Silence and darkness were the only witnesses as Vyara Teodor slipped out from beneath her bedsheets. Though the nights were growing colder this late in the year she made no move toward the tattered wool robe that lay across the foot of the bed. Instead, she walked softly across the worn hardwood floor towards the bedroom door. Even in darkness, she could unfailingly navigate her way around the home she had lived in all of her fourteen years. Vyara grabbed the door by its latch and pulled. After squeaking in protest for only a brief moment the door yielded and slid open.

Beyond the door a narrow hallway sat still and empty save for a small wooden stand. Upon the stand rested a simple stone vase with a single sunflower. Vyara's room lay at one end of the hallway, and at the other end was her father's. At the hall's center, where the sunflower kept a silent vigil, an archway led into the main living area of the home and it was underneath that arch that Vayra now passed.

The sparsely furnished room had four simple wooden chairs neatly tucked under a wooden table barely big enough to accommodate them. A large woven rug, once brightly depicting flowers but now faded and patched, occupied the center of the floor. The only other furnishings in the room were an ordinary wooden desk with a single drawer and the small three-legged stool underneath it.

Silently Vyara retrieved the stool, placed it before the desk and then sat down upon it. She proceeded to pull open the drawer, revealing its occupants: blank sheets of parchment and a few charcoal pencils worn to nubs. From among them she first took one sheet of the parchment and placed it on the desk before her. Gingerly, as if handling a sacred and fragile relic, she picked up a pencil and placed it on the desk beside the parchment. After sliding the drawer closed a few moments passed where she sat there, upright and still, with hands folded neatly in her lap. Then, in the dead of night, she picked up the pencil and began to draw.

It began with a single line, rigid and bold, from one end of the sheet to the other. Following that she drew more lines, and then more and more and still more. Her movements were deliberate, as if she knew with a certainty what she was drawing and exactly how to draw it. Not once did she pause or hesitate, as if the image had always been there and she was simply revealing it. As she drew the only sound in the lightless room was the soft scratch of the pencil against the parchment. After less than an hour, she once again opened the drawer and with the same gentleness she used in retrieving the pencil she returned it. She slid the drawer closed and following that stood from the stool and returned it to its place under the desk.

Ever so carefully she picked up the drawing of between thumb and forefinger and then returned to her bedroom. There she knelt at the foot of her bed and pulled from underneath it a long, shallow wooden box. Stained dark and covered with intricate scrollwork that had been etched into its surface, the box was out of place amongst the more humble furnishings of the home. She unbuckled the leather strap that held it closed and lifted the lid. Loosely scattered inside the box were many, many sheets of parchment. Some were drawings eerily similar to the one she currently held, while some contained line after line of text. Curious patterns of dots and dashes arranged on rows of horizontal lines covered others with melodies Vyara had composed. She placed her newest drawing , which depicted a massive crystaline structure rising from the fog-covered ground, into the box and then secured the leather strap once more. Following that she slid the box back under the bed. Vyara then lay down on the bed and pulled the grey, moth eaten sheets up to her shoulders, having been asleep the whole time.