Chapter Text
A ruffling sound is all that you hear when you manage to transport yourself back to the castle, and though the darkness still hasn’t unravelled to show you your whereabouts, you know with absolute certitude you’re there. In the palace. Most of all, you know she has been waiting for you. You can feel her presence and her enquiring, feline stare, and before you can open your mouth her voice chimes in the empty hall.
“Hello, dreamer. I believe our conversation was interrupted”.
Your head raises to look at her, but her purple silhouette is all you manage to see behind the dark fog that’s clouding your eyes. The action of transporting yourself to the castle has drained you, again. Pursing your lips, you try to clench yourself to your dream.
“No time”, you cut her, quickly walking towards her. “You must come with me. Please”.
The woman frowns, evidently bewildered by your words. Clearly, she hadn’t anticipated such a desperate request from you. “What seems to be the matter?”
“You were looking for someone”, you murmur, breathing heavily, fatigue and fog weighing on you, “You called for a sir”. Your affirmation makes her blink in recognition. “I think I found him. He needs help. Please”.
Only then do her eyes trail to your figure to notice the white grains of sand powdering your knees. But as her usual composure finally breaks to give place to frantic scattering, your mind fails you again and starts pulling you back to wake, once more, for the third time. Just this once, though, the woman leans comfortingly towards you, her hands stretching to catch you, accompanying you to the floor as your knees cede.
“You have helped us, dreamer”. Her voice is barely a whisper, a murmur of rediscovered force. “The Dreaming will be grateful”.
A blink, and she’s disappeared. Darkness, white dust floating. Then nothing.
You awake.
**
“Lucienne?”
“My lord”.
“There was –”
Silence.
“Someone. A mortal”.
“Yes, my lord”.
“They helped me”.
A pause.
“I must admit it wasn’t the first time they came here”.
“Every mortal has been to the Dreaming thousands of times. What do you wish to tell me?”
“Sir - I believe they created something. In the Dreaming”.
Merely a blink. A thousand words encapsulated in a gesture.
“Show me”.
**
The sandy particles forming the six, new, crooked steps tense under his fingers as he brushes his hand against the surface. They’re relieved, somehow. Obedient, even after all this time.
Lucienne was right. This is not a creation of his. And yet, it’s there – tangible and fixed. The mark of an unknown hand in the very heart of his reign.
He can see you as soon as his palm settles around the angle of the first step. Every dream, every nightmare of yours. Your latest ones, too – every detail of your promenades in the castle, your creation of the steps, and then, at last, his own, withered and pale face, seen through your dreaming eyes. Your name, blazing in his head like blue flames. Your face.
It’s you. He recognizes your traits to be the same he first saw upon returning to his kingdom. Curious. Fretful.
Kind.
And yet.
Your visage dissipates from his mind as soon as he raises his palm from the gritty surface. His digits lengthen and tense towards the rest of the staircase, his wrist flicking to signal rocks and debris to move. But as much as deferential as they’d seemed when they’d perceived his presence, the grains of sand composing the structure of the steps don’t seem to comply with his orders. Heavy and inert, they merely raise from the ground to float briefly in the air, then they fall, useless.
I’m weak, he realizes. Weaker than I’ve been in aeons. Without his ruby, he’s nothing short of a fool. His powers are useless, even in his own realm.
His gaze falls to the new steps you’ve created, again. This time, the sand they’re made of shimmers cheekily, almost unrespectful. Before his blatant powerlessness, even these infant’s tricks, nothing short of foolery, seem to tar and mock him.
It’s a strange mixture of fascination and wrath, the burning sensation that arises in his chest.
“Very well”. He rises, and Lucienne advances to stand silently at his side. “It’s time for me to talk to the Hecate”.
**
They say you cannot dream of faces you have never once encountered before. Any person you meet in your dreams, you have actually seen in real life, in pictures, or in videos. And still, you cannot phantom where you could ever have met someone with a face like his. Ethereal. Terrifying. Yet, somehow, nimbly human.
You’re sure you could never have met someone like him in your daily life. But neither your dreams could have conjured such a ghostly appearance, nor transformed to such extent the face of anyone you may have known before.
And then, at night, sometimes you feel like you’re being watched.
Was it truly a dream?
If not, what else? Are you going crazy?
For a few days, you abandon your lucid dream exercises, unsettled and ashamed. Your nights are dreamless and dark.
**
When you decide to return to the castle in your dreams, you do so cautiously.
Even before the darkness has dissipated, you’re wondering if you’re really meant to be there. If you shouldn’t just forget what you’ve seen to mind your simple, daily life. If you haven’t stepped into something alien and forbidden to you.
The fear leaves you as soon as you allow yourself to open your eyes.
It is not the common scenery of destruction and fleshless concrete remains that greets you. At its place, green and luscious vegetation grows where brittle deserts had been, deep blue waters flow in fountained rivers, and the warm light of a dawning sun illuminates cobbled streets and bridges. And there, dominating it all, the castle.
Perfect. Immaculate. Each pillar standing audaciously at its place, each windowpane tinted in a different hue. Unbroken. Unshattered. No dust, no debris. No sign of the destruction that once was.
“Hello”.
You turn. And there it is – him.
Though his body has maintained its former emaciation and its distinctive angularity, the black coat you’ve already seen him wearing now envelops a fuller, healthier figure, and the sickish pallor of his complexion has softened to fade to an ethereal alabaster tint. There’s no sign of the crookedness of his old posture, now regal and balanced, almost militant. His eyes, once bloodshot and gleamy in tiredness and pain, now rest inert on your figure, studying you.
“You’re alright”, you finally observe, comparing his appearance to the ghostly one you’d seen in the desert.
“You helped me”, he replies, plainly. A mere constatation, and yet you catch a glimpse of gratitude in his gentle eyes.
There’s a moment of silence. You expect him to say something, but he doesn’t. His eyes linger inexpressively on your figure, not a single thought or feeling seeping through their irises. And yet, his gaze pierces you as if he could see past your own skin.
“You’re not a normal dream, are you?”, you ask, at last, voicing your thoughts. You’re struggling to choose proper words, and your observation comes out like an ingenuous triviality. “You’re – real”.
There’s a sudden, unexpected shimmer in his eyes when you pronounce these words, and something in his expression shifts. Amusement, almost. Now, for the first time in minutes, you feel like he’s begun to look at you differently. A minuscule speck of confusion passes behind his lashes. Then it’s hidden away, just as soon as it had come.
“Lucienne was right”, he says, his head tilting slightly. “You really do not know where you are”.
You don’t reply, the pursing of your lips silently confirming his hypothesis. He seems as perplexed by you as you are by him. Perhaps he’d thought you were a threat to his realm. After all, the woman – Lucienne, you suppose – had said you weren’t supposed to… be doing whatever it was you’d done. Creating, you guess. But if your dark interlocutor had doubted your benevolence towards his kingdom or imagined you to be a threat, your incertitude and confusion clearly contribute to calming his preoccupations.
Still, you want answers. The longing for an explanation builds up energy in your chest, pushing you to talk, now that you can, now that wake isn’t carrying you away already. If he isn’t willing to disclose who he is just yet, then you’ll have to bargain for that information. “I dreamt of the palace once – but it felt different from a normal dream. Real. I thought my mind was just being creative. I wanted to see more. That’s why I returned”.
Your words spark interest in him. “How?”
“I learnt to lucid dream”.
“No”. The sudden shift in his tone almost startles you. Somehow, his eyes appear to have turned darker, his figure taller, looming over you. You wonder if you’re just imagining it – but then a gelid breeze descends the hill behind you to brush threateningly against your nape. The man’s chin rises slightly, an insignificant movement that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. “Do not lie to me. Not even experienced lucid dreamers have ever managed to enter my palace uninvited”.
“But I did”, you insist, desperately trying to resist the urge to back away. A hollow tremor rouses under your soles. “Listen, I’m as confused as you are. But sometimes, I feel like this… like this place – like it was calling me. Like it brings me where I need to be. I don’t know how else I could have ended up in that desert, seconds before you”.
Something in what you say makes the breeze weaken and drop. For the first time since you saw him, the man blinks. The darkness in his eyes spirals back into somewhere unknown.
“I have frightened you”, he murmurs, his voice back to its usual silky, calm tone. “Forgive me”.
“You didn’t”, you reply, though you do not sound half credible. You peer into his now relaxed eyes, scanning something. “I feel like I know you”.
“We have met before”.
“How?”
The man takes a step towards you. This time, too, something in the landscape surrounding you shifts, but it does so unthreateningly. The remnants of the gelid breeze move to run through leaves and grass, making his long black coat billow behind him.
“That’s… scenic”. But your muttered observation doesn’t eject any reaction from him. Not really a talker, then.
“I am Dream of the Endless, King of Dreams and Nightmares”. It’s a sudden and unexpected introduction that catches you off guard. And though the castle had induced you to suspect a revelation of this kind, though you’d definitely imagined him to be a king of some sort, the pride that just slightly lifts the corner of his mouth when he’s finished pronouncing those words makes something in your stomach tumble. There’s nothing in his appearance that reminds you of the weak, sickish man you’d helped in the desert, and still – still, that same feeling of ethereality, that palpable and visible extraneity in the way he pronounces his own name reminds that of the sensation you first felt upon seeing him.
“Every living thing is connected to me and my realm. I move through your dreams each and every night”.
It was real, then – that feeling of being observed, somehow, the one you’d been experiencing since you returned from the beach. The mere thought makes a dull weight tumble in your stomach. What else has he seen of yours, with all of your dreaming hours at his disposal? Though extremely familiar, it is after all a stranger that stands before you. And yet he must know more about you than you could ever find out about him. Simply thinking about it makes you shudder.
Your lips part to give way to an answer – a difficult task after such an introduction – but he seems to catch your dazzlement before you’re able to express it. His fierceness is replaced by his usual placid, empty stare. Though his eyes are now unexpressive, you wonder if he did that on purpose, to relieve you of your embarrassment.
“Come”, he says, turning towards the castle and finally releasing you from his stare. “I believe you and I both seek answers”.
Tentatively, you take a step forward, joining him on the cobbled path. As you walk, the tail of his coat brushes lightly against your calves.