a moment of dawn

by PreludeInZ

Heavenward was a story about John and EOS. Heavenward reaches its conclusion in its eighth and final part. This is the eighth part of Heavenward. It follows the horizon's child, and concludes the series.

1. prologue

The sunrise is distinct from the dawn.

The sunrise has a precise astronomical definition—the instant at which the upper edge of the sun crosses over the horizon. Astronomically, sunrise consists of only a single moment, that brief, fleeting intersection of the edge of the Earth and the edge of the sun.

The dawn has a variety of definitions, technical and colloquial. Civil, nautical and astronomical dawn are all different things, and measured formally, by degrees. Dawn is something that heralds the sunrise, and happens in the slow lightening of the sky with the advent of the new day; subtle, gradual change. Dawn is a span of time that changes from season to season, from place to place. Dawn takes only minutes at the equator, can stretch out into weeks at the poles.

Dawn is many things in many places. It's easy to lose hold of the meaning in the colloquialism, to blur the line between the dawn and the daybreak, and not to understand that one begets the other. If the dawn is a curve, a progression of change over time, then the sunrise is the point that marks its end. The break of day marks the last moment of dawn.

Sometimes, it seems like all we get is a moment.