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The end. To him, it's an unravelling. The popular idea has always been that you see your life pass before your eyes, in the end, and as the final threads of Dream fall away, it seems to be almost the truth. Only the memories he sees—shifting sands in vast timeless deserts, dim painted caves and bright distant stars, small tangles of mortals in their cities and far-flung hovels, and finally the fine details and blurred edges of the Dreaming itself—are no longer his own.
The last memory he shares with Dream, the aspect, is one of sudden destruction and aloneness. Then, solely himself for the first time in a true but incomplete eternity, he feels uncertainty. It's not an altogether new feeling, but the completeness and certainty of it sits low and unsettles him.
He'd intended to abdicate, to stop, to cease existence. To rest, to sleep and, as Will wrote, perchance to dream. But though Dream is elsewhere, elsewhen, elseone, still he is as well. Truly, he expected that he would cease to be at all. Yet he finds himself remembering still —he remembers her standing there in her red dress, and he can feel her thinking of him. Despite the necessity of forgetting, he can sense that still she thinks about him. He'd never been certain, even, that he had this part of himself, this speck of a thought that was his own self, separate and apart from the aspect that was Dream. Yet he can feel his sister—his once, now former, sister—remembering him in exactly that way.
And here he finds himself—wherever here was, if here was a here—an echo of memory, a kernel of a thing that once always was, missing the thing that had defined it for so long. He feels incomplete, atrophied, like a story half-finished.
The realm he finds himself in is best described as an un-realm. It reminds him of the interstice between his former realm and those of the other Endless. Blank and full of nothing but borders with other, more definite, things. It's a memory that is already slipping away and seeming more unreal, more distant, more impossible. The part of him that was Dream of the Endless belongs to someone else now, and in a way it always has. The echoes of his memories, too, feel foreign to him, and already he tries to push those memories away. They are what he meant to leave behind. The Dreaming, the dreams and nightmares, the castle, his staff, Lucien. As he pushes them all away (in mental metaphor, for they're already beyond his scope, in reality), he finds that at the stripped-down center, a part of him still obstinately, resiliently exists and remembers. He is memory with memory, curled in upon itself. An orouborus, a cycle. At that thought, he begins to wonder whether he's gone mad.
He puts one foot forward, then another, because that feels normal and predictable—two things he sought rarely if ever in anything but his own duties. But there is nothing but a vast expanse of empty whiteness before him, and with no frame of reference the footfalls fall not at all and he's treading space, going nowhere.
Dream was never meant for Death's realm. That was part of was it was to be Endless. But the one who was once called Dream could no longer be counted among the Endless. He'd been separated from his names, suddenly without title or rank or definition. Others had been destroyed, others had passed on, and they too were a mystery, an in-between. He wondered if they'd met the same fate, finding themselves half-remembered and half-remembering in this vacuous space. Gods waxed and waned according to the beliefs of mortals. Mortals came and went as they did. Aspects of the universe, however, were meant to be constant. And yet he persists: a memory, or an idea, or both, but all unmade and undone.
In the eons before he'd bent blank slates to his will without effort, but now without power or strength beyond his own form he walks with his thoughts, alone. Without the power of the dreaming at his disposal he feels numb. Unable to touch, unable to create. The powerlessness fills him with a terrible, powerful wanting. He doesn't mean to resent Daniel—because elsewhere he knows the new Lord of Dreams is remaking his realm from scratch. This realm, he decides, must be the Dreaming's stark opposite—where it held all the raw materials to construct every thought and fancy in fine detail, here there was nothing for even the broad stroke of generalization—a fact he found himself resenting, though he did not envy Daniel his work.
Now the only thing endless is the emptiness that surrounds, he thinks, and it's his first complete thought—the first he would have said aloud if he'd had anyone to speak to—in what feels like weeks. He frowns. It's not a very good one.
To counter the void, he begins to wonder what he could make. He closes his eyes and pictures himself in a realm with all the other lost things, but when he opens them again, the same nothing is there.
The senses he had once relied upon are gone, passed on to his successor. He'd had an infinity to fill, with nothing but his own mind and the certainty of purpose. Now, he felt like he was forging forward without a plan, without tools to make what he needed and without a map to guide him. He missed certainty. The idea that things might be this empty forever appeared at the back of his mind and lurked.
And yet, he could still feel the other realms. Their presence at the periphery lingered at the edge of his senses. He could move toward them but could never reach them. He wonders if this was what it was like to be mortal and unremarkable, metaphorically—wandering blind and aimless, at the edge of influence of all the Endless, but never quite close enough to see them. He thinks of family, and what that means when one is completely alone.
He begins to populate the space with his own imaginings, and though they no longer are able to leave his own head and take form, they are something his, and in that he takes comfort. He decides to walk, and he thinks, and in defiance of time he searches for what he's missing.
After what could be months, but could equally be a few hours time, he's started out of his reverie by a feeling. It's the feeling of returning to reality as if from a dream, like the moment of falling just before you wake. It's a curious feeling, like an anchor around his feet, and yet somehow reassuring.
“Hello, Morpheus,” Death says, close behind him. She'd be at his shoulder, but both of them remember her being more than a head shorter, and so she is.
“That's not my name any longer.”
Death smiles a small smile. “Daniel left that one for you.”
“They were supposed to forget.” he says, then adds, “You were supposed to forget.” He refuses to turn around.
“I don't forget,” Death says. Her voice is soft, conciliatory, but there's unrepentant certainty to it that Morpheus clings to in spite of himself.
He takes a long moment before answering, but she is the only thing in this realm now other than him and he is acutely aware that he does, in a way, owe her his existence. He wants to know when this visit is for her—if it's the same day she said goodbye, or before, or after, but his pride keeps him still. “Where does anyone go from here?”
“You let the answer to that escape centuries ago. 'To sleep, perchance to--'”
“No,” Morpheus says. “That's not what was meant.”
Death sighs. One thing that remains endless is Morpheus' obstinacy. “You could have gone on to any afterlife you like. You had a hand in nearly all of them.”
“I can't return to the Dreaming,” he says.
“Not as you are, no.” Death places a hand on his arm and he turns to her, finally. She's still in red. “If you're going to stick around and sulk, though, why do it here? Go to the mortal world, maybe find love. I don't know. I can't decide for you.”
“And subject myself to Desire's whims?” he asks.
“You might not even be noticed.”
“I'm not certain that's better,” he replies, though there's a light in his eyes.
“Then try staying here?” Death asks, though it's obviously a statement. The matter was decided long ago. “Listen, feel—I know you can sense it. You're just paying attention to the wrong senses—ones that you know you don't have any longer.” There was a wry but rueful smile. “Do you want to go?”
“I did, and that's what brought me here.”
“Then you're halfway there.”
He spends a long moment considering what she's said, searching his thoughts for its meaning. He'd been used to having the answer within reach, even when he didn't want it. Yet this time, he finds its not there.
“Halfway to where?” he asks, and the uncertainty seems a comfort. This time, he can let Death explain.
“You're learning to perceive things one at a time, not as all potential at once.” She smiles and stands on the tips of her toes, giving him a quick kiss. “You'll get the hang of it.”
The last thing he remembers is her red dress filling his sight, then his mind. The very first thing he notices is that there's a light at the end, and a pair of waiting hands. In a few hours, he would sleep, and he would dream for the very first time.