HER SLEEP WAS DEEP AND ENDLESS, A LONG SLOW UNWINDING of time and space. She floated on the air currents of the world, riding the back of the wind, gliding like a bird across the sky from light to dark, day to night. Her journey was smooth and undisturbed, and she drifted in her dreams from the real to the imagined and back again. At times, she dwelled in the past amid memories of what had once been and now was forever gone, as if she were paging through a book in which pictures captured perfectly the years of her life. At times, she was cocooned by blackness with no pictures, no memories, and no sense of what had been or might be; only a warm, comforting sense of well-being.

But at other times, she could hear and see and smell and taste the world about her, the one that was real and present and active even though she lay dormant. She could see the faces of those she knew and hear their words as they lived their daily lives while she slept. The voices whispered and buzzed and told her of the fears and hopes and joys and promises of the people she monitored in her subconscious, tracking their movements and reading their thoughts in a slow, languid unraveling that was able to penetrate even the deepest layers of her sleep. The effort came unbidden and as a consequence of the magic that shaped her half-life sleep, so it was always there, weaving its way through the stretches of darkness and sudden bursts of dreaming and small moments of remembering. It was there in the way that her breathing was there, a function of her body, a necessary reaction to her need to stay alive and informed within the confines of her strange and special sleep.

She drifted and spun, waiting for the time when she would be awakened. She flew unfettered, knowing that one day, when it was time, waking would come, brought about by a hand on her shoulder or a voice in her ear.

Or come instead when her own monitoring of the world told her that it was time …

Time …

Time …

Her eyes blinked open, and Khyber Elessedil, Ard Rhys of the Fourth Druid Order, came awake.

She lay wrapped within coverings in a chamber whose walls were layered with tapestries and whose windows were covered and sealed with heavy drapes. There were no lamps or candles in the room, and the light that seeped through past the edges of the drapes was pale and gray. It was either early morning or evening. She did not move at first, but lay collecting her thoughts and recovering her memories from where she had shelved them when she first entered the Druid Sleep. Years ago now, she guessed, but it was impossible to tell without talking to someone who had been awake and monitored time’s passing while she slept.