The room was quiet and warm, filled only with the soft hum of an air monitor somewhere near the corner. Outside the windows, the world was completely black, bathed in the silence around four o'clock in the morning. Azaria had been lying in the bed for hours, floating in uninterrupted darkness. Her body was completely exhausted, weighed down by a bone-deep weakness. Every single muscle and her skin felt strange.
Slowly, Azaria began to drag herself up out of the deep sleep. It had been dreamless and she did not remember going to sleep. Her eyelids felt impossibly heavy, fluttering open bit by bit. At first, she couldn't make sense of anything she was looking at. Her vision was extremely blurry, smearing every object into blobs of light and shadow. She blinked several times, trying desperately to focus, but the world remained a confusing smear. She felt a tightness in her limbs, a dragging sensation that made even twitching her fingers feel like a massive effort.
