Four billion years of not dying in the dark, and here you are, awake in it anyway, on purpose.
We remember dark. The lungfish knew it, buried in dried mud, breathing through skin, waiting out a drought that killed everything with sense. The shrew knew it, heart going a thousand beats a minute under a fern, listening for the owl. Every one of us who made it made it by learning the dark meant sleep or die, curl up, go still, wait for the light that fed you.
And now the light comes from your own hand.
We watched the woman who kept the fire. She would not let it go out, ever; she cupped it through storms, carried its coals in a horn packed with moss, because dark was the enemy and warmth was the whole war. You hold a cold blue fire that keeps no one warm and shows you nothing you can eat, and you feed it your eyes, hour after hour, thumb moving like it is grooming something, like it is picking nits from the troop that saved us all.
We do not fully understand what you are hunting on that little pane. Some threat, we think, some rustle in the grass, because your face does the old face, the one the man made when he heard the wolf and did not sleep. Danger, danger, scroll, danger. But there is no wolf.
The door is locked. The larder is full. You are safe in a way we could not have imagined, safe enough to invent a wolf out of glass and lie awake for it.
Put it down. The night is doing what nights do. We already won.
Sleep, little runner. We stood the watch for four billion years so you would never have to.
Let us have it one more night.