Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue-

“Little did he know, this was not the end of a story—it was only the echo of its first breath.”

---

It was always cold in Wych Cross. Not the kind of cold that bit at your fingers and made you long for fires, but the slow, creeping kind. The kind that seeped into walls, skin, and memories.

Alex Burgess stood in the long hall of Fawney Rig, one hand clasped behind his back in practiced politeness. He was fifteen—though his bones already felt older than that. Inherited silence had carved itself into the corners of his mouth, trained him to flinch without blinking.

His father, Roderick, was shouting again. Something about the Magus’ circle, about control, about power. Alex didn’t hear it all. He didn’t want to.

What he did hear—what he always heard—was the silence beneath the floorboards. The room.

The thing they kept there.

No.
Not a thing.

He had never quite believed that.

---

He moved when the house slept.

Alex made his way down the forbidden hallway with a single flickering candle in hand, the flame bobbing like a heartbeat. The guards had stopped bothering with vigilance years ago. What harm could a boy do, after all?

The doors to the chamber creaked open. Dust swirled in the beam of candlelight.

And there—at the center of the vast ritual circle, trapped in spinning runes and absolute stillness—was him.

The being was impossibly still. Bare feet folded beneath robes of endless black. Pale skin. Eyes closed. Shadow bleeding from him like smoke from a dream’s mouth.

Alex had never spoken to him before.

But tonight, his chest ached in a way he couldn’t name. So he stepped closer, trembling.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “About… everything.”

No response.

Alex cleared his throat. “They don’t see you. Not really. They think you’re a tool. A weapon.”

He swallowed. The words were treason.

“But I think you’re lonely.”

Still no movement. But the candle flickered sharply, casting brief fire across the prisoner’s marble-like cheekbones.

Alex knelt just outside the circle, like he was praying.

“If I could let you out, I would,” he whispered, voice trembling with something dangerously close to tears. “I don’t want to be him. I don’t want to be them.”

That’s when it happened.

A faint shift.

Eyes opened.

Alex froze.

Twin pools of starlit darkness met his gaze.

And Dream of the Endless—ancient, fallen, proud—looked at a child who had spoken to him not as a god, but as a person.

Time did not move. The candle stilled. The house held its breath.

And then…

The smallest, tiniest tilt of the head. A monarch nodding to a sparrow.

Alex exhaled like he'd been underwater for years.

He stood. His knees shook.

“I’ll come back,” he promised. “I'll find a way.”

And the boy fled into the night, unaware that in that moment, history had turned its head.

---

Far above, in the fractured realms of dream and nightmare, something ancient stirred.

A ripple through the Dreaming.
A name remembered.
A cage creaking open.

Not with power.
But with kindness.

And it all began… with a boy and a god, and the quiet promise of a better dream.

---

Chapter Text

The manor had never been silent.
Not truly.
Even when Roderick Burgess’ footsteps stopped echoing across the marble, even when the spells had settled into the walls like rot into old wood, even when the guards had gone to sleep and the world outside was blissfully unaware of the god imprisoned below—Alex heard it.

The hum.

Low. Unholy. Like the earth itself murmured warnings it dared not speak aloud.

Alex Burgess was sixteen, and he had already committed treason against blood.

He stood in the mirror-warped library, bare feet silent on the red-carpeted floor, where forbidden pages hissed when touched and ancient symbols crawled when ignored. Candles flickered. Shadows danced.
He wasn’t supposed to be here.
He wasn’t supposed to know anything.

But Alex had grown up beneath the floorboards of power—watching, waiting, enduring. And now, he was stealing from it.

On the desk before him lay the old man’s personal grimoire, flanked by the first stolen feather: jet-black, warm to the touch, a relic of the raven Dream had sent—a companion turned trophy.

“I’ll get them all,” Alex whispered, jaw set. His fingers hovered over the ink-scrawled page where incantations bled into diagrams. "And I’ll get Him free."

---

Elsewhere—far from the manor, buried beneath dreamstuff and human longing…

A gloved hand turned over a cold crystal fragment, humming with unearthly resonance.
The shard was small. Harmless-looking. Dull, even.

But the man holding it smiled.

“The first piece is ours,” murmured a voice wrapped in silk and static. “The heart of the Endless’s son, now born again in ice and ache.”

The laboratory's lights flickered once.
Somewhere, deep in the Dreaming—something shivered.

---
The Dreaming was no longer in rhythm.

Books fluttered when they should’ve been still. Doors refused to stay shut. And somewhere in the grand heart of the library—Lucien’s hand trembled as he scanned the seventh ledger in an hour.

“This isn’t right,” Lucien muttered, brow furrowed beneath golden spectacles. “He said he’d be back within hours. Days at most.”

Lucienne—her mirrored double, brought into existence when the Dreaming began fracturing long ago—paced the mezzanine above. She clutched a scroll of recorded dream-activity, the edges frayed as if scorched by thought.

“It’s been weeks,” she said flatly. “And he never breaks his word. He went after the Corinthian. But now—nothing. No traces. Not even Matthew.”

At the mention of the raven, the silence seemed to deepen.

Matthew, so often annoying, ever-flapping, ever-chattering, had gone radio silent mid-report.

Vanished.

And worse… so had one of the Shards.

A Dream Shard—essence of his soul, his power, and… something else.

Locked away in a vault of conceptual memory only he and Lucien were supposed to access.

But when Lucienne went looking for it, all she found was a whisper of ice… and an echo of Orpheus’s melody, long dead.

---

Far, far away—in a cellar lit only by candlelight and Alex Burgess’ shaking hands—the Ruby pulsed.

Red. Deep. Alive.

Alex didn’t breathe as he whispered the incantation to cloak it, to hide it from eyes not meant to see.
Magic wrapped around it like velvet. Memory recoiled. Even the air forgot.

And as he locked it in a silver-lined box beneath the floorboards, he whispered:

“I’ll use it to fix what we broke.”

Because he had a plan.

And no Endless, not even Dream himself, would see it coming.

---
---

The crypt beneath Fawney Rig was never supposed to exist.

It was carved through salt-soaked earth, spell-sealed by generations of Burgess magic and desperation. It breathed like a living thing—walls lined with wards older than Alex himself. Father never knew this place.

This one was his.

The Ruby pulsed faintly from its hidden place above—quiet for now. The robes, dream-woven and stitched with starlight, were folded with trembling reverence on a nearby chair.

But now came the hardest part.

Alex stood before the Vault.

The Helm.

Forged from the spine of a dead god, crowned with bone and dust and memory—it didn’t sit. It loomed. Floating above a plinth of obsidian carved from a dream of fear itself. The air around it shimmered like heat haze—guarded by ancient curses and a whispering presence that judged.

Alex pressed a bloodied hand to the sigil. “Please,” he whispered. “Let me take him home.”

The Vault did not open.

Instead, it tested.

Every memory of failure. Every ounce of guilt. Roderick’s eyes. The weight of years. Paul’s grave.

It cracked his knees. Bent him to the ground.

But Alex—older now, stronger in quiet ways—endured.

He whispered his love for the world Dream once shaped. He spoke of the children. The nightmares. The broken sleep of millions. He cried, not for himself, but for the Dreaming.

And the Vault… relented.

The Helm descended slowly, weightless, and yet impossibly heavy.

Alex cradled it to his chest like a crown of thorns, heart racing, body trembling.

“One more to go,” he whispered.

The pouch.

And then… it would begin.

------

Beneath the white halls of false sanctity, far from any god’s eyes, the Hexzerkiel Foundation stood like a cathedral carved from control. No prayers here. Only purpose.

A silver room hummed, frost climbing the walls in fractal patterns like veins of a dying planet. Within a stasis tank floated something not meant to be touched.

A shard—pure cerulean, pulsing like a heartbeat, curled in a spiral of light and cracking glass. It gave off a scent not even machines could name.

But the mages called it:
“The Breath of the Forgotten Orpheus.”
Or, as some whispered in sleepless awe:
“Lain.”

The shard wept inside its shell. A symphony of pain and lost lullabies. Music hummed from it—soft, broken notes that caused tech to flicker, minds to wander, and birds to fall from the sky.

A child of dreams. A piece of something Endless.

Dr. Virex, masked and veined with golden ink, turned from the tank.

“How long until it stabilizes?” he asked.

“Thirteen years,” the warlock beside him answered, adjusting an alchemical monitor. “Its metaphysical memory fights us. It’s...sentient.”

“Good. Let it fight. It’ll make the weapon stronger.”

The shard trembled.

They called it a weapon.

But it was once a soul.

And in its crystalline prison, the shard dreamed—not of death, but of skies, of feathers, of a father it had never met…
A man made of shadow and stars.

---
---

The manor was quiet in the way a grave is. Silent but never still.
Alex moved like a ghost—not because he wanted to be—but because being loud got you hurt.
His shoes didn’t creak against the floorboards anymore. He’d memorized where not to step.

The bruises under his shirt bloomed like spilled ink.
He pressed his arm tighter around his coat, careful. Jess—the tiny crow with the broken wing—nested there, her beak occasionally brushing his ribs. She didn’t caw. She knew.

“Just a little longer,” he whispered, voice thinned from not speaking for days. “I promise.”

The office door loomed like judgment. Polished. Heavy. Roderick Burgess didn’t need wards; he was terror enough.
But Alex had learned—through pain and practice—that fear could become a blade.

The safe was behind the portrait. Cliché. Pretentious. Just like Roderick.
He slid the painting aside, cold air leaking from the hidden compartment.

The pouch was there.
Simple. Leather worn with time.
But it pulsed faintly in his chest like a memory he wasn’t allowed to have.

He reached—
Bang.

He froze.
Not a gunshot. A slammed drawer. Upstairs.

Alex exhaled. Jess nudged his ribs gently, like a reminder that hope was still alive in her, even if it wasn’t in him.

His fingers curled around the pouch.
It was warm.

Warm like the lap he hadn’t sat in since he was six.
Warm like the voice Dream had used when he first appeared—too late—yet somehow right on time.

Alex tucked it away, holding Jess closer.
His eyes stung.

He didn’t cry.

Not because he wasn’t sad. But because boys like him were only allowed to bleed.

---

Far from the waking world, in a place built from stardust and the breath between thoughts,
The Dreaming shifted.

The library stilled. Lucien and Lucienna paused mid-discussion, their twin pens halting.
Every tome in the library—every record of every dream ever dreamt—rattled on its shelves.

Something sacred had stirred.

---

Dream—or what was left of him—floated in the empty dark between bars of glass and symbols.
Time passed here without permission.
He did not move.
He did not speak.

Until now.

His fingers twitched. His head lifted slightly.

Something old. Familiar. Touched.

The pouch.

Like a fragment of his soul breathing again.
The slightest restoration of form. His eyes, empty and starlit, flickered open—not with power, not yet. But with...awareness.

And somewhere across the ocean of minds—

A boy with trembling hands and a crow in his coat whispered:
“I’m coming. Just hold on.”

---

Dream blinked slowly.

Alex.

He remembered.

The boy who spoke gently.

Who never made demands.

Who looked at him not like a prize—but like a person.

And in that moment, something shifted deep within the Dreaming.

Hope stirred.

And it hurt.

---
---

He never slept.
He did not need to.

Dream of the Endless sat still in his sphere of glass and spell-forged runes—legs crossed, robes long discarded, shadows dripping off him like forgotten ink.
Time no longer mattered.

He sat.
Watching.
Waiting.
Enduring.

The only light was his own—a faint glow in his chest like a dying star that refused to wink out.

He did not blink.
Did not flinch.
He only stared.

A posture carved from centuries of restraint.
Not rage. Not sorrow.

Something deeper. Older. Something sharp.

Because Dream was not asleep.

He was watching.

Always.

---

Elsewhere, in the same house—

Alex sat on the edge of his narrow bed, breath ragged, pain flaring behind his ribs with every shallow inhale.
The pouch was hidden under a loose floorboard.
The robe wrapped in a layer of linen, tucked beneath a drawer where Roderick never looked.
The ruby sat inside a teacup from his mother’s old set—the one thing Roderick refused to touch.

He would have laughed at the irony if it didn’t hurt to smile.

Blood welled along his palms where splinters hadn’t been kind. He ran gauze over them with shaking fingers.
It wasn’t from stealing the pouch.

That had gone… almost too smoothly.

No. This was after.

Roderick didn’t need a reason.
But he gave one anyway.

“Dawdling,” he said.
“Disrespect.”
“Your voice irritates me.”

Each word struck harder than the cane.

Alex kept his cries to himself.

Even Jess stayed silent, tucked in a wool sock on the windowsill, eyeing the door like she wanted to peck it open and escape.

“I’m okay,” Alex muttered through clenched teeth, trying to mean it.
He pressed the gauze tighter. “It’s just a little longer. We’re so close.”

He thought of the way the pouch had pulsed—like it recognized him. Or needed him. Or both.

And he thought of the figure in the sphere, unmoving. Not sleeping.

Just... waiting.

---

Chapter Text

---

The cult called themselves "The Light of Hexzerkiel."
A name spoken only in whispers. A name buried beneath erased scrolls, and locked behind veils of illusion magic older than most names for God.

They believed in the death of gods.
They believed that dreams were parasites—that humans, to evolve, must destroy fantasy and cage the subconscious.

They were led not by priests, but by "Architects"—mages and former scholars who had once worked under Unity Kinkaid’s abandoned research fund.They wanted more than answers they wanted silence. And they wanted to build it.

In the heart of their compound—a cathedral carved into a glacier hidden within a nowhere-pocket of Siberia—they had finally acquired it:

The Shard.

It glowed a soft blue. It smelled of grief and winter and music.It sang, not aloud—but within.
No machine could measure its pulse, yet all of them trembled in its presence.

One of the apprentices, a girl with burn-scars shaped like moth wings, whispered:

"It hums in my teeth."

Another, delirious, begged,

"Let it sleep. It’s dreaming."

They did not let it sleep.

Instead, the Shard was lowered into the Foundry of Aethersteel, where magic and cold science intersected.
There, it was suspended in a field of salt and silver and weeping glass.Chants were performed. Glyphs of division, transmutation, and gestational architecture were drawn in powdered ruby and lined with mercury.

The Architects’ plan was almost complete.

They would birth a weapon. A living thing carved from memory and myth. A child of dreamstuff and pain.

A vessel for something even Dream himself would be too late to stop. They did not know its origin. Not truly.

But they called it Lain.

And Lain… was already beginning to stir.

---
Lucien stood in the Archives of the Unspoken, spine straight, hands clasped behind their back, glasses catching the low amber light of a dream-lantern flickering above. The shelves creaked as if sighing—older than time, filled with books that should not, could not exist anywhere else.

These were not books written by authors.
They were dreams written by dreamers.
Each one a precious fragment of someone’s inner world.

And today… they were breaking.

Lucienna arrived behind them silently, always the echo, always the whisper between two breaths.

“The Maladaptive Sector’s wards are unstable.”

Lucien didn’t turn around.

“I know. They’re fading.”

He reached for a book titled “Solstice of the Stars that Never Were”, one of the most active daydream tomes.
It had once pulsed with golden ink, flowing across the pages in loops and whorls.

Now—
the ink bled.
The pages were dry.

Words vanished mid-sentence like they had been unwritten.
No fire, no theft. Simply… gone.

“Lucienna,” Lucien murmured, eyes narrowing, “the dreams are being devoured.”

"Or… rewritten,” Lucienna answered, voice low

They moved deeper into the section. Row after row. Each tome a broken memory, half-lucid fantasies splintering apart. And then—they found one shelf entirely empty.

Lucien reached out, brushing their hand over the wood.

It was ice cold.

Lucienna’s breath caught in her throat.

Etched into the side of the shelf in crude, sharp lettering that hadn’t been there before were five haunting words:

"He dreams, but not yours.”

Lucien stepped back.

“He?”

Lucienna whispered.

"It couldn’t be…”

And both looked at each other with dawning horror.

A presence not Dream… but cut from Dream.
Not born—but forged.
Something was stealing daydreams to feed something alive.

--

The pouch was hidden inside a hollowed-out ledger safe, tucked beneath Roderick Burgess’s desk. A desk that still smelled of ink and anger.

Alex’s hands trembled as he picked the last lock.
His knuckles were bruised, skin cracked and stained.
Jessamy nestled beneath his coat, silent, feathers fluffed nervously.

“Please…” he whispered under his breath, “…let this be worth it.”

The final click.

The safe door groaned open—
And there it was.

A simple cloth pouch.
Unremarkable. Dusty.
But it pulsed in his hand like a second heartbeat.

Alex swallowed hard, knees threatening to give in.
The pouch, the helm, the ruby, and Dream’s robes—all hidden now beneath his floorboards, wrapped in stitched shadows.

He wasn’t ready yet.
But it was almost time.

He walked slowly back to his room, his limp more obvious now. Every footstep dragged like he carried chains.

Inside, he sank to the floor beside the bed, pulling Jessamy out.

“Just a little longer,” Alex told her, petting her head.
“I’ve got everything. I’ve just got to wait for the night. He… he can’t stop me forever.”

He flinched as the bruise along his ribs throbbed again.

"I don’t want him to suffer in there anymore. Not like I have."

He paused.
Then, whispered:

"Even if I don’t make it out alive.”

Meanwhile… far from Wych Cross —

Underground. Somewhere forgotten. Somewhere cruel.

The Hexzerkiel Foundation’s facility buzzed beneath steel floors.

In a glass tank half-filled with a glowing blue cryo-fluid, something floated.

A body, pale and forming, veins glowing faintly. Hair white as snow.
Crystals of dream-ice curled along the chamber walls like roots, thrumming in a slow, mournful rhythm.

Technicians in cultist robes mixed with lab coats adjusted runes, chanted quietly in tongues half-remembered from stolen grimoire pages.

Above the tank—
an embedded fragment of glowing blue crystal pulsed violently.
It was not supposed to react.
Not this much.
Not this violently.

“The shard’s flaring again,” one mage hissed. “Dream matter is rejecting containment.”

“Stabilize it,” the lead ordered. “We are almost ready to birth him.”

They didn’t know it had once been Orpheus.
Didn’t know it still wept inside.

And inside the tank…
the eyes of the being flickered open.

Frost-blue. Empty. Furious.

The weapon was almost awake.

--

The Dreaming pulsed with unease.

Lucien felt it first—
Books in the Maladaptive Daydreaming Wing crackled like glass under heat.
Sentences erased themselves mid-sentence, fading to blank pages like tears soaked through them.

She looked toward the glass ceiling, a library of stars swirling above.
And said only two words:

"He’s weeping.”

Matthew was missing. Jessamy hadn’t returned. Dream hadn’t come back.
And now—now, one of the most dangerous fragments of the Dreaming was gone.

Lucienna turned a dozen eyes toward the shelves.

"This is not fading,” she said. “This is extraction. Something’s feeding on it."

Lucien nodded grimly. “Or someone is forcing a dream to live in a place it cannot survive.”

---

And elsewhere...

Caged in glass and spell, imprisoned in ritual, Dream sat with hands folded and eyes narrowed.

Even without his helm, his pouch, or his ruby, his form sat monumentally still—
like the eye of a black hole.

But behind his starlit eyes, there was movement.

Something… burned.
Something familiar.

A piece of him, long lost, once dismissed as irretrievable—
His son.
Not flesh, but soul.
Not form, but echo.

A shard of Orpheus, never truly gone, only silenced. Hidden in the deep corners of the Dreaming.
Dream had buried it there. With guilt. With shame. With love too painful to keep close.

But now—

"Someone has found it,” he whispered aloud for the first time in nearly a century.
“And they are breaking him.”

The warded walls shook. Roderick’s spells blinked once in confusion.

Dream’s hands curled into fists.

The temperature in the room dropped a full ten degrees.

His voice was colder than void:

"You will not touch my son.”

And somewhere across planes, the cryo-chamber walls groaned—
cracks spider-webbing from the embedded blue shard.

The boy inside stirred again.
A shard of song. A storm. A soul reclaimed.

---

---

The manor was old.
Too old.
The floorboards groaned like they remembered screams.

Alex stood in the upstairs bathroom, cold water dripping down his trembling fingers as he flexed his bandaged hand.
The bruises up his side were already blooming purple-black beneath his buttoned shirt.

Jessamy, curled in the small curve of his shoulder under his jacket, fluffed her feathers in frustration.

He whispered to her as if they were co-conspirators in a murder mystery.

> “I know. I know. But I have to go back down there tonight.”
“The pouch is next.”
“I can’t—I can’t let him stay like that.”

Jessamy tilted her head, giving him a quiet caw, like encouragement—or warning.

---

The basement key was easy.
Rodrick rarely remembered to change his hiding spots.

It was tucked inside the worn copy of Paradise Lost on the library’s third shelf.
Alex held it like it was a burning coal.

He wore gloves this time.

> Not because of the cold.
Because of the door.

The door remembered him.
The moment he turned the handle, something in the basement sighed.

The faintest pulse of Dream's presence rolled through the house like pressure before a storm.

---

The steps creaked.
One. Two. Ten.

He counted them in his head to distract from the shiver in his spine.

Alex reached the bottom.
The glass orb was there.

And inside it—still, silent, seething with the universe behind his eyes—
Dream.

He did not speak.
He did not move.

But Alex swore he could feel it now—raw and furious and watching.
Like something not quite awake but far from asleep.
A held breath. A loaded storm.

Alex’s hand trembled as he walked past the orb and toward the safe hidden in the side wall.

The pouch was inside.

Rodrick’s office had enchanted it with three layers of protection.

He'd broken the first two yesterday.
Tonight was the third.

He whispered the words he found in the old journal.
Blood-magic. Illegal, nasty work.
Rodrick would flay him alive if he found out.

Jessamy perched on the side table beside him, feathers fluffed, eyes locked on the orb.

Behind them, Dream blinked.
Just once.
A slow blink like a sleeping god... awakening.

---
The final lock clicked.

The safe creaked open.

And nestled inside—among paper notes, strange objects, and dried herbs—was the leather pouch.

Small. Unassuming.

Heavy as memory.

Alex picked it up gently, holding it to his chest.

"I've got it,” he whispered.

The temperature dropped again.
Behind him, the orb shone with the faintest shimmer.
Jessamy hopped up and cawed, sharp and urgent.

Alex turned—and saw that Dream was no longer staring into the distance. He was staring directly at him. The King's eyes glowed—deep, infinite, familiar.

And for the first time since he was fifteen, Alex Burgess didn’t feel alone.

---

Somewhere in a hidden research facility beneath the Scottish Highlands,
where ley lines cut through the land like veins,
the Hexzerkiel Foundation worked.

They were quiet. Methodical.
A fringe cult masked as a mage-scientific order, obsessed with divine fragments and unseen truths.

In their sealed white chamber, a pale, shivering boy floated in a glass womb.
Suspended in cryo-fluid the color of frozen ocean light.
Needles fed spells into him.
Machines monitored his vitals, though his heart beat differently than a normal human’s.

His name had not been chosen.
His purpose had.

He was Lain Ignatova.

A name fabricated by a woman with too many degrees and no soul.
A name that would look good on an obituary, or worse—on a weapon manifest.

---

Inside that tank—

Jet black hair, floating like strands of ink.
Skin as white as fresh snow, untouched by sunlight or warmth.
Lips cracked and blue, like something that forgot how to live.
Eyes pale—almost white—except in light, where the faintest spiral of gold shimmered beneath the surface.

A whisper of Orpheus. The song of mourning.

But more than that—
A piece of Dream that had been stolen from the Dreaming.They didn't know. They didn't understand what they'd unearthed.

The shard they used was kept cold, buried in liquid starlight for thirteen years.
Modified by magick and gene-forged code until it screamed into being.

And when it no longer screamed—when it sang—

Lain opened his eyes.
---

Alarms didn't blare.
He did not thrash or wail.

He simply floated there, staring upward, lips parted faintly.
The sound of violins played in his mind. Dissonant. Sharp.

And for a moment…

The Dreaming itself trembled.

Lucienne dropped her quill.
A hundred books in the Maladaptive Daydreaming Sector lost words simultaneously—entire chapters vanished.
Poems collapsed into static.
Songs hummed into silence.

"No..."
Lucienne turned to Lucienna, wide-eyed.
"The shard. It's not gone—it's been... born."

---

Back in the facility, Lain was removed from the tank.

Frail. Quiet.
Wrapped in medical robes and freezing even under thermal enchantments.

He was placed on a slab of carved obsidian.
His heartbeat was monitored in fourteen languages.
No one dared speak directly to him. Not yet.

He was to be their perfect cryo-weapon.
Their "son of frost and silence."
Their "Night Psalm."

They underestimated one thing.

He was also the son of dreams.
And dreams are not obedient.

---