Legend IV – The Sleep Watcher

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It is said that every sleep is a borrowed space. No human, no animal, no wandering wind ever rests completely within itself – for in the hour of slumber, a guardian steps between the waking world and that of the dreaming. She has many names, but none that should be spoken over an open fire. The ancients simply call her the Sleep Watcher. Some imagine her as a woman, but those who claim to have met her face to face always report something different. A child spoke of a shadow with eyes of glassy dew. A dying man swore she was a tower of folded night skies. An old man, however, claimed she was nothing but a sound – the creaking of a door that no one had opened. Whether she has hands, no one knows. Yet she touches all. It is said that she did not come when the first dreamers were born – but long before. That she already walked through the world when no heart could yet beat. She is not the guardian of the sleepers, but the guardian of sleep itself. Not a servant, but a boundary. Her office is not mercy, but order. For dreams, so the ancient school of night-wise men teaches, are not toys. They are corridors. Some lead to one's own – some to another. And every night it is possible for a person to lose their way down the wrong passage. Therefore, it is said, the Sleep Guardian leaves no slumber unattended. Not to protect, but to prevent. An ancient monastery in the north of the Ashenlands preserves a single parchment describing her transgression. It tells of a king who boasted that he feared neither man nor god. He laughed at the legends and cried: "Let her come! I will await her awake!" For three nights he remained seated on his stone throne, his eyes wide open, his lips stretched into a triumphant slit. In the fourth night he was found asleep. In the fifth night he was still asleep. In the sixth night too. And in the seventh. And in the hundredth. They carried him to the sun, to the storm, to the ice – but nothing moved him anymore. No dream twitched, no eyelid trembled. And they murmured in fear: She has not visited him. She has left him. Since then, people have known: Not all sleep is mercy. Some are judgments. But there is a second tradition, less well-known because it was not recorded in parchment, but passed on through the mouths of wanderers. It tells of a village in the Misty Valley whose inhabitants were struck by a night in which no one could sleep. They lay in their beds, with burning eyelids and throbbing temples, but sleep recoiled from them like a frightened animal. At first they thought it was coincidence, then illness, then a divine test. For three nights they begged for rest. At the end, they gathered in the village square and called out loudly into the darkness: "Sleepkeeper! Come! Take us!" At that same hour, silence fell over the village. So deep that even the wind seemed to be listening.