I Believe In the World Right In Front of Me

Never in the entirety of her second life had sleep been capable of sneaking up on Fianna, and when it finally caught her in its chokehold and robbed her of consciousness, its spell could never conquer her for a whole night.

Its record lay between seven hours and eight, but its usual grip could barely last for half of that painfully average number. The woman ran on a humble handful of sleep that many would call a nap’s worth, barely three hours would pass from the moment her head rolled back into her pillow and her fingers lost touch with the book in their grasp, to the moment her eyes fluttered open and attuned themselves to the dark. An early bird by nature, Fianna could race and best the sun without a second thought, with hours left to spare before it finally caught up.

This morning had been no exception. Her lantern was shifted from the desk to her bed to accompany the dog-eared book she had dropped in her sleep, and now that dawn had begun to give chase to the dark, shared with its owner the doorway that she had gently, almost silently, slid open, the pair of them now exposed to the inky black silhouette of the horizon and the first sign of dawn.

All of this, according to the silver pocket watch beneath her pillow, before four in the morning.

The three quarters mark in her novel was fast approaching by the time the dawn gained her full attention. Hands flecked with scabs gently returned the book to a closed stance without the supervision of her eyes, enchanted by the glow of the sky. The warm tropical green tint of dawn crawled up from behind the horizon whilst the ultramarine night claimed the farthest stretch of the celestial sea, tiger-striped with midnight blue clouds, like ripples carved into the sand by a rising tide. Not a single sparkle from a single star punctured through the heavy cloak of heaven, the moon itself sheltered in a sanctum of clouds.

Yet in spite of an absence of the key elements necessary to create a picturesque nightscape, the sight remained spectacular, and as she placed her weight against her door frame and inhaled deeply in the hopes that a breath from such a sky would feel just as glorious as merely observing it, Fianna pondered unto herself - wondered if somewhere in the court, between the ivory towers that dressed the horizon, someone else’s eyes were opening at this ungodly hour to appreciate the sky as she did.