The horses in the stable went wild; they knew of the coming storm. They felt it in their bones. Something was wrong, deeply wrong. Inside, the halter chains rattled and shook, wild with their fear, as the horses reared and bucked, thundering against the earth in frantic unison. The old, weathered walls trembled, shedding flakes of red-orange paint that swirled through the air like sparks from a fire, settling onto the floor. The barn was a mess—hay scattered everywhere, stale and untouched for weeks, desperately needing to be swept up. With all the chaos, it wouldn't have been a surprise if the paint itself had sparked a fire, igniting the hay into flames.

But outside, the world was still. The trees stood motionless, the grass swayed in a soft whisper, and the sun shone brightly, indifferent to the storm inside.

Yet the frenzy in the stable fed itself, a cycle of growing madness that spiraled into infinity, an Ouroboros of fear and chaos. One by one, the horses saw the paint's bright splashes as flames, and one by one, they kicked out, striking the walls and stirring up more sparks. The cycle repeated over and over—fear giving birth to the very thing it feared, chaos struggling to contain itself. The horses, in their panic, created their own storm.

Hours bled into days, days into months, months into years, and still the horses flared their nostrils and struck the walls, their hooves ringing out in defiance. Decades became centuries, centuries to millennia, and still the horses continued their frantic dance. Their hooves battered the walls, until the vibrant red paint that once adorned them now stained their own coats. They fought with all their might against an invisible tempest, their fear ever deepening as they became more and more covered in the very thing they dreaded.

Eventually, when the paint had all but vanished from the walls, leaving only the raw, bare wood behind, the horses, with a strange desperation, tore those walls down. Perhaps they thought that by destroying the shelter, they might stave off the storm they believed was closing in on them. Perhaps they thought the open sky would protect them.

And, in a way, they got what they wished for. The rubble of the barn collapsed, the walls they’d so desperately fought against tumbling down with the force of a final, cataclysmic release. The horses were buried beneath the ruins, the wind from their violent struggle scattering the last remnants of the red paint. It swirled away, carried on the wind, and drifted far and wide, touching lands beyond the barn, beyond the stable.

Maybe in their final moments, the horses found peace. Maybe, in the afterlife, they no longer needed to fight, no longer needed to scream in terror at an enemy that was never truly there. Or maybe, in some other corner of the universe, they discovered that they did not like the color yellow either.

And perhaps, it all began again.