The Endless, a Mai HiME fanfic

Notes:

Ah yes, let us call this an experiment: a cross between Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Sunrise’s Mai-Hime/Otome. It came to me last night and I thought I would try it once. Tell me if you like it, if you please, and I shall give a thought to adding more. Otherwise, this can function quite well as a one-shot, so I suppose I do not really have to make a follow-up. Bien, pardon any typos. I wrote it in one burst and will edit it later if it so requires. Some parts are taken directly from the Sandman because one feels as though it would be impossible to improve on them and folly to not use them—lovely material, really.

Avertissements et Autres:

AU, obviously, and can be quite OoC, but I am trying to keep it down. Still, needs must tweak personalities when fitting them into new settings, so it cannot be helped. Also, Mai-Hime/Otome characters belong to Sunrise, while rights to the Sandman go to Neil Gaiman.

Prelude to Waking

In the year 1916 according to the human calendar, something unthinkable happened, and all due to a few men’s folly. I remember it well, having been privileged to watch the movements from my vantage point as the keeper of the Great Library... although some of the other things were only revealed to me by the books that later recorded the events and by the words of the Lady herself... but I remember it all perfectly, as is expected of someone with my designation.

I am the Librarian, the Keeper of the Annals of the Dreaming, and while I am known by either of those titles, I did use to have another—in a sense, “proper”—human name, given to me by my mistress. But that was in another lifetime and it does not matter now. I am content to be known merely as the Librarian.

My mistress is the Lady of the Dreaming, which is both her realm and her body. Her body, or that is to say a part of her, in the same way that all the dream-creatures are part of her and have existence only with relation to her being. I am no exception.

The realm of the Dreaming is prey to her whims and desires, and is always changing. A rose garden in full bloom one day may turn into a dun-coloured desert in the next. The painting of angels hanging in the throne room (taken from a dream of Boticelli’s, which the painter never had the opportunity to make in the waking world, as he died soon after) morphs into a Gorgon’s head (from a dream of Rubens) on occasion. The throne room itself is in perpetual flux. It never stays in the same place for more than a day, but shifts around all over the palace—something which distresses the petitioners coming to see the mistress... but it does discourage those with the more petty appeals, so milady keeps it that way.

Sometimes, some of the younger, more newly-created dream-creatures come to my library and ask about her. What is she like, they ask, and is she really as fearsome as some of the older ones say so? Is it true that she is as terrible as all the nightmares that streak through the halls of the castle at night, incarnations of fear kept alive and writhing mutely at screaming-pitch?

A difficult question. It is true that, being creator of all dreams, the mistress invents nightmares. But it is also true that she was put in charge of the Dreaming to control the nightmares that arise into being from human minds, saving the mortals from their own fears and creations. I have heard it said that the Lady is overconscientious, a workaholic, someone who sacrifices all things to the proper performance of her duty.

She has to be. The Dreaming requires such attention, and it is the reason why she, and not any of her siblings, was given this task.

Like the rest of her brood, she collects names. She has her own favourites among the lot, such as the Lady Shaper, Morpheus orOneiros (she found it amusing that the ancients portrayed her in masculine form), or the Princess of Stories, the Sandman (another masculine name), or simply Dream. When she goes to move amongst the mortals, however, she often—but not always—insists on using the name “Natsuki.” It has always made me wonder... but then, even her sisters have pet names they employ for the same purpose. These are also the names they regularly use when speaking to each other.

I know this because I am privy to many of the encounters between milady and her favourite sibling, the Lady Death. This Lady is said to be elder than my mistress, but that is a difficult concept to understand. After all, the members of their family, the Endless, do not have any real age, having always existed and being... well...endless. Not gods even, but beyond gods. Besides which, it is not truly proper to speak of them as being siblings in the sense that mortals understand. But, for all practical purposes, they may be spoken of as being family. It makes everything simpler.

Or perhaps more complicated.

One of my fondest memories of my mistress and her elder sister took place just before the events of 1916. I was archiving some new books, moving amongst the shelves of the library, when a beautiful voice sang out behind me.

“Librarian,” went the voice. “Hello, did you miss me?”

I turned around to see a woman standing there, her hands behind her and her hair falling about her shoulders. She was fair and thin, waif-like, but she looked kind and had the most beautiful smile I had ever seen. It was—and is—always a pleasure to see her.

“Lady Death.” I stepped off the ladder I was standing on and bowed to her, listening to her pleased laughter. “May I help you?”

“Actually, yes,” she replied. She brought her hands from her back and revealed a book. “I just finished this, and you were right, I did like it a lot. Would you mind recommending another one, please? I like this author’s work.”

“Of course,” I replied, taking the tome from her. “I would be very pleased to help you.”

I made my way through the shelves, which towered to several stories above us in height. After a while, I reached into the stacks and took another book out, handing it to her.

“They were never published, you know,” I said. “The author had a stroke and died without being able to tell anyone about his stories. So they live on only here, in the Library of Dreams. A pity.”

She nodded. She knew, of course, that all the stories that were ever written, or could have been written, were to be found here. She flipped through the pages, constantly smiling.

“I know. He was a nice man. I remember he told me a little bit from his stories when I came to pick him up, and I only recalled it after I read that book,” she said, gesturing to the one I had put back up into the shelves. “I’m glad I was finally able to read his stories for myself.”

“Certainly.”

“I wonder where your mistress is,” she murmured absently. “She should know by now that I’m here.”

I nodded.

“Perhaps,” I ventured, imagining my Lady sitting sulkily behind her great black desk, as she was wont to do. “Perhaps the mistress is caught up in finishing some work.”

This brought on a chuckle, soft and fine as a breath of wind from some immaculate sea.

“Work,” she said. “Always, the work. You are probably right.”

She sighed and leaned against one of the shelves, and I noticed then how casual her dress was—and how different from the present fashion of humans at the time. In fact, she looked as though she had stepped out of a magazine of the 1990’s, almost 80 years in advance. Then again, the Endless often overstepped the boundaries of time to pick whatever fashion they felt like emulating, so it was no great surprise.

“Would the Lady Death care for something to drink while she waits?” I asked, knowing her fondness for tea. “I can have the helpers bring up some tea.”

She smiled at me, shaking her head.

“I told you before,” she said. “No need to be so official with me. You may call me as your mistress does. I don’t mind at all.”

“I would be ashamed to presume—“

“There is no presumption when I myself say so, is there?”

A soft cough made us turn our heads. There, standing at the end of the nearest row, was my mistress.

“Ah, milady,” I said, bowing. “We were wondering about you.”

My mistress nodded, coming forward to stand before her sister. It never failed to strike me how alike and yet different they seemed. Both moved gracefully, almost languidly, and yet there was a deliberate quality to their gestures—casual but lacking excess movement. They were both tall and undoubtedly good-looking, in a way that was as timeless as their very existence.

However, whereas the Lady Death dressed and somehow contrived to look wonderfully human despite her ethereal beauty and the odd colour of her eyes—which were a fresh, bloody red—my mistress always had the air of her title about her. Something dreamlike in the dark fall of hair, the wax-white skin, and the near-gaunt look... but most of all, in the terrible black eyes without pupils, eyes that were perpetually shadowed. Something of who she was in her appearance, unlike her sister, who looked the opposite of what she embodied (for the Lady Death looks the most alive of all the Endless, ironically enough). I find it curious, too that my mistress only casts a shadow when it occurs to her to do so, whereas the Lady Death always has one.

“Shizuru,” milady said, using the name her sister favoured. “I’m sorry I’m late.”

She came forward, then, and kissed her sister’s hand. She looked very much the gentleman, the Queen of Dreams, with her elegant European waistcoat and aristocratic bow. My mistress is a very handsome woman.

“Natsuki is always so sweet,” said the other, smiling broadly. “And always so formal. Why kiss my hand when you can kiss my cheek? You would think I am no more than a stranger.”

Sighing, my mistress obliged and pressed her lips against the other’s face, doing it with a gravity that made the gesture look even more formal than the kiss she had given her sister’s hand. I tried not to smile.

“And then again,” said her sister. “Why kiss my cheek when my lips are so close? One would think I was not your lov—“

The Lady was unable to continue, however, as my mistress had clamped a hand upon her mouth, a mortified look on her usually straight face. I confess to being unable to suppress my chuckle, however, and earned myself a most frightening glare for my pains. Still, I treasure the memory. It is not common to see the great and awful Lady of the Dreaming looking like an embarrassed child.

But how I digress! I was about to begin the story of how the humans brought a curse upon themselves, and see how I have slipped over it until now. Well, then, let us begin by speaking of the man who called himself Roderick Burgess.

Truth be told, Burgess was not the man’s real name. His background and origins were as obscure as the fogs of Wych Cross, where he settled himself. Now the town of Wych Cross lies in the Sussex weald of England, about midway between London and the Channel. There, this Burgess purchased a secluded, gothic, monstrosity of a mansion—of which the painter John Constable might have said the same thing he did of Parliament Building’s design, which was that it had “no soul.” Burgess himself fit that description.

Burgess was a magus, a self-proclaimed worker of the dark arts, and he gathered followers of the same discipline. He was head of the Order of Ancient Mysteries. Of course, he had his rivals. One was the magus Aleister Crowley, and the other was a sorcerer who was known to his followers merely as “Mocata.” They engaged in magical duels for fame and power, seeking always to gain an advantage over each other. Still, no one ever could claim a clear ascendance, so the duels escalated, growing more and more outrageous as time passed.

This went on for a few years, and the madness reached its height in the early parts of 1916. In the same year, Burgess resolved to end the three-way tie by working a spell the power—and effrontery—of which had never been seen before: Burgess would attempt to capture Death.

The ceremony took place on midnight, at the point where the 10th and 11th of June met. Gathering his disciples in the crypt of his mansion, Burgess inaugurated his so-called triumph over all his opponents, laughing as he bade his assistants draw a pentacle on the floor. He oversaw the writing of the runes into the lines, told them where to put the gigantic crystal sphere he had prepared for the ritual.

His eight-year-old son Alex watched, mentally filing everything away for reference. He was terrified of what might come about from the spell, but he was even more terrified of what would happen to him if his father saw his fright. Alex kept his fear to himself.

He would dream of this night long after his father died.

“Tonight,” his father declared, bringing out the objects necessary to the spell. “Tonight we do what no man has ever done. We shall bind the reaper. And through this, we shall become immortal. Think of what we can gain, my friends! Immortality! The promise of never being subject to the decays of time! Are you ready for it? Are you ready to gain never-ending life?”

After the enthusiastic answers, he came forward and began the chant. For a moment—just a moment—he paused, wondering at the sheer daring of what he was about to do. But his dreams were strong, his dreams of power and eternity. So he brought forward the tools for the spell and bade his followers repeat the chant. On and on they spoke, calling upon every dastardly power they could think of, their excitement and fear rising to fever pitch as the words tolled in their heads. Over and over, calling for the darkness. Calling for Death.

They were stopped by the sound of hissing air, and the sight of a dark-clothed figure falling on its side in the circle, steam rising from the edges of its tattered cloak. And then they were silent.

“I can’t believe it,” one of them finally mumbled, his voice hushed in awe as he moved to stare at the figure lying prone on the floor. “We did it. We actually did it.”

And then the marvelling pronouncement: “We caught Death.”

It was Burgess who interrupted the murmurs of self-congratulation, his voice rough and harsh as he sneered.

“No,” he said, spitting his words in annoyance. “This isn’t Death, damn it all to hell.”

He came forward, mumbling a protection spell in case the figure was only pretending to be unconscious. Kneeling next to it, he smiled as he caught sight of the large red gem that hung about its neck. Undoubtedly magical. Satisfied that there was no danger from the truly insentient figure before him, he beckoned to his disciples to come forward.

“Hurry up and help me take these,” he said, tugging at the gem and the cloak. The hood of the cloak fell away and their eyes grew round at the sight of dark hair spilling out onto the floor, uncovering the white, delicate face of a woman. Burgess stared and then laughed.

“I see,” he said, preoccupied with divesting the creature of her effects as soon as possible, before she could recover. “This is not Death, I know that much... but if I am right, we may still gain something from this... Yes... yes, a most profitable evening, all the same...”

Alex Burgess watched with wide eyes, wondering what his father was mumbling about and why he looked so happy if indeed the incantation had failed. He resolved to venture into their library later, to find a clue as to what or who the mysterious woman they had called up was. For he knew his father would not tell him.

Even as this occurred, the consequences of that night were already spreading about the earth, little strings pulled by the core from which they webbed out, fraying at the ends and in the dark. All over the world, people began to fall into a deep and deathlike sleep.

And they did not wake.

Some of the cases stay with me clearly until now. There was Unity Kincaid from London, who began to sleep for ever-lengthening stretches until she would sleep for more than 20 hours a day. Soon she ceased to wake at all. Someone raped her a few months later in her slumber, and she eventually gave birth to baby girl. Unity’s family hushed up the scandal, and the child was adopted.

Unity herself never knew. She slept through the entire thing.

And then there was little Stefan Wasserman, who was sent back from the front lines in Verdun, France. You could not blame them for discharging him from the army—he was rather a poor fighter. He never dreamt that the fighting would be like that, really. Stefan actually lied about his age to enlist: he was merely fourteen. When he came back from the war, the doctors thought he was just another casualty of what they called the effects of the psychic residue of warfare.

He sat, like the other discharged soldiers, staring at nothing with a horrified expression frozen on his face—a sort of zombie, as they would call them later on. The doctors were perplexed, for they thought they had seen every form of shell-shock. They observed Stefan, wondering how long a person could go without sleeping, as he did. How long did it take, they wondered, before the nightmares crept from the dreams and began to sneak into the daylight?

Stefan eventually killed himself. He was sixteen.

The sleepers were not inert. They were not comatose in the sense of being unable to move or respond, in at least a disconnected fashion, to prompts such as voices. They would eat if fed and they moved about by themselves. However, their actions had no relation to the actual environment. They walked into walls purposefully and did not see even if they were open-eyed. Soon, people learned to let them be—although in some countries, they were disposed of or left to the elements. In other places, they were put into special wards where people took care of them. They were bathed and washed and fed. They would sit and relax and enjoy a nice TV show. Asleep.

Although no-one was ever truly able to explain it, doctors came up with names for the sleepers’ disorder, right and left. Sigmund Freud saw a few cases and wrote a cautious but quite inconclusive monograph on the subject, titled Beobachtungs des Wahrschlafssperrung. With the ungainly precision of German, it meant Suspension of True Sleep. There is a copy of it in my library, of course, and it is in quite good condition.

Others called the state the sleepy illness, sleepers’ flu, midwar hypersomnia, dreamers’ disease, and most popularly, Encephalitis Lethargica. At most, it affected perhaps twenty thousand persons worldwide. Still, against the millions of casualties in the Great War and the influenza pandemic that followed and killed another twenty million, what were a silent few, quietly fading away?

The sleepers were mute. They did not rave, or suppurate, or provoke those who were awake. They did not require a good deal of tending, and in some cases, got no tending at all. There were no dopamine drugs yet, at that time. The sleepers did not do anything to incite interest, nor did anyone do so for their sake. And so, what had been a great but brief medical mystery became a mere curiosity of circumstance, a short footnote, a nothing at all.

Back in Wych Cross, there were stirrings of malign rumours among the townsfolk, rumours which lasted for several decades and gained the vagueness of legend. By the year 1947, the legend had filtered down to one simple myth: that Roderick Burgess had the Devil in his basement.

“Preposterous!” Burgess would exclaim to his son, waving his cane. “That’s no devil we’ve got there, boy. Do you know what—or who it is? Tell me! Do you know?”

“Yes, father,” his son always answered, having long figured out the identity of the pale woman they kept prisoner. “It is Dream.”

“Hah! Dream! Damned right it’s Dream! Oh, the witch, the stingy witch!” said the old man, frothing at the lip as he raved. “Dream of the Endless, in my basement! An Endless, boy, an Endless!”

Alex would nod and say “Yes, father,” having grown used to the man’s fits by now. It was part of the routine. At the end of every day, they would step into the basement and peer into the crystal sphere within which they had sealed Dream thirty years ago, always careful not to break the circle of powdered bone spread around the crystal prison. And they would marvel at how the woman never aged, never changed but simply sat there, eyeing them darkly through shadowed eyes. She was naked, for they had stripped her of all her effects in the fear that she would somehow be able to gain power through her possessions.

Thus the Queen of Dreams sat on the cool cement, her chalk-white skin uncovered, the sharp wings of her shoulder blades and ridges of her ribs showing in the dim light. She should have seemed vulnerable... and yet, thought Alex, she looked as proud as though she were on her throne. No amount of nasty heckling from Alex’s father could get her to talk or show any emotion. All that ever showed on that face was a terrible patience. Like someone waiting.

But this time, Roderick Burgess had had enough. He tottered forward, coughing and hacking as his wasted frame sat slackly upon him.

“Damn you,” he sneered at their captive. “Damn you for this! This is your fault! Yours!”

He paused to slap away his son’s hand.

“You aren’t Death,” he went on, still addressing the figure in the sphere. “But you don’t die either. You haven’t aged a bloody day since we caught you. Too bad you can’t really use it when you’re trapped in this goldfish bowl, can you? Think about it. We could let you go, you know, and all for the price of a little power.” He coughed. “All you have to do is give us immortality and take an oath never to seek revenge. Good conditions, don’t you think? Come now.”

The figure in the prison stared at him, no expression on her face as her arms moved to embrace the knees she had drawn to her chest. Burgess tried again, as he had been doing for several decades now. His voice rose with each word, the cadence of his speech growing rougher and jerkier with each breath.

“As you can see,” he said. “The circle traps you incorporeally, while the crystal cell imprisons your material aspect. You can only escape if the circle is broken.”

He paused and took in a wheezing breath. “And the circle will not be broken unless I give the order. Come, say something. Why don’t you say something? How dare you not say something?!”

Alex started as his father reached forward, jabbing a spotted yellow finger at the crystal as he scowled at the prisoner.

“Damn you!” said Burgess. “All this time and you still haven’t said a word! Not eating, not sleeping—you can’t even breathe in that damn thing, for all I know. This is all your blasted fault!” He bared his teeth, thin dry lips turning up as the prisoner still betrayed no change in countenance. “Demon!”

It was Alex who stopped him, fearing for his heart.

“Father,” he said. “Enough, now. This might not be good for your health. Let me handle it now.”

“Don’t be so bloody insolent!” Burgess roared, wheeling to glare at his son, who shrank back. “You’re still a pup, boy, and if you think you can talk to me that way, you’ve got another think coming! Oh bugger and blast all of you!”

Still throwing expletives, the old man stumbled out of the room with his son and followers after him. And the door shut behind them, sealing off the unsettling gaze of the Queen of Dreams as she waited, ever-patient. She was of the Endless, and the Endless were always patient.

Roderick Burgess died soon after, due to an aging heart.

Alexander Burgess carried on his father’s legacy, taking over the Order and continuing to cater to the interests of those seeking the dark arts. In the 1950’s, he was able to experience the freedom of taking a lover, something he had never done while his father was alive. His lover was his young assistant, who would eventually take over the functions of the Order and morph them into a more practical, money-making exercise meant to part the credulous from their cash. Alex’s lover was not a believer of the occult, but he was a believer of business. His name was Paul McGuire.

In the late 1960’s, the young people came to Alex, seeking enlightenment or greater knowledge of such things as astral travel or whatever occult ideas were in vogue at the time. He entertained them, telling them of things that although they fascinated them, were trifles in terms of true magic. He also forbade them from using psychedelics in his house, for fear that the waking dreams would empower his prisoner.

At night, he would come down to the cellar as his father used to, announcing himself so that the guards would open the door. There were always two guards in the room, working on rotating shifts, and they were given free supplies of coffee or amphetamines to keep them awake. It was forbidden to sleep in the cellar.

“The deal is still the same, you know,” he would say, trying to cajole their prisoner into finally speaking. “Just power. Immortality. A promise not to seek revenge.”

There was never a reaction.

“Why don’t you speak to us? You could tell us so much. We could learn so much from you.” A sigh. “Really, you don’t have to be in there. We could let you out, if only you’d give us those little things.”

And when the frustration crested: “Well? I know you understand what I’m saying. Why don’t you say anything? Say something!”

At this, the prisoner would lift her head from where it rested on her knees, breaking her pose for the briefest moment. She would say nothing, simply looking at Alex with those eerie eyes, the grim set of her lips not needing to move to convey the answer “no.” At this, Alex would shake his head and leave, deciding to try again another night. So it went for years.

Meanwhile, people around the world dreamt of a thin, pale woman shrouded in black, her eyes burning like twin stars. They woke abruptly, not as though from a nightmare, but from a cloudy notion that something—or someone—was missing.

It happened in the year 1988, a full seventy-two years after they had first captured their prisoner. Alexander Burgess was attempting to persuade her yet again to divulge some magical information to him, all to no avail. Frustrated beyond all endurance, Alex took to insulting the prisoner, snarling like the old man he had become.

“I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in sixty years,” he growled. “Is that your doing? It’s your doing, isn’t it? You’ve been doing it?”

His scowl deepened at the sight of the expressionless gaze upon him.

“I could torture you, you know,” he threatened. “Don’t think I can’t. I’ve killed people before.”

Still there was no reaction.

“I hate you,” he said, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “I’m glad we trapped you. You’re nothing special, you know that? You’re nothing at all...” He frowned, painfully aware of the sag in the aged flesh of his right cheek. “Just a naked woman in a glass box. You’re nothing at all...”

Suddenly, he felt as though those dark eyes were searing into his own, and he shook his head, glaring at the prisoner afterwards.

“Ehhh,” he muttered angrily, waving his hand over his shoulder. “Quite pointless. Take me to my office, Paul. I have work to attend to, don’t I?”

Paul smiled at him.

“Of course,” he said, turning him around. “Of course you do, Alex, love.”

They did not notice the wheel of Alex’s chair run a track through the powder just a few inches from it as it turned, breaking the circle. The guards shut the door, left to their devices once again as they took to chatting to take away the edge of having to be alert for several straight hours.

“The old man’s stroppy today,” said one, grinning. He turned to his partner on the shift and pointed his chin at the tabloid the man was reading. “Anything happen?”

“Nah,” the other replied. “Same old rubbish. Don’t know why I even buy the blasted thing. Force of habit, I s’pose. That and page three...”

He turned to the said page and began to talk absently about his upcoming vacation as he eyed the nude woman in the paper.

“I’ll be in Majorca this time next week,” he said. “There’ll be plenty o’ the real thing there. The kind o’ eyeful you’d never get at a beach in Eastbourne, Ernie.”

As though the same thought occurred to them, they flicked their eyes towards their prisoner, flicking them away just as quickly. They had spoken about it to the others before. It was common consensus that the captive was “damned good-looking,” but there was simply something disturbing in her eyes that cooled their ardour whenever they tried to get a better look. Better to look away.

“Dunno. There’s this time—did I tell you ‘bout it already, Fred? I met this blonde over at...”

But his partner was no longer listening. He knew Ernie, and to Ernie, every conversation was merely an invitation to concoct tales about his sexual prowess. He was used to it, and had learned to filter it out by now. His mind was on his holiday, his eyes fluttering heavily as the Spanish beach in his mind transmuted into a tropical paradise.

And so it began.

Fred was lying on the beach, the sand fine under his chest and the sun warm on his back. He could smell the salt from the sea, and it seemed like the best perfume at the moment. He could hear the women laughing as they played volleyball, the dull thock of the ball connecting with their arms music to his ears as he savoured everything.

Straight out of a holiday brochure, he found himself thinking, smiling as he let his muscles go slack against the sand. He did not see the chalk-white, slender hand reaching into his dream and sifting through the sand beside his leg.

Then the sound of something substantial falling over. Fred woke up.

“Christ,” he said, eyes snapping open. “What was that?”

Ernie was on his feet, peering into the crystal prison.

“Oh, bloody hell,” he said. “Look at her. You think she’s dead?”

Fred got up too, looking at the unconscious body of their charge. The dark hair was splayed out onto the floor.

“I dunno what to think,” he said. “They won’t say it’s our fault, will they? We didn’t do nothing...”

“Wait here, I’ll go get Mr. Paul.”

“Dead, I bet she’s dead.”

Later, when Paul arrived, he brought a few more guards and some of the elder officers of the Order with him. Alex was not with them, for he was already in bed. The group stared at the still figure, wondering what had happened.

“How long has she been like this?” Paul McGuire asked, scratching his chin.

“Just now. Just dropped and went like that.”

He folded his arms, thinking.

“I told Alex she would do that sometime,” he said. “Oh, damn it... unh... I suppose we better take a look at her. She’s never done anything like this before.” He sighed. “Hell.”

He reached into his pocket and took out the key Alex had given him for safekeeping. It was the key to the base of the crystal sphere. He slipped it into the lock, pleased with how easily it fit, and felt the tumblers click in place as he turned. The prison opened so smoothly that he had to smile at the silence of the mechanisms responsible for it, pushing the edges apart with his hands to help. He froze when the woman lying inside it looked up at him and lifted a clenched hand to her lips.

The last thing any of them saw before falling asleep was the smirking face of the Queen of Dreams, as she blew something into their faces that seemed remarkably like sand.

The Lady Shaper flitted through the dreams of mortals everywhere, savouring the sensation of being once more in her element. But before that, she needed some things first, things which had been denied her during her captivity. Weakened, she clutched at a passing dream...

Michael Norton’s recurring dream was taking place again. He was in a party, a swell party, but he went dressed as a clown. He thought it was a costume party and no one told him.

They all laughed at him. He flushed, trembling with shame, and prepared for the first morsel of food to be launched at him. The contents of a beer glass, perhaps, or a rotten tomato. Why was there a rotten tomato at a party, he wondered... when suddenly, a naked women came out of the shadows and began to raid the buffet.

Now that was weird, he thought, watching the woman make off with two legs of chicken and a great hunk of bread. That had never happened before. Oh well, at least the woman was hot.

Dreams.

Go figure them out.

The Queen of Dreams chewed quickly, almost roughly, at the first food she had tasted in seventy years. She was so hungry that she could barely taste it, her jaw almost new to the motions of grinding it down. She slipped into a vacant dream-space, finishing her food as she concentrated on the next item in order.

She felt weak. Not only had her strength been deteriorated by her imprisonment but she was lacking her tools, which her captors had taken from her decades ago. Still, she focused her mind on the feeling of raiment against her skin, mapping the texture of it and drawing it out from dream-space. Soon she was clothed, dark whipcord jeans embracing her legs and a black shirt covering her chilled body.

“Not enough.”

She lifted her hand, clutching at the tag-ends of what strength she had left, and whipped out a long coat the colour of the dark beyond the stars, materializing it once more into being. She put it on, smiling very slightly at the familiarity of the garment. But now was not the time for dwelling on such things. She needed the tools that had been stolen from her by her former captor. She would make him return them to her.

And she would make him give her the other thing she so craved.

Revenge.

Things were taking place elsewhere. The universe knew that something important, something vital was back, and it reacted accordingly.

All over the world, they began to wake up.

Those who had survived the decades in their sleep stirred, then arose from the murky depths of whatever nightmare in which they had been entangled. Some of them woke with no consciousness of what had happened, wondering why they felt so rickety and awkward in their bodies. They groaned, stretched, stiff arthritic pop—all the while thinking they were still the same age as when they had fallen asleep. They were octogenarian children.

And still others woke with a vague idea that time had passed. They looked around them with dazed expressions, wondering what had really happened and what had been a mere dream. They came to themselves, not really recognising what they found there. And some... some felt it more keenly than others.

In a London nursing home, Unity Kinkaid stirred in her wheelchair, tears falling down her face as she awoke.

“I dreamt,” she murmured. “That I had a baby.”

Alexander Burgess had not been with the others when the Queen of Dreams escaped her prison. He was having his nap.

In his dreams, he was a boy again, a boy wearing spectacles and carrying a candle as he made his way past dense blocks of shadow. He was following a black cat. It had glowing green eyes.

Alex followed the cat through the dank halls of an abandoned castle, shivering slightly as a draft whistled past him. It led him up a twisting staircase, past a noiseless corridor where mirrors hung and reflected to him not his face but that of his father’s, and into a room on the highest turret. There were two chairs in the room and he sat on one. The cat settled itself on the other, watching him.

Then that sudden convulsion of time and space, the transmutation of the cat into something else, someone he knew well. Alex dropped the candle, but it did not go out.

“Hello.”

His felt the sweat bead on his forehead, trickling in great, sluggish drops down his chin. He wanted to move, but felt as though the very idea was anathema to the situation.

Alexander Burgess was horrified.

“You aren’t talking. What’s the matter?”

His eyes felt as though they were about to leap from the sockets. The young woman in front of him smiled and spoke again.

“Cat got your tongue?”

Alex’s mouth finally worked its way into speech, and he fell off the chair and onto his knees as he panted.

“You!” he said, breathing hard. “It’s you!”

“That’s right,” said the low, frigid voice, like the sound of a thousand nightmares whistling in his ears. “It’s me.”

“Oh my god,” Alex babbled. “Oh my god, I’m sorry, I’m – it wasn’t me – I didn’t do it. Please. It was my father – he – I didn’t—“

The woman cut him off, placing a thin finger to her lips.

“Shh...” she whispered. “Enough.”

He fell silent, wondering at the odd warmth that seemed to be trickling down his legs. The woman before him smiled as though she knew what was happening better than he did, her sleek hair falling about her face as she considered what to say.

“There are offences that are... unpardonable,” she said quietly, pulling her coat more tightly around her. “Can you have any idea what it was like? Can you have any idea?”

She leaned forward, putting her elbow on the arm of the chair and resting her chin atop it as she spoke.

“Confined in a glass box for a human lifetime,” she said. “Do you know... time moves no faster for my kind than it does for yours... and in prison, it crawled at a snail’s pace...”

He parted his lips, attempting to launch into another series of apologies, but she cut him off with a sharp look.

“I was—am—Queen of the Dreaming, the Ruler of the Realm of Dream and Nightmare,” she whispered, biting off the words in accents of great bitterness. “You... your father... piped me down with that petty spell.”

She paused, fixing him with an eye the colour of infinite darkness.

“Me. You did that to me.”

Alex Burgess wished, in that moment, that he had never existed.

“You barred me from my realm with your foolish magic,” she went on. “You threatened, cajoled, and pleaded for gifts that are neither mine to give, nor humankind’s to take. You had no thought for the harm that you could have brought to your world.”

A deep, drawn-out sigh. “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

“Well?” she asked, after a brief silence. “No explanation? No attempt to make me give up any notions of reprisal? No excuse at all?”

Alex shuddered all over, not even feeling the rough cement of the floor scraping his knees.

“It was a mistake!” he whined, as soon as he was able. “We didn’t want to capture you. We were trying to capture Death.”

The pale face before him seemed to still, then arrange itself in an expression that was caught between surprise and disbelief.

“What?” she asked. “Death? You wanted to capture Death?” She gave a short, dry laugh of amazement. “Count yourself and yourtrivial species and planet lucky that you did not succeed... that instead, you caught Death’s younger sister. Capture Death?”

He swallowed, not knowing what to say in the face of this cold fury.

“You’ll never know how lucky you were,” she finished. “My things? Where have you put them?”

“I – I’m sorry?” he said, not comprehending.

“A pouch. A ruby. A brooch that looks like a hairpin. You stole them from me. Where are they?”

Alex’s eyes widened.

“I don’t know,” he spluttered. “That was part of the stuff my father’s right-hand man, Sykes, pinched years ago when he split from the Order. He stole them and we don’t know they are now.”

“I see.”

Alex blinked. The room seemed to be getting darker by the second. He groped about for the candle he had dropped earlier but it had disappeared. Soon, the only light in the room was from the eyes of the woman before him, flashing in the blackness. He whimpered.

“So, then,” she said, her voice holding the faintest bit of amusement. “Your punishment... or rather, your gift. A reward for all the years of hospitality.”

That trickling warmth was dripping down Alex’s legs again.

“I give you this...” came the soft voice, more frightening than any roar the boy had ever heard. “Eternal waking.”

Alexander Burgess lay in his bed, tossing and turning as he grumbled complaints in his sleep. With a sudden jerk and a shout, he woke up, rising from the bed in a spasm of aged muscles suddenly finding renewed strength.

“What – my god – my god,” he breathed, still sweating. “It was just a dream.”

“What’s the matter?”

He turned to his side to see Paul sitting in a chair, reading a newspaper.

“Are you all right?” Paul asked.

“Yes,” Alex said, relieved. “I dreamt... god... I dreamt our prisoner escaped... she was – and in the tower – she said...”

“She has. She did.”

Alex stilled, then turned to stare at Paul, who was still looking at him calmly. He gasped as Paul’s face began to melt, rot before his very eyes.

“She’s out, you know ,” said the drooping mask, its flesh pouring down in rancid rivulets all over the newspaper. Alex screamed, unable to help hearing Paul’s voice as he went on talking, even with his lips slopping halfway down his neck.

“She checked out this morning, Alex...”

Alexander Burgess shot up from his bed, gasping for breath.

“Get away from me!” he shrieked, only to be met with the puzzled face of his personal nurse as she stared at him.

“Now, now, Mister Burgess,” she said, soothingly. “Please calm down. It was just a bad dream, no more. There’s no point in getting worked up about it. You’ll give yourself a fright.”

He stared at her, trying to get the image of Paul’s melting face out of his mind.

He took the glass of water she handed him and sipped carefully.

“God, oh bloody god,” he whispered. “It was ter – terrifying. So real. You know.”

“Was it?”

“Ye – yes.” He shook his head. “You ever had one of those dreams, you know... where you think you’ve woken up but you haven’t? It’s just part of the nightmare and you’re still in it...”

She looked at him strangely.

“I can’t say I have, dear,” she said, putting her hands on her hips. “But you know what?”

He looked up, only to find that her head had fallen from her neck and dropped onto his lap. He stared at the head, horrified as it spoke while smiling maniacally at him.

“I think you’re going to be having a lot of those dreams from now on,” it said, laughing.

Alexander Burgess screamed and screamed and screamed. In the real world, his nurse and Paul were trying to shake him out of whatever nightmare had taken over his dreams. He refused to wake, and Paul McGuire was reduced to begging his lover to wake up, to please wake up.

Nearby, the Queen of Dreams smiled, watching.

At this time, I was in the realm of the Dreaming, still trying to stave off the frightening decay that had taken place ever since the disappearance of our Lady. For indeed, she was the incarnation of the Dreaming, and without her, it was inevitable that the realm would rot, begin to crumble...

The process was slow at first. Things began to transform. I became aware of it in my library when the words in the books began to fade. Sometime later, they disappeared completely, leaving me with bound volumes of blank paper.

The next day, the whole library vanished.

In the same cruel deterioration, the castle walls became insubstantial and weak. I watched, vainly trying to repair turrets that collapsed and kept collapsing, groaning with every dream-creature that dispersed and returned into the essence of the dream-stuff that had formed them. It was frightful, and by the time Alexander Burgess had his interview with our Lady, there were only about a thousand of us left in the Dreaming—all the strongest, most resilient dream-creatures, such as gods and archetypes.

A few thousand, when there had been an infinite number of us before. Some, as I mentioned before, had returned to their essence, while others simply faded away. Still others had chosen to leave the Dreaming for other realms... a frightful idea, since some of the most brutal nightmares were missing. Without the Queen of Dreams to put them in order, they could wreak havoc in the waking world by taking shape there and simply being themselves.

So there I sat, watching the continuing ruin of the Dreaming, my heart aching for our mistress. Not one of us knew, at the time, where she had gone or why. Some brave souls even went so far as to seek Lady Death and ask where our Queen had gone... but, of course, they never came back. Everything was a mystery.

I was ruminating on these things that day, sitting by the entrance to the Dreaming, the Gates of Horn, when I felt it—the quiet, cool feeling of my mistress’s presence, like the night slipping into the cracks of the day. I turned and saw her, paler than ever and weary with travel, her face torn between relief at being home and rage at what had happened to her kingdom during her absence. I fell to my knees and she turned to me, her dismay still evident in her face.

I wept, not knowing whether it was from fright at her terrible anger (though it was not directed to me) or from the joy of seeing her once again.

“At your service, milady,” I said, my head bowed. “As always.”

I heard the soft footfalls and felt her coming closer until she stood before me. I remembered, then, what my name had been before she made me the Librarian—what I had been before that—for she said it.

“Get up,” she said kindly, for all that I could her tiredness in her voice. “Please, Duran. Get up.”

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