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Chapter Text

The group of shuttles came down from the Library's ship to the surface of Dreaming like metal beads on a string, clicking into place on the ground one after another, as the Citadel's children flooded out clutching anything that might be accepted as payment: coins, trinkets, bags of rice in wheelbarrows, bottles of sauce and spices, tanks of oxygen and purified water, fabric and old boots. The Apprentice Librarians jostled and teased each other, trying to compete for the largest crowd to listen to a story, or help make a trebuchet (and learn about physics), or watch a demonstration of alkali metals in water. All knowledge was gathered by the Library, and it was the Apprentice's job to learn as much of it as possible and teach it to anyone who wanted to know. The ones who got the most interest in their subject got to stay and teach it for the next year, in tandem with a star system's schools, and form the networks they needed for their Voyager travels later on.

And of course, their arrival was an excellent excuse for a festival.

Several food stalls were set up already, filling the air with delicious smells and the cries of the vendors overlapping with the Librarians trying to drum up a crowd. Dream ignored them. He wasn't here for food, he wanted to find the playwright who had been so good at telling stories last year.

"Dreammmmm, come on! I want to see the fish!" Delirium said, pulling towards a tent that, from the painted sign outside, was full of aquariums.

Dream tried to deny her. "My sister, I-" he couldn't do it. She looked too excited.

"I'll go with you, if you come with me to see the rats after," Despair offered, saving him.

"Alright. But don't stand around being boring all day, OK Dreamy?" Delirium didn't wait for an answer, but pulled Despair away by the hand, leaving Dream blinking in their wake.

"Well, big brother. Shall we go and find your lovely crush?" Desire asked, linking arms at the elbows.

"I do not have a crush, Desire. I patronised his play to ensure the troupe had the success they deserved. There is no need to add anything scurrilous to the situation."

"Oh, no, one such as you would never stoop so low, I'm sure." They pulled him off towards the entertainers on the edges of the growing fair.

They didn't find the playwright, or any of his troupe. They did find an old scientist raving about the possibility of immortality to a Librarian who seemed to be trying desperately to find a way out of the conversation. The scientist seemed to be related to beavers in much the same way that humans were related to orangutans, except for the horns.

"He's quite something, isn't he?" Desire whispered in Dream's ear. "So passionate. All that drive…"

"You go and speak with him if you wish. I am busy elsewhere," Dream said disinterestedly.

"I think I shall."

Dream gladly lost track of Desire for the rest of the day, being too busy wandering through the various tents and entertainments. There was an absolutely fascinating lesson on calligraphy, and another on papermaking, and there was an introduction to ceramic sculpture which he was probably a little too advanced for but which was very fun regardless. He came home with clay in his nail beds and ink stains on his fingertips.

Desire came home looking as immaculate as ever, and with the castoridian man in tow.

"Desire. Why is he still here."

"Oh, I couldn't just send him away! Professor Burgess" - as was, apparently, his name - "was in the middle of telling me all about this absolutely fascinating amphibian that lives in flowers in the tropical forests of Waking, and if we could just get Mother Dearest to send an expedition to the area we could learn so much about the ecology! Not that I necessarily care for its own sake, you understand, but academics, all they ever want is to know!" They grinned giddily. "Never satisfied, I tell you."

Dream didn't know the details, but he knew that Desire argued with their twin over Burgess. Desire was convinced that it was just a case of Despair being jealous, but they clung to Dream's company like they hadn't since they were all children; they were devastated, in a way that was obvious to everyone who knew them well.

A few weeks later, Desire began talking about going on expeditions with Burgess, to find this critter or that herb for study. But there was one glaring problem.

"Brother, dear, could we borrow one of your ships? You know I share mine with Despair, and, well, she has the shipyard…" Desire looked embarrassed, which Dream hadn't been sure they were capable of. They hadn't been ashamed of anything they did since they hit adolescence, as far as he knew.

Dream had sighed, and let them use the Griffin, one of the three colony-starters he had brought in the fleet when the family had settled this system. It had the best setup for scientific endeavours, and some of the cryogenic systems were even still in place. Some of his personal servants came along to crew the ship, too, though it was an unspoken understanding among all of them that only Desire actually wanted to go and traipse around the wilderness.

Dream mostly kept to his cabin, and used the time to catch up on administration and have necessary boring meetings without any family members butting in.

Desire and Burgess were out again, determining the range of some fruit tree Dream could not care less about; Desire had sent check-in pings, but they were late enough in returning that he had given up and gone to bed. Emerging blearily from a restless attempt at sleep he woke and found the professor standing over his bed with a needle.

"Easy now, it's just a sedative. You and your sibling are going to be so helpful to my research, you know. There, that'll keep you down for a while…"

Dream rolled out of bed, diving for the drawer where his blaster was, but was knocked off-course with a shout. Burgess tried to wrestle him down, and left an opening for the door, and Dream jinked toward that instead, Burgess dropping the needle behind him judging by the thud and curse.

He ran out into the shared sitting room shouting for Desire, then drew up short and shoved a chair under the door handle to prevent Burgess following him. The door rattled not a moment later, and Dream went to Desire's room still calling for them.

Jessamy, his PA, poked her head out of the servant's rooms next door. "Whatever is the matter?" she asked, eyes darting up and down to check him for injury.

"Where is Desire?" Dream demanded.

"Oh, they haven't been back yet. You can see where their speeder normally parks in the shuttle bay from one of our windows, you know, and it's not there. That professor has his out there though, has Desire's broken down? Do we need to send a search party-"

The door to Dream's room splintered open at last. Burgess emerged, Dream's blaster in hand. The world flashed with light and a new round burn bloomed in the wall near Dream's ear.

"No!" Jessamy screamed, launching herself at Burgess. There was another flash of light, and she went down. Dream forgot himself for but a moment, and scrambled for her.

There was a sharp pinch as the needle broke skin. He tried to lash out, and only banged his hand against the wall. He slipped into the darkness.

Chapter Text

Lucienne never tired of watching a new planet rise into view on the ship screen. The interminable journeys, the terrible prepackaged rations, the way every space station seemed to have an inescapable aroma of welding fumes, rotten eggs, and, occasionally, cat urine… all of it was worth it for the new worlds and knowledge she got to experience.

"So, Loosh, what's with the Library sending you out to this dump?" a disgruntled voice came from the ship computer's speakers. Apparently the ship's AI was less than impressed.

"Standard book flow run, Mervyn," she smiled. "I go to the local branch, see what materials have been checked out and how much, and send a report back on what needs more copies and what can be reduced for space…"

"The hell? Why'd they need more copies on digital stuff? An' are you sure this ain't below your experience level? You should be setting up your own branch somewhere if they had any sense how to use your skills!"

"Not everything is digital, especially on planets as backwoods as this. And you can't just download infinitely from one digital copy, the information starts degrading - it's a basic limitation of the system." She finished strapping herself in for the final approach with a solid click. "Besides, I would need to find a patron willing to sponsor a collection and building, or a mother-ship to run flights from, and do you know how much luck and politics that takes?"

"I might just be a glorified nav-comp, but everything you just said smells of bullshit to me."

Lucienne was saved from arguing further by the space traffic control pinging coordinates to dock at the spaceport. Merv grumbled and started charting out the vector for the good ship Raven to follow.

According to the guide she had read on the first few days of the journey, this system boasted eight planets, four of which were in binary orbits: Forking Ways, Sunless, the binary Waking and Dreaming, Fulcrum, another binary of Threshold and Greymist, and the vibrantly rainbow Mania. The outlying planets had barely been settled for a century, and Sunless was still working on a cloud city for settlers since the clouds rained sulphur and thus the surface was thoroughly inimical to life, though Waking had been developed for considerably longer. The grown children of the rulers, Night and Time, had charge of the development of a planet each, with Waking acting as a capital and base for colonisation of the rest.

The lights of the spaceport orbiting over Waking glinted in the endless night, guiding the Raven in to dock. Other ships, almost all of them much larger than her one-person runabout, jostled for space in the age-old dance of docking navigation. They always put Lucienne in mind of a coral reef, with intra-system shuttles like shoals of small fish darting in and out between larger species like turtles or the occasional visiting dolphin - the freighters and long-distance cruise ships - and everywhere the vibrant colour and scale-flash of the inhabitants - or, in this case, the bright paint and hull lights of the ships.

"We're here," said Merv, and the ship shivered almost imperceptibly with the shock of the berth clamps engaging.

Twenty minutes later, Lucienne made her way through the bustle of the station crowds, ducking under strings of dried herbs and air fresheners impregnated with scented oils strung between stalls selling cheap souvenirs, street food varieties from a hundred different systems, and overpriced items that travellers might have left out of their luggage. The overlapping voices in myriad languages were overwhelming, but not as much as the scents battling for dominance of the air in the enclosed space. And somehow the inescapable miasma of welding fumes still underlaid everything, as it did everywhere in space.

A television overhead was blaring a newsfeed, but it was news even she already knew: two of the system's ruling family, the Endless, were missing and had been for several months. Law enforcement was baffled and were asking for any leads the public might have. The visuals cycled between official photographs of the two, Dream and Desire, and paparazzi shots of the other siblings taken in the aftermath. The official photographs were stiff and seemingly workshopped to the void and back, but that was fairly standard. Their species looked basically human, except for the shining eyes, and were rumoured to be extremely long-lived, and that was all she knew, not being a biologist or anthropologist.

This level was built for humanoid beings within the general height range of Earth humans, so the variety of people wasn't as extreme as it could be, but queuing for the boarding inspection she still spotted several other Corvians, with their pointed ears and feather crests, a Merfolk with their striped tail and iris-less eyes wheeling past mostly submerged in a large water tank, and of course various Humans, this being a majority-Human system.

The pair of blonde Tuath Dé in front of her were arguing in hissed tones. "Cluracan, if you tell me you lost your passport I swear to the Dagda-" They reached the desks and the female stopped threatening her male counterpart to don a diplomatic mask. "Yes, hello, we're here to visit the Faerie system's embassy, could you direct us…" Lucienne tuned them out as she was called to the next desk over.

The woman on duty was from a species she didn't know and made a mental note to look up later, with diaphanous wings and a pattern like nebulae across her skin. She was wearing a name tag reading "Gault".

"Name and system or nomadic fleet of origin?" she asked, in a bored tone as Lucienne placed the paper copy of her ship papers down for inspection.

"Lucienne Gienah of the Interstellar Library Fleet, Lambda Wing." Gault's eyes lit up with understanding, and some of the patterns on her skin began to glow with bioluminescence. She typed busily on her workstation, presumably checking against Mervyn's digital copy and the Library's pre-sent records.

"Ah, so the purpose of your visit-?"

"Routine administration of the local library system, yes. It should last a week or two if nothing goes wrong."

"I see your ship information corroborates that, and we have a booking agreement logged with the library in town on the surface. Where are you intending to stay while here - berth on your vessel or somewhere else?"

"Oh, berthing on my ship. Paying for rooms is a little out of my price range." Lucienne smiled nervously.

"Yes, that's standard to my experience. That expenses budget they give you never did stretch very far. I see you've included a confirmation of your return vector to your fleet… Looks like everything checks out! Have you been to the Endless system before?"

"No."

"Well, here you are then, a map of the station is probably a good idea. There are basic copies on the wall opposite each lift and a more detailed one by the shuttle bays for the surface. I recommend the White Horse if you want to eat or drink at an actual inn before you go down, they tend to cater to most of the visitors who don't berth in their ships and they're well-regarded - one of the first establishments on the station! I'm sure you will have researched as much as you could in advance, you knowledge-peddlers always do, but just in case: you're cleared for this station and the surface of Waking and Dreaming only, if you find the need to venture elsewhere you will need to get and pay for a permit, and I suggest also a guide for at least Forking Ways, Fulcrum, and Mania - the first because navigation is very tricky and the other two for social reasons."

Lucienne didn't bother to ask why. Fulcrum had always been an unruly place, and Mania had a very relaxed view on the necessity of laws and a lot of readily-available substances. They would both be safer to visit with people who understood the cultural norms better than an outsider.

"Thank you," she said, pocketing the map.

"You have a good stay!" Gault replied. "Next!"

Chapter Text

The White Horse was the sort of place that looked like it had been used and remodelled for centuries, but given enough attention to look worn-in instead of worn-down. The air smelled gently of alcohol and freshly cooked food, and they had even gone to the trouble of installing a small airlock at the entrance to keep as much of the outside station from getting into the tavern as possible.

Lucienne slid into a booth with a sigh of relief, and thanked the waiter who came to take her order.

The man at the next table was doing some form of paperwork on a tablet branded with the local university's logo. This was interspersed with watching the door with a sense of hopelessness, swirling his glass around in a way that said he needed something to do with his hands or he would start screaming. Lucienne gave him a sympathising grimace and asked what was wrong, since she had little else to do but sit and talk - and besides, this might be the representative the university had sent to meet her at the shuttle bay in a few hours.

"I've been waiting for a friend," he told her, "he should have visited three months ago now, but I haven't heard anything. We, we fought last time we met, he left in a snit, said he wouldn't come back again, but I hoped maybe- never mind. It's my fault for upsetting him, I know, but I'm starting to get worried."

"Could you not look him up?" she asked delicately. "If he doesn't want to see you, then you know where you stand, but surely you could contact him, or a friend or family member, if you want to check that he's alright."

The man paused briefly, tugging his ear. "Ah. Bit of a problem with that. You see, I never actually knew his name."

Lucienne tried not to raise her eyebrows. "I see. And you were meeting regularly enough to have a schedule for-"

"Six years now." He sucked air in through grimacing teeth.

"Ah." One of those friendships then. Well, if neither of them were willing to be brave enough to get to know each other beyond the thrill of secrecy, that wasn't her concern. Though perhaps that was why they had fought. She put it out of her mind, except for noting that Mervyn would be much more interested in this gossip than she was and she should mention it to him later.

"Right now, though, I'm mostly killing time waiting until I need to pick up a visitor to escort to the university," he said, drumming his hands on the table and brightening up.

"From the Library, by any chance?" Lucienne asked, knowingly.

"Why yes, how did you- oh! Are you Voyager Lucienne Gienah?" he asked, smiling like a sunrise.

"Exactly so. And you are-?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, where are my manners? Professor Robert Gadling, call me Hob if you like."

"Hob." She gave a gap-toothed grin back. "I like it."

The two of them had a very pleasant dinner — Hob knew all the best dishes the inn served, it seemed — and were still chatting amiably through the shuttle flight to the surface and the trip to the university itself.

"Here we are," Hob said, as they entered the university's library building. "The master terminal is through there, and we made an inventory list of all physical and digital books for you to compare with your own records; if there's any discrepancies, please let me know as your faculty contact. The Dean told me my comm code was sent to your ship, so that should be easy enough. Any questions?"

Lucienne had none, so Hob let her get on with it. The initial inventory check took two days of mind-numbing staring at screens and checking lists until she went cross-eyed, and the physical check to find any missing books another three. At the end of it all, only one missing book remained outstanding: an obscure tome known as the Magdalen Grimoire.

"It's kept in a specific archive vault due to rarity and its age making it delicate, there's cameras set up there that I could get you access to?" Hob offered, and Lucienne agreed. She set Mervyn to the task of looking through all the feeds.

"What am I, a security unit?" Merv griped, but started skipping back and forth through the data to find the book's vanishing point nevertheless. "Can't we just send this to law enforcement and make them do their jobs?"

"It would be too far down their priority list," she told him, and left unsaid that she didn't know the authorities here, how they operated, or what treatment they might offer to an off-worlder, but that from past experience she was not optimistic.

"Aw, yeah, everyone'll be swamped with looking for the rulers' kids, huh," Merv snarked. "Must be nice to be so important. You'd think there woulda been a ransom demand by now, though."

"The what now?" Hob asked.

"It's been on all the feeds for months, you live under a rock or somethin'?"

"I don't keep up with the news, alright, I've been busy recently- oh. Oh fuck."

"What?!" Merv snapped.

Hob laughed a little hysterically. "I guess I know who my stranger is now, huh. I am going to be useless at helping you find this book, I'm sorry, I have… so many other things to freak out about instead. Stars."

Lucienne handed him a packet of tissues. "I can manage. Go." Hob practically ran out of the room.

"Well, we found the time where it's gone, but there's no one there. There's a bunch of nothin' to work from in most of 'em, Loosh, but there's artefacts of looping if you look real close so you'll want to check who mighta been around elsewhere at those timestamps," Mervyn told her after a few minutes of searching. Computer intelligence was so much faster than organic.

Checking the information against the rest of the university's cameras gave one that hadn't been spoofed properly, and a lead to one Professor John Hathaway, of the archaeology department. A search of his recent trips turned up an obscure laboratory named Fawney Rig, near a village on the edge of Waking's wilderness called Wych Cross. Information on what the lab did was hard to come by, something to do with researching the planet's flora and fauna to allow its further colonisation, and Lucienne sighed and resigned herself to a trek through alien woods.

Chapter Text

Lucienne walked through the forest near Wych Cross with no small amount of trepidation. It was not generally in a librarian's remit to visit places where people weren't, unless they were on the road to the next inhabited place, and frankly she much preferred trees after they had been processed into books. All around her, unfamiliar sounds of alien animals echoed through the branches, and she had no way to tell which ones were harmless and which might be a threat if their owners got too territorial about her presence.

A twig snapped off to the right of her path, such as it was, and someone swore. She whipped her head around in surprise.

"-Hob?"

"Lucienne? What in the void are you doing here?"

"I was about to ask you the same thing," she said wryly.

"Well, this area is where the Endless ship was last seen, except the cops couldn't find it so they wrote it off weeks ago as having gone elsewhere." Hob seemed to stop himself pulling his ear at the last moment, and scratched his head nearby instead. "But it's the only lead I could find, so. You?"

"There's supposedly a research outpost of some kind near here known as Fawney Rig, which Professor Hathaway has had some dealings with, and that's my only lead for the Grimoire. I haven't been able to find anything of the sort, of course."

Hob rolled his eyes. "Of course, why should it be easy?"

The woods around them abruptly went quiet, and she froze for a moment; would it be better to run or climb a tree?

Out of the trees came a thundering noise of a large animal without any concern for its surroundings, and Lucienne gripped the rough bark of a nearby tree and hauled herself into the branches, pulling Hob up behind her just in time to witness a large quadruped of unknown species stagger into the clearing she had just vacated.

It was reddish, with grey around the muzzle and at the ears; likely an elder whatever-it-was. This was supported by the size of the horns on its head, like a longhorn bull's, though unlike a bull it seemed to be mostly adapted for swimming, with a set of dexterous-looking paws like a beaver's. Lucienne cursed, searching her pockets for her comm so she could take pictures, and got it out just as another creature thundered in from the other direction.

This one was smaller, and evidently younger as it had no grey and less developed horns, and it had a collar around its neck such as scientists sometimes used to track wildlife for study. It also appeared to have the remnants of fabric around the collar, which gave Lucienne pause.

The younger creature put its head down and charged the older one, and they clashed for a little while. Surely that wasn't right, no build up or displays to intimidate the opponent? Fighting was a costly activity, even in mating season or with very territorial species there was usually an attempt to scare off competition without needing to fight.

"What is going on here?" she asked, and realised too late that she had done so out loud, as Hob, wide-eyed, shushed her.

The noise caused the older creature to swing its head to look for her, just for a moment, but it was enough for the younger one to skewer it with a horn. It collapsed with a scream and lay still.

The remaining creature turned from the maybe-corpse and charged the tree Lucienne was hiding in. The whole tree shook at the first impact, and she dropped her comm with a curse as she clung desperately to the trunk, short claws digging into the bark and releasing the volatile smell of injured greenery. Hob was hanging on to the branch they had been on with one hand.

The creature charged again, and she lost her grip. She fell, seeing golden eyes flashing past before the creature caught her in its mouth and tossed her onto its back, then snatched up Hob, who was scrabbling to get back in a tree. She clung to the first thing she could find as it set off running again, which she absently noted to be the cold metal of its collar. She was much more concerned with the wind whistling past her ears and the trees blurring on either side of her, however. Poor Hob was clinging on behind her for dear life.

Eventually they reached a clearing at the base of a cliff. The creature suddenly stopped and sat down, dumping them off its back. It snuffled at her in a seemingly-concerned manner as she got to her feet and brushed off the forest-floor debris, then turned and charged the cliff-face. It looked at her pointedly, like a cat trying to get its owner to do something about the food bowl, and charged again. And again. There was a small explosion of sparks and the creature stopped and sat down again abruptly, blinking in a slightly dazed way.

Lucienne went over to investigate. There was a control panel, cleverly concealed behind a sheet of rock that had blended into the cliff, which was now exposed, as the camouflage rock was hanging off by a frayed wire. She hunted for a small dry stick nearby, and finding one, pressed the biggest button on the panel.

The whole cliff-face seemed to crack open down the middle as a metal-mesh door came into evidence, opening to a small room, perhaps large enough for her to lie down against each wall but little bigger. She exchanged baffled glances with Hob; on the far wall was a control panel with two buttons, arrows pointing up and down, and she wondered why there could possibly be a lift to an underground facility here. What could need this level of secrecy?

Naturally they went inside to investigate.

The whole room was made of perfectly-square bricks or panels of some metal, every one of which except the one with the controls was stamped with a symbol or logo she didn't recognise. It looked like two circles, one drawn around the other, with the space between the circumferences covered in intricate smaller symbols. While she was studying one, she found that the light suddenly dimmed as the door creaked closed behind her, and even as she heard Hob's alarmed shout and whirled around to look she felt the floor drop below her.

The creature was still sitting quite calmly on the ground outside, she saw as she dropped past.

"We didn't even hit a button! The thing shouldn't have moved, who designed this apparatus?" Hob asked, furiously looking around the walls and floor for some kind of emergency override. She snorted at the frustration in his voice.

The lift rattled and groaned as it sank into the depths, further and further, until finally it reached the bottom with a thud. Whoever had built this place, Lucienne decided, they hadn't maintained it recently or well.

Chapter Text

The doors creaked open, and she was hit with the musty smell of damp cellars; either this place didn't have an air circulation system, or it had broken down. The light was dim emergency lighting of the sort found in any space-side construction, some form of luminous paint on the walls and at important places, and what she could see of it suggested the clean lines and austere sterility of a lab. There must have been a motion sensor somewhere because as she stepped forward, trying to make out the shapes in the gloom, a bright spotlight shone down onto the object in the centre of the room.

It was a cryopod, occupied by a figure with skin so pale it glowed in the harsh light. A figure Lucienne had been seeing on newsfeeds everywhere recently, actually. Hob gasped behind her, and stepped up to press his hand to the cryopod's transparent pane.

He looked up at her, murder clear in his eyes. Lucienne quite agreed, but steeled her spine. "We need to get him out before we go breaking anything that might be vital."

"Can't we break things to get him out? I could really go for breaking a few fingers to get the gravity of the situation through, if we find the bastard who did this, just saying."

"Maybe as an escalation tactic." They traded determined glances. "Is there anything we can use first?" She glanced around quickly, and saw more cryopods lining the walls, filled with bodies. Strangest of all, though, was the glass case on the far wall filled with what seemed to be a scale model of a ship - the sort that could land on planets and brave the depths of interstellar space, and which were generally the first home for a new colony and viewed with jealous suspicion by both settled planets and nomadic fleets for being neither one thing nor the other. It could have been the prized toy of a fledgling colony's child who wanted a replica of their own home, or an educational model for a museum. She squinted to read the name in tiny letters - the Griffin - written near the stern of the ship, stepping into the circle of bright light as she did so. The floor shifted slightly below her as some weight limit on a pressure plate was presumably reached.

"Awakening programme one initiated," came a voice from the computer terminal. "Welcome, authorised user. Please identify yourself so that I may log your information for Professor Burgess."

"Who are you?" Lucienne asked, darting her eyes around to find cameras.

"I am ALEX, the AI for this laboratory. You must be the new assistant!"

"My name is Lucienne," she said grimly, "I'm from the Library."

Hob visibly restrained himself from swearing at ALEX, eyes darting around the room. "Professor Gadling, from the University - I work with Professor Hathaway?"

The figure in the main cryopod was twitching around the eyes, like it was dreaming, and breathing in gasps like a runner who was trying to get their breath back after the last full-out sprint to the line. Lucienne stepped towards them in concern, and their eyes snapped open, vivid frost-blue under the light. They focused on her with some effort, and glared like she had shot their best friend.

"Dream?" she asked carefully. The figure only glared harder. Then the gaze drifted to Hob, and widened in shock.

"He won't speak to you, you know," ALEX said reproachfully. "He never speaks to anyone. Not me, or the professor. Just sits there and glares like he wants to tear your throat out. Or the RAM processors, in my case, I suppose. The professor tried everything, for a while there. Not that the other one didn't talk enough for both of them. All 'I want to leave' and 'how dare you do this' and 'when our family learns what you've done, maybe you'll get lucky and live long enough to be very sorry'. Honestly it got extremely tiring, I was almost glad when they couldn't talk anymore but for what it did to the professor."

Dream was trying to speak now, but only letting out rattling noises and a lot of coughs. Hob shushed him urgently, making nonsensical soothing noises; it was obvious that the rest of the room had ceased to exist to him.

Lucienne almost didn't ask in sheer disgust. "What was he trying to do, what did he actually do to them, and what did he do to himself?"

"It should be obvious what he was trying. Everyone knows that the Endless don't die unless they're killed."

Lucienne gasped and stared at the man in the cryopod. Burgess had been experimenting on him? Then that meant 'the other one'… she remembered the vivid golden eyes from the photographs. And the creature's eyes. Oh, poor Desire.

She didn't really understand the explanation ALEX gave. Something about trying to get both Desire and the professor's DNA to change enough to be compatible so that the properties which made Endless functionally immortal could be transferred to him, and it going very wrong. She didn't particularly care.

"I think I've figured out what he did, though. I could do it better, with the second subject here. It would be better to have the professor to correct, but thank you for bringing the subject to me. The possibilities are vast, you know," ALEX said.

Lucienne turned away from the panic in Dream's eyes. "Can I look at your data? I want to see what I'm working with."

Chapter Text

There was a lot of data to work through, but ALEX was accommodating about it, showing Lucienne more than she needed to know about what exactly Burgess had done. Of course, she didn't need to know much about the process when her goal was to get ALEX to reverse it. He was shockingly naïve, or secretly rogue, and very easy to hack - if there were any firewalls at all, they were bypassed just from being at the laboratory terminal in the first place.

"You've got to get the subject back to original condition in order to be able to redo the process properly, the other subject is acting as a control after all," she said in a reasonable tone, while hacking furiously. She could feel Dream's eyes staring at the back of her head the whole time. Hob was cracking every one of his knuckles in sequence, and looked about five seconds away from simply trying to punch through the window and dragging Dream out, and she desperately hoped he wouldn't; who knew what ALEX might do?

"And done!" ALEX said, proudly. "This formula to sedate the subject, this one in a cryopod replacing the preparatory injection procedure, and you should be able to reset the process! My notes on what I think went wrong and how it might be fixed next time are in the eyes-only folder for the Professor, when he is restored to himself!"

Lucienne smiled. It was not a very pleasant smile. "Thank you for your cooperation," she said, and shut the AI down. It fell into machine sleep like a stone into the ocean.

She turned to look at the cryopod, where Dream was now pressing the palms of his hands to the window, teeth bared.

"If you are here from Burgess," he spat, "I will not relent to his wishes, and you may as well give up and go back to him immediately."

"Oh, no, I want nothing to do with that man," Lucienne said, typing furiously.

"How can I trust you? My own sibling trusted Burgess as a friend, and look what happened there," Dream asked, though she thought that shutting ALEX down for him must have been a pretty convincing argument to get him to talk at all. Hob made a wounded noise of protest.

"Well, I did get the way to bring your sibling back out of his AI; and besides," she finished the sequence to let him out and the door swung open with a soft hiss, "I think that it would be much easier to control you into doing what he wants if you were still in that pod, don't you?"

He narrowed his eyes at her. "Perhaps," he conceded, and stepped out; his legs wobbled, and she hastily reached out a hand to steady him. He paused a moment, and held her hand more firmly as he pulled himself up, smiling. Hob slung his own jacket round his shoulders, and wrapped an arm around him to keep him up.

"Now, what do we do about all these other people? Who are they, do you know?"

"My servants and the crew of my ship," he said. Lucienne nodded, glad that her assumption was right. "We need to restore them as I have been-"

"-Of course. But do we need to hack them out? Because I don't know the awakening programme, ALEX did that when I got here."

The lights on the various cryopods blinked in a rainbow of colours, turning the coolants within into a writhing spectrum of smokes; she and Hob worked together to bring each person up and out of their artificial sleep as Dream told them both about them.

"This is Gilbert Green," he said about one jovial-looking gentleman, "he's the gardener, knows everything there is to know about aquaponics. He has always been very enthusiastic about stories, he used to tell them to my siblings and I whenever we went to see him. My youngest sister adores him."

"This is Taramis," he said about a woman with pale hair, "she's the head chef. She's been with my family since before I was born." Lucienne heard the familiarity in his voice, and could well imagine a small boy with dark hair and blue eyes being indulged in licking the spoon for some baking project by this woman, or getting into trouble with his siblings as they tried to steal sweets from the pantry.

"That is the Corinthian. He and his father before him have both been ship pilots for the family all their lives." The newly-freed man with the dark glasses waved shakily.

"Technically I'm the first officer on this shitshow," he said, grinning unsettlingly, "but someone will insist on trying to do everything himself around here."

Soon there was a confused and delighted gaggle of people greeting Dream and Lucienne and being gently directed to the lift to the open air and sunshine. Dream had quite a forceful glare when he wanted to, she learned.

Hob was glued to Dream's side, but Lucienne found a door into another room, full of shelves of books and strange gadgets. Every liberated crew member got firmly handed an armful of books or an incomprehensible doodad to take to the surface. Lucienne gave a triumphant shout halfway through. "There you are, you delinquent little bastard!"

"Ah, found the Grimoire then?" Hob called, amused. She sent him a rude hand gesture on principle, and he just laughed.

"Is that a shrink ray?" Corinthian asked as Taramis claimed a weird cannon-looking thing nearly as big as herself. "Where the fuck did they get one of those?"

"Sir, should we not- that is, the ship needs to be moved out of here, yes?" Gilbert asked, fidgeting with the hat in his hands. "That is to say, it's too small in here to fix it, surely."

Lucienne frowned at the puzzle. That case was definitely too big to be moved even by several people, but it and the cryopods must have been moved somehow... "There must be a cart or hand truck around here somewhere, if only to move the cryopods around when they need to. Has anyone looked for a storage cupboard?"

The wagon that was eventually found and wrangled into service to carry the ship in its glass case made Corinthian look humorously like a small child with a toy pull-along, but it did its job.

Eventually there was no-one left in the laboratory but themselves, squinting in the solitary glare of the spotlight.

The lift rattled one last time, and the doors slid open to reveal a panting Desire who promptly came over to Dream and tried to lick his entire face. This provoked a wrestling match, which judging by the smugness radiating from a quickly-victorious Desire was the point. They sat on top of their brother, stared at Lucienne, and swung their head back and forth between her and the cryopod, then tipped it in question.

"Yes, sibling, you need to get in there so that we can restore you to your rightful self," Dream rumbled, in the universal tone of annoyed older brothers everywhere. Lucienne put a hand to her mouth to hide her amusement, and nodded.

Desire sighed and did as they were told like a dog going along with a bath. The process was fairly short and painless, and soon an amused humanoid Desire was stepping out of the cryopod and into their brother's arms.

"Remind me never to listen to strangers who seem interested in our species instead of myself again, won't you, big brother?" they drawled, draping themself over his shoulder dramatically.

"Believe me, you will never hear anything else if I find a situation even remotely similar," Dream said, holding their wrist like a lifeline.

The lift was just as slow and ponderous going upward as it was going downward, but this time instead of a sterile and unsettling laboratory the door opened to a vibrant forest full of celebrating people and a now full-sized ship which seemed to have flattened several trees as it grew. Lucienne hugged the rescued Grimoire to her chest tightly, even as she boarded the ship, and for a good while as they lifted off with a rumble of engines and a jolt of speed, until Waking was a jewelled ball behind them as they approached Dreaming.

Chapter Text

The four of them, and several of Dream's servants, told each other the whole story from every angle several times, in a joyous whirl of laughter and dancing and feasting over their freedom, on the way back to Dreaming; and there was a lot of rehashing they had to do, too, once the authorities got involved, and the rest of the Endless family. But eventually, everyone left them alone except for Desire's twin Despair, who had not yet let her twin out of her sight or even blinked very much. Dream and Desire turned to Lucienne to ask a question. The Question, really.

"Do you want to stay here and create a proper Library? You seem very… competent. And we both want to reward you," Desire said, in a voice dripping with molasses. Despair giggled in an unnerving way, seemingly content to watch the conversation like a riveting sports match.

Lucienne pursed her lips. "I don't want to be a burden on your resources; the system's libraries are still in their infancy…"

"If you don't want to go with these two I can poach you for the University. The Dean will be happy to have you once we're both through with him," Hob said, half-jokingly.

"There would be plenty of room for you in the palace I have been building on Dreaming; you and it would be able to grow together," Dream said hastily. His cheeks were the faintest shade of rose-pink.

"Our dear Dream is simply mad for stories," Desire grinned, "any stories, from the most heart-stopping romance or fantastical adventure to frankly the dullest little plot line about someone buying new curtains. You have no idea how happy you would make him!"

"Desire!" Dream sounded scandalised.

"What? Should I lie? And of course, you are already one of his people. He does try not to show such things, but" they rolled their eyes "he falls in love, or any other kind of affection, with such enthusiasm and verve! Always wanting relationships with people in an instant, it drives Mother mad!"

Lucienne felt the need to clear a point up at once. "I don't… my desires do not run in the direction of romance or sex, and even if they did, if you became my patron it would hardly be appropriate-"

"Ahhhh, is that the issue? Believe me, he doesn't want you that way either, he'll be happy to treat it like a marriage regardless-"

"Desire, I find myself missing when you didn't have the physical apparatus to talk, stop making my decisions for me-"

"Let yourself take what you want for once in your life, big brother! You can turn it down if you want to, yes, but I know you don't! Moron."

"I would be delighted," Lucienne said, ending the argument. "If you don't want me on Dreaming, I can of course set up on any of the other worlds in the system," Dream's nostrils flared, as did the light in his eyes, "but I think we can work something out."

"Oh, you don't want to set up on Threshold, darling," Desire said, "Utterly wrong vibes, we cater to pleasure cruisers and gamblers. It's a fountain for money to develop the rest of the worlds, of course, but a Library there would be quite out of place."

Dream shuffled his feet. "I could show you what I have already, and we could negotiate from there."

The Library-to-be was full of wood panelling, a luxury to any spacefarer, and Lucienne immediately began populating it with shelves bursting with books in her imagination.

"Yes, I think I would be very happy here," she said.

Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as all that.

"What the hell have you been playin' at?" Mervyn grumbled at her when she got back to the Raven. "Your comm got smashed in the middle of a fucking forest, I thought the local wildlife stomped you into paste!"

Chapter Text

Lucienne stepped into the White Horse behind Dream, watching as Hob lifted his eyes from his work and lit up like a supernova.

"You're late," he said, and Lucienne found herself grinning just as much as he was.

"I must ask your forgiveness," Dream replied. "I had not meant to keep my friend waiting. I am given to understand it is insufferably rude." He slid into a chair like a shadow growing as the sun slipped down the afternoon sky, fluid and inexorable; Lucienne followed with considerably less grace.

"Well, you are often insufferable, but so am I, and we both seem to suffer each other gladly enough."

"There's no suffering involved, you both like each other perfectly well. You just run up against your own idiocies now and then," Lucienne said, looking over her glasses at the pair of them.

Hob shrugged. "When you're right, you're right."

"Lucienne usually is, I have found." Dream held his hand palm-up on the table, and Lucienne took it and squeezed gently.

"Good job we're both going to be working for her for the foreseeable, then," Hob raised his glass, "she can keep us in check."

"I think you mean working with me?" Lucienne raised hers back and took a sip.

The two glanced at each other. "No, no, definitely for. You're the boss, whatever official titles may say."

The three of them laughed - well, Dream huffed a little in amusement, but Lucienne counted it - and outside their little bubble of friendship, the White Horse bustled with life, and the station hummed with the activity of thousands of visitors, and the system turned gently in its graceful orbits, as it always would.