Written for: the Tara Ficathon for RebeccaSHF, who asked for no Angelus and no character death and the pairing of Tara/Angel

Author Notes: This is a crossover with the Sandman comic book by Neil Gaiman. I think everything is clear enough to read without knowing anything of Sandman, but just in case, here is a brief explanation of the Endless.

The Endless are seven brothers and sisters, anthropomorphic representations of aspects of life. They are, from oldest to youngest: Destiny (male), Death (female), Dream (male), Destruction (male), Desire (male/female), Despair (female), and Delirium (female). While they primarily control the aspects of life they represent, they also define the opposite of those aspects. Thus, Death also defines life, Delirium defines sanity, etc. They form a dysfunctional family, rivalry and scheming by the younger siblings interrupting the work of the older ones. Each of the Endless has a realm, a place of uncertain location, geography, geometry and physics in which they are absolutely sovereign. Within their realm, each member of the Endless has a gallery. In the gallery hang picture frames containing symbols of the other Endless, or sigils.

Catharsis: The Tale of the Faerie and the Darkling Prince

Once, in another time, she had been a creature of divinity and gossamer. She had danced on the petals of the lotus flower and supped of its morning dew, giving joyous dance to the rise of the sun. Fair of face and most blessed of her kind, she lived in tranquility with the magic of earth and nature that was her honor and her birthright. She was Fae, and she was beloved—but being Fae, she was also eternal, and the simplicity of life that so appealed to the others of her kind left her with time.

The Queen of her kind was harsh and cold, and the desire to be anything more than what one was lay beyond her lovely sovereign's ability to imagine. And so she sought the aid of another.

The Land of Dreaming lay not far from where she lived, and one morning, the sun rose upon the lotus flower to find her songs had gone.

The Dreaming Lord had a countenance that many feared to look upon; somber hues of black and white, harsh angles and planes that fitted together like jagged ceramic. His eyes burned the deep red of sunset, and His voice was the absence of light and reality. Many shrank or bowed in His presence, and few would not give acknowledgement to His strange features at all. But when He looked upon the Fae girl, He found her strong and earnest, completely unafraid, and despite the brooding, mercurial disposition that was His by right of the dreams that created Him, He found Himself impressed.

He would grant her wish with one condition: when the deal they made had ended, she would serve forever in His realm. The Fae girl agreed, and then Lord Morpheus reached into the kingdom of dreams and drew out those things she needed most. Strands of a maidens hair from the dream of an ancient unicorn, willowy branches of elegant trees from the daydream of a wizened dryad, the skin of an angel from a holy mans devout vision, the wisdom of a prophet from a King's uneasy nightmare. With these things and many more, He built her image, placing skin over tree branch, then hair and eyes and feature. And then He gathered wisdom, and placed it with her heart and soul inside.

"You will not be as you were before, and you will not remember. Your magic will be but a fraction of what you have known, and death and heartache always crouch just beyond the doorway of Desire. Do you still wish this?"

"I do."

And so Lord Morpheus gathered the last of the magic He needed—a bit of ancient power from his own heart—and with a touch of the hand that could make nightmares or goddesses walk upon the earth, He gave the final piece that made the dream girl real, and she went forth into the world of Man.

He watched her sometimes, when she dreamed, and He saw in her mind that though she remembered little of who she had been, she remained mostly unchanged in heart and spirit. In her nightmares there were whispers that did not quite tell her who she was, but they chased the demons she worried she might become, urging them on faster. He watched her walk among dreams in deserts as a creature who already served the Dreaming, speaking for an ancient warrior whose power he recognized from a dream of men long ago. Once, a Goddess stole her mind, and she was lost to Him in his youngest Sister's realm. When He looked for her He saw only one blue eye and one green, words spilling out like endless rainbows into nothingness, and He thought that Delirium had claimed her forever. But she returned from that hellish realm, somehow, and her dreams became clear to Him again. One day, her dreams changed and He saw that she no longer believed herself a demon, and there was lightness and love in her life, a happy time where she was wholly herself once again, beloved and giving, a girl living a normal life with powers that were not so strange in the world she traveled.

But the Lord of the Dreaming knew better than anyone that Golden Ages were not meant to last.

Time passed, and the day came when His sister Death returned the girl to His realm. She was still clad in the clothing of man, and to the left of her chest, where the human heart resides, there was a dark and ragged hole.

"Was it all that you hoped?" He asked.

The girl shook her head, golden hair tumbling in the gentle wind. "No. But… I think… I think it was worth it."

The girl turned to His sister Death, who still stood beside her.

"Is it over? Is that it?"

The woman smiled at the girl with a face that should rightfully have been skeletal and filled with ugliness to inspire loathing, but was instead only peaceful and happy. "That's it."

"It wasn't long enough," the girl said, and His sister smiled again, softly.

"I haven't met anyone yet who thought it was."

Death faded from His realm with a final gaze, and two more of His sisters materialized in Her place.

"We come for the girl," Desire spat, golden eyes flashing sparks. The voice was sharp and hard, masculine and feminine, the voice of something so dense and pure in its humanity that it was inhuman. "She was born of my realm and to my realm she must return."

"A witch who loves her suffers in her absence, and dwells within both our realms," Desire's twin Despair whispered.

"The one who calls cannot be denied," Desire said. "The girl must be returned, and the power of the witch who calls makes us stronger than you in this case, brother."

The Dream Lord looked upon Them both, rare anger curling within his heart. "The girl was shaped and given new form by the Dreaming, created from its very cloth, given life by my power, and no one may say where she goes, save I who recreated her. You cannot touch creatures of the Dreaming, sister/brother. This is a law that defies even your insatiable appetite."

Desire gnashed Its teeth, and Despair contemplated Her rats, and the moment passed.

"The one who calls has gone to our brother Destruction's realm, now," moaned Despair. "We have waited too long."

"One day brother, I shall win this game between us," Desire promised, and then both were gone.

And perhaps Desire would, but not that day.

"Are you ready to serve the Dreaming?" Morpheus asked, and the girl nodded.

She missed her mornings of lotus flower and songs of joy, but she was no longer that creature and could never be so again.

"I will do as I promised."

……………………………………………………………………………………………

That is the tale as it is told among the Fae. Fae parents tuck their children into bed and kiss their foreheads, the warning still echoing in the child's mind; do not dream to be other than you are. The story ends there rightfully, as any lesson tale should end.

But any tale that ends outside the realm of Death has not yet truly ended, and the girl did not truly die, but only lived out her eternal days as a servant to the land of Dreaming. There is much still yet to be told.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

Time passes unevenly in the Kingdom of Dreaming, and a moment can be either an hour or a century in those ever-shifting halls.

"I've been here forever," the girl said, and time twirled by on strands of amber and gold, twisting in the slow wind with images of butterflies and surgical knives. "There must be something more I can do."

Sometimes she dipped her hands into the pool of her human lover's dreams, and remembered the time when she was part of the world of Man. But as with all things, those moments passed and the day came when those dreams were no more. The Dreaming passed through it all, changing and yet ever unchanged, and there were no more echoes to remind her of what she was, once.

Fields of green shaped themselves beneath the odd shade of pink summer twilight, and the sky was a harmony of the sound of fluted reeds, woven together in lacey patterns that tasted like candied apples, and she had never loved her new home more. But still she felt there was something missing. Something vibrant and vital that clung to its shape even in this supple world.

And so she returned to Lord Morpheus one day, and spoke of all that troubled her heart.

As the land of Dreaming changed yet did not change, so had Lord Morpheus changed without changing. Where once He had been sharp angles of black and white, cloaked in dark secrecy, He was now bereft of shadow, soft and pale, and His form was garbed in the serenity of white. The burning, baleful eye of the ruby that held His power had become an emerald, far more serene and contained. He was still the strange and haughty creature He had once been, somewhere beneath His skin, but now He was ruled by tolerance and understanding as well. And though not given to being disposed to the requests of lesser creatures, He remembered that He had given this girl a piece of Himself once, and He felt Himself far fonder of her than any other. So it was that He gave her what she desired; a chance at place and purpose she had sought since she had abandoned her homeland and forsook the lotus flower.

He walked with her to the edge of the Nightmare Lands, and there, He showed her a man. His skin was pale and tattooed with the sigils of Lord Morpheus and all His brothers and sisters; the bleak pattern of Destruction circled his eyes, the vibrant red of Desire hissed and burned against his skin, Lord Dream's sigil burned like distant fire in his eyes, and the sigil of Destiny shone forth from his forehead for all to see. Such were his markings that even the Fae girl could see that he belonged equally to each of Them, divided and existing in all Their realms, even Death's.

"This is the Darkling Prince," Lord Morpheus said. "He would be the greatest of his kind were he not the only one, and still he could be great were he not divided between the blood of Man and the emptiness of the Undead."

She knew a little of such things from her time among Man. "Vampire and human?" she asked, not quite understanding.

The Dream Lord nodded. "He has a soul, and the war between his soul and the evil in his heart keeps him trapped in all our worlds, unable to follow his path to Destiny, which calls to him the greatest of all."

"I remember him," the Fae girl said, and so she did. They had never met in the world of Man, but the people she'd loved had known him, and had spoken of him often. There, they had called him Angel.

"He does not belong trapped here between our worlds, but I am not allowed to interfere. My brothers and sisters and I may not manipulate the game, not even to push a creature into another's realm."

"Then what can I do?" the Fae girl asked, and trembled. For indeed, if Lord Morpheus could not help, how could she?

"What anyone of blood and bone may do, if they care." And with that, the Lord of the Dreaming vanished.

She turned toward the dream of the Darkling Prince, reached inside and caught his hand. She pulled, and he slipped from the nightmare with a shedding of his skin, ethereal and diaphanous as he melted seamlessly into the heart of the Dreaming.

"I… Where am I?" asked the Darkling Prince as he gazed upon the shifting meadows and daffodil birds that cut patterns into the clear turquoise skies just beyond the edges of the Nightmare Lands.

"Safe, for now," said the Fae girl, smiling, and she pulled the Prince down beside her on a grassy knoll, beneath the boughs of the willow tree that had birthed her bones once.

They sat and spoke of many things as the Dreaming shifted all around them, and the Fae girl found that he was indeed a man who lived in unending torment, a man alone now that his friends had all died. He told many tales and she listened, always with a serene grace she barely knew she possessed, always with a caring and understanding that the Prince had scarcely encountered. The skies churned and storms rose, flowers bloomed among the clouds and once a small burbling stream passed by their feet filled with rainbow colored frogs, and still they talked, until at last the Prince began to fade away.

"I don't want to go," the Prince said, and he shook violently as fear gripped him. He did not want to return to the world that caused him to visit the Nightmare Lands.

"You're waking up," said the Fae girl, and smiled. "But we will see each other again."

And so they did. For many years, or hours, or centuries, between her duties tended about the realm, she would always find time to sit beneath that willow tree and speak with the Darkling Prince.

And for his part, the Darkling Prince found himself anxious to sleep when the sun rose, eager to return to the strange shifting place where the Fae girl with hazel-green eyes smiled and listened. He had been embraced by arms that needed, arms that loved, but never so selflessly as he was embraced by this girl, and with time, with her forgiveness, he began to forgive himself.

Slowly, so slowly that he did not notice, the sigils of the others faded and lost their power. Desire's sigil lightened to a faint pink tinge, and Destruction no longer cast shadows beneath his eyes. Death's mark ever remained, but that was as it should be, as he did not breathe nor his heart pump blood. The Fae girl watched the symbols fade with eyes that were both happy and loving, and at last, the day came when only Destiny's sigil remained bright and clear.

And on that day, Lord Morpheus appeared to her again. "You have done well," He said. "You have done what even I could not."

Fearing that the Dream Lord might take her away from the Darkling Prince now that her duty had been done, the Fae girl thought quickly. "Am I to be owed a boon then, my Lord?"

Lord Morpheus' brow darkened and the Fae girl shivered, but she stood her ground, as proudly as she had ever stood before Him.

"You would ask a favor in return for the favor I granted you?"

"I would, Lord Morpheus, but a small one."

"You wish to return to the world of Man?" the Dream Lord asked, for He remembered her love of the place, and was not oblivious to the love she held for the Darkling Prince. "To be with him?"

The Fae girl thought long and hard, remembering all she had loved and endured in her time among Man, and though the thought tugged at her heart, and her spirit cried to be made flesh alongside the Prince she had come to love, she slowly shook her head. "No my Lord. I wish to remain here, in the Dreaming, where I may always be close to him and as eternal as he is, no different than that I agreed to many years ago."

"Then what do you wish?"

"I wish to remain and to help others as I have helped the Darkling Prince. It is for this I left my homeland of endless song and summer morn's."

"You wish power?" asked Lord Morpheus.

"I wish to help," the Fae girl said, and the Dream Lord looked upon her and saw that it was true; with her love and care of the Darkling Prince, she had found her heart's desire at last.

And thus it was that the Fae girl went on to become a guide to those who were lost, plucking them from the heart of Nightmares and helping them find the path to their true place. And always she returned to that knoll beneath the willow tree, to love and adore her Darkling Prince who was no longer, in truth, a Darkling.

Her name had been something else once, but she no longer cared about that Fae child who had spun on flowers and sung joy without having known any. Her story became a legend upon the lips of those who encountered her, and always to them she was an elemental creature of magic, embodying the spirit of the Earth mother in mind and heart.

She was Terra, called Tara in the world of Man, beloved of the Darkling Prince and the Light to those who were lost. And at last, she wanted for nothing more.

And though somewhere there is a lonely lotus flower who still weeps with morning dew, its dreams at night are soft, and comforted with smiles of memory.

……………………………………………………………………………………………

This is the tale as it is told among Man; that a great and beautiful creature, once dissatisfied with what she was, went on to become something even greater. And though the tale has not ended with Death, and thus not truly ended, we have followed it as far as we need to, and it must end here, as any good lesson tale should.

Though should you happen into the Land of Dreaming, you may find volume upon volume in its libraries about The Faerie and the Darkling Prince, and be comforted that there is much still yet to be told.