Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

i know the end

Chapter 1

He almost walks past her.

Almost. Not quite.

She is on her way to work, and she is tired. Her sleep has been broken and fractured once more, shards of dreams in muted colours, wedging painfully into her subconscious. Frozen vistas; rivers petrified by ice, hoar-frosted trees, iron skies. An arched bridge in the far distance. Brief flashes of colour jarring to the cold colour palette: bright red and greens.

Her eyes are burning. Her movements are slow. Her mind is muddled. There is an insistent sort of unsettledness enveloping it all.

The summer rain has worked its way beneath her upturned collar and down her neck. She has already resigned herself to a day spent feeling slightly damp and uncomfortable. It’s nothing new.

The old sandstone houses are leaning against each other like drunkards, steeping the alleyway in a smooth sort of dusk. She likes it; it eases over the old bins, the junk, the boarded up windows. Makes it feel like she’s walking two hundred years ago. And it offers some protection against the drizzle, which is half the reason for the shortcut.

The cobblestones are cracked, uneven and slippery but she knows each one well enough. Fenn is loping ahead, silent despite his size, ears pricked up, keen snout taking in all the smells of this place, pungent even to her own very human olfactory senses.

In the corner of her eye, then, a snowstorm.

It’s there. In this dusky, wet alleyway. For a second she could swear it. Snow: gusts of wind sweeping it about in wild whirls and swoops, elemental fury so cold she can smell it. She reaches out to touch the snowflakes, but when she turns her head to follow her hand there is only a damp stone wall with graffiti.

Then she notices him. She is distracted, stressed and confused, and it’s not all that unusual to meet someone coming in the opposite direction here; still she does a double take.

It’s the contrasts. She’s got the time to think that much. Sharp cheekbones, soft mouth. And he’s all…white and black. Black hair, white skin, black clothes. Tall, slim. A peculiar economy to his movements. A queer stillness to his face. An eldritch quality to his entire countenance that fires at something in her hind brain. Some age-old instinct, dormant through millennia, suddenly kicked into cognisance. ‘

It just doesn’t tell her what to do. Or if it does, she is not tuned enough to hear it.

He’s about to pass her. Time slows, just a little, a syrupy sense to the flow of it. A curious moment, tucked neatly right next to reality. For a second their eyes meet. His are black, she thinks. Not dark brown but black, with points of light. Like druzy crystal. Like stars in the night sky.

Not like others, she thinks. Other.

Time returns to its normal pace. Sound returns even as she realises it had disappeared.

Just past her, he stops. Turns. She knows he does because she is looking over her shoulder at him.

“I believe I know your father,” he says.

His voice is deep, so deep. Lulling, but with dark wings underneath. It isn’t swallowed by the acoustics of this alleyway; it lives on its own. No hint of a Scottish brogue. He’s not from here.

She frowns.

“You mean knew, in that case,” she answers him, and is careful to maintain distance. Ensure that the space behind her is clear to launch herself into. “He died years ago, when I was little. Mean drunk, not missed.” She shakes her head. “I think you must be mistaken.”

He tilts his head as he looks down at her.

“I’m not so sure,” he says slowly. “You are rather far away from home though.”

“What? I was born here,” she says, and takes a step back. “Right here in the city.”

“I don’t think so.” He still doesn’t move, and he doesn’t give any hint of emotion. His face is so still. “Is that your wolf?”

He is looking down at Fenn, who has doubled back and come to stand by her side. Fenn’s hackles are raised, but he is still. No growling, no show of teeth, but alert, staring intently at the strange man. She puts her hand down on the top of his shaggy head.

“He’s not a wolf! He’s just a stray. He started following me around a while back and now I’m quite fond of him.”

The man looks at Fenn again. Fenn looks right back.

“You are a curious one, Morn Harrow,” he tells her.

“How do you….”

Someone shouts at the mouth of the alley. She turns the way of the sound; a jarring intrusion of reality.

It’s a scaffie. Just a scaffie.

When she turns back again the man is gone. Fenn is growling softly at the space he used to occupy.

A sole snowflake lands on her hand.

It is cold. It is real.

“You work in a graveyard.”

She recognises his voice immediately. How could she not? The hoe slips from her hands, lands with a thud on the ground. She looks down on it, and grants herself the grace of a few moments to breathe. She’s more tired than she can ever remember being. Her dreams these past few days - more fragmented than whole; tears and threads from a lost tapestry - have been debilitating. Ice and snow, white hills, unbodied shadows; visions flickering and sliding through her fingers before she can properly grasp them.

And now…

She slowly turns around. Next to her Fenn stands rigid, intent on the returning stranger.

He stands very close. Too close. Her nose almost bumps his chest. She has to tilt her head back to look at him. If she backs up she will hit a gravestone, and so she stays put.

He appears the same. Same clothes - at least she thinks so. Hard to tell with so much black. But now, in daylight, she finds that she was wrong about the colour of his eyes. They are not black, as she had thought, they are the darkest blue she has ever seen.

“I’m the groundskeeper here,” she tells him.

He looks at her, his hands deep in his coat pockets. She can’t read his microexpressions. They are slight and fleeting moments on such a stoic face.

“Do you like it?” he asks.

Something inside her… it comes slightly undone.

Just a little; a small break of structure and of fundament. And so, for now, she simply accepts that this, whatever this is, is not quite of any known reality. Perhaps she might have fought it harder had she not been so fatigued. But inside of this moment she decides to play along, simply because not doing so would be too difficult.

“What’s your name?” she asks, the question riding on the tailcoats of a sigh. “You apparently know mine.”

“You may call me Morpheus.”

She doesn’t comment on his peculiar name. Probably fake. The entirety of this man is strange, and everything about this situation absurd.

“Yes, Morpheus, I do like working here. It’s quiet and I appreciate that. In spring and summer I enjoy tending to the flower beds and the herb garden. The rest of the time.. well, there are always things to do. The gravestones and mausoleums, they are all old. They need looking after.”

“It does not disquiet you, to work in such proximity to death?”

She sweeps her eyes around the kirkyard. It is tucked away right in the heart of the city, a walled, hushed pocket just off the bustle of Grassmarket Square. Now it is dressed in the soft greens of summer, but she is intimately familiar with this place in all the different seasons.

“No. The dead are silent. My mind is loud. It’s a match made in heaven. It’s…peaceful.”

She rocks back a little on her heels, looks up at him. He hasn’t moved, and his attention on her is as intent as Fenn’s is on him. Absently she reaches down to scratch the dog behind an ear.

She hesitates for a second, unsure if she even wants to know, but then decides to ask anyway:

“Are you going to tell me what it is you want?”

He nods, slowly. Distantly she notes that his long coat doesn’t move in the lively breeze. The silence she noted last time is back. Everything seems muted, far away. She should be hearing sounds from the city all around them; cars and voices and music and sirens. Shouts and laughter and play from the George Heriot school next door. But she doesn’t.

“I need loopholes,” he says. “I need time.”

She shrugs, but she doesn't feel the nonchalance she is trying to convey.

“Well, do you need someone to fix a gravestone? Because that’s kind of my skill set. Don’t know so much about loopholes and time.”

He pulls his hand out of his pocket. Lifts it between them: a white hand with elegant, tapered  fingers hovering in front of her face.

“May I….?”

She flinches, doesn’t know what he means to do. Her calves bump the tombstone of James Cambell, died 13th July 1769, as she tries in vain to create some distance.

Without waiting for an answer his hand touches down on her throat. For a wild moment she thinks he means to clutch and clench. Hurt. Steal air. But instead he places his palm on the side of her neck. His hand is neither warm nor cold, it just is. His touch is light and unobtrusive.

She stands still, feels her pulse beat into his hand and she watches as his gaze turns…away. He is not here in the graveyard with her anymore, she can see it clearly. And those pinpricks of light that she had seen in his eyes when they first met, they are back, and they glow cold like stars.

“I was right. They do not see me like this,” he says in an almost-whisper. His voice is a low rasp, full of vibrations, notes just slightly out of reach.

“What?” she whispers. The word comes out on a cloud of frost. It is cold, suddenly. Next to her Fenn growls softly.

“‘Any number of destinies, any number of outcomes’.”

“You’re scaring me now,” she says, and she shivers beneath his touch. She feels goosebumps spring up, and each breath is of frost, even though the summer sun stands high in the sky.

He meets her eyes, and she feels like he’s back, that he sees her for the first time since he touched her.

“I believe this might work,” he tells her.

His hand falls, slowly, from her throat, and she sucks in a breath. Softness against her legs - Fenn is leaning against her. He rarely instigates touch, and she is grateful for the grounding.

“Please leave," she tells Morpheus.

And she kneels, head bowed, breaths uneven, to pick up her hoe. Closing her eyes and wishing him away, hiding like a child behind her eyelids.

When she opens her eyes again and stands back up he is nowhere to be seen.

There are grey shapes in her peripheral, unbodied and threadbare. She doesn't turn her head.

Her breaths remain frosted for the rest of the afternoon.

Chapter Text

i know the end

chapter 2

The next day, crossing The Meadows on her way to the off-licence, Morn slips on ice.

There should be no ice. It is summer in Edinburgh, brief and tempestuous as it may be. It’s June. The parks are full of people picnicking, the tourists are climbing up and down Arthur’s Seat, and the locals are still a couple of months away from the madness of the Fringe.

Nevertheless, her foot slides away from her and she goes down hard on her side. When she tries to get her hands and legs underneath her to stand, they slip and find no purchase. When finally she manages to get back to her feet, she finds herself looking down on a patch of ice. It doesn’t reflect back. Not the sun, not the sky. Not her.

She buys more wine than she intended before limping home. She drinks it all, too.

The day after that, at work, she sees Claire MacLeod amble around the graveyard, close to the Candlemaker Row exit.

Mrs MacLeod was buried in the family plot last week and should not, Morn is sure, be out and about. She is tidying among the roses climbing the MacKenzie mausoleum when she sees the old woman, and she freezes with the secateurs aloft.

She is sure of what she is seeing. That is Claire Macleod, dead as a doorknob. Flickering in and out like a bad splice in an old movie, eyes empty, wandering about Greyfriars Kirkyard.

Morn leans her forehead against the old stone wall, pricking herself on rose thorns. She closes her eyes and she tries to slowly breathe her way out of the fog of panic.

She takes the rest of the day off sick. She walks back to her flat in Marchmont staring straight ahead, refusing to be drawn by anything just outside her field of vision.

At home she pours a large glass of wine and curls up on the sofa. She tries to entice Fenn to come up there with her, but he chooses his normal spot on the floor by the front door. She tries to feel safe. She wants to feel safe. This little studio flat, a sublet, is tiny. She chose it for the high ceilings and the bay window. She’s lived here for some years now. All her books are here, in bookshelves, piled higgledy-piggledy in uncertain towers on the floor, on tables, on her desk. It has, slowly, become home. It’s where she comes to decompress, to hide when things are too much.

Things are too much now, and she doesn’t know what to do.

She probes at that place inside herself, the spot for the sundering she had perceived before Morpheus touched her in the cemetery. A tiny fault line running between realities.

Perhaps it is widening. Perhaps she should stop worrying away at it, making it worse.

She has no one to talk to. There is no one.

The shadows lengthen, and out there rain gives way to a hesitant, golden evening sun. Dustmotes float about in the light of it. There are the creaks and sighs of an old building. There are the faraway sounds of traffic. There are her breaths, and her thoughts.

She drinks more wine.

At some point, she falls asleep.

She dreams, of course. That arched bridge. It’s made of crumbling stone, she sees, and it gleams with frost. It doesn’t span water, instead it spans darkness. A vast expanse of pitch black, spilling out in all directions, the bridge a small cold fleck in the midst of it all.

When she wakes it is dark outside, and her head aches with a steadily encroaching hangover. She stands, unsteady, to refill the glass. Buy some time against the inevitability of it.

When she is walking past the wall mirror on the way to the small kitchenette something makes her double back. Look again.

There, it is her face. Angular, pointed chin, girlish round cheeks. Lips stained red by wine. Tired eyes. And the unruly curls around her forehead and ears are touched by frost.

She tries to fathom. Tries to widen the net of her mind enough to accept that this, this is…

She lifts a hand, feels. It is frost, not an illusion or an hallucination. It melts into water between the warmth of her fingertips.

In the mirror, she watches how her eyes fill with tears. Watch them spill over. She touches them too, and is relieved to find them warm.

There is a sound, then. A whisper amplified. A wind contained in too small a space.

Fenn growls. The warning comes too late.

“You are disquieted, Morn.”

Morpheus, appearing behind her in the mirror. A dark shape, sure and solid, as if he’s been here all along. As if he’s got a right.

She shrieks, suddenly a creature reduced to instincts, and she tries to run. His hands come down on her shoulders, arresting her motion. The grip is not punishing, it is not restrictive, but she finds it brings her to heel all the same. She shakes beneath his hands, full to the brim with adrenaline with nowhere to go.

She stares at them both in the glass. The white of her widened eyes and the paleness of her hair jars with the black of him. In the gloaming of her flat their pale faces seem to hover unembodied, one beneath the other.

“Do not be afraid.”

He is trying to make his voice something approximating soothing, she can tell. She can also tell that it isn't something that comes to him with ease or habit: it sounds like he’s chewing rocks, grinding and harsh.

Her heart throws itself against her ribs, hard, trying to break free from its cage and fly away.

“I need you to tell me what is going on.”

“I will,” he says, and inclines his head to her in the mirror, “but not here.”

“Yes, here. Definitely here!”

He shakes his head.

“Know that I seek not to do wicked things, though my actions sometimes lead me there despite my efforts. But my situation will soon spiral beyond control. The Fates will be coming for me. I care not much for myself, but I care for the lives of those who serve me. I care for their wellbeing. I care for my realm, for my dreams and for my nightmares. My creations.”

“That means nothing to me,” she says. She wants it to come out as a scream, a protest so loud it can be nothing but unmistakable. But instead it’s a whisper. “Nothing. It’s just… gibberish.”

“Then, know that I am sorry.” His grip on her shoulders hardens just slightly, enough that he may spin her around to face him. She looks up at him, at that face made of sharp planes and angles, shadows and a little light, and knows that he cannot be human.

Then there is something like a whirlwind, there is grit or sand whipping at her cheeks and her forehead. It gets in her eyes, she closes them and lowers her head against the pull, clings to the feel of his touch.

An anchor.

And she is gone, then, from everything she thought she knew.

She comes into cognisance in a massive, cavernous space. She can feel all the empty air around her.

She falls to her hands and knees the second Morpheus releases his hold on her shoulders, and she stays down.

The agony and confusion of displacement pushes through her in rattles. Vertigo and nausea, cold sweat, goosebumps. Painful breaths. The floor she is on appears to be marble, and she welcomes the cool solidness beneath her.

She focuses on her breathing, on her hands against the marble. On making sure there are two hands, not four.

“You resisting the transition here has caused some… discombobulation within your body and mind. Rarely does anyone enter The Dreaming with their physical self. You made it much harder than need be.”

“Well I’m sorry,” she pants, shaking her head a little, “that I didn’t just adopt a “smile and no questions asked approach” to you kidnapping me. Next time though. I promise.”

He doesn’t answer. She feels steady enough, finally, to sit up on her knees. To look around.

She is in a throne room.

It’s not hard to tell. There is an enormous, ornate throne right on the top of a winding staircase. The physics doesn’t look quite right. She decides to leave it be. Physics, she thinks, is the least of her concerns.

The ceiling - almost unfathomably high above her - bends in smooth arches. There are graceful pillars with statues flowing out of them, as if the marble had suddenly been imbued with life and sprung forth in exuberance.

There are large stained glass windows on the wall behind the throne, siphoning in beams of light in muted pastel colours.

It’s terrifying. It’s overwhelming.

It is also beautiful.

It’s mostly dread, and confusion, but a small part of her, filled with more innate curiosity than self preservation, can’t help a glimmer of wonder. It’s not the time, though. It really isn't.

“You are in my realm. This is the Dreaming.”

Morpheus stands on the first step on the staircase leading up the throne. Back straight, arms at his side, looking down at her. He is wearing robes now, long, black, flowing. They seem to be moving independently, a sinuous sort of undulating around his legs. He looks even more otherworldly here, in what is obviously his domain. The otherness of him is like a low hum on the air, a sibilant kind of acoustics. It sings along with his surroundings. Melds with them.

“The Dreaming,” she repeats.

He inclines his head. Being in his own realm, in what is very clearly his throne room, is doing nothing to lessen his graveness, his stillness. He is…more, here.

“I am Dream of the Endless. King of Dreams and Nightmares. This realm, created by me, is where humanity comes in sleep. Here, all dreams are manifest.”

“Am…am I sleeping?” she asks, and she hears it, how there is a tinge of both hope and desperation in her voice.

“No.”

That one word, simple, flat, heavy, effortlessly wedges itself into the sundering inside her. Into that splitting of realities. Widens it, without a care. It’s almost cruel.

No, she thinks, it is cruel.

She could fight against this, she thinks. She could refuse to believe. Deny the existence of him, of this place. Deny what little he has told her and what has happened. The dreams of winter leaking into her waking. The ghost of Mrs MacLeod.

But what good would it do? How would it help her? She is here, now. And the one link between here, and…and home, is Morpheus.

That gives her enough impetus to stand. It’s not easy, but she gets to her feet. Sways ponderously like a tree in a storm, but she stands.

Slow, flowing movement behind Morpheus draws her attention. It’s the enormous stained glass windows behind the stairs and throne. As she watches the panels within the windows meld and rearranges, creating different pictures. She realises that one, presently static, looks like a stylised version of her.

Her curls, her big eyes, the same red jumper and loose jeans she is wearing at this very moment.

Small flares of panic are back to nipping at her spine. A numb sensation in fingers and toes. Short breaths.

It almost sends her back down to the floor, but she grits her teeth and locks her knees and fights it.

She isn’t too confident in how it looks from the outside, because Morpheus takes the one step down from the staircase while reaching out with a hand; perhaps to catch her if she falls, perhaps to suggest she gets back down.

It makes her fight harder. Makes her remain standing.

He comes to a standstill close to her. Too close; he seems entirely unencumbered or uncaring of the concept of personal space. She must tip her head back to meet his eyes.

“Why am I here?”

“To be my shield.”

“A shield? Nice. Thanks for asking first.”

“Too much is at stake to concern myself with ethics. You will be treated well…”

“Magnanimous of you.”

“...and rewarded.” A very slight hesitation, a minute frown. “Should I succeed.”

“And if you don’t?”

“Then I will die.”

“Oh.”

He says nothing to that. He simply stands there, far too close to her, placid, uncompromising. She hates that he gives her nothing to grasp, nothing to hold to better understand him. He is so sleek and shut that she slides clean off him, can’t find expressions, or body language, or intonation, to hold on to.

“Can I refuse?”

“No.”

“And if I do anyway?”

“You would be left to find your own way back from the Dreaming to the waking world. From one realm to another. My advice is not to attempt it.”

“That’s…that’s extortion. Coercion.”

“It is,” he agrees, with no discernible emotion. “The welfare of the Dreaming and its residents takes precedence over what my own personal feelings may be on… coercion.”

Well, she thinks bleakly, he certainly made that plain enough. She doesn’t even see an obvious way out of this room, let alone out of the realm. The helpless feeling of being forced chafes at her. To have no recourse, no option, but do as she is told…

Her hands curl to claws.

“But I’ll want answers,” she bites out. “Explanations.”

A small nod.

“Later.”

She suddenly realises, then, what she had been too distracted to take note of earlier.

“Fenn,” she breathes, and she looks frantically around the enormous space. “Where is he?”

“Your wolf is quite safe.”

“He can’t come here?”

“…I would rather not.”

“But without me…he needs food. He needs to get outside.”

“I assure you that he is well.”

“But I…”

“You have my word.”

The way he emphasises word carries with it physical manifestation. Echo. A wind, sweeping through the great hall, ruffling her hair. A slight rumble of the floor she stands on, increasing her vertigo once more.

She gets the sense, though, that he didn’t place the emphasis as a way to reassure, but rather to display annoyance with her recalcitrance.

“Ok,” she says, tucking her windswept hair behind her ear. “And what…what is it that we are meant to do?”

“I have a duty to fulfill. I owe a boon. And it is a matter of some haste.”

“What does that even mean?”

A stiffening of his contours, barely there. A slight lowering of his head; his eyelashes fan out like black smudges, throwing shadows down his cheeks.

“I must kill my son.”

Chapter Text

i know the end

chapter 3

She stares at him, and she thinks that perhaps her mouth might be hanging open in a rather unflattering manner. Slowly, she moves. She inches from out of his shadow, past him, and sits down on the first step of the staircase.

“Tell me something.”

He has turned with her, and now towers ramrod-straight before her once more. Rigid body, blank face.

“What would you like to know, Morn Harrow?”

“Do you have wine here, in the Dreaming?”

The slightest furrow of his brow as he studies her. A frisson of excitement shooting through her to finally see a decipherable expression on his face. It means there must be more, she thinks. It means there must be emotions somewhere deep beneath white skin and smooth, sloping bone.

“I shall ensure you are supplied,” he answers finally.

She sighs, rubs her temples. Pulls her hands through her hair and tries to reconcile her situation. Gives up. There is no reconciling it.

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeats, the faintest lilt of a question suffusing his voice.

“Why would you kill your son?”

Another small ripple across his face, so fast she might have missed it had she not known what to look for.

“I owe him a boon,” he answers stiffly. “I intend to grant it. Death is his wish.”

“You don’t look old enough to have a son that is old enough to consent to his own murder.”

“I am of the Endless. I have existed since the beginning of Time. My son is thousands of years old.”

She understands what he says. The words. She understands them. She just can’t fathom them. It’s too big.

“I just…Look, I’m really clinging on to the ankles of reality here. I’m going to need a moment.”

“And you shall have it. After. We must go now.”

“We only just got here. And you haven’t even told me where it….”

Steps then, approaching, cutting off her words. Soft, quick treads against the smooth floor.

Morn looks beyond Morpheus towards the sound.

A woman with kind eyes behind thick glasses. Dressed in a pantsuit, holding some papers, she looks so reassuringly normal that Morn could cry.

“My lord, I took the liberty to arrange for…”

She comes to a sharp halt when she sees Morn sitting there. She looks at Morpheus.

“My lord. You brought her here?”

He nods, once.

“I did. Lucienne, this is Morn Harrow. Morn, this is Lucienne, my librarian.”

Judging by the pursed mouth, Morn gets the distinct impression that Lucienne is disapproving of her presence and is holding back quite the barrage. She can’t exactly blame this librarian of Morhpeus’ - she herself has a great many words on the subject.

She gives Lucienne a little finger wave.

“If it makes you feel better,” she tells her, “I didn’t exactly come willingly.”

Lucienne looks at her, sighs, and nods.

“It’s nice to meet you, Morn,” she says, and her voice is polite, almost edging on gentle.

“Likewise,” is all she says though, with a small smile to the other woman.

Then, soft, slow, colour-streaked movement in the corner of her eye. She turns slightly where she sits, and sees that it is the stained glass windows again. She gets back to standing, and backs up a couple of steps to better take it in.

The largest window, the one immediately behind the throne, is rearranging itself. Slowly the panes of coloured glass move and merge within their lead frames, and when they cease moving again, she is looking at a temple surrounded by trees.

Morpheus steps forward, holding in his hand a glass of red wine. He hands it to her, and numbly she accepts even though she has no idea where it came from.

“We must leave. I have left my son waiting long enough.”

Staying right where she is, Morn brings the glass to her lips. Takes a sip. It is wine, and good wine at that. Nothing like the cheap bottles of Merlot she’d buy in her favourite offie in Marchmont. It’s smoky, and complex, and easy. She drinks some more, chasing that limber, soft-around-the-edges feel of mild intoxication.

Suddenly, hysterically, fragments of fairytales from her childhood come to her. Of people lured into fairy rings, abducted away to magical realms. The one thing common to all those tales: never accept food and drink while in these foreign lands.

Well shit, she thinks. Too late now. In for a penny. She drinks some more, even as Morpheus takes her arm and leads her away from the throne, walks her underneath all those graceful arches. Her steps echo slightly, Morpheus’ are barely legible.

“Lucienne, will you see to it that Morn is found appropriate accommodation within the castle,” Morpheus says over his shoulder. “Have it ready for when we return.”

"Certainly, my lord.”

Doors in front of them. Towering high, high above. Finely wrought, ornate carvings. Faces, animals, creatures, blossoms, starfalls. Awe inspiring, beautiful, and she is almost certain they weren’t there before.

The doors open outwards as they approach. Light spills in, warm, almost blinding, as Morpheus leads her out of the great doors and into the light.

He holds her arm tight, and that whirlwind of sand again; dissolving her, blowing her away.

They stand in an olive grove. The sun is warm on her face, almost too warm, and the breeze is gentle and thoughtful. It brings with it hints of brine, thyme, lemon blossom.

She looks at Morpheus.

“Are we…”

“We are in the waking world, yes,” he says, and his voice is even more clipped than usual, the shadows and light of his face in such sharp relief that he looks almost abstract. “We are in the Aegean Sea. This island is uncharted. Unknown.”

That last bit is for her benefit, she knows. Though even if she did try to run from him, she rather suspects he’d catch her faster than she would find the edges of this island.

“Message received,” she tells him sourly.

He doesn’t acknowledge the barb.

“Listen to me carefully,” he tells her instead. “As part of your birth right you’ve been granted…cloaking powers. Of a sort.”

“‘Cloaking powers’?”

“Yes. A severely weakened version of those of your ancestor and…”

“My ancestor?”

“…so, if you touch me or I touch you, to certain observers, I appear… gone. Dead. And right now, I am about to commit a forbidden act. I need to do so without detection.”

“A forbidden act?”

He turns and looks at her then. She almost takes a step back; his face looks sunken, shaded, wretched.

“The Endless are forbidden from spilling the blood of kin. To do so means death.”

He sees, obviously, how she is about to protest. Ask. Pry.

He puts a hand up to prevent any such overtures.

“I will explain as much as I am able. After. You have my word. For now I ask only that you touch me, skin on skin, without letting go. No matter what happens, do not let go. Do not protest. Do not interfere.“

She thinks of asking him what he’ll do to her if she refuses. If she goes against him. But, she decides, she doesn’t want to know.

She nods.

“Fine,” she whispers. “But after, after you owe me answers.”

He inclines his head. He’s not looking at her, his focus is elsewhere entirely: on something through the trees. With one hand he pulls up the sleeve of his robe, exposing his arm, pale and strong. He holds it out to her.

Hesitantly she reaches out, and wraps her fingers as best she can about his wrist. Hard, and smooth, and warm. And, beneath her fingertips, a strong, fast pulse.

The relief to feel it is greater than she can express.

But aside from his heartbeats there is no great evidence of an eldritch power. She feels no different for touching him, senses nothing but him.

“Come,” he says. “This way.”

He leads her through the olive grove. They move towards a natural opening in the trees, and eventually come to stand before a pond. Smooth dark water, lily pads, reeds, rushes.

And beyond, a small domed temple.

It’s very old, she sees, hushed and bone white. Some cracks in the pillars and the frescoes. Faded glory, but still standing with dignity and forlorn magnificence.

They begin rounding the water, walking among crumbling statues and cobwebs. Sea birds are calling. The sun is beginning to move lower, warm light casting long shadows off the statues.

“The temple,” she says quietly, unbelieving, “your son is in there?”

“Yes.”

He says it like it’s the last thing he will ever say, his voice so dark she feels as if clouds might gather to cover the evening sun. She shivers, and tightens her hold on his wrist without quite knowing why. He doesn’t acknowledge it.

They walk up the steps, between pillars, and Morpheus’ steps grow quieter and quieter. When she dares to look sideways she sees only his profile, set as severely as if carved out of stone.

They come upon guards standing sentry outside. They jar with the timelessness of the temple, with their Adidas trainers and baseball caps and AK4s. Morpheus simply nods at them, and the sentries step aside without saying anything.

He opens the doors, and ushers her slightly ahead of him. The speed of his pulse remains unchanged, but she sees something like a flinch move across his face when the doors slam shut behind them again.

She looks around.

They are in a large circular room, and it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Earthenware, beautiful pots, sculptures, fluttering linen drapes. Everything seemingly chosen and arranged to be a pleasure to the eye. Soft lines. Whitewashed walls. A graceful arched opening with uninterrupted views out over the sea. She can see the setting sun and the rising moon.

But dry leaves are blowing across the floor, a dry sound, a susurrus amplified by something like dread.

In the middle of the room, and on the pedestal…

“Father. Thank you for coming back.”

A young man. He has a lovely face, she thinks hazily. Handsome. Animated. Boyish curls down his forehead, eyes that are kind and wise. His voice, as he speaks, is melodic and gentle.

“Orpheus. My son. I gave my word.”

But he’s a head. Just a head. A living head on a pedestal. She feels numb with the shock of it. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t even whimper. But the weight of what she is seeing is too much for her hands to hold, and she fears that later, if a later exists, she will crumble beneath this. Her fingers turn to claws around Morpheus’ wrist, but he doesn’t react at all.

How can he live? What must his life be like?

“I bring with me Morn Harrow,” Morpheus tells the head of his son. “She is here to lend me some assistance. I fear it is necessary.”

The head looks sideways at her, and without thinking she moves just a little in front of Morpehus, so that his son can see her without effort.

“Well met, Morn Harrow, “ he tells her with a soft smile, and she tries to smile back, but she can feel her upper lip wobble, can feel her eyes begin to brim.

“Likewise, Orpheus,” she replies, and she is proud that her voice is almost steady.

Morpheus stands looking at his son. He speaks, and Orpheus answers, but there is a ringing of terror and sorrow in her ears, and she picks out only fragments. It’s best that way. She feels like an intruder on a moment she should never ever witness. She looks stubbornly out over the sea, towards the sun and moon, one descending to meet the other’s ascent.

“You always said I could never love, but I did. And for a long time I was afraid to live in a world without you in it.”

She can hear, though, the wretchedness in Morpheus’ voice. Pain in different notes, tumbled together with nowhere to go.

“I should have died long ago.”

“Perhaps.”

“Thank you, father. Thank you for helping me now. I am ready.”

The last words a whisper, but she can hear the longing in it.

She feels more than sees how Morpheus is looking at her. Still looking at the sea, she tightens her grip to show him she will not relinquish it, and that she is paying attention.

“Close your eyes, Morn,” he tells her. “Do not open them until I give you leave to do so.”

She nods silently and obeys, without questioning, without protesting. Because she wants to. Because the alternative would be unthinkable. The last thing she sees before she closes them is Orpehus smiling at his father.

A long silence, ruled only by the dark behind her eyelids and by movement. She feels her arm rise with Morpheus, move with Morpehus’ movements. But she hears nothing, and she sees nothing. She focuses solely on the feel of Morpheus’ bones beneath his skin, and on her own breathing. In and out. Try to make it steady. Try not to cry.

“It is done,” Morpheus says. “You can open your eyes again.”

The words fall like boulders onto the floor, and she feels like it shakes beneath her feet with the force of it. She draws a shuddering breath, and she opens her eyes. He is standing between her and the pedestal, carefully blocking her view. She is grateful.

So grateful.

“Hold on to me,” he tells her again. It’s becoming a mantra. “Do not let go.”

“I won’t,” she says, and she can hear how wet her voice is. “I promise.”

She looks up at him. His face so horribly white, the lines of it etched too deep to be real. More shadows than light, his mouth gone from graceful curves to a hard protest. She feels wetness on her fingers, and looks down. His hands drip crimson. Some of it is on her now. She doesn’t let go.

He turns her around, and he leads them out.

He walks like an ancient man, shuffling, bent, her next to him, pacing her steps to his. She allows her tears to fall warm and freely now. As freely as the drops of blood from Morpheus’ hands. Wherever a droplet of blood falls, she sees, a flower springs up. Beautiful, strange blossoms, crimson and intricate and full of thorns.

Morpheus doesn’t seem to notice. He keeps walking, and leads her back into the olive grove.

It is dark when they return to the Dreaming. The skies are stormy and violent, the clouds roil and rush overhead. They emerge right outside the great gates, and when they walk inside she sees that the throne room is of black marble. Black candles, black drapes, deep pitch, the entire space one of gloom and sorrow.

“Hold on to me,” he tells her again, even as he walks so fast she struggles to keep up. “I cannot have the Fates see me like I am.”

She thinks he must be talking about the blood on his hands. The blood of his son. She speaks for the first time since they left the temple.

“Was he…for how long did he exist as just a head?”

“For thousands of years,” he answers, looking straight ahead, jaw clenched. She feels the tension of him beneath her fingers, strung and vibrating with no hope of release. “He begged for death when first it happened. I refused him.”

“My god,” she whispers, and she knows that sometime soon, the magnitude of everything will crash around her like an enormous wave and drag her out to sea. She feels like her legs will give out and send her to the ground. She can feel her heart thrash like a bird in her chest, wings beating vainly against the bones of her ribs.

They reach a quiet, shadowy room. There isn’t much in the way of furniture or embellishment, but she feels the peace and sanctity of it. Evening light slowly filtering in. A hushed atmosphere.

Morpheus drops his long cloak to the floor, even with her holding on to him. Then, black and white in the sparse light, he pours some water into a wash stand, and bows over it. His hair falls down to obscure his eyes, and his contours seem to hum with tension and despair.

She stands there, holding his wrist, as he scrubs and scrubs the blood from his hands. The water is cool on her fingers too, but it’s not soothing, and the tears running down his cheeks as he finally begins weeping hurts her. She knows these kinds of tears, she knows the insidious way they hurt, she knows how they ravage.

Just salt water, but with more gravity than a black hole in outer space.

Eventually he stops cleaning his hands, and stands up straight before her. He stares past her towards one of the windows, still, the only motion from the tears on his cheeks.

Earlier, she had wished to see emotions in him. Now there are too many, unfettered and raging, and she doesn’t know what to do with them as they come loose from him. As they billow and twist like a dark cloud between them. As she stands here before him as the only receptacle.

So she does the only thing she can do.

She doesn’t really know who he is. She doesn’t even know what he is. But right now, in the face of hurt of a magnitude greater than she can fathom, she finds that she doesn’t care. Innate empathy sets her into motion. She knows death. She knows grief, is as intimately familiar with it as if it were a lover.

She takes the small step needed to come into him, to press her nose against his chest and wrap her free arm around him in an embrace.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers hoarsely. “I’m so very sorry.”

He doesn’t reciprocate. He doesn’t lift his arms and embrace her back. She hadn’t expected him to. She just stands close, and feels his shuddering breaths, and she tries to lend something like warmth.

“Do you sleep?” She places the question into the hollow of his throat, like it’s a wishing well. “How I wish you could get the peace of it.”

His hand comes up then, and wraps hard in her hair. It seems like he doesn't know whether to pull her away from him, or push her closer into him, and his indecision hurts her. Her scalp stings. A pained sigh from between her lips.

“Leave now,” he whispers, “before I…”

She hears the warning, but she doesn’t understand it. It vibrates through bone though, settles in marrow. So she releases his wrist for the first time in what feels like eons, and she turns and runs from him.

Let this castle of the Dreaming swallow her whole.

Chapter Text

i know the end

Chapter 4

When he finds her again she is drunk.

She thinks it’s the next day, but who knows how time passes here. There is hesitant light siphoning in from the lead framed library windows, so until proven otherwise she’ll call it daytime.

“I owe you answers,” he tells her.

She hasn't heard him approach, but then she is too sozzled to notice much of anything. Lucienne was kind enough to show her both the library and the wine cellar, and she has been availing herself of both instead of sleeping.

“And you are a man of your word, aren't you,” she answers him, even though it’s a cruel thing to say and she knows it.

He gives no discernible reaction. She hadn’t really expected one when she made the jab.

He stands there and looks down on her. The nook she has found in the library is a secluded one, but she was never under any illusion that he would be unable to find her.

“I trust your accommodations meet with your approval?”

“Probably. I haven’t seen them yet.”

He eyes the half empty bottle of wine and the full glass on the table before her. Just the merest tightening of his mouth signals his disapproval.

“Let us talk outside. Perhaps fresh air would do you some good.”

“I’d rather…”

But he is already rounding the table towards her. When she still hesitates the table, along with wine and glass and the book she had been reading, disappears into thin air.

She stares at the space it used to occupy, then looks up at him.

“Some would call that cheating.”

“This is my realm,” he answers simply.

“Could you do that in the real world?” she asks and quickly stands before he can disappear the chair from underneath her.

“The waking world is bound by its own rules of physics, and time, and place.”

With that he touches her arm, and suddenly they are standing in a flowering wild meadow. Sorrel, daisies, buttercups. Poppies, cornflowers, knapweed. A rambunctious and entirely disorganised riot of colour.

“Fiddler’s Green,” he tells her. “I thought you may find it soothing. It is a dream I made to be so.”

The air here is smooth and clear. Dense woods surround the meadow on all sides, hemming it in and making it seem like a protected pocket of peace. There are butterflies, and cumbersome bumblebees, and the soft, unobtrusive white noise of bird song. Somewhere, out of sight, she hears the laughing, rushing hum of moving water.

She wanders around a little, feels the warmth of the sun on her face. It feels real enough. Everything feels real.

She doesn’t doubt her displacement. She is here. Perhaps, she thinks, some meadow blooms may spring up within the sundering inside of her. Perhaps something…not terrible, may come from the damage.

She touches a poppy. It turns to frost in front of her eyes. Beautiful, blood red, but dead beneath the delicate network of silver crystals.

Perhaps not.

“The Dreaming responds strangely to you,” says Morpheus. He has come to her side and is watching the frozen flower.

“But the Dreaming is you.”

“Yes.” His voice is dark but without inflection. “Come.”

They move in among the tree cover, walking under latticed branches. Dappled sun on carpets of moss. The smell of sap, of chlorophyll, of green. Sounds are muted and faraway.

Eventually, they reach a very small clearing. The branches intertwine above it to form an arched roof, but enough sunlight filters through to form beams looking almost solid enough to touch. Small yellow flowers cover the ground. In the middle of the clearing bubbles up a small spring, making a pool of moving water. It is crystal clear. She can sense no source for it. It’s simply…there.

She sits down by it. The ground welcomes her; soft, yielding.

A gentle wind that might not even be there tousles her already unruly hair, sweeps it about her face. She moves to to swirl a finger on the surface of the little pool, but hesitates.

“All this, only for people to mostly forget their dreams when they wake?” she asks Morpheus' moving reflection in the water.

A part of her is aware that she is trying to regain equilibrium after what happened. After she gave him something she so rarely, if ever, gives freely. After she stood still in a storm of his raw emotions, and felt her own respond to his.

She’s not used to it. Doesn’t know how to handle it other than to push away from her.

Grow barbs.

He meets it with something akin to patience.

“It is not that simple. Do your dreams not affect you even when you cannot remember them? The feel of them, the emotions brought forth. The memories, just out of reach. And what about day dreams? Stories?”

“Stories?” she asks, meeting his eyes in the pool.

“What are stories but dreams?”

She says nothing to that, just closes her eyes against him, and the impossibility of her situation.

“You have questions,” he says. “Ask them.”

She opens her eyes again.

“Can I go back now? Home?”

“No.”

One small word, but the heavy finality of a portal slamming shut in her face.

”Why?”

”For as long as I am able, I must go undetected by the Fates. I need time. With you, I may have it. I cannot let you go. The greater good must be put above your free will.”

She had known. If he only needed her for the killing of his son he wouldn’t have brought her back to the Dreaming afterwards. But, she thinks, getting him to put it in words somehow makes it feel as if her anger is more justified.

It doesn’t have to make sense.

“You took me from the only life I’ve ever known and you didn’t even ask.”

“I apologised before doing so. I will not apologise again.”

She does touch the water of the spring then. She intends to write “fuck you” on the surface, but rather as she had suspected, the pool freezes to ice before she can even complete the F.

“What is this?”

There is a plaintive note to her voice that she dislikes.

Morpheus sinks into a crouch on the other side of the little body of water. His robes billow out around him, and this new position doesn’t speak of awkwardness or humility. Instead he looks graceful, poised and coiled.

“What do you know of the Norse gods? The pantheon, the mythology?"

She stares at him.

“I am not terribly brushed up, truth to be told.”

If he hears the sarcasm then he makes no mention of it. His face remains entirely placid.

“I suggest you remedy that.”

“Why don’t you…” Her voice peters out, quite against her will, forcing her to try again. “Why don’t you help?”

He rests his elbows on his knees, white wrists and long fingers hovering above the frozen water.

“There is, within the pantheon of Norse mythology, a goddess called Hel. Have you heard of her, Morn Harrow?”

At her mutely shaking her head he carries on:

“Hel is one of Loki’s children. She is the goddess of death. Her realm is Helheim, which is tucked away within Niflheim. A cold place, a place of winter and mist. In Helheim, Hel would receive those of the dead not meant for Valhalla. The people that died of age, or disease, or simply by happenstance.”

“Ok,” she says. “So far, so Norse-sounding. I guess. Where do I fit in?”

“You are a direct descendant of Hel.”

“Funny.”

“I thought at first, when I came to see you in Edinburgh, that you were her. From a certain angle there is some resemblance. But I made some… enquiries, and I realised you are merely a descendant. But you carry within you an echo of her power. Just enough.”

She laughs a little. Decides to follow through on her previous impulse and so, with a nail, scratches her message into the ice. In cursive.

Morpheus raises a brow and purses his lips, but says nothing. Perhaps he has decided to treat her like one would an errant child: ignore bad behaviour, reward good. He carries on as if nothing happened:

“I found that Hel has chosen to remain in her realm. In Helheim. This, even though she has next to no worshippers. She cannot sustain herself without believers. Other forgotten deities have been forced to get creative, to go out in the world. But Hel, she was always stubborn. ”

“You talk as if you know her.”

“I know them all.” Morpheus says simply. “I’ve seen the birth of the universe, and I’ve seen the rise and fall of all its gods.”

She doesn’t know how she feels about his revelation. Her heritage. His age. Wonder? Fear? Disbelief? It’s too vast, she thinks. Too enormous to grasp. So she focuses on something a lot smaller.

“If I am a far off descendant with only an echo of her true powers, that would make me a bit player. If… any of this is actually true…”

“Do you think I would bring your physical body into the Dreaming if it was not true?”

“...then I am from a pantheon greatly diminished, virtually gone, for a lack of worshippers. Shit, I’m not even part of the pantheon. I’m…I’m a watered-down bastard. Diluted. What can I possibly do?”

“You shield me. You have enough of Hel’s powers to make it appear as if I am no longer among the living. And so when we touch, the Fates cannot see me, in neither the waking world nor other…realms.”

“There must be others like me. Go find one of them instead.”

His eyes visibly darken. Those pinpricks of light again. Cold stars. The cruel vastness and collapsing gravity of space.

“I find few things less tiresome than people refusing to walk the path of their own life. Their own story. This wallowing in self pity and cowardice, it is tedious to me. I am tangling with strands of destinies. I require you to step up.”

She huffs out a laugh, but it sounds more like a sob.

“That’s the worst pep talk I have ever heard.”

He stands again, and walks around the frozen spring to reach her. His fingers on her wrist, perhaps a bit harder than necessary; she imagines the swirls and whorls, the patterns on his fingertips, imprinted into the blood in her veins below. “Come.”

“Where are we going?”

“We will head to the very furthest North. We will visit Helheim. Then there is the matter of the Kindly Ones. They will eventually find out that I… took Orpheus’ life.”’

She doesn’t miss the pause, the faraway look in his eyes. He is suffering. He is in pain. He just hides it very ably. She is beginning to learn him a little, and she knows the signs of his grief and despair because he has shown her what they look like. Not out of choice, but because she had to be there so that no one else would see.

This, she thinks, can never end well.

“When they find out, they will likely find a way to get someone to petition them for revenge. Then they will come for me.”

Tendrils of headache again, as the fresh air is doing exactly what Morpheus had wished: sobering her up. She sighs, shifts.

“I was there. I saw him. What you did, it was mercy. How can they possibly punish you for an act of kindness?”

“There are ancient laws. They must be followed and obeyed.”

“Could… could they actually kill you? You?”

“Yes. I would rather they did not. But if they do, then arrangements must be put in place. For my successor. For the survival of the Dreaming. For my…friends. For that, I need as much time as I can get.”

She understands. His callousness makes her feel salty and stung, but she understands.

“Ok,” she whispers. “Ok.”

He pulls her a little closer to him, and she knows the feel of the whipping sand now, she knows.

As they disappear from the clearing, she sees how the spring remains frozen.

“Niflheim,” he says simply, as they arrive.

The only thing she can think of is the cold. It hits like a wall, the sheer ferociousness of it. Within seconds, she is chilled to the bones. Her teeth shatter, and it feels like her limbs seize up. She fights the impulse to get down on the hard ground and curl up into a little ball. Surely death would come quicker that way.

Next to her stands Morpheus, stoic, seemingly untouched by the elements. His fingers about her wrist is the only warmth in her world.

“Well,” she stutters, teeth clacking together, jaw hurting, “if you want me around long enough to appreciate the fantastic views,“ she feebly throws her free arm out, with the gesture trying to encompass the tendrils and walls of mist that is everywhere, “then you need to find a way to keep me warm. I will last minutes otherwise.”

Morpheus says nothing for a moment, just looks at her.

“Put your hand on my neck,” he says eventually.

She obeys without questioning it, a frozen hand touching down on the side of his throat, clinging to the feel of him. It leaves him free to slowly shrug off his long cloak. She can see, as he holds it open for her, that there is a night sky on the inside. It seems part of the cloak, stars and nebulas and galaxies weaved into the dark matter of it, and she thinks of the sundered fabric of her reality.

There is no turning back, not anymore. It seems that she now inhabits realms of unreality, and this is her new normal.

Morpheus grasps her wrist again, allowing her to let go of him and try to pull the cloak tighter around her.

“It is much too long for you,” he says tonelessly. “Pull it up over your head.”

She obeys, makes a crude hood out of the top part of it, then holds it close in front of her chest with the hand he is using as his link.

It helps some. Warms her enough that she can start to focus on her surroundings a little more. The wind nips at her face, making her eyes water, but still she is able to look around.

The fog she had noted earlier is prevalent. And it’s not just shades of grey, she realises. There are muted, ephemeral colours in the mist: purples, pinks, greens, all swirling and melding. Tendrils of it, thick and thin, floating and swirling in among black, eldritch formations. These formations are gnarled, and twisted, and seem to defy physical laws in the way they lean and bend. Some of them arches well above their heads, a tangle of broken towers and spires and turrets reaching heavenwards with impunity. Others are wrought and contorted into crude altars and chambers and dolmens. The darkness of them is of a solemn, impenetrable quality, entirely otherworldly.

It is all beautiful, she thinks, in a way that is both stark and somber.

She looks up, but cannot see the sky,

“It is there,” Morpheus assures her. “The stars shine even above Niflheim. They are just different from the stars with which you are familiar.”

He urges her on, and they walk together in among these shapes, this petrified mythology, and she feels so small. She touches one of the them as they pass.

It’s lava, she realises. Ancient lava, frozen in place by time.

There is an eerie silence, like the mist is eating all sounds. She begins to talk, just to hear something, just to know she is still alive.

“So this…Hel, being my ancestor and being the goddess of death and everything…is that why I had started to see dead people?”

She senses how he turns to look at her as they walk.

“I find that likely.”

“And the signs of winter in summer, the frost, the snow?”

“I cannot account for it all. But I will allow that it, too, seems likely.

She feels so lonely. Lost.

“Fenn…”

“Is not a stray. Or a dog.”

A couple of beats, where she considers asking the obvious question. Then she decides that it will have to wait. that she is too cold and feels too lost to have another corner stone kicked out of place.

“Well, whatever he is, I want him with me. I will stay with you for as long as you need me without protest. I will not whine. I will not…wallow in self pity and cowardice. But I want Fenn.” She knows she isn’t here with Morpheus by choice, that everything is done by his rules and his will, and so she adds, “Please?”

The merest tightening of his fingers on her wrist, a brief thrum against fragile bones and visible veins.

“If he keeps to his current guise, then he may come to your side. I will see to it.”

She looks at him. Again, she doesn’t ask. Just inclines her head slightly.

“Thank you.”

They carry on walking in silence, and she feels like the sense of time goes the way of sound: devoured by the mist. She doesn’t know if minutes or hours have passed with them walking side by side, Morpheus holding her wrist, when he finally stops.

Without thinking about it, she moves closer to him, enough that their sides touch just slightly. She thinks the solidness of him might be a lie, skin and muscle and bone and a beating heart just an illusion, but she clings to it anyway.

He nods ahead, and she looks.

They stand before a crumbling staircase crudely carved into the suspended lava. And up there, at the summit of it: a domed, perfect archway. An entrance. She can see nothing but darkness beyond it, thick and undulating.

Morpheus begins leading her up the steps, through mist and chill and premonition.

“Through lies Helheim, “ he says. “Come, Morn.”

Chapter Text

i know the end

chapter 5

She can feel it, when they pass through the archway. How they go from one reality to another. Can feel the texture of this new realm smooth over her skin as she moves into it. A shiver. A sigh like a touch, not a sound. Not unpleasant, but fey and palpable. A tactile thing, a real thing, even though nothing is there for her to see or hear or touch.

“I could sense the difference,” she mumbles and pulls his cloak closer around herself. “The transition.”

“Not surprising,” says Morpheus, his hold on her wrist now something of reassurance and warmth. “We are below. We are in Helheim.”

She turns to him, eyes wide.

“We are below ground?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

He doesn’t elaborate. She is beginning to learn that he rarely does if he sees no need.

So she looks around instead.

The light here is queer. It is dark, she is sure of it, but yet she can see everything just fine. The darkness is a suggestion, something that curls around her subconscious. Lingers.

Outside, in Niflheim, they had walked among shapes and formations of black, petrified lava. Here, there are structures smooth and graceful, flowing into organic shapes like waves frozen mid-crash. She cannot tell what they are made of. Onyx, basalt, obsidian, perhaps material unknown to earth; soft blackness reflecting back different colours, like oil spills trapped in stone.

She resists the urge to touch.

It’s cold here as well, frost and snow in the air. Sharp, fresh. The mist, with its different, muted colours, shifts and shimmers all around them. Sound is muted, contained, perhaps living only inside her mind.

It’s other, she thinks. Strange, eldritch, unknown. But it’s not horrible. It’s not terrifying. It simply is. Much like the man (is he a man?) walking next to her. With her wearing his cloak, he is clad only in black trousers and a black shirt, and he seems entirely unencumbered by the permeating cold. She doesn’t understand.

Something glitters far, far above them, stealing her attention away from the pondering of him. She stops, tips her head back.

Morpheus stops with her, but the tug on her wrist tells her that he is reluctant to do so.

“They are not stars,” he says, as he follows her gaze.

“What are they then?”

“Hel creates her own light,” he answers. “Her version of the night sky. Crystals, stalactites and glow worms, far up there.”

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“Perhaps,” he answers, and pulls on her again. “We must be on our way. By now Hel will know that we are coming.”

In the distance, in shadows and in the mist, she sees human figures move. They walk among the black formations, they emerge and then disappear again. They all seem to ignore Morpheus and her.

“Hel’s dead,” says Morpheus. “She has no believers left, and so has not had any new dead in a very long time. And the ones already here, they are fading. Slowly.”

Morn looks. The one nearest to them is a woman in a roughspun dress. She can see the woman’s hair clearly: faded red, in braids. But even though she is looking right at them, her face is obscured. Her features are faint and slightly warped, as if wrapped in a nylon stocking.

“That’s…unnerving.”

“They are harmless to us,” Morpheus says. “They will leave us be.” Then a slight nod ahead. “We are almost there.”

Rising up ahead of them is a great building. It's of dark wood, long and narrow, gnarled and twisted in its construction, yet strangely alluring. A grace similar to that of the black structures of this realm. A flow and a feeling working with the wood, not against it.

It takes a little while for Morn to realise that the building is emerging out of what appears to be a giant root system.

“Hel has her hall built into the roots of Yggdrasil,” murmurs Morpheus, then tightens his fingers about her wrist to ensure her attention.

Absently she considers how they have begun to silently communicate with the slight press of fingers on skin. But mostly her regard is on the woman that is standing in front of a pair of intricately carved wooden doors, waiting for them.

Above the big doors are runes scrawled into the wood. She can’t decipher any of them. She wouldn’t know how, and she doesn’t try. Her attention is entirely captured by the woman standing calm and still, watching them approach.

From a certain angle, Morpheus had said. From a certain angle they do look alike, her and this woman, that is true. Morn can certainly see what he had meant by it. Her long, fair curls, her sharp, briskly drawn bone structure. Her green eyes. Her soft, childish cheeks.

At least half. The other half of this woman, the right half, is…dead. Cold. From crown to toe. Frosted over. The eye on that side is empty and white, the hair made of hoar frost. The blue-tinged skin threadbare, enough that Morn can see a cheekbone almost poking through. She is wearing a beautiful green dress, but on the right side it is ripped and torn and faded in colour. A golden neckring half tarnished and oxidised.

When she speaks, her voice rings like silver bells and death groans.

“I greet you, Dream of the Endless, and welcome you to Helheim.”

Her mouth moves in synergy, the dead part with the alive. On the left side white strong teeth, on the right something like fangs. Sharp canines.

“I thank you for your hospitality, Hel of Helheim,” Morpheus says with a small bow, his voice formal and correct.

Hel nods, once, then turns to her. Both eyes, the green one and the one clouded with frostbite, focus on her.

“And who is this woman, wrapped in the Dream Weaver’s cloak?”

“A child of yours, Hel of Helheim. Her name is Morn Harrow.”

Hel steps closer, comes all the way up to Morn. She feels how Morpheus tugs her closer, just slightly, and she follows his wordless suggestion, moving into him.

“Oh yes,” says Hel slowly, looking deep into Morn’s eyes. “I believe you are correct, Dream Weaver. I wonder from which dalliance you hail, child.” Then she nods once. “I greet you, Morn of Harrow. Welcome to Helheim.”

The corners of Morn’s mouth pull upwards, just slightly, at being referred to as a child even as she is rapidly approaching thirty.

“Are there many, then, like me?” she asks.

Hel looks somewhat amused.

“Aye. A fair few. I cannot say for sure. In my prime, when my believers were at their zenith, I would often visit the mortal realm. Walk among them. Love them, take them. I loved many gudijas. I did bear children. You hail from an old, powerful line, that I can say for certain. I sense my power in you.”

Then she takes a step back, throws out a dead, wizened arm.

“I bid you welcome into my hall.”

Morn looks up at Morpheus for guidance, but he simply follows Hel through the large doors, drawing her along with him.

The inside of the hall plays with the laws of physics, Morn thinks, because it is much larger than it had first appeared from the outside. It’s vast. Wooden pillars, heavily carved, all along the length of it. Beams, so high up that they disappear into nebulous shadow. Benches and furs and a large fire, roaring in the middle of the hall. There is no warmth emanating from it though. In fact, there are frost blooms spreading all along the walls, painting the wood in tinges of purples and blues. There is no warmth in this hall. Just the illusion of it.

“Come sit by the fire, girl,” Hel says anyway. Perhaps she doesn’t realise her dead kingdom is unbearably cold, that her fire is throwing off nothing but frost burns.

Morn and Morpheus both sit down on a bench close to the hearth. Hel seats herself on something like a throne: growing out of the nearest wall, a snarled, tangled thing seemingly fashioned from roots and antlers and bones. It suits her, Morn thinks: the queen of Helheim looks regal as she sits upon it, her right side melding with her throne.

The nearly faceless dead are in here as well, moving about the great hall silently and seemingly without purpose or function. But when Hel snaps the bony fingers of her right hand one of them approaches, wearing a drinking horn.

Morn can’t even see if it’s a man or a woman.

The horn she is handed is large and beautifully carved. Inside, a dark red liquid. It’s warm; she can feel it through the bone. She can’t lift it to her mouth and drink using only one hand, but Morpheus, having clearly anticipated the quandary, puts his free hand on the side of her neck before releasing her wrist with the other.

She brings the vessel to her mouth. Around her, all the dead appear to stop as one and watch. She hesitates, but Morpheus taps her neck lightly with a finger and she takes it as a tacit order to continue. So she swallows down a careful sip: mulled wine, warm, sweet and richly spiced. The warmth doesn't spread within her though; she remains just as cold.

Morpheus raises a brow, just slightly, and unbidden she puts a hand on his throat, returning the favour and freeing him up to accept the vessel and drink from it.

Hel has been following the silent exchange between them with keen eyes.

“I thank you for the wine nourishing wary travellers,” Morpheus says, inclining his head and passing the horn back to the dead.

Morn senses the significance to the offering of hospitality and drink. To the acceptance of it. So many rules, she thinks. So much to adhere to. And she: walking blind.

“Tell me your errand here, in this the most forgotten and forsaken of realms,” Hel says to Morpheus.

“I am here,” he answers, his voice grave and careful, “to ask for shelter and protection for Morn Harrow should I fail in my endeavours.”

Morn snaps her head around to look at him. She had not expected this. She draws a breath, opens her mouth, but Morpheus brings his hand up to the back of her neck and grasps it. Hard. A tug, a small shake, perhaps barely perceptible to onlookers, but his intent is clear. He is essentially shaking her by the scruff of her neck, telling her to heel.

She snaps her mouth closed again, but she can feel her ears going warm, and she glares at him.

“I am sure to bring the Kindly Ones down upon my head,” he carries on as if their little interlude hadn’t just taken place. “I may have done so already. And by…enforcing Morn’s assistance, I have surely endangered her. I therefore owe her protection from the Furies.”

Hel looks at them, and both her eyes, warm like spring and rebirth and frigid like winter and doom, take in the way they touch.

“And what is her use to you, Dream Weaver?” she asks, but Morn thinks she might have already guessed.

“Her touch places me in the realm of the dead,” Morpheus says nonetheless. “Her touch hides me beyond the Dreaming.”

Hel nods.

“A daring gambit, Dream Weaver, I will give you that. The girl has inherited just enough of what I am to shield you from the Norns. But I fear it cannot last long.”

“I am aware,” says Morpheus. “Hence my visit here.”

“I see,” says Hel. There is no discernible expression on her divided face. She looks at Morn.

She appears to see how Morn shivers, how she tries to siphon warmth from Morpheus. She stands from her throne and comes walking towards them both.

“You suffer in this realm, girl. That should not be.”

She moves forward, hand raised, and Morpheus stands and steps in between them. Morn is having to struggle to keep their link intact, slides her hand down to grasp hard around his. She feels his long fingers wrap about hers.

“Morn Harrow is under my protection,” he says, standing tall. Eyes turning darker and lighter at the same time. Morn thinks she knows what that means. “She belongs with me.”

Hel smiles. Morn tries to understand how the beauty and the destruction works so well together.

“I merely wish to make her comfortable, Dream Weaver. She is very cold indeed.”

Morn squeezes his hand.

“It’s ok,” she says. “Really.”

He looks down at her. She meets his eyes and nods with a conviction she most certainly does not feel. But this feels important, feels monumental, feels inevitable. The slow movement of a great mass of ice, the fast death of an avalanche.

Morpheus moves to the side, but his eyes and the slant of his mouth tells her that he is not happy doing so.

Hel raises her dead hand and touches a dead, cold finger to the spot between Morn’s eyes.

At first: nothing. Then, a silence within the bones of Morn’s skull that simply cannot be real. A vast darkness, devoid of any sounds or life. Any notion of time.

Then it comes to life. Violently. Suddenly. An explosion of oil-spill colours splattering against her skull bones, against the inside of her eyelids.

She sucks in a breath.

And she is warm. But there is something else, something rushing just beneath her skin. Following the path of her veins, fast, breathless, making it feel like her skin is too small and tight to contain her bones and muscles and flesh and heart and mind. Like she might explode.

Something new.

“What did you do?” she hears Morpheus ask.

Hel doesn’t answer him.

“There,” she tells Morn. “You will never freeze in this realm again.”

“Thank you,” Morn says, but she is not sure what for. Something just happened. Something has changed. The spot between her eyes burns cold.

But the rest of her is comfortable now. Warm, even.

“It is the least I can do, girl. My blood and my power within you has brought you nothing but sorrow and loss. Perhaps this may make up for it.”

“What do you…”

“We must take our leave,” Morpheus interjects, and pulls her to standing. She almost loses her balance, and steadies herself by grabbing hold of his arm.

Hel takes a step back, her hands by her side.

“Of course, Dream Weaver. I shall not keep you. The girl has a place here should she need it. Let us hope she will not.”

And she walks ahead of them out of the hall. Back outside, into the mist lit by glow worms and crystals.

“You better tell me what this is about,” Morn hisses at Morpheus, “or I swear I’ll…”

“Not. Now,” he tells her with such forceful authority that it stills her on the spot. His fingers slide up beneath her jumper sleeve and squeezes hard enough that she sucks in a breath.

He turns to Hel.

“I will need to visit your father,” he tells her. “Do you wish for me to bring word?”

Hel smiles, a smile with bite and bitterness. Both parts of her face look equally terrifying .

“Tell him I hope he gets thrown back into the pit.”

Morpheus looks at her, solemn, then bows.

“I will, Hel of Helheim. Goodbye.”

And he turns them both around to walk back toward the passageway between worlds.

“Bye and nice to meet you!” Morn throws over her shoulder as she walks away.

“We will meet again, Morn of Harrow,” Hel calls, and the words seem to land on her shoulders, cling to her hair.

She shivers, even with Morpheus' cloak, even with Hel’s magic.

When they are back in Niflheim, standing among the gnarled lava formations evoking castles and towers, she turns to him.

“I need to know what the fuck that was really about. Don’t you dare keep it from me. But first…I don’t know what your plans are right now, but I am human. I need to eat. I don’t know how time works with…with you, but I need food, and drink, and sleep. I don’t know when I had any of it last. I don’t know how much time has passed. I don’t know… well, I don’t know much of anything at all, do I?”

Morpheus shifts slightly. There is an air of reluctance about him, his hold on her slightly too tight, imprinting her skin with frustration.

But he inclines his head in assent.

“Then we will return to the Dreaming. I will allow you time to rest, and replenish. After, we will need to visit the waking world. Vigilance and care is imperative. But so is haste.”

They arrive back in the Dreaming across the bridge from the castle. It’s the first time she has seen it as a whole, from a distance. Surrounded by a darkening sky, shot through with sharp shards of reds and pinks and oranges, it makes her breathless, wide-eyed, mute.

Morpheus leads her out onto the bridge as she takes it all in, the sheer impossible beauty of it all. The castle, the river, the skies. The fields and the meadows and the creatures. The fantasy, the creativity.

She looks up at Morpheus. The disappearing light gives some colour to his white face and reflects in his dark eyes.

He loves this place, she thinks. He will go to great lengths to defend it, keep it whole. But this place is him, and she is not so sure he loves, or even likes, himself.

The paradox of it makes her exhausted head throb, and she walks silently beside him, too weary for conversation or questions or demands.

They don’t really have to keep touching here, in the Dreaming, his own realm. Not when he’s not doing anything worth hiding. But it seems habits have been formed, and they are hard to divest. His hand remains on her wrist as they start climbing the steps up to the massive front doors.

She stops, suddenly. Stares upward. She’s getting used to being overwhelmed, but still, this deserves recognition.

“There is a dragon guarding your castle,” she tells him conversationally.

“It is a wyvern."

“Of course. My apologies.” She squints, shakes her head. “And is that a unicorn? Or a…a pegasus? What?”

“A hippogriff. And a griffin.”

“You don't do understated, do you?”

“This is the Dreaming,” he says as if it explains everything, and it does, she thinks.

It does.

They are uninterrupted as they enter the castle and begin traversing the many halls and rooms. She tries to take note of it all, because the castle is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside, but she suspects it is all ephemeral, subject to its master’s capricious moods and wishes. The gallery they are currently walking through, with its wood panelling and its many windows straight to outer space, she thinks it may perhaps not be here the next time. Nor the orangerie with the marble fountain and the hummingbirds and the statues turning to look after them as they pass.

Finally he stops them outside a plain door. She thinks she recognises this long hallway, with its arches and its hushed light. Morpheus confirms it.

“Out of necessity I’ve arranged for your accommodations to be close to my quarters.” He indicates a large double door down at the very end of the hallway. “I will be there.”

And she remembers them, his quarters. She remembers the pain and the grief within. She remembers the unimaginable storm unleashed from the man in front of her. 

Quite without thinking she touches his cheek. At his look she quickly lets her hand fall.

“I meant to ask you…how you feel? After what happened. I..”

“I will be well,” he interrupts, voice entirely without intonation, contours sharp and knifing into the air around him

But his eyes…

No, she thinks. She can’t. Not now. Not tonight. She is too worn down.

“Fenn,” she says instead, “You promised.”

Something that might be annoyance mars Morpheus' face then, and she is grateful for the sight of something real.

“I keep my promises,” he says, somewhat tightly. “The beast is here.”

Paws against stone, then, echoing around the arches of the hallway. When she turns she sees Fenn trotting toward her. He is not hurrying, and he is showing no discernible signs of being happy to see her. But he touches his cold nose very briefly to her hand when he reaches them, then sits down next to her. Almost close enough to touch.

He looks bigger here, somehow. Shaggier. More fearsome.

She sinks to her knees and begins stroking the wild, thick scruff around his face. Fenn tolerates it. She looks up at Morpheus, who is standing stiffly next to them.

“I know you don’t like him. But he’s my dog. He...”

“...is Fenrir,” interrupts Morpheus. “And if you are unaware of his provenance I suggest you avail yourself once more of the library upon waking.”

He inclines his head at her.

“Goodnight.”

And he walks down the hall, towards his own door.

“Oh,” she says, looking into Fenn’s yellow eyes.

She is still wearing Morpheus’ cloak.

Chapter Text

I know the end

chapter 6

Her “accommodations” are eerily similar to her little flat in Marchmont. Similar, but improved.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, she thinks.

Wooden flooring, a large bay window. Books everywhere. Candles, plants. An oaken bed, a squishy looking sofa. Throws and rugs. Gentle lighting. A large open fire, burning merrily. Two deep armchairs in front of it. Perfect for reading.

She suspects that Morpheus' intent had been to make her feel at home in his realm. Comfortable.

Ease the transition he enforced when he took her.

Instead all she feels is homesickness and a sense of disquiet over the similarity.

She hasn’t had the time to decompress. To think. To try and make sense.

If there is even any sense to make.

She can still feel him against her fingers. Morpheus. The sharpness of his cheekbone. The slight roughness of the skin of his cheek. She is also intimately familiar with the bones of his wrist, the strong tendon of his neck, the beat of his pulse. All of it etched into the grooves and whirls of her fingertips.

He feels so real. Human.

But he isn’t.

She runs a hand over the maroon bedspread. Over the spines of the books. The glass of the large window, looking out over the rolling hills and snow capped mountains and serpentine rivers of the Dreaming.

It all feels so very real, just as Morpheus himself feels real.

But is he? Is it? In reality, is she sitting alone on a pile of coals and rocks in deserted nothingness, thinking herself surrounded by finery and wonders?

“And you,” she murmurs, looking at Fenn. “Are you who he says?”

The dog - no wolf, he is a wolf - simply looks at her with those yellow eyes. He allows her to scratch his head for just a couple of seconds, then he pads over to the door and lays down before it.

She considers the books again, and smiles a little when she sees that many of them are on Norse mythology. She picks one at random, then finds the adjoining bathroom. It looks nothing like her rather shabby one at home. This one is luxurious, with a copper tub and gold washed taps. Fluffy towels, glass bottles of richly scented soaps and lotions.

Another kindness.

So she takes a bath. A long one, even though she is so tired she might fall asleep and sink beneath the warm water, encased as if in a womb. She reads from the book. Learns enough for now.

She puts the book on a built-in shelf above the tub, then sinks back. Goes below the water, until only her nose breaks the surface. Until her hair billows around her like seaweed and she can hear only her own heart beat through the water, bouncing off the sides of the tub.

She had put it into words earlier. Morpheus has kidnapped her. He has taken her away, and he has made it clear she is without choice. There is coercion. This, all of this, is a prison.

But that is not to say that she is in the wrong place right now.

It is obvious that something is happening within her. Something…that can’t be explained in what she deems to be the real world. It might have an explanation here though. And if not, then at least she is with people who might know a way forward. Who might sit on suggestions.

She doesn’t know a single thing. Does Morpheus want her to think that this is the best place to be?

She wonders if that is part of his plan. To keep her here, away from everything she knows, forcing her to rely on him. He had inferred as much, hadn’t he, when he first brought her here.

Her mind wanders some more. Helheim. Hel. Frost. Hel’s touch. Something had happened there, then, but she doesn’t know what.

She begins shaking. At first she doesn’t quite understand why, then she realizes that her bath water is freezing. That it is slowly turning to ice around her body. That her breaths billow with frost.

Things are veering far beyond her control. She doesn’t understand the speed of it.

She gets out of the tub as fast as she can, water halfway to ice clinging to her. She is shivering. Her teeth chatter. She dries herself off standing in front of the fire, wrapped in a woollen throw. She considers the conundrum of clothes. Her jeans and red sweater can, at this point, be considered rather ripe, and she doesn’t much fancy getting back into them.

She needn’t have worried though.

In a large armoire opposite the bed she finds a wealth of clothes. They are not her usual practical choices though. No jeans, trainers, hoodies and sweaters. Instead it’s long dresses and flowing trousers and tunics. Muted, warm colours. Earthen. Silk and thin soft wool; cashmere, merino, alpaca. It irks her, how this is another thing in which she is robbed of choice. It seems he is willing to grant her only some grace; like familiar, comfortable accommodation, like Fenn. But not others. Perhaps to keep her on her toes, perhaps to remind her of her place here.

She doesn’t know.

She pulls on a cashmere set, then looks around the room, searching for wine. Hoping it might materialise just as the clothes. Nothing.

She suspects that is on purpose too.

She gets into bed. She thinks she might not be able to fall asleep, here, in the Dreaming. But she does.

She doesn’t dream though.

She is awoken by a raven.

She cracks open an eye at the persistent cawing, and sees the big black bird sitting atop the armoire.

She contemplates the thing with curiosity, but not surprise. That much, at least, she has learned while here: that anything might happen, including the impossible. A raven in her bedroom is, in the scheme of things, within the realms of the entirely possible.

She slowly gets out of bed, and approaches the large bird with something like reverence. Stands below the armoire, looking up at it.

“Are you, uh…Hugin?” she eventually asks. “Or the other one?”

The raven sets off from the armoire and flies down to perch on the head rest of one of the armchairs.

“Cute, princess,” it answers with a very human voice. It speaks with a grating American accent. “The boss sent me. He says it’s wake-up time.”

She looks at it. At this point, a talking raven isn’t anything that ought to cause a raised eyebrow. But she’s only half awake.

“The boss?” she asks.

“Yeah,” it says and preens the downy feathers under its wing. “Morpheus? King of Dreams? Tall, dark and emo? That guy? He says you need to eat something. I am to take you to the kitchens.”

It hops from the chair onto the window sill, tilts its head and looks up at her with a beady eye.

“I’m Matthew, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Matthew,” she says and resist the urge to stick a hand out and shake his wing. “I’m Morn.”

“I know. You’ve caused quite the stir here. A mortal, physically in the Dreaming. Big news. Huge.”

“Well,” she says. “Glad to hear I’m the cause of gossip. And with “glad” I mean the exact opposite.”

“Yes, well. I’m pretty new to this whole Dream-of-the-Endless’-raven gig, but I’ve learnt that he’s got a reason for everything. If that helps?”

“Not really. No.”

"Didn't think so. So how about some breakfast instead, huh? Go get dressed. I’ll wait right here.”

She grabs some clothes entirely at random, then retreats to the bathroom to change. She sighs when she sees herself in the gilded mirror. Sleeping with her hair wet has left it a mess of tangled curls. She shakes her head at her mirror image, then splashes water on her face and pinches her cheeks. Brushes her teeth and feels halfway human.

The pile of clothes she grabbed so haphazardly turns out to be a green wool skirt and a red silk camisole.

“I look like a Christmas tree,” she grumbles to Matthew as she exits the bathroom again. She is not used to clothes like this. Restrictive and revealing at the same time. She feels a fool.

She looks around for her trainers, but they are gone. In their place…

“Slippers?” She picks them up. Delicate things, made of green silk, with soft and thin leather soles. “Wow,” she says. “He really is hobbling me.”

“Oh I think those are for aesthetic purposes only,” says Matthew cheerfully. “His tastes do tend to skew renaissance faire, you know.”

“If you say so,” she mutters, not convinced at all. “Well then. Lead the way.”

She opens the door out to the hallway, and Matthew swoops through it. She follows, along with Fenn, as the raven leads her down the long hallway, through large rooms and up and down curving staircases.

“Nothing looks the same as it did last night,” she says.

“Things tend to change a lot around here,” Matthew answers. He is perching on the withers of a large statue of a horse, waiting for her to catch up. “It’s kinda part of the fun. Except when the boss is in a mood. Then the interior tends to get dreary. And it rains.”

Yes, she’d seen some of that last night.

“And how does one become a raven in the employ of Dream of the Endless?” she asks. “Is there an audition process?”

Matthew somehow manages to pull off a shrug.

“If there was, then I wasn’t privy to it. I died, I woke up as a raven in the Dreaming. That was that.”

“And how do you like the gig?”

“Well…” He perches himself on a large urn instead, and she stops to consider him. “I am kinda new to it. But I like it. Morpheus…” Matthew tilts his head, looks at her through black, beady eyes. “...he is kind of a stickler for the rules. And real married to his duties. But he’s good. He means well.” He caws, sharply, and spreads his wings but remains in place. “I don’t know the ins and outs of…whatever it is you’re doing here. But it’s clear he needs your help. I’d really appreciate it if you would. You know, help him.”

“Your master hasn’t exactly given me much choice,” she tells him drily.

Matthew doesn’t answer her, simply leads her onwards, Fenn padding softly at her heels.

They eventually reach a large kitchen. It’s all flagstones and wooden beams and copper accents. An enormous fireplace. No modern touches in sight. When she thinks about it, the whole castle seems to sample liberally from many different epochs, but hardly any modern ones.

A scrawny, birdlike woman hurries up to her. She looks up at Morn, which hardly ever happens.

“Morning, sweetie. I’m Taramis, Lord Morpheus’ chef de cuisine. What can I get you?”

Morn hesitates.

“I’m not sure. Have you got tea and toast?”

Taramis looks her up and down, her beady eyes appraising.

“Something more than just toast, I think.”

“And Fenn?”

Taramis turns to look at him.

“Sure, sure, I’ll see to your wolf friend as well.”

And before she knows it she is sitting before quite the spread. Fresh fruit, yoghurt parfait. Bacon, toast, sausage. Orange juice. Tea. Fenn, on the floor by her feet, is gnawing on a large raw ribeye.

She is starving, she realises. Her sense of time is becoming skewed, but even so she thinks that it must be a long time since she had a proper meal. And it feels close to peaceful, sitting here next to a crackling fire, Taramis fussing with something behind her, Matthew snoozing atop a large cupboard, head stuck under a wing. There is not quite silence, but soothing white noise. Chewing, sipping, not thinking. Warmth. Lulling peace. The taste of normalcy.

Morpheus enters as she is cradling her second cup of tea.

“Morn,” he greets her. “I trust you slept well.”

She looks at him, quite uncertain of the quality of her sleep.

”I read from some of the books you left, and Fenrir is supposed to be this fearsome monster,” she answers and scratches Fenn’s neck with her foot. Fenn tolerates it very briefly, then turns his head away.

“He is in disguise,” Morpheus says, perfectly droll.

She begins to laugh, but stops again - he hadn’t been making a joke. She looks up at this strange being, and tries to understand.

He stands tall above her, ramrod straight as always, hands behind his back. Meets her eyes, perfectly inscrutable.

“If you have finished your meal, we must leave.”

She nods, and puts her cup down.

“See you soon,” she says to Fenn, who carries on gnawing on his bone, not looking at her.

“Rome,” Morpheus says simply.

She looks around.

“If you say so.”

They are standing in an alleyway that could be in any warm country, really. The smells are…hightened. Morpheus shows no sign of noticing. She rubs her nose with her arm.

“Well,” she says, “I’ve always wanted to go to Rome. But I guess we aren’t here to sightsee.”

“No,” says Morpheus, and begins leading her down the alley, towards the bright sunlight at the end of it. The camisole she chose gives him plenty of access to skin, and his hand envelopes her elbow.

“As always, it is important that we keep touching,” he tells her as they walk.

“You don’t need to tell me. I know.”

He doesn’t answer.

They reach the mouth of the alley, and step out onto a large square. Immediately they are surrounded by swathes of people. There is chatter, cameras, socks with sandals, garish baseball caps, crucifixes. Sun lotion, sweat, sun on stone. The wet rushing hum of fountains.

The plaza is elliptical, embraced by marble colonnades curving out from a large basilica. In the centre of the space a vast obelisk, reaching vainly for the blue sky. She recognises it all from pictures, from TV. Movies.

“St. Peter’s Square. The Vatican? Loki is here?”

“Yes. He is currently, along with his associate Puck, impersonating Leo XIV.”

“The Pope? He is impersonating the Pope?”

“Yes.”

“I…” Then she catches up with what else he said. “Puck? As in…”

“Yes.”

“So faeries, they’re…”

“Yes.”

“Fucking hell.”

He doesn’t respond to that, and she walks silently, trying to keep up with both him and the speed with which her world-view is brutally expanding.

“So,” she says finally, “why are they pretending to be the Pope?”

“Who can say. They are both chaos merchants. Mischief makers. I suppose they felt it would be fun.”

“And you are seeking them out, why, exactly?”

“Loki owes me a favour.”

He doesn’t say anythin else, just leads her across the plaza. He walks with purpose, unheeding of any distractions, and the people around them seem to naturally, subconsciously, give him space to do so.

Some of them don't though. Some of them are flickering and threadbare and greying, and will not move out of the way. Morpheus and her simply walk straight through them. They are dead, and she feels how they look at her. Notice her, even when they seem to notice nothing else.

She shivers in the warm sun, and feels how control is slipping through her fingers. She brushes closer to Morpheus. and casts around for something to take her mind off the dead. She watches a man, in cargo shorts and Birkenstocks and a tee saying HIGH ON JESUS, nodding at Morpheus before stepping out of his way.

“They can see you?” she asks.

“They can, just as you did when I first appeared in front of you.”

She looks sideways at him.

“So how does it work for you, in… in the waking world? Here?”

“I operate under certain limitations.”

“Limitations?”

“Yes.”

He seems unwilling to say more on the subject.

“And in other…realms?”

“In some more than others.”

They walk up the steps of the basilica, then inside. Pillars, stone saints, a hushed echo. It’s cooler here, darker. There are also more dead. She briefly closes her eyes. Shakes her head.

Morpheus looks down on her. It seems he notes her discomfort for the first time.

“They can’t harm you. Ignore them.”

“Easy for you to say,” she mutters, keeping her head down, tracing the patterns of the marble and brass floor as they venture deeper into the basilica, away from the public spaces.

Morpheus’ grip about her elbow tightens, alerting her to a group up ahead. Cardinals, in black and red, chattering and flapping, weaving around pillars. Surrounding the Pope, making him stand out in all white.

“Your Holiness,” Morpheus calls out. “May I speak with you?”

The group turns to look at them. One of the Cardinals ushers the rest away, as the Pope walks towards them, face stony, mouth turned down. He doesn’t look the least bit happy to see Morpheus.

“You too, Cardinal Visconti,” Morpheus adds.

She watches them approach, and her reality feels slippery and tempestuous again.

The two men stop in front of them.

“Dream Weaver,” says the Pope in grim greeting.

“Loki,” Morpheus returns. “Puck.”

The Pope’s face starts burning. There is the smell of singed hair, of cooking flesh, and she tries to rear back, but Morpheus holds her still. She looks away instead, confused, horrified, wondering again what she has been dragged into.

“What is your errand here, Dream?”

The voice she hears is different now. Younger. Full of laughter and petulance. Morpheus’, in contrast, is calm and void of any emotion as he answers.

“I have come because it is time for you to end your charade. The time has come to call in the boon which you owe me. As we discussed last time we met, the infant Daniel Hall must be closely guarded from now on. I expect you to undertake this with the greatest care and subtlety.”

She turns back. In front of her, still in cassock, zucchetto and stole, stands a fair-haired man with a wide mouth and arrogant brows. She studies his hair, fashioned into a careful mohican. The face of his companion, also freshly revealed, can only be described as impish.

“You’re Loki?" she asks the pretend-Pope. “What’s with the Billy Idol aspirations?”

Loki looks at her. Up and down. A studied curl of his lip tells her that he finds her lacking.

“And who is this bedraggled young lady you’ve so curiously attached to yourself, Dream Weaver?”

“I’m…” she begins, but Morpheus bids her quiet with a tightening of his fingers.

“Morn Harrow is a descendant of Hel’s.”

“Ooooooooooooh,” says Loki, and steps forward, hand raised. “Really? I want to see for myself.”

He reaches with a finger for her forehead, much as Hel did, but Morpheus holds out his free hand, almost touching Loki’s chest.

“You will not interfere with her in any manner.”

“Oh poo,” pouts Loki, his bottom lip jutting out halfway comically, but she sees the hard, calculating look in his eyes. “Always so stingy with your toys, Dream. Never wanting to share.”

“Morn Harrow does not leave my side.”

“Ah, but she is my kin.” He looks at her, and smiles. “Aren’t you, poppet?”

She shakes her head, and steps closer to Morpheus.

“I think I’ll stick to the guy that isn’t currently cosplaying as the Pope,” she tells him, and he laughs.

“Not a fan of organised religion? Guess I don’t blame you. How is my darling daughter faring?”

This to Morpheus, who inclines his head and sounds entirely neutral when answering.

“She remains in her realm.“

Loki smirks.

“She was always stubborn.”

As they’ve been talking he’s been looking at the way Morpheus holds her, the way he doesn't let her go.

“Do you see, Puck, how the Dream Lord clings to my relative?” he says over his shoulder to his companion. “I do believe he uses little Morn as a shield.”

He smiles at Morpheus.

“That’s actually pretty clever. Devious even. I didn’t think you had it in you. But what have you done, I wonder, that requires you to appear… gone? Have you been naughty? I can think of only one thing you might truly fear….”

His smile is a thing of true wickedness and delight.

“Have you angered the Norns, perhaps?”

“My motivations are none of your concern, Loki,” Morpheus answers. “I bid you to do your part. That is all.”

“You have, haven’t you?” Loki sing-songs. “That can only mean one thing, can’t it? Now then…”

And he moves in to touch her again. It’s an unthinking thing, how she throws her free hand out to ward him off. And she doesn’t know how it happens, but frost-bitten roots shoot forth, seemingly out of thin air. They are gleaming and fey in the low light, and wind themselves about Loki’s hands until a crude sort of shackles binds his wrists together.

Morpheus’ long fingers feel like a similar vice about her upper arm.

“...I didn’t mean to do that,” she tells him.

Loki clenches his fist and the shackles burst into small pieces of ice and wood, falling to the flagstones with a soft clatter.

“Parlour tricks,” he sneers.

“That was real, darling,” Puck says. He looks amused, and he is eyeing Morn in a way she does not like. “What else can you do?”

“I didn’t even know I could do that,” she says, and tries to back up, but Morpheus stills her again.

“We are taking our leave now,” he tells Loki. “Best not forget your duty.”

“I am duty-bound to no one,” Loki says, and she can see how angry he is, how the rage simmers about him, a twisting, gnarled aura.

“Nevertheless,” Morpheus says. “In this there can be no doubt. The repercussions for you, should you refuse, will be severe. You know this.”

And then he simply steers her out of there, and as they walk she feels the heat of Loki’s anger between her shoulder blades, against the frailty of her neck. She holds her tongue though, because she doesn’t know what to say.

The Dreaming is moody and long of shadow when they return. The clouds are dark grey, and the winds are whipping them every which way across the sky. The castle looks gloomy as they approach, every window dark.

“Tell me something,” she says to Morpheus when they stand once more outside the door to her quarters.

“What?”

She hesitates for just a second, then ventures forth. She can only abide this if she has done everything she can.

“Do you really want this? Succeed? Live?”

He doesn’t answer, just looks at her steadily. His fingers around her wrist taps her pulse point though, in a gesture she has begun to understand as censure. She carries on anyway. She has, she thinks grimly, little to lose. Or maybe too much.

“I don’t know the ins and outs of your big plan here, but it seems you are hinging a large part of it on Loki. You told me to brush up on Norse mythology. Well, I have. He will fuck you over.”

Nothing. At least no words, but his brows and his mouth tighten.

“And the thing is, if you fail at whatever it is that you have really set out to do, my fallback is a freezing underground realm full of disappearing dead.”

Now his grip could bruise. It will bruise.

“I’m doing what I am doing in order to protect my subjects, the Dreaming and its creations and refugees. You are now included in that. I have secured you a safe space, one where the Fates cannot reach you.”

“And what about protecting yourself?”

His face becomes something like opaque glass then, blank and dull, impossible to find any purchase on. Sliding on black ice, breathless and out of control.

“I have some errands, things that must be done.”

It’s so abrupt, the way he inclines his head and then walks away. Not towards his own quarters, but back from whence they came. Towards the throne room. Towards the front doors.

She wishes she had something to throw after him. Something heavy.

She’s a fool, she thinks.

She’ll never understand.

How can she possibly understand?

It’s pitch black outside the windows when she startles awake. There is confusion and displacement, and It takes her some moments to realise what has thrown her out of sleep.

Morpheus is perched back against the sill of the bay window across the room. She sees him as a silhouette even darker than the night behind him. His eyes are glowing like stars again, and he is entirely still.

“Are… you watching me sleep?”

“I was waiting for you to wake.” He doesn’t move at all, is just a shadow with a voice. His hands are gripping the edges of the window sill. “It is a strange thing, a sleeper in the Dreaming.”

His voice is low, and darker than she has ever heard it. Not even, but full of twists and turns.

She rubs her forehead and tries to shake sleep out of her hair.

“I went away while you slept,” he says.

“You left the Dreaming? Without me? But you will have been exposed!”

“This I had to do alone.”

Slowly she slides out of bed. She is wearing only a short cotton nightgown, but crosses the floor towards him anyway. The fire has burnt down, but the room is still enveloped in residual warmth.

She stops a few paces out from him. She still can’t see him all that well. His eyes cast some light across cheekbones and brows, but that is it.

“Well then what is even the point of me being here?” she asks.

A couple of beats, before he answers.

“I did look in on you before I left. You were asleep.”

“You could have woken me. Or waited. Like you’ve been doing just now.”

“I do not do well with confinement.”

It’s a different sort of answer, and his voice is clipped and toneless enough that she knows it has nothing to do with merely feeling cooped up or wing-clipped. This is something deeper.

“I had to leave,” he says. “Had to move alone outside my realm. So that I know I can.”

“Do they know yet? The Fates, the Furies, the Kindly Ones. Whatever you call them. Do they know?”

The silhouette of him, it vibrates, seems to become soluble then return to matter again.

“They now know about the death of my son. They will not act against me until someone petitions them for revenge.”

“Until? So it’s a matter of when, not if?”

“I have made many enemies along the way.”

Loki among them, she thinks.

She sighs. Feels the weight of inevitability and things she doesn’t understand settle heavy on her shoulders. Why does she care? Is it something in her heritage, something in her cells, that bids her to ask:

“What happened, Dream?”

She hasn’t called him that before. He seems to think of Morpheus as his name, his identity. Dream is a concept, something much bigger than the being shaped like the man perching in front of her.

He seems to understand why she chose to use it.

“My father is Time,” he says slowly. “And my mother is Night. They exist outside creation. I went to see them both.”

“Why?”

“The rules placed on the Endless, on me and my siblings, were created by ancient laws. Laws put in place before even the stars learned to burn. Created by my father and my mother. I petitioned them for an exclusion, for help, but they told me they will not help me. And they told me that they do not love me.”

“Jesus fucking…”

She goes to him, then. All the way. The last few steps, and it’s so natural, now, to touch him. Feel the solidness of him, his warmth. She wants to comfort, erase the hurt caused by his parents.

She stands between his legs, aware that he could unmake the ground beneath her bare feet with just a thought. One hand on his shoulder. The palm of her other hand on the side of his throat. Warmth. A pulse. So deceiving.

“It is what it is,” he says, and his voice is so carefully void of feeling. “I cannot ask of them what they are unable to give. Lucienne told me that I did better with my own son than they did with me.”

He killed his own son.

“Lucienne is right. Please believe her.”

One of his hands let go of the windowsill, and climbs the thin slice of air between them to delve into her hair. She thinks of when he had grasped her hair when she comforted him after he’d washed the blood of his son from his hands.

Go now, before…

There is a terrible darkness in him, she thinks, one no longer so tightly leashed. And she thinks she might be the one standing in its path when finally he unleashes it.

But for now, he simply begins sifting her hair between his fingers. Slowly, thoughtfully. Undoing knots, she realises, and with ponderous patience at that. It seems to soothe him, and so she quietly stands there, trying to understand, as he travels along kinks and tangles with his fingers. Unmakes them.

“Tell me,” she says, “what you will do now. Will you fight?”

His other hand leaves the windowsill too, and slides slowly up inside her night shirt. Up along her thigh, just the lightest of touches, then follows the slope of her naked hipbone. It should feel audacious. It doesn’t. She is already so used to him, to his touch, that this is just a deeper sort of intimacy.

“If I asked, would you?”

His voice is the darkest she has heard it, and the lowest. A whisper carrying boulders. She can feel how he hurts, this being that began as a concept but has made himself something more.

“I don’t know,” she sighs, and she doesn’t know if she lies.

His hand doesn’t go further, it stays on her hip. A warm weight, an embrace of bone. The other in her hair, carrying on working on kinks and knots. The warmth of his thighs on either side of hers.

And she stands there worrying at him in her mind, trying to smooth all his strange edges with her thoughts. Like sea waves whirling broken glass, hoping to make it smooth and tactile to the touch. Turning it to something like a jewel.

“If I were to walk out of here, from this castle. And walk, and walk, through the Dreaming, until I found the end of it. And if I stepped outside its borders. Would I find my way back home?”

A soft tap of his finger against her hipbone. An admonishment, perhaps. An answer, maybe.

“No,” he clarifies. “You would wander forever lost between realms.”

“I see.”

But the night is too quiet and his pain too palpable for her to berate him.

That, she thinks, will have to come later.

“You must go to bed now,” she whispers.

“Yes.”