Time

23 hours

The faint rustle of turning pages filled the room as she continued to leaf through the large tome resting on the desk in front of her. It was an old thing, the pages yellowed and chipped with age. The original text was faded and hard to read, especially since someone had gone through and written in the margins of almost every page. The cover was worn, the old leather beginning to crack in several places. The golden trim around the edges had long since lost its glimmer, now simply a faded gray. The binding that held the whole thing together was beginning to fray, the book close to falling apart. Still, she read on, carefully, tenderly turning each page as her eyes scoured over the words and diagrams contained within the wizened novel.

She had much to learn.

Coming to the end of the current page, she paused, her lavender eyes flicking up to stare at the shelves of the desk. They were filled with different assortments of materials: clay, gems, fabrics of all types and colors, beads, buttons, cotton, teeth, bottles of various colorful liquids, thread, needles. The shelves were overflowing. Tacked onto the wall between the shelves were dozens of pieces of paper, each one containing a diagram of anatomy. String ran across the wall like spiderwebs, connecting similar pages together. It was a chaotic jumble of information.

This would come in handy later.

Her eyes were immediately drawn to an item sitting amongst the chaos of objects: a small hourglass resting within a wooden stand. It was a simple thing with symbols etched into the wood. There appeared to be no means of turning it, nor any axle on which it could spin. It was currently running, a small trickle of sand flowing from the full upper half into the empty lower half. It had only just started but a few minutes ago, but the stream of sand was steady. It glowed a faint red in the dim, murky room.

The room was disheveled, a layer of dust covering everything. It was disturbed in some places due to recent activity; hoof prints could be seen in the dust on the floor, two sets clearly distinguishable.

Continuing to stare at the sand for a few more seconds, she shook her head before snorting softly. Wings rustled by her side as she turned her attention back to the ancient tome before her. Turning the page, she winced as it began to crack, a tear appearing on the bottom of the page. She held her breath as she finished the motion. Nothing more happened and she went back to her reading, her eyes darting across the page at a fevered pace. She was barely halfway through the book, and she still had many pages to go.

She continued with her task, the world silent around her except for the dry rasp of pages turning and the soft hiss of sand.

Time was short, and she had much to do...