Timepiece

*PREFACE*

"Is she ready this time, do you think?"

"They're always ready when we send them. Now stop worrying."

"But it's supposed to be different this time. Something is supposed to happen, and not one knows what it is-"

"Calm down. She'll be fine. She's been given a good mind, a strong heart."

"Then she might not even make it past the first task! Those are two such conflicting things you know, the mind and heart. They don't go together as well as you'd think."

"Plenty of others have made it through with both go those things."

"But she's not *like* the others! She is different, just as they said!"

"She's beautiful."

"They're always beautiful."

"But this one is different, remember? Look at those eyes. They look like snow. And her hair is nearly chestnut."

"It's much darker then last year's."

"I don't know if I've ever *seen* hair brighter then last year's."

"The last one had a very nice voice."

"Ironic, wasn't it?"

"Terribly."

"It's almost time. We should let her be."

"And her name?"

"Leah."

"She's the 2,014th. I thought that she deserved something special."

"She is special all on her own. Now, come, we must go. Before she wakes."

___________________________________________________________________

Born with a tick of the clock, January 1st, 12:00am. Midnight.

The girl remembered waking up in still, muffled darkness. The kind that looked as if someone had carelessly snapped a cheap Papermate pen over the entire world, leaving it coated in slick blue-black ink. White flakes had pirouetted gently from the sky, twirling and leaping in the last rendition of The Nutcracker. They freckled the sky like falling stars, hiding the night.

A blue blanket was wrapped around her, though she wasn't cold. For a long while she looked around curiously, observing the world like an owlet dropped out of it's nest. Then she stood. On her shaky legs, she stumbled over two items lying next to her.

In the nearby crystal powder had sat two things. Why, she didn't know. She'd reached for one of them without thinking, fingers fumbling in the cold. She jerked her hand away when she felt the startlingly cold bite of the...metal? No, it couldn't be. It was softer then that, and combined with the startling image of what she could only guess to be a reflection helped her to understand what it was. A mirror, paneled with dark and elaborately carved wood. Walnut perhaps? She didn't know how she knew. Her face in the little mirror came as a surprise to her. Dark brown hair that wound down her back in a wavy mane, tumbling past her shoulders and stopping at the middle of her ribs, grey-white wide-set eyes, slender artist's fingers, and a face that was shaped like a Valentine.

She set it down slower then she wanted to. Perhaps it was because of the cold, her stiff digits betraying her in the darkness. The face in it was so strange, so unexpected...Though if you'd asked her to tell you what she was expecting, you would have been met with silence. Just silence, because she didn't know either. Maybe she'd expected the wind, howling in her place. Later on, it seemed more likely then anything else. Especially the unfamiliar face that she'd seen staring back at her.