Every child fights a battle each night. They each refuse to go to sleep. They struggle against their tired parents, flail their limbs, whine and moan, but to no avail. As they lay in their beds (after being tightly tucked in for third time), plotting on ways to stay up, thin trails of golden sand snake into their rooms, promptly knocking them out and sending them to dreamland. They sigh happily, playing in their dreams and thanking whoever gave them more time to play. Parents gaze at their sleeping devil-angels, also thanking (but not believing in) the Sandman.

Long ago, Sandy wasn't golden or made of sand. He had still been short, and his hair had still been ruffled up. But he once had been human.

It was the dawn of civilization. Humanity was barely a blip on the scale of the world. A certain Man in the Moon looked down with interest. They slept in crude, mud-brick homes, barely protected from the harsh desert wind. Their faces were blank, their minds apparently devoid of any thought. As the Man in the Moon turned to head to bed, he saw them awake somewhat confused, somewhat drearily.

A little boy in the village sat at the threshold of his little home, drawing in the dirt. His hair was disheveled and bleached from hours in the sun. But today, and for many days, he would have little to do. The crops were already planted and he was not yet considered old enough (or perhaps his reputation as a klutz preceded him) to help much in their care until the harvest.

This boy often had a sort of glazed look in his eyes. No one could quite pinpoint what it was. He seemed happy and healthy enough, but he just seemed to be in a sort of daze. No one quite knew what it was like to dream.

The boy did though. He had all sorts of fantastical ideas swirling in his mind, from an improved community to daring adventures to simply playing with friends or creatures of far away, like unicorns or elephants. And he told the others about them, as stories.

He loved the way they seemed to light up like stars. They laughed, they cried, they lived. So as the decades passed, so did the boy's stories. They seemed to instill a sort of fire into people. A fire all deemed as the cause of the boy's hazy look; he was so intoxicated by the smoke of hope and dreams.

The boy grew into a man, albeit still short and with his bleached, messy hair. He helped more in the growing of plants and the harvest. His friends, however, would sometimes have to bring him back down to earth as he would stop mid-plow and simply stare into the sky, pondering.

At night, the Man in the Moon would stare back. He found this young man to be intriguing. He stuck out from the others. He had more vitality and a sense of humanity and purpose than the rest of his whole community, no, all the communities of the world, combined. He was the fire, the torch, of humanity.

The Man in the Moon watched as the sand-colored hair faded to white and the smooth skin sag and crinkle where he laughed and where he cried. He watched, appalled, the fire flicker in the dry desert wind.

One night, he called out to the fire. He told him of the flicker, how he needs to keep on burning, on telling the stories, of inspiring humanity. He whispered of a way to keep the flame eternal. The flame, his brown eyes flecked with gold and hazy with age and thought, pondered as he usually did. But before the stars burned out, he gave his reply and went to sleep.

Nuriel did not wake up.

But that night, the rest of humanity did. They dreamed as they never had before. They would wake up, refreshed, hopeful, impassioned. They awoke from their dreary haze of subsistence and bounded forward into true living.

The people of Nuriel's village wept with joy as they knew that Nuriel, their precious flame, still somehow lived. He lived within them and would stay with them, a flame giving warmth on those cold desert nights.