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Sally’s never been sure if her dreams are blessings or curses. The hyperrealism of it all, how she sees things in real time despite not being there. How the things in her dreams can see her, too.
The first one she can remember takes place on a plane.
She was five years old, staying with her uncle at his beachside cabin out on Long Island. She remembers being restless, fighting with him to stay awake, something inside her head telling her not to go to sleep that night.
Eventually, when she was tucked into her bed with nothing to do, sleep caught up to her.
Sally had never been on a plane before, had never seen what the inside of one looked like, but there she was, walking down the aisle of one towards her parents.
A voice came through the speaker, staticky and broken. She didn’t catch much of what the voice said other than a word she didn’t yet know the meaning of: turbulence.
The plane rattled, and a few women wearing uniforms rushed about the plane. One of them came over to her, holding onto the nearest seat as she bent down to Sally’s level.
“Sweetie, do you know where your seat is?”
The plane shakes some more, plastic bags with cups dropping from the ceiling. The lady tightens her grip on the seat some more.
“I need you to go back to your seat, okay?”
Sally nods, clutching the armrests of the seats as she stumbles towards her parents.
The aisle seat beside her mom is open, and Sally slips into it. Neither of her parents seems to notice her, too preoccupied with fitting the yellow cups over their mouths.
“Mama?” she asks, pulling on the sleeve of her mother’s shirt.
Her mother doesn’t answer; instead, she reaches a hand out to squeeze her fathers’.
“What about Sally?”
Her dad closes his eyes. “It’ll be alright, Estelle. Rich will take care of her.”
“Daddy? What’s happening?”
Her parents ignore her, continuing their conversation.
“She’s so little, Jim,” her mother says, a tear sliding down her cheek. “We don’t even get to say goodbye to her.”
“Mama, what’s happening?” she tries again. “Where are you going?”
“I know,” her dad says, pressing his lips to her mother’s head. “I know.”
“I want to see her.”
“Mama! I’m right here,” Sally says.
“I do, too, Stelle.”
“Daddy! I’m right here!”
Her dad’s head snaps towards her, his eyes widening.
“Sally?” He reaches over his wife, grabbing Sally’s hand. “Sweetheart, you can’t be here. You need to leave!”
“Why? What’s going—”
The plane lurches, sending her flying into the seat in front of her. Her mother’s arm pulls her back, holding her close.
“Baby,” she mumbles into Sally’s hair. “You need to get out of here.”
“But—”
“Now, Sally!” her dad insists.
Something in Sally’s head stirs, the same cloudy feeling she gets right before she wakes up.
“Okay,” she says.
Slowly, everything starts to fade away. Just before everything is gone, she hears her mom speak again.
“I love you, baby.”
The last thing she hears is a crash, the sound of metal crunching, glass shattering.
And then she’s shaken awake, a different voice cutting through the fog.
“Sally?” her uncle asks. “Are you alright?”
She sits up, rubbing at her eyes.
“What happened to the plane?”
“What plane?”
“The plane I was on with mama and daddy. They told me I had to leave.”
Her uncle raises an eyebrow. “That was a dream, kiddo. You’ve never even been on a plane.”
A few days later, she finds out that her parents had died in a plane crash.
The dreams are a curse, she decides.
— — —
They don’t stop after that. They’re nightmares, dark twisted images of creatures made of shadows, bat-winged women with talons, giant one-eyed men, serpent-like things with glowing eyes that peer at her through the surf.
They’re not just in her dreams, either. She sees them while she’s driving down the tree-canopied roads of Long Island, while she’s walking home from the market, while she’s reading books down on the beach.
They persist, torturing her nights and haunting her days.
But the day she meets him, they stop.
The creatures sink back into the shadows, into the depths, leaving her days alone. At night, he’ll wrap his arms around her, press his lips to her temple, mumbling ancient words into her hair.
They won't come at night, either, he promises. Don’t worry about them.
She buries her head into his chest, letting the in and out of his breathing lull her to sleep.
For seven months, the dreams leave her alone. For seven months, she sleeps wrapped up in him. For seven months, she has the most blissful sleep she’s gotten since she was a child.
The day she sees two pink lines staring up at her, they come back full force.
Even Poseidon, all calming words and soothing touches, can’t ward them off.
He tells her about the prophecy soon after the dreams come back. Her son— their son—has a prophecy written about him. Words carved into stone, solidified by the Fates themselves, paving his life for him.
Sixteen, he says. He’ll be sixteen.
Sixteen years until the fate of the world rests on her son's shoulders.
And then he tells her about the oath, about the promise he made to not have another child, and she realizes that the prophecy and the monsters are the least of her worries.
The prophecy will come to pass in sixteen years, the demons even sooner, but the gods are the worst threat of all. If the gods find out about their child, the one that holds the power to destroy them, they’ll come for him.
Sally tries to bury those fears, hide them behind the protection that Poseidon provides. He acts as a shield, a barrier between the creatures and their son; none of them dare come near when he’s around.
With time, with enough reassurance from his presence, her fears shrink to a fraction of what they once were. The months of being unable to let Percy in a room by himself fade into the past. She’s able to let him sleep in his own room, with only a baby monitor connecting the two of them.
The steady drone of static becomes a constant to her nights, one that brings her peace rather than anxiousness.
They’re down by the water one day, Poseidon holding Percy in his arms while the waves come up to greet them. Sally sits a little behind them, watching her son and his father and the ocean in front of them.
He can’t stay forever, she knows. He can’t keep protecting them without raising suspicion.
It’s then that she realizes she has a choice to make. It’s between the wrath of the creatures or the gods.
She’ll take the creatures.
When she tells him he has to leave, he begs her, pleads with her to reconsider, to join him at the bottom of the sea.
I can keep you safe from both the monsters and the gods, he says. Nobody can reach you in my domain.
She doesn’t give in, telling him that if their son’s life is already going to be marred by monsters, by something he didn’t choose, she wanted to give him as much normalcy as possible.
On land, she tells him. Where he can grow up unaware of the weight hanging over his head.
He’s never liked arguing with her, never liked going against what she wanted, so when she doesn’t give in, he does.
He places a hand on Percy’s head, says some words she doesn’t understand, and comes back over to her.
She feels his lips on her forehead, feels the grimace he makes.
“Please be careful,” he says. “Please.”
She nods, presses her lips to his once more, and then he’s gone.
She can still feel him sometimes, and she knows he’s watching over her and Percy. The water gravitates towards them while they sit in the sand. It catches Percy before he hits the ground when he stumbles in the ankle-high water.
But even that is too dangerous, she thinks. The gods are no stupid beings—one of them is bound to notice how Poseidon favors the two of them.
So she leaves Montauk, the place she’s called home since she was five. She flees to the city, away from the ocean, away from Poseidon.
She has a few years until the monsters come, anyway.
— — –
Having a kid makes her realize that the dreams might be blessings in disguise. They plague her, but they keep her son safe.
She knows where they’re at, where they’re hiding. She knows what days to take off work, and to not send Percy to daycare—she can always make up hours, but she can’t replace her son.
Sally gets used to waking up to every small sound through the monitor, her brain always on alert.
Tonight, it’s to the soft coos of her baby.
She rolls over, the other side of the bed empty. It’s the same mattress she’d had at Montauk, brought with her because she hadn’t been able to afford a new one.
He might not be with her anymore, but she keeps to her own side of the bed anyway, unwilling to taint the way his side had molded to his body, indented where his weight had rested.
It’s not as painful these days to wake up and find a sea of vacant space rather than a strong figure, but she still finds herself longing for the safety he provided. She picked the lesser of two evils, she knows, but she can’t stop the what-ifs. What if she would have gone with Poseidon? What if she’s putting Percy in more danger?
It’d been much easier when he was still with her, when he’d pull the blankets back up over her shoulders as he slipped out of their bed, padding across the hall to where his son slept. She’d listen through the monitor, warmth spreading through her at the way Percy immediately quieted, pacified by the presence of his father.
“There’s my boy,” he would say, and the rustling of Percy’s crib mattress would follow.
It would be quiet for a few moments, just the creek of the floorboards and the sound of him sitting down on the wooden rocking chair. Then she’d hear their breathing, both her son’s and her lover’s, followed by the waves gently crashing against the shore. The three of them would sync into one, the ocean and Percy both responding to Poseidon.
Their baby would babble then, unintelligible noises that Poseidon pretended to understand every word of. Percy would coo out a sound that could vaguely be mistaken for Mama, and Poseidon would pause, his deep laugh mingling with Percy’s baby speech.
“Mama?” Poseidon would ask, and Percy would respond with more noises.
“You’re right,” he says, and Sally can hear his smile through the monitor. “She is amazing.”
But he’s not here. He’s not over in Percy’s room rocking him back to sleep. She’s not looking at a mess of black hair, she’s looking at the empty pillow where his head used to rest. There are no waves now, no steady rhythm to quell her fears. Now there are car horns and shouting and sirens, the never-ending noises of the city that never sleeps.
Percy starts to fuss a little, and she hears him say “Mama.”
She moves to go check on him, switching on her lamp.
Then a creek sounds through the monitor, followed by a coo from Percy and the sound of footsteps, and her heart stops.
Her blanket ends up tossed somewhere on her floor, carelessly discarded as she rushes down the hallway.
Percy’s door is ajar, just as it always is, and she hears him babbling inside.
“Dada.”
She hears a voice mumbling ancient words, a lullaby she grew familiar with hearing through her monitor, and she pushes the bedroom door open.
Poseidon turns to her.
“I’m sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of Percy’s head. “I tried to get him before he could wake you.”
There’s a soft blue glow covering the room, emanating from a trident that rests by the window.
Sally exhales a breath she didn’t know she was holding and slouches against the doorframe.
“I was already awake,” she says.
A silence settles over them, and he bounces Percy gently in his arms.
“How mad are you?” he asks after Percy’s small coos turn into a quiet slumber.
“I’m not mad, you just scared me.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
Sally pushes off the wall, taking a few steps towards him.
“How often?”
He gives her a small smile that tells her everything she needs to know.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I’m just worried; I need to make sure you’re okay—both of you.”
“You don’t have to do that, Sei.”
“I do, Sal. It’s my job.”
Poseidon places Percy back in his crib, coming back to wrap his arms around Sally.
“What are you going to do when he’s old enough to remember?”
His lips press to her forehead.
“I’ll…figure that out when we get there.”
“And for now?”
He pulls away slightly, sliding his hands down her arms.
“I’ll do whatever you’d like me to.”
Her hand moves on its own accord, her thumb brushing across his cheek.
One of his own hands covers hers.
“I’ll leave, if you want…” he trails off. “I know you told me to stay away, but I—”
“Or you could stay.”
— — —
The next time she wakes, it’s from a dreamless sleep—the first one she’s had in months.
There’s light just beginning to spill through her bedroom curtains. The other half of her bed is empty but still warm, and she can hear movement across the hall.
“Come here, Perce,” Poseidon says. “Let Mama sleep a little longer.”
She hears his footsteps heading towards the living room, accompanied by his voice quietly singing out a soft, ancient tune.