19: What do they think about before falling asleep at night?
It was after midnight; the time when the moon began its descent into the West, withdrawing its pale light from the bedchamber’s eastward window as it did. Curtains billowed in from the gusting breeze, their gossamer cloth a spectre in the night. The room itself seemed to be asleep… Save for the two verdant lights beaming from behind the bed’s canopy. Tyellan lay wide awake.
The prospect of sleep was something of a double-edged sword to the oracle. As elusive as it was, and all the more sweet for it, it was with dread that she allowed herself to sink into its embrace. Not every night brought nightmares, but those that did were made all the worse by the knowledge that somewhere, at some point, what she saw was real. Eldritch horrors, slaughter of soldiers, murder, betrayal, and loss… In every case, there was untold grief and pain. Tyellan mourned the lost as though she had been present herself, their blood on her hands.
In these late hours she wages her own battle between these inevitable terrors and her exhaustion. I must accept them, she tells herself. Every gift comes at a price. Or, Perhaps tonight I will dream of something much more palatable. Something that won’t wake me in a cold sweat, gasping for air, and forfeiting my sleep in panic. After decades of such nights as these Tyellan concedes that there is no rhyme or reason to which visions she receives. She still dares to hope otherwise.
