The Dreaming Child: Fantasy

The post of Writer for the Sleeping Child was a fairly prestigious one, and well-paid, and it wasn't as if anything bad was happening to the Child. The Child--slept. The Child would always sleep, until it was no longer a child. Then it would wake up and be taught all the things about the world that a non-sleeping child would have learned from the time it could open its eyes and look around. Except how to talk, and certain other aspects that were significantly distressing to most people who interacted with the former Child. He was pondering what he would do when the Child woke. He had not had it for its full life; there was a previous Writer who had decided to stay on for the next Child. He did not think he could do that. He knew too much of her sighs and the slight lisp with which she talked, he knew what many of the symbols meant and annotated them in the Writing as should be sent. Some Writers adopted the Child when it awoke, took it home with them and made it part of their family. If he had a family, he thought he would have done that, but he did not. He knew very little, really, about even normal children, and so he worried that he would not be able to take proper care of her. His family still lived out in the country, by the foothills, a journey of a week's length that he made only once a year, in time for the annual Moon Dreaming festival. He would not be able to rely on their support as another unprepared father might. And he could not move back, first because his entire life as far as he could remember living there was devoted to escaping, and partly because his only chance at making a good income to support a family was to stay in the city. He did want a family, he just wasn't particularly good at talking with women, and he knew none of the ways that a solitary man might acquire a family. If his sisters had lived nearby, he assumed he most likely would have been married for a good ten years already.


Inspiration: http://www.danielmerriam.com/index.php?option=com_ponygallery&Itemid=0&func=detail&id=150
Story potential: High.
Notes: She wakes up early, say at--oh--ten. And no, there is not nor ever will be anything romantic between them. Ew. But because she wakes up early, she retains more of the powers of the Dreaming Child than normal, at least when she sleeps. And then plot ensues.