“Staring in the darkness, trying to sleep. My body was aching with tiredness. My limbs were numb. My sightless eyes were crazed with light/ I was dying of oblivion, but it wouldn't come. I didn't think I've ever sleep again.”

“I can’t think. I can’t work or sleep. My body aches for you. I can make you want me again. Let me try.”

“I'm losing my mind without you.” His lips were gliding down my neck, his tongue stroking over my racing pulse. He sucked on my skin and pleasure radiated through me. “I can’t think. I can’t work or sleep. My body aches for you. I can make you want me again. Let me try.”

“I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”

“You were sleeping?" said Princess One."No," I said. "Sometimes I just like to lie in the dark for hours with my eyes closed.”

“This darkness is for sleeping, for escape; it's where I go when the other places ache with light; this is where I curl up and close my eyes and darkness flows like lava, and I dissapear into what, into nothing, into pure dark, into what there is before there is anything else.”