, with no leggings underneath. She could already feel a chill building up, and though the snow wasn't falling any longer, a quick turn of her head out the window showed blankets of snow covering the entire neighborhood, and naturally, the backyard was a complete and utter mess of the same.

Tugging her slippers tight against her hooves to keep them on, Gloria tried to ignore the bitter chill that was building up within her body as she climbed out of the pile of blankets and made her way down the old, rickety ladder on the side of the tree. Taking a deep, heavy, regretful breath, she jumped down from the last step, and her feet and hooves were immediately covered up by the deep, heavy snow: even the bottom hem of her skirt was getting soaked, as she tried to race for the back door.

Struggling through the chilling precipitation and cursing her bad luck, Gloria finally made her way to the back door of the house, but naturally, it was locked from the night before. With no pockets, Gloria had no key...and worse still, no cell phone.

"...That's okay, I'll...I'll just knock! They'll hear me and let me in," Gloria realized, as she banged on the back door a few times, and waited.

She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered in place as she stood there...but there was no answer.

WHAM WHAM WHAM. She slammed her forearm against the door with such force that it shook, but after another minute of shivering, there was still no answer.

Trudging over the side, Gloria stepped over the back window of the garage, and her heart sunk into the pit of her stomach as she noticed the family car was missing; she was alone, freezing, and the house was completely locked up. She knew she'd be in terrible trouble if she broke one of the windows to get inside, and thanks to the fenced off back yard, she couldn't get to the front of the house anyway, and she couldn't reach the windows in the back.

Her paws were nearly going numb already as she jogged across the backyard to the fence, and her slippers were the only thing keeping her from falling over in the heavy snowfall. The fur just above her hooves was still soaked, and her ankles were growing colder by the second as her skirt kicked around with her pace.

Sandals didn't make for great speed, however, as she Gloria leapt for the top of the fence, she tripped over and fell forward, kicking one of her sandals into the air and leaving her to fall flat on her face.

" Oooomf! Ugh...s-seriously?" she groaned, cursing her continued misfortunes, as she pushed down against the snow. Her light jacket, already too thin to do much against the weather, was completely soaked...and worse still, when she set her hoof down on the ground, she immediately had to yank it back up to her own body. "Oh, come on! How the heck did I lose a sandal in all of this?"

If not for the bright, green band around the top of the sandal, Gloria might have never found it. Frustrated eyes of cool blue scanned the white blanket of the yard, but it was hard to focus when she was shivering so badly that her teeth were chattering.

Gloria worried that if it were still snowing outside, she might have never found the missing footwear, but as she literally hopped around the yard on one hoof, she tripped over once again, and as she fell...she fell straight down into the missing sandal, catching it on one of her short, stubby horns.

"Yes! I knew I'd be able to get you back!" Gloria tried to keep her spirits and hopes up as she pulled the green sandal from among her dark, raven locks and slipped it back over her hoof, but it was a short lived victory. She had no idea how long her aunt and uncle would be away from home for, and though the snow had stopped, she wasn't adequately dressed to be out in such weather. She couldn't hop her way over the fence in the backyard, and she didn't have any way to contact anyone else.

Most people would already be gone for the day around her, so neighbors weren't a viable option, either. Gloria was truly beside herself, and though she considered herself to be a resourceful bovine, she'd put herself in a tougher situation than she ever needed to be.

Standing still was just sending a deeper chill through her flesh, however, and her sandals were completely soaked with the snow as it began to melt around her body heat, just slightly.

"I guess...I guess I could go back into the tree house?" Gloria thought to herself, though that was only good as a last-ditch effort. She didn't really want to resort to her tree house, after the kind of trouble that it put her into in the first place, but the more she stared down the fences around her, the taller they looked. The more she thought about the idea of breaking a window to climb into the house, the more she realized that the trouble simply wouldn't be worth it, not to mention that she could end up getting severely injured by the broken glass.

It was bad enough to be so cold, but she didn't relish in the idea of dying in her garage, bleeding out from her stomach.

Hooves that were finally numb from the terrible weather picked up again and began moving for the tree house. Gloria knew that it was only a temporary solution to a longer problem, but she really didn't think she had any other options, at that point.

She also didn't realize was a struggle it would be for her, just to get back up into the tree house.

SCHLUP! Small holes formed in the yard during the fall, thanks to the poor treatment of the yard, and though spring was rapidly approaching and thawing the ground, this latest snowstorm had covered up the spots that Gloria would normally know by heart.

Her leg sunk right into the muddy dirt, and her long, adorable skirt was stained with the same dark, gritty mess as she gripped her thigh and pulled up as hard as she could. Her hoof eventually pried free from the freezing cold tunnel of sinking ground and snow, but sadly, her sandal never came back up with it, and her eyes shrunk down to tiny dots in a sea of panicked white.

"N-no...no, please...give it back, damn it!" she yelled at the mindless earth, as she looked down into the hole that was left by her paw print. Her sandal was already buried somewhere deep in the sinking ground, and snow was filling in the gap around it, as she threw her paws at the ground and tried scraping snow away from where her sandal once was.

Despite her best efforts, the sandal wasn't appearing, and tears began to well up in the corners of her eyes as she fell backward into the snow, unfortunately soaking the bottom of her skirt and leaving her even colder than she was before. It was somehow a less painful chill than the one she felt on her hooves, but it wasn't something that she could sustain for very long.

The best source of comfort that she could find was the one that was waiting for her all along, and with the last efforts that she could muster in her poor mental state, she scrambled over to the ladder of the tree house and began to climb. Without the second sandal, it was a mighty struggle, but she finally did reach the old, rough wooden floor of the tree house and crawled across it, back into the pile of blankets, which still retained a little bit of the warmth that she left in them before.

Diving in, she wrapped herself up the best that she could, and pulling off the sandal that remained, she held it in tight against her stomach and hugged it, as if to assure it that she would find the companion to it when the snow finally melted. She knew that spring was coming soon, and hopefully, her relatives would be returning soon, as well.

She never felt that she could trust them, but right then, she didn't have anyone else to turn to.

"Dunno what I was thinking, ever leaving this place," Gloria wondered aloud, as she used the blankets around her body to wipe the tears from her eyes. She dried them from her cheek, as well, as she folded her legs up into her body and sat right above her hooves, doing everything that she could to keep them dry and warm, even though almost every inch of her body had gotten soaked in the process of making her way back to the tree house. It all felt so foolish and unnecessary to her, as she had one last thought of making a daring rescue of the lost piece of footwear.

She didn't know that she could stand the cold any longer, however, and as regrettable as it felt, she knew that she just had to leave it there until the snow melted.

There was little solace to be had in the meantime, but she was certainly in the right place to find it. The blankets filled her with a new warmth in minutes, and her shivering body and chattering teeth came to settle much sooner than she expected. She picked one of her favorite books, detailing the long, terrifying march of a hero across some of the most treacherous terrain in all of the kingdom, and for just a moment, she felt comfort in knowing that she had her own adventure of a similar nature.

She only hoped that when the time came, she'd have gained enough strength from her experience to save her own unusual damsel in distress.