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*
"Huh- hu- hey G- Goldie." Abel smiled kindly at the small gargoyle. He picked Irving up in his hands and held her close.
"Wuh- would you la- like to hear a suh- suh- story, Guh- Goldie? I muh- mean it's gonna have to be a suh- suh- secret, you see, because I'm- I'm- I'm-"
"Meep" Irving said kindly.
"That'ss ruh- right, thas right, I- I- I live in the House of Secrets and I know aaall duh- duh- the secrets and you- you mustn't t- t- tell Cain that I'm- I'm telling you a secret, he- he uh he doesn't like it when I tell suh- secrets, e- e- even th- though I- I- I stopp stuuh- stutttering when uh when I duhh- do, you suh- see Muh- muh- Matthew said that, uh-"
"Meep!"
"Oh! Uh I'm sup- suppposed to be telling the suh- suh- story a- a- aren't I? Yes, y- yes, suh- sorry so- so there was a storm ..."
*
"There was a storm.
Death wondered when it had started. Last year? 3 years ago? A hundred? A million?
Or perhaps it had always been there, raging, screaming, tearing everything and itself apart like a storm is meant to.
She wondered ... Perhaps she could have prevented it. Maybe she had missed a turn in Destiny's labyrinth that led down a path of healing and forgiveness. If she'd said a kind word more maybe, offered a hand of assistance without waiting first to be asked. She wondered ...
Perhaps ... Perhaps it was in the nature of dreams to end in this. In rage at being false, in pain at a fantasy ending and a need to go back to the strange world that would begin to feel so much more real than the waking world. Thinking the next time would be different. The dream would last. It never does. Dreams are temporary after all. A fleeting respite from the real world.
Unlike Death.
So in the wake of the storm, she was here, the last and only true respite. Here to offer the last words of comfort, before she took Dream to the Sunless Lands.
"Dream," she said to him, the gentle whisper carried away by the winds.
She paused to calm herself. It was not yet the time to grieve. She knew she had to comfort him, she knew what he needed, although she wasn't sure how to gift it to him. How could you give to an all-powerful being who had never shed tears a gift of a shoulder to cry on. A being who flooded the Dreaming with his sorrow and lit it's skies ablaze with his joy. Who despaired because his breast knew not the tremors of heaving sobs.
He raised his eyes to look at her. There they were, the black pools of starlight some called void, empty, terrible wells of nothingness for you to fall into and lose yourself and everybody else. So many saw them this way, mortals, gods, dreams, Endless and Time.
Still Death saw them as they were like she saw everybody as they were. Her cruel brother's eyes held stars and suns and galaxies and the little Sun who called himself Sol and the Siamese cat with a brave voice but a grieving heart and a broken man who would be Emperor of America and a place who preferred to be a man and a scarecrow driving a bus and a hopeless tree whose twig he had snapped and a wronged soul of a lover and a row of red flowers that had never existed and a girl called Hope Beautiful Lost Nebula and a dead brother who knew all the secrets and-
She knew what to do.
"Little brother?"
"Could you- could you give me a dream? A story that I've always liked? Please?"
He was still as the storm raged.
"What story would you have me give you, sister?" Uncertain. Scared. Desperate. His eyes begged her for something he didn't understand.She knew which story he needed.
"A little secret."
"A little secret buried under mountains of mistakes and pride and pits of rage and cruelty and graveyards of loss and shame and guilt."
"A little secret only the dead and me know."
"Of a girl and her little brother who lived in a cottage by the sea ..."
"And in the night the brother had a nightmare ..."
"So she woke him up and told him kind words and held him while he wept."
There were no more cliffs, no more roaring winds, no more shards of ice that cut your skin, no more storm. There was grass and a cottage by the sea and a small girl holding a small weeping boy in her arms. The girl had a pale kind face beneath a mess of black hair, a silver ankh on a chain around her neck. The boy had marble white skin, a thin body and face with twin stars twinkling in pools of darkness neath a shock of black hair. The stars were muted now. Liquid as if the pools had finally spilled over, tired of everything they held.
He sobbed and wept and cried his soul out onto his sister's polka dot pajamas. The tears made their riverbeds on his cheeks where they had never before ran.
She was a little girl who calmed her brother's fears in the wake of a nightmare. He didn't need to use words for her to know what he had dreamt about. He dreamt of centuries and millennia and eons of life. A life of being shaped by others like a handful of sand built into a sandcastle one day only to be torn down by the sea the next. Of walking a strange world with wooden legs of a toy soldier and loving one paper ballerina after another and for the love never to last, as fleeting as dreams. Of waking one day to find he had a role to play, to take the hearts of others at night and shape them into monsters he had found within them and himself.
"A little secret yes, that's it, lil' brother," Death said to Dream.
"Of how we were children once."
In that one instance in the history of the world, there was no Death and there was no Dream. There was no one to give a kind smile to the dead and no one to sprinkle sand onto the eyes of the sleeping. They were here, just two small mortal children, holding each other.
There never was, is not and never will be anyone who could tell whether it was real.
But then again it was a dream.
And it is never only a dream."
*
"An- an- and y- you see Guh- Goldie-" the story told, Abel began to stutter again. "You suh- see I'm gon- gonna ssst- stop telling it huh- hu- here, buh- buh- buh-cause if I k- k- k- keep telling i- it then it's not gonna have a happy ending y see ..."
"Meep?"
"O- oh- oh I suh- see, you d- don't uh- uh- understand do you? Da- da- dhat's the šecret you see ... And I- I- I'm the dead buh- brother so I nuh- know alll the- the secrets. I- it's Morpheus' suh- secret. It's a secret ab- ab- about- t stories an- and hee was the puh- puh- pu-"
"Meep."
"Yes, the puh- Prince of Stories, yes that's what hu- he was. It- it's that if yuh- you don't suh- stop telling a story th- then it- it- it- it- then it's not gonna have a happy ending!"
Abel raised his chubby head high, proud of himself that he had managed to tell the explanation. Irving gave another encouraging meep.
*
When Death came to say hi to Abel, after Cain had bludgeoned his head to death for telling secrets - It was Supposed to remain a mystery you idiotic excuse for a bag of raven poop, you- she told the younger brother what a nice story it had been. 'It was kind and I quite liked it', she said.
But she was Death and she knew how all stories end.
"In that story," she said later to no one in particular, "the little brother realised that he always slept and that the nightmare would just come back again. So he said 'I am tired, my sister. I am very tired.'
And he killed himself.
And he went with his big sister, hand in hand to The Sunless Lands.
The End" she finished lamely, with a sad smile.
"Now where did I put that mullet wig- Uuugh, dammit, I always lose shit in here ..."
*