Usually, morning looks like morning — all oranges and pinks smeared across the sky like someone had knocked over their paint pots. But when I crawled out of our little campsite at the edge of Rainbow Meadows, the sky was just… gray. Flat, dull, boring gray. Like someone had taken the whole sunrise and replaced it with a very large piece of cardboard.
I blinked. I looked left. I looked right. I looked up again, just in case I’d missed something.
Nope. Still cardboard.
“Biscuit,” I said. “The sky is broken.”
Biscuit was already sitting up in her bedroll, her copper bowl-cut hair perfectly neat on one side and completely sideways on the other, which was unusual for her. She was staring upward with an expression I recognized — the one where her nose twitched like a rabbit’s before a big sneeze.
“It’s not broken,” she said slowly. “It smells like old socks. And also…” She sniffed again, more deliberately. “Sadness. Coming from the north.”
I had learned, since our adventures in Rainbow Meadows and everything with Baron Blaze’s ridiculous cape, to take Biscuit’s nose very seriously indeed. If Biscuit said something smelled like old socks and sadness, something was definitely, horribly wrong.
