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The sky of The Dreaming was on fire. It started as a dull heat, which morphed into a faint orange glow and the smell of smoke, before finally erupting into flame which bathed the firmament in deep, molten red. Tongues of it licked down to the ground below, burning nothing yet leaving smears of ash in their wake.
The Corinthian sat on the steps of the palace, sunglasses propped on top of his head, watching the sky shift and smolder. It was beautiful in its intensity, a temper tantrum the likes of which The Dreaming hadn’t seen since Lord Morpheus. Somebody must have set Daniel off like a powder keg. The Corinthian was torn between gratitude that he hadn’t been the one to ignite Dream’s ire, and envy that someone else could pull such strong emotion to Dream’s usually-placid surface.
The heat of the flame was warm on The Corinthian’s face, almost gentle, even as it crackled and roared.
A wave of shocking color streaked past him, trailed by bubbles and flying green beetles. He inclined his head at Lady Delirium as she took her hasty leave. He wouldn’t have expected Dream to get explosive with her, but then, he hadn’t known them to have much closeness in their relationship at all. And she did have a way of pouring salt into old wounds with words that could just as easily have meant nothing.
Lucien burst out of the door behind Lady Delirium, running full-tilt to catch up with her.
The Corinthian had never seen the librarian run before. Not once.
Something was very wrong.
Before he consciously decided to do so, The Corinthian was on his feet and dashing back the way Lucien had come. There was no deliberation on which way to go. Once he was inside the palace, he simply had to head toward where the heat and smell of flame was strongest: the throne room.
The imposing double doors hung ajar, unguarded. From within came Matthew’s grating, squawking voice. “Boss? Hey, I can see that you’re freaked out, but you need to get out of there. I’d help but I don’t have thumbs. You’re starting to scare me with this whole bonfire-thing. Hello? Are you listening to me? Boss!” Underneath the raven’s voice there was the hitching, unsteady sound of panicked whimpering. Usually, The Corinthian would find music in the fretful, pathetic vocalizations. But not this time; they sounded wrong, here, in the usually-smooth tone of Lord Daniel’s voice.
The Corinthian stepped into the throne room. The throne was gone, replaced with a brightly-burning fireplace. The king of dreams sat at the heart of the flames, hunched over, face hidden in his hands, pieces of himself slowly flaking away as ash and floating down from the raised platform. A smell like burning sugar filled the air.
This wasn’t a tantrum, as The Corinthian had initially assumed. This was something altogether worse.
The Corinthian climbed up to the platform, neglecting the bow that would have otherwise been customary. Up close, the flames surrounding Dream were no warmer than they had been standing at the bottom of the stairs. An incorrectly-made dream of fire, rather than the real thing.
Which meant it was only hurting Daniel because, on some level, the king of dreams wanted to be burned.
“My Lord,” The Corinthian started, not knowing where the sentence was going. Dream parted his fingers, to reveal red-rimmed, tearful eyes. Strange, mismatched eyes. Only one of them was the star-filled void recognizable as belonging to Dream. The other was very nearly human, bloodshot white sclera surrounding a vibrant green iris. A tiny black pin prick of a pupil. As The Corinthian watched, the skin around the eyes singed, first red, then black, before crumbling away as white ash. Dream made no move to stop it, or to remove himself from the flames at all.
The Corinthian had no such patience. He bent down and pulled Daniel into his arms, taking him out from the fireplace. The flames did not bite him, even as they stuck to their creator, eating away at his curls and melting his simple white nightgown. Daniel clung to The Corinthian tightly, shivering with fever-heat. He whined when he was set down at the bottom of the stairs so the nightmare could smother the lingering flames.
With the fire put out –it fizzled down to nothing outside, too, seen through stained-glass windows– Dream’s flesh simply forgot it was meant to be burned. He rubbed at his eyes, revealing new skin underneath streaks of ash when he withdrew his hands to twist them in his tangled white curls, looking for all the world like a lost child.
Without thinking, The Corinthian wiped away the next tear that caught itself in Dream’s long eyelashes. In a calm, insistent voice, he said “I need you to tell me what’s going on.”
Matthew fluttered around The Corinthian’s head, agitated. “Yeah! That’s what I’d like to know.” Daniel’s hand tightened in his own hair, pulling his head painfully to the side. Matthew continued chattering. “Hey, kid, stop that. You’ll hurt yourself. Just tell us what’s going on with you. We’re trying to help. This is the part where you let us.”
Dream took a few moments to answer, seemingly only winding himself up into a worse state, breathing unevenly and chewing on his lip until a bead of red formed. He opened his mouth to speak. “Can’t.” He shook his head violently. “Too much of me, too big.” His words were whispered, mumbled, slurred. He shook his head again, The Corinthian stopped the motion with a hand soothing over Daniel’s hair. Over-familiar, out of character, and yet the motion came naturally. As if he’d been made for this.
Daniel continued. “The boxes are all gone.”
“What do you mean? What boxes?”
Daniel knocked his fist against his head, hard. “These! Here!” He repeated the motion, leaving a red mark on his forehead. His eyes were open wide now, fixed intensely on The Corinthian, something crazed behind them. “Beetles opened them all up. Spilled on the floor. All the little pieces.” His fist drew back again, The Corinthian caught it, and pressed it gently back to his side.
“What do you mean ‘beetles opened your boxes’ and what does that have to do with the literal fire in the palace? You’re not making sense. Work with me here, boss!”
“Matthew, go help Lucien,” The Corinthian said, leaving no room for argument. It all made something like a shadow of sense to him. “He’s following the beetles, who are following the Lady Delirium. They’ll explain.” He turned to back to Dream. “You’re saying you fought with your sister, and now you’re in pieces. Or something like that, anyway. She did something to you?” It could certainly explain why Dream sounded more like his sister than himself; he had one foot in her realm.
Daniel hummed, in a way that could have meant nothing. The Corinthian took it as an affirmative. “Okay. I can work with that.” He considered the consequences of taking his knives to an endless sibling. He might have a chance at surviving it, if Dream backed him. He’d have to wait until later to go hunting for Delirium, then. “Matthew, go.”
“Are you sure I shou-"
“Now!” The Corinthian growled. Matthew fluttered back, and took off out the door.
Daniel’s face went suddenly solemn. “Bye birdie,” he said, voice too serious for the childlike words. He raised a hand in a finger pistol. As Matthew disappeared through the door, a bullet hole appeared above the doorframe a few inches above him. “It doesn’t always miss. Sometimes birdies go splat, did you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” He was an expert in such things. Dream, on the other hand, wasn’t known to speak of them. “Come on, let’s get you out of here. Find somewhere more comfortable. We’ll just ride whatever this is out until the bird gets back, alright? Can you walk?”
“I think I might have gone splat like a birdie.” Dream responded, non-sequitur, swaying as The Corinthian helped him to his feet. “Right before I changed. It’s too bright to really remember. The rocks were sharp and I was high up. And I thought…” Dream lurched forward, knees giving way. The Corinthian, already supporting much of his weight, caught him well before he could hit the ground. Even so, there was a sickening crack, and suddenly Daniel’s legs were bent in a place they shouldn’t be able to. He let out a grunt of impact like he’d been punched in the gut. Like he’d hit the ground from a long way up. His head hung forward limply, and blood began to well up at the back of his head, stark against his white hair.
The Corinthian swore, and scooped Dream back into his arms, earning a pained intake of air and a choked sob on the exhale. Blood soaked into the shoulder of his jacket where he supported Daniel’s head. A broken hand weakly clutched at his lapel.
“And I thought…” continued Daniel, a new shattered-rib wheeze in his voice. “Crunch! And I’d be done.” Blood dripped to the floor, then reversed course. The trickle of red sealed itself back in Dream’s skull, bones snapped back into place with echoing clicks. “But it was too bright to see. And I was so many before-me’s. Maybe it didn’t happen at all.”
Daniel trailed off, and The Corinthian didn’t encourage further chatter. Part of him wanted to: the same part of him that liked to prod at open wounds and make them gush blood wanted more of Dream’s free-spilling words. More of the way his body bent and burned and broke at the whim of this non-linear story he was trapped in. Still, something in him was repelled by the idea of bringing Daniel any more distress. Call it a leash, or child-proofing, this line he couldn’t cross. This desire — foreign, implanted, somehow essential to him — to protect what remained of Daniel Hall.
So he didn’t ask questions. Later, he would demand an audience with Dream and get what answers he could. Failing that, he’d sneak and steal and find his own way to understanding the true depths of this fractured episode. But for now, he only carried Dream -who buried his face in The Corinthian’s shoulder- until the palace revealed the entrance to his personal chambers.
The room reshaped itself around them, manifesting a starry mobile hanging from the ceiling, and a massive squashy rocking chair in the corner. The bed, strangely, shrunk down to less than half its original size, and lined its perimeter with white wooden bars. A crib. Useless, now.
Rocking chair it was. The Corinthian settled Dream on its plush cushion, where he curled up into a ball with his head against the armrest, closing his eyes tight. The Corinthian brushed a curl off his sweaty forehead. He was still fire-warm, pushing his face against The Corinthian’s cool hand, which offered little relief.
There was a porcelain basin and a pitcher of water on a dresser across the room. The Corinthian nudged the chair so it would rock gently while he wet a washcloth.
His back was only turned for a moment, but when he returned to Daniel’s side, a patch of pale skin just above the collar of his nightgown had set itself once more to smoldering, its glowing orange edges spreading out as if over paper.
“No more of that, now,” The Corinthian hushed, kneeling at Daniel’s side, pressing the damp cloth over the burn, wiping it away like a smudge of ink. Another tiny fire started up, this time creeping over his spindly fingers. This, too, The Corinthian soothed away. “I pulled you out of the fire, remember? It’s all over.”
“Too late,” Dream mumbled, as The Corinthian passed the washcloth over a patch of embers on his cheek. “I burned up. Not even human enough to cry, in the end.” Gently, The Corinthian washed away salty tear tracks. “You got there after. Found a dream of a dead boy.”
He’d been a cog in Morpheus’s selfish plan, he told himself. He was never supposed to save little Daniel Hall in time. He resented the lack of choice he’d had in the matter. “You’re not burning anymore.” Whatever was going on with Dream, it seemed to be shaping itself according to his thoughts at any given time. Maybe The Corinthian could push it in a less self-immolating direction with a few well-placed words.
“Then why am I–”
“Because you have a fever. That’s all.”
“I’m sick?” Daniel blinked up at him, confused.
“That’s right. So you just let this run it’s course, yeah? It’ll be over soon.”
Daniel sniffled, and stifled a cough in the back of his hand. Clearly the idea of sickness had distracted him from the fire. Purple smudges bloomed under his eyes, but no more embers appeared. The Corinthian folded the cloth and laid it on the back of his neck. Daniel shivered.
They sat for a few minutes, The Corinthian rocking the chair with his hand. Daniel quieted as this new line of thought pulled him into feverish exhaustion. He looked pitiful, high blush on his cheeks, breathing shallowly through his mouth. Strangely, his tongue was stained candy-apple green. How long had that been the case?
“I don’t feel well.”
“I know, my lord.”
“Why isn’t my mother here?” A dangerous question. His voice rasped painfully. “Why doesn’t she take care of me?” It was unclear if Dream meant Lyta Hall or Night herself.
“I couldn’t say.”
“She killed me to save me to lose me. Bad idea. It’s good she never tried.”
Daniel sighed, so sadly, only to break off coughing. Something rattled wetly in his chest as he shook with effort, gasping for unneeded breath when he could stop coughing long enough to inhale. The Corinthian helped him sit up more comfortably, rubbed circles into his back until the fit subsided.
“You would serve me, Corinthian?” Dream’s voice was little more than a pained exhale. Still, there was something regal in his bearing that could never be shaken.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Then hold me. Please.”
The Corinthian could refuse Dream nothing. He sat beside Dream and gathered him again into his arms. Kissed the top of his head. Rocked them both. Dream coughed and wheezed, sounding truly awful. Still, he’d calmed somewhat, and seemed to be taking some comfort in The Corinthian’s presence.
Of course, Lucien had to interrupt. He strode through the door with Matthew on his shoulder.
“Where’s Lady Delirium?” The Corinthian asked, unconcerned with greeting them. Daniel stirred, making an unhappy noise. The Corinthian shushed him gently, earning a strange look from Lucien.
“The Lady could not be persuaded to accompany us here, and has returned to her realm.” Before The Corinthian could snap at the librarian for being useless, he continued, voice low. “From what I understood of our conversation with her, Lord Dream is in no serious danger–”
“He keeps trying to set himself on fire!” The Corinthian whispered snappishly.
“He’s merely shaping his own form. As is an essential part of his being.”
“It’s out of control!”
“It’s harmless, I’ve been assured. The Lady Delirium said she saw fit to give him a taste of her realm. Though I admit to questioning her methods, I don’t disbelieve her. I’ve been told that this…condition… isn’t meant to last.”
“She drugged him.”
“I don’t think that’s–”
“No, I’m telling you. She gave him something, it stained his tongue.”
“Be that as it may, the Endless are forbidden to harm their siblings.”
“What do you call this?”
“A misguided attempt to help him. From what I gathered from The Lady herself.”
“Help him how? By–”
“By crashing me all together,” Daniel murmured, opening his eyes. He tried to sit up from where he rested his head against The Corinthian’s shoulder, but quickly aborted the motion. “All at once, all I am. Facets… my sister said something about those. I can’t remember.” A tiny, hairline fracture started, just at the center of his hairline, beginning to snake down his face. “She did a bad job.” the crack bifurcated at his nose, splitting to travel down each side of it. “I didn’t want this, I don’t think. Can’t think.” The cracks spread further, fractal patterns across his cheeks like a broken porcelain doll. A fragment fell to the floor, shattering, leaving a window below his eye where The Corinthian could see a starless void. “I feel… crumbly. Too many of me.” Another piece of porcelain fell, this one into The Corinthian’s lap. He picked it up and carefully fit it back into the space it had come from. “Doesn’t fit… Can’t hold together…”
“It’ll hold,” The Corinthian murmured, holding Daniel tighter as if to keep him from coming apart, even as more porcelain shards fell away, leaving Dream’s face a jagged-edged patchwork. “Just hang on tight, we can put the rest back to rights later, okay?” He was losing the thread of the metaphor, only sure that his purpose was to ease the king’s suffering. Dream’s soft curls crumbled away like spun sugar when he brushed a hand through them.
Daniel squirmed, looking from The Corinthian to Lucien to Matthew, who had remained on the librarian's shoulder, a shocked kind of quiet. He started to giggle, shoulders jumping. “My lord?” The Corinthian questioned.
“It’s funny!” came the reply, between bouts of awful laughter, high pitched and breathless.
“What is?”
“You’re dead!” The words snuck under The Corinthian’s ribs like a blade, the sting of them only noticed after the weapon had been removed. Dream laughed harder, covering his face once more. “All crumbled to teeny-tiny pieces! Sand! Pieces of me, made all too well, wretched things. Too much of the me-that-was. Perfect mirrors, all shattered, you and me. Dead!” Laughter was shaking Dream so hard that his one starry eye fell backwards into his head, leaving another window to the void. The human eye overflowed with tears, of either misery or mirth. It was impossible to say. Madness, though, was unmistakable. Daniel pointed to both Lucien and Matthew, the tip of his pointer finger falling to the floor as he did so. “You’re both dead too! More birdies that went splat. A dream-full of corpses! And nobody mourns.” His laughter took on a hysterical tone, freezing his mouth in a rictus grin half-seen between his fingers. “All of us dead…”
The Corinthian couldn’t help himself. He laughed too, something short and bitter. Something that chewed on the pain under his ribs and spat it out, bloody, on the shattered-glass floor.
Lucien and Matthew excused themselves wordlessly, clearly unnerved by the display. The Corinthian threw a knife once he knew they’d turned the corner. It lodged in the doorway. “Bang.”
Dream’s hysterics collapsed in on themselves until he was sobbing through them, chest heaving, so busy coming apart that he forgot he was meant to be falling to pieces. The porcelain swept itself up off the floor, and settled back into place while he wailed like a child. The Corinthian smoothed a hand down Daniel’s back, again and again. There was nothing left to say, here at the heart of Dream’s implosion. Later, he’d press on the bruise. For now, he could only rock the king of dreams to sleep, and wait for his sister to loosen her hold.