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The high elves don't sleep.
You knew this long before you came to the Academy. You sleep, and your father's snores can be heard through walls, but your mother never sleeps. Half the night she spends working on the business ledgers and the other she spends simply sitting in one place, a half smile on her face, drifting into a peaceful trance that washes away the day's toils. As a girl you'd find her like this often when the night terrors drove you from your bed. Words failed you as you rambled about eyes and tendrils and things that knew who you were, but the sight of her scared daughter creeping into her study never failed to snap her from her trance. She'd take you by the hand to the kitchen and prepare you a soothing tea, the sort that takes hundreds of years to learn how to brew properly. She'd delight you with illusions in the palm of her hand, and it almost made the nightmares go away. You always did love magic.
It's different at the Academy. There's a dormitory, though their word for it is much different. There are no beds. Just more desks and cushions to sit upon for brief trances. It's only after your silver-tongued father spends hours cajoling the administrators that you're allowed to have your own bed brought to the premises as a 'special accommodation,' but it doesn't take many nights for you to realize what a terrible idea it is to actually use it.
The elven girls you share the space with are older than you, much older. They spend half their nights in trance and the rest deep in their studies. To your parents you are a brilliant young woman; as far as these girls are concerned you are a bothersome toddler, woefully inexperienced and spending valuable study time lapsing into unconsciousness. When your head touches the pillow you can already hear their chittering laughter. When you awake it's to find your things stolen or tampered with, or worse, a jinx placed on you as a practical joke when you were powerless to defend yourself. Funny how no one in a room full of unsleeping high elves ever happened to see who messed with you.
Nature cannot be changed but it can be trained. You need your sleep but you take it where you can, usually deep in the back corners of the library where no one ever goes, behind shelves of books older than even most of the teachers. An hour here, a couple there. It's not ideal but it gets you by. At least the night terrors aren't so bad these days. You're usually too exhausted to dream. When they do jolt you back to waking reality you have plenty of books to comfort you. You pull down a musty spell tome and read by the light of a cantrip, murmuring incantations to yourself until they're inscribed in your mind and there's no room for anything else. You do so love magic.
Time passes. You're falling behind your supposed peers. Your parents always hoped sending you here would give you an advantage in life. These days you think of them mostly with bitterness at their naivete. This place wasn't made for you. Every curriculum assumes decades of background study you simply weren't alive for. Every assignment assumes an extra eight hours in a working day you simply do not possess. The studies themselves would be hard enough if half the staff didn't resent your very presence here and purposefully pile your work higher and punish your failures all the more harshly. Where others walk you're expected to sprint. Where others stumble you're expected to keep your back straight.
But you're clever. You find your ways to get by. You experiment and find ways to pull off assignments in a quarter of the expected time. Hours that others waste with their useless friends you fill with focused study. And when all that fails, you cheat. There are a million and one ways to cheat here. You steal others' notes. To get access to more accomplished students' spellbooks you trade favors that range from the sultry to the criminal. And as your own talents grow you even learn to enchant your way into their minds, leaving other students in a drooling daze while you pilfer their notes, components… sometimes their gold. Sometimes still more interesting curiosities you'd never find outside an apprentice wizard's pockets.
You really do love magic.
Every year raises the bar of what's required. Every year you find a way to exceed their patronizing expectations. But you're pushing yourself to your limits. To keep up you spend more and more of your time in the library trying to find any scrap of practical knowledge to help you impress. More and more of your time with bags under your eyes. That brings you to the Book.
What you had to do to get your hands on this tome is… unimportant. What's important is that it's old, truly old... and forbidden. Its dyed black cover is of a worn leather, what kind of hide you dare not guess. You are told that it is no ordinary book. It is a window. A window to what, you ask. To knowledge itself, you are told.
And you peer through that window. Little by little you make sense of the strange sigils and meandering musings. Every hour you come to new creepy realizations about the arcane.
You laugh. The fools here have it all wrong--here is how the magic is actually woven!
You weep. Even you never knew spellcraft could be so beautiful.
You scream. The two page spread of eyes and tendrils isn't an unknown monstrosity to you. It's familiar. You know this is no mere drawing but a window, a genuine window, and It can see your face peering through at It. And It is old, older than elves, older than time; if It sees you now then It has always seen you. Every night terror, every paranoid thought that eyes were on the back of your head were no delusions but the reality you could not yet conceive, the reality that in this moment you would gaze through this portal and in so doing let this god of old pages see you now, then, and forever.
You're never quite the same after the Book. There are things that eyes can't perceive and ever look quite right afterwards. The Watcher in the Pages is one of those things. It isn't long before everyone starts to notice; everyone starts to whisper about the mad gleam in your eyes. Elves start snooping. The Book is found. You're cast out. Of course you're cast out. They would have taken any excuse and you gave them a good one.
But you can't quite care, can you?
Dreams are just another way of traveling, you realize. You're unconscious but you know where you are. The temple of the mind, where the Watcher holds all knowledge in Its black tendrils. You don't have night terrors. You're no longer afraid of that which you see. The Watcher has gifts aplenty for faithful pilgrims.
You do not sleep.
You worship.
And you are saved.