The soft warm one has stopped moving except for a single flexing digit, which it drags across a small bright square of cold light again and again, the way a slow trickle of meltwater will wear a groove into me over some ten thousand summers. But this creature does it in the span of one darkness.
Down and down and down, the little claw goes, and the light throws its flat glow up onto a face gone slack and pale, and I feel, dimly, through the ground and the bedding and whatever it lies upon, the faint drum of a heart beating far too quickly for something that intends to last.
I have watched water do patient work. I have watched a root split me over the length of a forest. This is neither patient nor work. This is a small heat, held very still, pouring itself into a glowing pebble that gives nothing back, hour upon hour of the short dark, while the good long dark of proper sleep is squandered.
It will do this until the sky grays. Then it will rise, heavy and slower than yesterday, and stagger off into its one brief afternoon.
The light in its hands will go out. The creature itself will go out, soon enough, gone before the next frost in the reckoning that matters. And the groove it wore into itself tonight, that frantic worried channel, will smooth over and vanish before I have so much as shifted my weight against the hill.