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A clink makes him flinch. Fall sideways into a pile of glass. They cut into his hands and feet and arms. He bleeds, liquid sand and starstuff. The pain and blood bring him back, more than anything. Dream doesn't know why there's shattered glass here or how he got here.
He doesn't recognize this part of the Dreaming. The wounds continue to bleed, and he stares at them, not entirely comprehending. He stands. If he doesn't recognize this part of the Dreaming, he must have just made it, even if accidentally. It is entirely made of glass except the floor.
He doesn't – There's a blankness. You die when your spirit dies, Morpheus thinks. Otherwise, you live.(1)
Averno by Louise Glück. He'd been told to catch up on that book of poetry in particular by someone. The conversation feels very far away. He's still bleeding.
The floor is, inexplicably, polished wood. The blood is staining patterns on it. A glass cracks. He flinches. Another pattern. He flinches when glass cracks. Patterns. He looks up. He doesn't understand. He has tried, has he not? He has tried to reckon with a century in a glass cage. His own other self forced him to do that.
Oh. He's still bleeding. Why is he bleeding? It should have stopped.
His other self trying to tell him something again? Then what is it? That he's not done with the reckoning? Well, he knows that, in theory. He's been staring at nothing. Like the poem, he notices how dark it has gotten, how cold it has gotten. How long? Once the earth decides to have no memory time seems in a way meaningless.(1) Ah. Averno again.
Time. Reckoning. There will be time, for the yellow smoke of Prufrock, by Eliot. To prepare a mask, a face to meet others. And time yet for a hundred indecisions.(2)
A time to create and a time to destroy. A time for everything under the sun and moon and stars. A purpose for everything under Heaven. But then only that shall happen, which has happened, only that occur which has occurred; there is nothing new beneath the sun.(3) Kohelet, a book in the Ketuvim writings of the Tanakh. Kohelet, also called Ecclesiastes.
The glass is spiraling into fractals of light, with new spots. Oh. He's still bleeding.
Matthew. I require assistance, bring… help.
He hits the floor, the floor made of wood, and stares up at the slowly rotating ceiling. Light pours in from the skylights, through glass, and he shudders under it. Dream's eyes keep slipping closed. He hears wings, his eyes close, and he can't get them open. He says something, something incomprehensible even to himself, and doesn't hear a reply. Doesn't hear anything after that.
Dream blinks. Someone's hand is on his shoulder, and he flinches away from it, shuddering. Something's not right, his vision won't focus, like he's looking through glass.
Glass – "No – no, no, no –" He tries to lurch upright. "Where –"
His head pounds, and his limbs feel heavy, and something tugs. Bandages. Someone is saying something but he's too busy falling back to wherever he was lying, dizzy and unable to find where his memories of the preceding – preceding time frame have gone. There was glass.
"There was glass," he says a bit dumbly. Once the earth decides to have no memory time seems in a way meaningless.(1) His vision clears, and the hand belongs to Lucienne. Matthew perches nearby. He's on a bed.
Lucienne clears her throat. "Yes. There was. We found you bleeding in it. Was this intentional, Morpheus?"
Oh. She's asking if he was trying to die. He doesn't think he was. "I do not think so," he says. "I think. This may be similar to… The literal wound manifestation. That happened some time ago." Dream feels like his head is full of sand. He closes his eyes. "I don't remember getting there."
He's standing in the Waking, in the park near the New Inn, with no memory of what happened between lying in his chambers and whenever now is. Morpheus closes his eyes, and sitting on a bench, draws inward, looking. Are there fault lines he's neglected? He's missing something. Something besides the time and recent memories. Expands. Facets, all seeming intact. There are no inclusions or fractures, but something hurts, glancing across his being.
"– Hey, mate, you all right?" someone is asking. A stranger. Dream is on the ground, staring at the glittering sky. The sunlight is diamonds and glass. He flinches.
"I am… fine," he manages, sitting up, then standing. His legs bear his weight, and he strides off, ignoring the calls behind him. He pauses at the door to the New Inn, and to his relief, Hob is inside.
"Hob," he says. "I. It is. Happening again."
His words aren't particularly clear, but something in his bearing must give Hob pause, because he finds Hob packing his bags, steering him to his flat, sitting him down on a couch. Morpheus does not know how to explain how everything has become timeless, sprawling fields and the barren earth of memories, the voids between his actions. And there are still bandages under his coat.
Hob doesn't know what Dream means by it is happening again. But his friend lists a bit, like there's a wind blowing into him. A bandage pokes out from under his sleeve. He's pale and clearly stressed. Hob packs his bags, takes Dream's elbow, pulls him upstairs to his flat. Brings his hands up to frame Dream's face, gently. "Dream. Are you hurt?"
"I don't know," Dream says. "I am. Losing time. There are voids in my memory. I woke up in a room of glass and fell into the pieces. I woke up in my chambers bandaged from the cuts. Then I stood in the park by the New Inn. Looked inward at the facets. Looked. And looked. And woke up on the ground. And came to find you. My head. It hurts."
Morpheus can be cryptic, but usually makes more sense than half of what he just said. But Hob also understands parts of it. Blackouts of memory and body, Dream's head hurting. Hob breathes, in, out, in, out. "All right. All right, love, just. Lie down. Please."
And Dream goes under his hands, docile, without protest, and Hob fights back even more panic. "Can you call for Matthew and everyone? Get all of us who can help on the same page in the same room?"
Morpheus exhales, something like resignation or trepidation in it. "Pen and paper," he instructs. "Draw an ankh. Burn it with intent." Hob scrambles to find the requisite supplies.
Dream makes a complicated gesture in the air, like he's unlocking a door, and a portal unceremoniously drops Lucienne and Matthew out of it. Hob has finished drawing the ankh, and strikes a match against it. Death, Dream needs you, he thought. An inrush of air, and Death appears.
Everyone starts talking at once, until Morpheus makes a small noise of pain and shuts his eyes. Flinches, like it's too much. "I cannot find what is wrong," he says. "I look inward, through all of my selves, and…"
"Let me look," Death says softly.
Dream swallows. Nods. Death tugs him upright, takes one of his hands, and places the other on his forehead before making direct eye contact.
There isn't human vocabulary for what happens next. Staccato flashes of a million different versions of both Dream and Death. Dream's eyes burn with stars and shadows wisp out, surrounding the couch. Death has massive wings. Hob has to look away after only a few seconds.
"You didn't say how much the Vortex had done," Death finally says. Hob opens his eyes.
Dream's body is melted starshine, and he's fallen forward into Death, eyes closed. He can tell his form still flickers at the edges.
"Is that it, then?" Dream murmurs, with a sigh. "I thought. I had… fixed it."
"There were cracks in the Dreaming," Matthew caws. "Like, earthquakes and cracks in the ground."
"Yes," he says. "I thought…"
He is alone, as much as he ever is, but there's something buried in the Dreaming. Something he doesn't understand, is too distracted by the cracks to feel. It's not until he finds Hector and Lyta Hall that he understands. Something else was taken from him. And he will take it back, eventually.
He gasps, eyes flying open. He had not remembered closing them. For a second the room in front of him is imprinted on his vision, Hob's hands raised in placation and Death standing, Matthew on Lucienne's shoulder, and he's pressed against a wall, and then –
In his throne room, an echo of Rose's voice says, "You killed my friend. In front of his wife, and then you threaten to take her baby?"
Dream doesn't understand. He doesn't. Why is Rose's –
"I didn't ask for any of this." No, she didn't, did she. None of them really did.
Unity says, as they stand in Fiddler's Green: "But because you were imprisoned and locked out of the Dreaming, that fate was handed down to my descendants."
"I don't understand," Dream utters. He doesn't. His head hurts. His head hurts so much. Unity dies so that Rose could live – and Desire is their great-grandparent.
Dream says, "You and your brother are children of the Endless. You have suffered enough. You may leave this place."
"Rose Walker," he says, blinking. Death's hand is on his shoulder, a bulwark. "I never – I have been remiss –" Human beings living in fear. In between, the pit of disappearance.(1) Children of the Endless, adrift and unmoored. He could make excuses, that he was sure Rose wouldn't want to see him, would take his presence as a threat, but truthfully, how much had he spared to her and Jed Walker's lives after? Too busy rebuilding, repairing, falling apart and being put back together again.
"I have left the Walkers bereft of explanation," he says. "I must – rectify this."
"Morpheus," Lucienne says. "Morpheus, you need to sit."
Death swears softly, yanking up his coat sleeve; the bandages from his earlier collapse into glass are starting to soak through.
"Oh," he says, dizzied by the sight, as though he has not ever seen himself bleed or be wounded. Or, no, had he lost too much? He takes a step forward, and grabs onto his sister with a stagger. "Hob, do you have a first aid kit?"
Death hauls him to the couch as Hob disappears to some other part of the flat. She pulls off his coat, and he instinctually draws his arms in with a hiss. Too cold too much he needs his coat they took everything from him his shirt is going to be next –
"Dream," Death says. Almost pleads.
He wrenches his gaze to her, then away, then back, then jerks back at Hob's sudden re-appearance in the room. "Too much," he manages. " Too many –" His gaze jumps around the room, unable to land on anything for more than a few seconds.
Death takes the first aid kit from Hob, and says something to the others. A minute later he's alone with his sister. He grits his teeth and takes the first aid kit, winding the fresh bandages on his arms as she wipes them clean.
"Where else?" she asks.
Dream avoids her gaze.
"Dream."
He takes off his shirt, slowly, and immediately starts trembling from the air over his skin, the exposure of it, and closes his eyes. "Make it quick."
She works fast, patching up the wounds. When his shirt and coat are back on, she kisses the top of his head and draws him into a brief hug. Dream leans into it for several seconds before sitting upright.
"There is more to address than simply… reaching out," he finally says. "I had not realized. That the cracks had not quite healed. But it is a start."
"Rose Walker," he says, gentling his voice as much as he can. Hob's hand keeps coming to rest on his elbow when he stumbles. "I have left many things unexplained."
Several shouted accusations, panicked noises, and one reflexively flung object from Rose later (which he probably deserved), they all sit at a cafe.
He manages to smile.
For once, it seems to land correctly.