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What a strange thought it was, that your life was not always like this: drowning in jewels, silk, delicacies which names you couldn't pronounce, wonderful creatures bowing low each time they saw you and most of all - an entity the strangest of them all who wanted to bend over backwards to keep you happy. Would it be a little too on the nose to say it felt like a dream?
Morpheus made sure to keep the word he had given you, so not too long after you settled down in Dreaming the news of a wedding spread across the realm. Although none of his subjects had the faintest clue as to who you were, they seemed to put trust in the integrity of their king and welcomed you more than warmly. To them, it seemed quite obvious that whoever is worthy of being the bride of Dream of the Endless, had to be at least a little bit exceptional - an expectation you weren’t sure you could ever fulfil.
You didn't feel at home in Dreaming, not right away: your life only became stranger as you were suddenly showered with gifts and honours you doubted you deserved in any way. It felt wrong to accept those riches - after all, you had done exactly nothing to earn such honours. What if one day every creature of Dreaming realizes it? What if he does? You had fooled him so far but how could you be sure this lark could go on? Like every good thing in your life, this spell, too, had to disperse someday. You were nothing more than a leech on his charity.
"There is something on your mind," Morpheus caught you off guard once. Apparently, there was nothing that could escape his stern gaze - especially if the said thing was connected to you. You could only wonder how much he had learned about you just through his silent observation.
"I don't know if I deserve any of... this." You made a vague circle with your hand. It was a nice euphemism on your part - ‘good life’ couldn’t quite move past your lips.
"No," he answered in a decisive tone but before the painful hole in your chest could open once again, the very hole this unjust world scratched inside you, he continued, "You deserve a lot more. More than I am able to give you."
A sad smile entered your face. To some degree, you pitied his delusional perception of you but your selfishness forced you to lick every last drop of it. "You're a real sweet-talker, you know?"
Morpheus’s hand gently held yours. Without letting his gaze fall from your face, he placed a warm kiss on your fingers, right next to the magnificent yet bizarre ring he had given you on your wedding day - ‘a testimony of my love’ he called it. ”There is nothing sweet about truth. It simply is."
“I find it hard to believe in that truth,” you answered quietly.
“Truth remains despite beliefs.” He presses another kiss to your fingers before letting his lips leave a trail of pecks along your skin down to your wrist. “There is no price I would not pay to let you see yourself through my eyes even once.” Perhaps that was better for the soul - should you become privy to Morpheus’s perception of you, there’d be no more modesty left in you, no innate obligation to remain humble; oceans, volcanos, supernovas… were they not all terrible, beautiful and prideful? And yet even they dimmed in the halo of your sacrilegious wonder.
Due to Morpheus’s explicit prohibition, you couldn’t leave the castle grounds without him - he only cared and wanted to make sure that no malice lurking in the hearts of his subject would raise its hand against you. Considering how passionate he was about that one rule, you never even questioned it, simply gloating in the indirect confession of his affections and how much they tormented his every thought.
But who were you to defy your husband’s (reminding yourself of that rightful title made a flustered blush appear on your cheeks) orders? Waiting for him to finish his royal duties, you wandered through the palace. Despite seeing those marble walls and crystal chandeliers every day, they still managed to take your breath away. It was a view no one back in the Waking World could ever imagine, and now it was your very own secret and your home. An infantile giggle escaped your lips - ‘a queen in a castle’. How ridiculous and wonderful.
An unexpected fluttering of wings diverted your attention from admiring the halls of the chateau. To your surprise, Matthew had decided to pay you a visit - rarely did he engage in friendly chatter with you and you never quite understood whether it was due to a lack of common interests or a lack of his interest in particular. His black feathers shone in the dispersed sunlight coming through the tall stained-glass windows. There was something equally malevolent and dignified about the way he looked.
"Not following Morpheus around?" you asked him humorously.
Without answering, Matthew hopped closer to you, his beady eyes watched you carefully. "Are you okay?" he asked quietly.
You furrowed your eyebrows at the strange inquiry. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"I mean this whole situation is just a little... weird, isn't it?” his voice remained low, somewhat anxious of suspected prying ears. Little did he know, his fear wasn’t unreasonable. “Dream shows up and, no offence, you throw yourself at him after he made a ludicrous offer."
To be fair, Morpheus was well-aware that he shouldn’t listen to your conversation with Matthew. Despite that, he also knew that it was his sole responsibility to tend to your needs and desires, which made eavesdropping seem a little less impolite - at least that’s what he had told himself. If there was the smallest thing that upset your heart, even a flowerpot standing a little too much to the right, he needed to know. He had to fix it as soon as possible so that you don’t see through his charming demeanour and realize what a selfish, calloused creature he truly was; what beast loneliness had turned him into. Now that Morpheus captured his little bird, he wasn’t going to let it fly away - even if that meant clipping its wings but that was a possibility he’d rather not ponder at the moment. Standing in the shadows of his own palace like a beggar at an emperor’s court, he appeared frozen in time as he drank each sound coming from your lips, his frenzied heart dismantled every word you said in search of Dream’s possible shortcomings.
When Matthew put it like that, it did sound a little mad but many mundane things could come off as wrong if put into the right words. Unsure what answer to give him, you only shrugged. "It's a weird world, Matthew."
"You don't even know the guy,” he raised his voice slightly. Clearly, he couldn’t wrap his head around your seemingly reckless choice. “Well, you didn't at the time. And you just left everything behind for him? Your whole life! What if he was crazy?” he was becoming more animated in his bewilderment. Then, he added quickly: “Not that I think he is, of course."
"Then I probably wouldn’t be complaining anyway, would I?" But Matthew didn’t seem to appreciate your grim humour. You looked away for a moment as images of your previous life flashed before your eyes. ‘Previous life’ seemed like a fitting phrase - memories of those bleak days appeared blurry, murky, as though you weren’t recalling real events but someone’s account of a storyline in a book they had once read. "There wasn't much to leave. It wasn't an impulsive decision, there just wasn't a lot to consider in the first place. I don’t know what kind of life you had led before, Matthew,” your sombre eyes looked at him again, “but not everyone desperately clings to whatever scraps they have. My life was nothing beyond bland longing to be elsewhere. No offer is ludicrous when you go to bed each night hoping not to wake up in the morning. But then, to your own horror, you do. As time goes by, you realize you had been alive for too long, that you were never meant to make it this far. So you have a wonderful choice between death and becoming a hopeless failure. For some ridiculous reason I will always hold dear, I was offered a third choice, a way out of the vale of misery and pain I called life.”
But your tale did not satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps this conversation in low voices wasn’t meant to prove something to him but to you. "Have you never considered why he did all of this?"
Of course, you did. You had been wondering about that ever since you agreed to join him in Dreaming. But each hour of long pondering brought you to the very same conclusion: you couldn’t give him anything, so something else was the matter. And the passion with which he had offered to change your life… this wasn’t accidental. Quite clearly, in your mind, Dream of the Endless had chosen you. “I trust his integrity, I suppose,” you answered Matthew with a slight shrug of your shoulders. Truthfully, you couldn’t quite explain your trust towards your husband to yourself. More than reason, it was a case of trusting one’s instincts. “I’d need to have something valuable or unique for Morpheus to have a reason for creating some elaborate scheme. But I don’t. I may be someone but not somebody. A creature of his sort would never pay attention to something like me unless he genuinely cared. It’s bitterly funny when you think about it: it takes an eldritch being to love the most unremarkable human.”
"You know, if something sounds too good to be true, it usually is."
Perhaps Matthew was right. In your own experience, good things in life never came without a price, some secret cost that you could never learn about until the very moment you had to pay it. Your eyes wandered around the majestic, marble hall; the stunningly expensive silk you were wearing; the strange ring on your finger and its crystal, which appeared infinite when you looked inside it - there was, quite literally, no price that could make you regret your choice. "And yet peanut butter ice cream is a thing,” you said absentmindedly still staring into the crystal. Light entered the wonderful jewel from all angles, reflected off of irregular sides inside and turned into a pleiad of colours you couldn’t even begin to name. The gem wasn’t of this world - that much you were certain of.
"Fair point."
Matthew’s agreement elicited laughter from you. Maybe you didn’t quite see eye-to-eye about your relationship with Morpheus but that didn’t necessarily mean you had to remain estranged in any way - truthfully, you wished you could befriend him. He had been, after all, a human once. If there was anyone in Dreaming who could relate to your experiences even a little bit, it was that back-talking raven (not that his cheeky attitude was a flaw).
As your giggling died down, Matthew tried his last chance at this suspicious inquiry. "Do you ever think about going back to the Waking World? Even just popping in for a visit?"
Morpheus clenched his fist. As much as he refused to think about clipping wings at the moment, the idea temptingly lingered in the back of his mind. You can’t go back. You can’t leave him. Suddenly, his frenzied desperation flashed Nada's face before his eyes - he truly didn't want that history to repeat. It would ruin him to live on knowing that you're going through unimaginably horrifying tortures in Hell but if you were to seduce him and then leave as though he meant nothing to you, perhaps that's exactly what you deserved.
"There's nothing and no one for me to visit,” you answered in a decisive tone.
Understanding that this conversation wasn’t going anywhere else, that you had told him all that could be said, Matthew knew it was time for him to go. If Morpheus notices he’d been gone, Dream might start asking questions and considering the nature of his inquiry - it was better to keep the King of Dreaming out of the loop. “Alright then, uh… good talk. See you around… your majesty.” If Matthew had a human face, he’d probably grimace at the royal title. Although Morpheus wasn’t adamant about being addressed properly by his closest friends, he became quite unforgiving when it came to your rightful title. You were a queen and he’d be damned if one of his creations dared to forget that.
With another flutter of dark wings, you were left alone once more. Solitude had never felt so serene - peaceful instead of overwhelmingly empty.
Slowly running out of ways to pass the time, you hesitantly sat on the throne that belonged to Dream. To be fair, he never expressed anything short of encouragement whenever you did but still, it felt like you were a deceptive imposter leeching off a King hopelessly in love.
Remaining in the shadows, Morpheus watched. His breaths became ragged as he admired the effortlessly regal beauty you were beaming with. Perhaps you refused to believe in your overpowering charm but none who had ever laid their eyes on you could indulge in such dishonesty. A new thought sprouted in his thoughts clouded with an obsession - maybe this is how things should be: the King of Dreams kneeling before his queen, a god-like creature rendered powerless by something far more perfect than he could ever strive to become. Whatever you’d ask him, he’d waste no time completing, never second-guessing your most bloodthirsty whims. Yet you remained completely oblivious to your absolute might, fiddling with the crystal ring he had given you. Inside that gilded cage, you had begged to be imprisoned in, there was a silvered perch like a pedestal an obedient bird of paradise sits on. You were a good nightingale and so you impatiently waited for your merciful captor to return. And what a sweet song you’re going to grace him with! Each mellow melody you gave him made Morpheus all the grimmer: he could never let anyone else know the blessing that calmed his sweet, sweet despair. You were his nightingale, all of your songs belonged to him only.