Sleep is not as easy to achieve as you had hoped. Flashes of conversation from the night's delegation meeting replay over and over. Tears come as you relive your parents' final words to you - them saying goodbye before they head off to a nearby village. And dominating your mind, the scenes of how this new reality might play out in the days, months, and years ahead add more layers of anxiety and stress to your already impossible supply.

After hours of this restlessness you finally give up and get out of bed. The castle is quiet, but not necessarily asleep. You are startled by a guard posted outside of your chambers, initially unnoticed in your dim candle's light. You grunt at him and he nods once sharply in acknowledgement from his chair. Had he been an assassin you would've had no chance.

Exhausted and bleary you wander the hallways, thoughts still racing. You know it must be delirium from lack of sleep, but graphic ideations about escape invade your thoughts. Most iterations are far more permanent than moving away and hiding out, and the visions both scare and comfort you.

Hardly aware of your path in the darkness of the night, and the darkness of your thoughts, you find yourself outside of your parents' chambers. As a young child you would sneak into their room at night when you were frightened, or even when you just wanted their warm embrace. You had always been welcomed, snuggled in between them until you drifted off to sleep.

Tonight, however, your footsteps echo in the large suite's emptiness. The window is dark, the approaching new moon not offering much natural light. You don't need light, however, as you have memorized the space from sneaking in as a child, and this inability to see blurs the lines between reality and memory and dream. You can hear your parents' slumbered breathing and for a hopeful instant you let yourself believe they are alive, and then for another instant that they have come in spectral form - just to sleep in their chamber lest you wandered in needing them.

You climb the tall bed and take your place in the middle, where you would have nestled safe from the violent thunderstorm, disturbing nightmare, or strange sound that gives you an excuse to visit. Almost instantly the twisted gnarls of your thoughts calm and you sleep.