It's funny how when something important happens, it feels like the earth should stop. But her earth-shattering event failed to do the shattering. The earth continued spinning, the sun still rose, and the other 7 billion people on the planet failed to recognize that an Earth-Shattering Event had taken place while they slept.

Thirteen hours.

A hero, a monster, a baby (a brother), and a journey. Like a greek epic, but somehow not, because those epics were remembered. Those epics had stood the test of time, but hers hadn't. The world had continued spinning, and spinning, and spinning, and before she had spun with it but now she couldn't keep up. Now she was motionless. And the world spun.

Her body improves. Her vision becomes perfect. Her skin flawless. Her eyes greener than spring grass. Her cheekbones sharpen and her hair grows ever longer. Anatomy shifts, she feels it in her sleep and greets something slightly different in the mirror each morning. One day, the changes stop.

One year later, one year and thirteen hours since the Incident.

Sarah sits in her classes, calmly waiting for her high school career to culminate in something useful, burying memories under piles of sand.

Sand in an hourglass, the hands of a clock, rushing, ticking, times slows for no one (and for some, it simply runs out).

She is not always Sarah. But when she is, the waiting comes easy, because waiting is easy for storytellers, and sometimes she is that, and sometimes she is that which she tells. After being Sarah, and a Storyteller, and a Story, there are left over parts, floating around, but she ignores those as best she can.

She sits in her classes, listens to her English teacher talk about shakespeare and faerie courts, tricksters and magic. She ignores the odd ache for a place she knew for such a short length of time; a blink, really. Blink and you'll miss it. She does.

When she graduates that spring, the flowers around her bow, petals sweep the ground, and rise with fluency. She says nothing to them, but cuts down the rosebush outside her bedroom window that night. It's returns the next day in full bloom.

She turns eighteen in July.

There is a white owl on her windowsill, pecking at the thin line of salt shellacked into the paint. She took the appropriate precautions and was pleased when they proved to be effective. But it appears the red ribbon in her hair was futile, as the bird's focus never wavers. Nor wanes, she discovers over the next week. Relentless, its determination follows her to the local community college, the library, and the grocers. She doesn't wander far from home, or visit much else. Her world is in between yellowed pages and dust, as it always had been. That, after all, brought her to be the way she is.

Sarah is twenty-one, old enough to drink. The storyteller is ageless. The remains are forever and never-born. Sarah is twenty-one, alone, downing a shot of vodka in tribute to her birthday. Birthdays were important to her. An annual reminder that life is fleeting, that survival is possible, and tradition perseveres through change. The pagan holiday has shifted and morphed into the current marketable commodity, but she doesn't spare too many thoughts for the forgotten; their time has passed.

A black glove of lambskin, soft as rose petals against her throat. He never lost her. Eternity breeds patience, and his was ribbon thin, curling around her wrists when her focus falters, when her eyes shut, and her guard lowers.