It marked the passage of hours with lines circling its bowl. Between the markings, hieroglyphs showed a woman cutting jewels, playing with a fox, and teaching pupils. On the darker side of the bowl, the woman lay abed. “All these years I wanted to sleep fewer hours in a day.” Hiresha watched water stream out of a pinhole in the bowl, showing the acceleration of time as the rippling surface descended line by line. “My thinking may be in need of a sea-change.” “Now we’re scared.” Intuition cuddled a wooden doll of a fox, a dab of black paint on the tip of its tail. “And excited. What if we could gain our powers while awake? We could dance on the clouds!” “Even the Lord of the Feast struggles to overcome the conventions of his magic,” Hiresha said. “I’d be foolish to try to reteach a lifetime of habit while the Murderfish tears the island apart.” The Jeweled Feaster leaned so far forward in her mirror that condensation from her breath pulsed across the glass in a heart shape.
