Embracing the Night (Where Sleepers Fear To Tread)

For a fleeting instant, he shed the weight of time, feeling the pulse of life coursing through him. The child seemed to have breathed life into the hollow chambers of his heart, injecting an unexpected vitality into his veins. The sensation unsettled him, a disquieting reminder of vulnerability. The years fell away, leaving behind a man unguarded, a ruler stripped of his armor. He stood on the precipice of an emotion he had long denied, and it both frightened and exhilarated him.

Day after day seemed to a reveal a world filled with the promise of shared moments, bright laughter, and stolen fragments of a life unimagined. And the world watched, as the ruler, who for the first time in an eternity, felt the flutter of something resembling happiness-discovering with it, a fragment of his own humanity.

The story of how it wasn't about Athanasia in the beginning-about how it wasn't about Athanasia at all, really-to how it became all about Athanasia in the end.