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People think of dawn and think of Pelor. Think of the blinding light of the sun as it breaches the horizon, gold and orange and amber turning darkness into light. They think of sunset and of the sun, think of Pelor's brightness against the dark, of the heat of noonday, of his fierceness against the betrayers.
Percy rarely wakes before Vex but it’s always struck him how different dawn is to the image people hold in their heads.
Dawn doesn’t start with light - it starts with song. The insect-song of night quieting away, birdsong chirps starting up. When he travelled the rivers and coasts as a fisherman the first sounds had been gullsongs, but gulls in chorus can make a music of their own - discordant, but unique. This far inland it’s crows and ravens instead - similar but different as they caw and croak, before the sparrows and swallows chirp, then the larks and thrushes singing in earnest. There's been goldenlarks in Whitestone since before Whitestone and they sing with the sunrise every day, something so Celestial in their song no one doubts their right to nest in the Sun Tree.
Songs first, to herald the dawn. The birds see it first, not the sunrise but how the sky pales at the very horizon, stars vanishing as night’s dark shroud lightens, waking and warning: rise, rise! before the day is lost.
Dawn doesn’t burn across the sky - it spills. The sky turns paler, dark midnight fading to forget-me-not, to paler still, to the finest wash of water, paler than a robin’s egg - the palest it ever gets before the sun’s rise lets it darken to deep water.
He likes these mornings, the very few he wakes before Vex. Usually she rises with the dawn and he well after - he never was a morning person, content to rise late and work late and after Orthax and the List, well. Some of his creations only deserved the darkness, not the light.
But Vex has coaxed him back to the light, reminded him that shadows only have weight because of the light that casts it, and that that light is a beauty all its own.
Is it sickeningly romantic to say Vex is his light? The kind of thing that even Vesper, lover of ridiculous romantics, would have teased him for? But it’s true, and so he can’t bring himself to mind.
Other sayings of the dawn are truer, though: it’s always darkest before the dawn. Midnight to dawn, moonset to sunrise, as the stars fade but before even the first fingers of the sun's light breach the horizon. Percy remembers cutting his fingers in that deep darkness, lost to time as he gutted fish. The scars still line his skin. Vex’s fingers press to them.
(She has scars of her own - from fletching, from arrow flights, from fights gone wrong. He hates half his scars, but it’s harder to remember that when he looks at some of his scars and some of hers and can only think that they make a matched set.)
He does not mind waking in darkness - he had once, as a child, and then the Briarwoods’ men had thrown him into a cell and he learned darkness could be a comfort and a safety and to fear the light of Ripley’s braziers. He wakes in the darkness because he can hear the song and he groans and he stretches but he doesn’t remove himself from bed.
It’s still dark.
He could move - with Tiberius’ departure and Grog’s belt, he’s the only one of their group without darkvision, and he’s done well enough for himself so far - but he has no wish to.
Outside, the sky begins to lighten, blue enough he can see the shadow silhouette of the windowframe, if not much more. The corvids quiet; the songbirds take the lead. Slowly, beyond the window, the sky lightens further, from midnight to navy to lapis to forget-me-not, through every shade of the blankets he can feel Vex has thoroughly stolen for herself.
And as the warm light of dawn spills across the bed he beholds his greatest treasure.