Of all life’s joys, Maren always considered sleep the ultimate. Guild-life had suited her sleeping desires: read all night, wake up whenever her body felt rested, take whatever job remained, get paid, and repeat. It had been a heavenly arrangement. But now...
“...twenty-eight... twenty-nine...”
There they were again, the signal to her suffering known as the waking world.
Maren groaned, her eyelids quivering as she pried them open. From outside her tent, heavy breaths counted what were undoubtedly calisthenic repetitions. Undoubtedly, because this was the fourth time in a row they’d woken her. A quick tablet search told her exactly what she figured: it wasn’t even five in the morning!
“Come oooon,” Maren grumbled. “Why can’t you sleep like a normal person?”
“...thirty-seven... thirty-eight...”
Mav’s early-morning workouts were torture. But in reality, it wasn’t like he knew she’d gone to bed only an hour ago.
But why wouldn’t he? I’ve been going to bed at the same time every morning and been exhausted the next day when he wakes me up! It’s his fault for not seeing it.
“…fifty-one... fifty-two...”
Maren turned away from the noise, clenching her eyes shut. But as time went on, she heard Mav shift from one exercise to the next, incessantly breathing his count, and Maren’s stupid brain wouldn’t let herself get back to sleep.
“Curse it,” she breathed.
Her tablet’s bright light illuminated the book she’d been reading before bed: Isle of the Night. It was a thrilling book about pirates, filled with daring seafaring adventures, treacherous battles, heartbreaking betrayals, and sanguine slayings. So the perfect book to calm oneself before bed.
The second time Mav had woken her, she’d tried to read the book to calm down. His ceaseless workouts, however, kept distracting her from the story. So it wasn’t peace and tranquility her mind needed right now, but a distraction.
She ruffled through her nylon bag and pulled out her book container, which fit in the palm of her hand. She placed it past the edge of her small mattress and pressed the thumbprint scanner. In seconds, the small container expanded to a three-by-five-foot bookshelf, doors opening to reveal all her most prized possessions. Sadly, this was the largest size-changing bookshelf she could afford, so she’d left many books behind at Radiant Dawn, her previous guild. She only took her absolute favorites with her. Picking those had been almost as difficult as leaving her guild family.
“One, two, three, four...”
Maren’s jaw clenched. A family she’d left for this. Mav was a good guy. He’d nearly died fighting a gargantuan monster that could have killed thousands. He’d abandoned his best friend, Koda, and his other Peace-Keeper Siblings and joined her guild, the first traveling one in Talam. Now, all they needed was one more person and they would be official. Then, Maren’s dream could begin.
But Mav was so–!
Stop! Maren scanned the bottom shelf of books, where she kept her scholarly manuscripts, all written in various long-dead languages. They ranged in their difficulty to translate. Some languages were simple as they were obvious ancestors of modern Talamese: a couple shared an alphabet and even one had archaic versions of Talamese words. Others were harder because they had different alphabets, but similar grammatical structures to known languages, as well as dictionaries to aid her research. Still others, however, were impossible. The script was so unfamiliar to her – in some cases groupings of lines bunched together or actual drawings – and she hadn’t been able to find a dictionary anywhere. She’d attempted to make her own, and she was pretty sure she’d gotten some words correct, but by herself she had no idea what those texts said.
“... eighteen, nineteen...”
She grabbed one of the medium-level difficulty books. It was a version of her favorite manuscript, with a cousin of the Talamese alphabet, but a grammatical structure where word-order mattered less than how word-endings changed. It was ancient, its binding brittle to the touch, with the words on its cover scratched out – which was an unfortunate reality for all of these books.
Maren flipped to a passage she knew quite well: Αὐτὸς δὲ ὁ κύριος τῆς εἰρήνης δῴη ὑμῖν τὴν εἰρήνην διὰ παντὸς ἐν παντὶ τρόπῳ. ὁ κύριος μετὰ πάντων ὑμῶν.
In essence, the author of the passage wished for the Lord of peace to grant peace to the reader always and forever. Which was easier said than felt when Maren had averaged about three hours of sleep the last four nights. But she moved from the passage, finding more difficult ones that she couldn’t simply translate from memory. When a particular passage troubled her, she flipped through another version of the book that was closer to Talamese, using it to help her translate the portion. It wasn’t until she straightened her back and stretched her arms did she notice the sun’s light pressed against her tent and Mav’s heavy breathing was silenced.
It was almost eight in the morning, according to her tablet. Three hours flew by like nothing, like they often did when she read. But now, in the silence, weariness heavied her eyelids. Without putting the manuscripts away, she flopped back onto her pillow and welcomed the soothing embrace of sleep.
For however little she knew she would enjoy it.