Chapter Text
What Roderick Burgess, and later his son did not stop to consider is that, yes, the King of Dreams is not human. But they have summoned him to this plane in human form, bound his false flesh in real flesh and cut it off from the magic that sustains it.
The human form that, locked away without food or water or air or magic withers and wastes away, eating at itself until there is nothing left, muscle and sinew burned away to bones held together by nothing that any mortal eyes could see, and then by nothing.
The Corinthian, perhaps, might have been able to tell them this, if he had stopped to consider. If he had cared. But all he had said to Roderick Burgess, with tiny Alex cowering behind him, was that no matter what the being they had captured looked like, no matter if it seemed to die, the binding circle must forever stay intact.
The bones, the beautiful shining pearlescent bones, are left in the glass cage for another decade, until Alex, grown sick with knowing they are there, has most of them removed. They are buried in the family plot in a distant corner, not because Alex wishes to pay respect to them, but because it’s the best place to bury bones you don't want anyone to wonder about. He doesn’t take all of them, as wary of this being called "Endless" in its false death as he was of it in its false life. He remembers the American man in the pale suit and the dark sunglasses. He alone, from his child’s height, had been able to see up under the bottom of the sunglasses. He could still see the teeth where the eyes should be, the skulls within a skull. So the skull he leaves, lovely, shining, accusing in the center of the golden binding circle. He dismisses the guards and pays for their lifelong silence. He has the iron doors to the basement welded shut, and his dreams, (what few he even has anymore,) are always of him, riding to the hunt. Riding beside his father, who charges with a spear in his withered hand. Who hunts down a beautiful unicorn and after he has speared it through, slits its elegant throat. For Alex Burgess’s last few decades of life, he dreams of nothing but being forced to watch, complicit in the murder of the most beautiful thing he ever saw.