Chapter Text
"You know there's a new man in the Dreaming, right?"
Silence meets this dire proclamation. The Dreamlord sits upon his throne, unnaturally still; the throne room is dim and quiet, the ever-shifting stained glass panels arranged behind the grand chair glittering multicolored in the low light. The Fashion Thing drifts closer on her broom, the long, red hem of her deel nearly touching the dark stone tiles of the floor. Her boqta hat wobbles dangerously; there's a cup in her hands that smells strongly of fermented mare's milk and blood.
"Hm," the Dreamlord says. He has a book open in his lap, the life of some mortal poet or musician or something equally as boring, not nearly as fascinating and complex as the current hanfu trends of the Yuan dynasty. The Fashion Thing tries again.
"And not a well-dressed man, either. Sort of rumpled. Rough. Stinky."
The Fashion Thing lifts her broom upwards, trying to peer over his lordship's shoulder to read the page on which he currently rests a single long, pale finger, dragging it slowly down the text. His nails are as black as midnight, she notes with approval. Trendsetter.
"I think he's mortal," she says with an air of conspiratorial glee.
The Lord of Dreams, King of Nightmares' finger pauses, partially obscuring a sentence about something something Reeve’s Tale something. More importantly, the lord’s eyes finally look at her, head tilted like a bird’s. She itches to get him into something other than that dreary black robe and grey shirt, maybe something like the red silk houppelande that saucy minx Richard II wore. She leans closer, like they’re sharing a secret.
“Show me,” he says, and the Fashion Thing wriggles all over in excitement.
It’s been three weeks, two days, and a handful of hours since Hob Gadling died.
In all honesty it’s the keeping track of time that’s been the most bothersome thing about the whole ordeal. Food and drink doesn’t appear to be necessary anymore, and he hasn’t wanted for interesting sights since he woke up…wherever this place is, but finding something that’s permanent seems to be its downfall. Every piece of parchment he’s come across has vanished as soon as he’s closed his eyes to rest, and he can’t make marks upon stones or trees because more often than not he finds himself somewhere totally different each time he wakes.
He’s resorted to marking each sleep cycle on his body – parchment disappears, quill and ink vanishes, but he knows how to make a fire, and where there’s fire, there’s charcoal. He’s drawn as miniscule lines as he can all up his right arm, and those, at least, seem to stay, so long as he doesn’t wash or smudge them.
He’s only woken up in a place without trees a handful of times: vast, black-sanded deserts, endless stretches of empty beach, a rocky cliffside in the middle of an ocean. There are gaps in his timekeeping for those places, and he just hopes that, when he’s eventually covered all over in charcoal and ink, that he’ll remember what they’re for.
He can’t truly complain, however. Even if he eventually loses all sense of time in this place, it beats being dead-dead, worms in the ground, darkness and decay, nothing beyond this mortal coil dead. He’s always believed in the Lord Almighty and Heaven and an eternal reward for the righteous, but in his last year or two of life he’s willing to admit that it was…harder.
Plague did that to you. War did that to you.
He thinks it was the war that did him in. He has vague memories of being surrounded by a throbbing crush of bodies, of sweating clear through his gambeson despite feeling chilled to the bone, the scream of horses. The smell of blood. But every time he tries to reach for them, the memories retreat. He’s not eager to go chasing them; he knows he’s gotten off easy.
After all, the amount of mercenary work he’s done, and not to mention the casual banditry, would surely be enough to land him in Hell under different circumstances.
So, he enjoys himself. This place, this fantastical world, wherever or whenever it is, seems to have a little bit of everything: cities, secluded woodland glens, sprawling deserts, charming little towns. They aren’t empty, either – the cities and towns are bustling with phantoms, wavering images of men and women who walk the streets without any regard for him. They pass through him like mist, and never answer when he calls, and for the first few days he is terribly, achingly lonely.
He’s fortunate that there are others who can see him, some in familiar configurations and some…not. He wakes up one morning to find that he’s lying on a settee in someone’s parlor. The ‘someone’ turns out to be a woman with snakes for hair, who gets one good look at Hob lying on her furniture and immediately tries to avert her eyes.
She’s not quite fast enough, and Hob spends a few hours waiting for his feet to turn back into flesh while she (now wearing curiously dark-tinted spectacles) brings him a hot drink and tiny cakes on a silver platter.
Another time he wakes on an island in the middle of a vast and wine-dark ocean, and spends the afternoon helping an entire village of grasshoppers harvest fruit from the trunk of a massive and ancient tree. They try to crown him as a king afterwards, and Hob, who started out with a somewhat neutral opinion of kings and doesn’t feel that death has much improved it, has to decline strenuously before they relent. Instead, they build a tiny statue in his honor out of the hulls of the fruits he harvested, and he’s so absurdly touched by this that he finds himself weeping when he lies down to sleep that night.
It’s not the same as the people he’s used to. Him and his friends going to the tavern of an evening, drinking themselves into oblivion, singing and carousing. His brothers in arms sitting with him around a guttering fire, passing a wineskin and telling stories of the family, women and children they’d left behind. He misses that. He misses people, the smell of them, he misses the touch of skin on skin, the sound of other voices. If he thinks too hard on it, the world he’s in becomes significantly less phantasmal and fantastical, and just a little bit more empty.
So, he tries not to think about it. There are marvels that he’s never even dreamt of here: temples built into living mountains, statues to pagan gods carved out of solid gemstones, ancient forests where skull-headed deer the size of siege engines pick their way delicately through mossy streams. Hob takes it all in with the wide-eyed wonder of a newborn, and every night, when the sun starts dipping low, he finds a place to make a fire and goes about marking the passing of another day.
It’s been three weeks, three days, and a few hours since Hob Gadling died, and he’s standing at the base of a massive tree. It’s the only thing around him for miles, everything else broad and dusty plains, dirt the color of yellow ochre, and endless white-blue sky. It’s the most curious tree he’s ever seen: a fat, rounded trunk, smooth under his palm, that soars upwards, tucks in a bit, and then explodes outwards into a crown of thick branches. Its leaves are few, but fantastically green in this otherwise golden landscape. It doesn’t offer much shade, but he finds that he doesn’t really feel heat in this place. Nor cold, nor weariness. He sleeps at night because it feels like the right thing to do. He eats when the opportunity presents itself and wishes he’d had the chance to try roast boar before he’d died.
This place, more than many of the others he’s found himself in, feels boundless and empty – no beginning and no end, just the eternal, searing sky and the tall, waving flaxen grasses. He hasn’t seen a single living creature, no insects, no birds, and certainly no people, and so he’s startled out of his contemplation of the strange tree when he hears someone clear their throat behind him.
It’s a woman. It is, quite possibly, the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, dark-skinned and dark-haired, a generous and kindly mouth, skin as smooth and perfect as polished stone. She’s dressed in a queer sort of tunic, short sleeved and, some might say, indecently revealing, and she’s wearing hose. A pendant on a thick silver chain hangs around her neck, a symbol that he doesn’t recognize, but which some instinctual part of him feels comforted by. She is comforting, and she tucks her thumbs into the top of her hose and walks towards him, smiling.
Her smile is a balmy breeze, a breath of fresh air, a ray of sunlight. Hob meets her eyes – they are warm, and knowing – and he recognizes her.
“I know you,” he says, and she tucks a flyaway curl behind her ear, still smiling. “Faith, my lady, where are my manners? I apologize for my appearance.” He gestures down towards himself, the inky marks on his arms, his well-worn tunic and hose. “I would offer you ale or bread if I had any. Alas, I only have this tree.”
“It’s a lovely tree,” the woman says, and steps up to stand beside him. “Do you know what it is?”
“I don’t. I’ve never seen its like before.”
“It’s called a baobab. You’ve dreamt yourself very far from home, Hob – some three-thousand leagues, in fact.”
“Three-thousand,” he repeats, baffled by the number, the sheer improbability of something being that far away and still somehow reachable. He looks up at the tree with renewed respect – he might as well be looking upon an angel, he thinks, so far away is this awesome thing from everything he has ever known. “And you say I’ve dreamt myself here? I thought I was dead.”
“You are.” She lays a hand lightly upon his forearm, as courtly as any fine lady.
He’s lying in a field. It’s 1389 and it’s April, and there’s an arrow in his chest.
There’s hardly any pain. He’s surprised by that – he’d rather thought that getting shot would be terribly painful, based on all the times he’s seen it before, but instead he just feels very heavy, and very numb. The wet mud of the West March is clinging and cold-silken against his bare hand; they’re some six miles outside of Carlisle, and they’d been on their way back, the long slogging march to a warm tavern and a pint of ale and a fresh straw mattress to lay his head down upon…
He tries to reach for the arrow, but the mud sucks at his wrists, holds them fast.
“Here, let me,” a woman’s voice says, and then a hand reaches into his field of vision, grasps him by the forearm and helps him up. Hob peels himself out of the mud and shakes off like a dog, the numbness, the heaviness, retreating. He looks around.
“Jesu wept,” he whispers. A crow alights upon the body of a horse nearby. It’s a fat, glossy thing, and it plunges its beak into the horse skull with gleeful abandon. Emerges with a glistening, plump eye in its terrible mouth. Hob waves his hands at it, shouts, but it ignores him – he watches it tilt its head back, and the eye disappears down the black maw of its gullet.
“It’s time to go, Robert Gadling.”
He turns, and his savior becomes apparent: a woman, dark of countenance and fair in beauty, wearing a sister’s habit. A silver pendant hangs around her neck, an unfamiliar symbol. He meets her eyes, and he knows.
“Truly?” he asks, and she nods. Her smile is comforting, but sad. Hob considers this.
“No, thank you,” he says, after long seconds of contemplation. The woman blinks at him.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, no thank you.” He turns on his heel, and he starts to walk. The woman follows him. There are bodies everywhere, he sees now, his friends, his brothers in arms. There are no signs of their assailants, whether they were French, or Scottish, or neither. That galls him, for some reason. There ought to be a monument here, he thinks. Something to memorialize the loss of life.
He knows there won’t be.
“That’s not how this works, Robert.”
“It’s Hob. And I think it’s exactly how it works. I’ve seen death, madam, I’ve seen half my village wiped out by the Plague, and the only reason people keep doing it is because everyone is doing it. Well, I’ll take no part in it.”
The woman keeps easy pace with him, picking through the mud and the double score of bodies. He feels very cold, and holds his hands in front of him, blowing into them to try and warm himself. It doesn’t work. His hands are faintly translucent.
“You can’t exist here anymore, Hob.” She sounds genuinely regretful, but also…a bit amused. A bit thoughtful. “The longer you remain here, the closer you come to needing to make a choice.”
There’s a terrible finality to those words. A choice. He stops, and turns to face her – fully, truly. “What choice?” he asks, and her smile is a beam of sunlight.
“Ghosts who remain among the living tend not to do well,” she says. She reaches out and takes his hand, and he feels a rush go all throughout him, a tingling starting at his fingertips and then sparking from nerve to nerve all the way up his arm. It spreads like the feeling of a hot drink on a cool day, and he watches as color and solidity bleeds back into his hand. “They get stuck, circling around one regret until that’s the only thing they can remember. Some can last a fair while that way, but eventually they aren’t even ghosts at all. Just echoes, casting themselves back and forth, forever.”
She pulls at his hand, leading him onwards, and what choice does Hob have but to go with her? He senses, perhaps with prescience granted by death, that she’s not taking him Somewhere, with a capital S. They’re only walking, putting the battlefield further behind them, the smell of blood and shit dissipating on the soft breeze. Even the raucous cawing of crows becomes distant. “Or, you have your other option, which is you can get angry. Anger is a powerful motivator, and if it’s strong enough it can keep you going for years.” She tilts her head, still smiling. “I can’t really picture you choosing that, but it is an option. But you run the risk of attracting attention from…other factions. The Morningstar is fond of strong souls.”
Hob hasn’t been to Church recently, what with the fighting, but even he knows that epithet. “That’s it?” She squeezes his hand. “There’s naught else? What if I just…refuse to get angry, or fade away? I’m very stubborn, you know.”
She laughs, and it’s the sound of running through a field as a child, sweet and free. “I don’t doubt it. But yes. Ghosts, demons. Or me.”
“You can’t just…stuff me back in? I could mayhaps explain the arrow.”
“No. Once your thread has been cut, it’s cut forever. You may occupy an empty body for a time, but it will never again be yours. It will decay, eventually, as all dead things do.”
Then she purses her lips. She stops in place, and Hob stops with her. He wants to tell her that he refuses – there’s nothing keeping him from just…walking away. He was getting a bit transparent there, for a moment, but he thinks he could probably power through it, given enough time and practice. And he definitely doesn’t have any plans to become a demon. He’s committed his fair share of sins, to be sure, but there’s sinning and then there’s sinning.
“There’s a third option,” she says, and Hob turns towards her.
“Aye?”
“Yes. Oh, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it right away. Will you come with me, Hob? There’s someone I want you to meet.”
And, because he doesn’t have anything better to do at the moment, and he’s still trying to wrap his mind around ‘being dead,’ Hob says, “All right, then.”
He’s standing in front of a tree, a great, odd tree with a fat trunk and many thick, crowning branches. The woman is still here, still smiling, but she’s no longer alone.
There is now a man.
If the woman is good cheer and sunlight, then the man beside her is moonshadow and rain, an alabaster statue, a creature carved by the gods. He’s dressed so strangely, a massive black cloak and a grey tunic and black hose beneath it; Hob can see starlight leaking from under the edges of the cloak, and he knows he’s gawping but he cannot help himself.
“Sorry for the jolt,” the woman says, “but I thought it might bring everyone up to speed. Hob Gadling, this is my brother.” She slants her eyes sideways, wearing a secretive little smile. “Shall I be the one to make introductions, then?”
“I would say you have already done enough.”
She softly punches the man in his shoulder, and gets a scathing glower for her trouble. “Be nice. Hob isn’t ready to go, little brother. He’s very insistent on it, and I find it difficult to disagree with him. You’ve already seen that he’s very good at navigating the Dreaming on his own.”
“Hm.” He is tall, his hair a wild black mane that looks thick and soft as featherdown, and his eyes are pools of black ink. No – they’re the night sky, and in the center spins a fistful of stars, twinkling and glimmering. This man is the night, the blessed softness of evening, the heavy rest of midnight, the chirping of crickets and the sweet song of nightbirds.
“Are you an angel?” Hob asks, and thinks himself five different types of dullard when the man’s dark brows furrow. The woman seems well-pleased, but Hob finds that all his attention is for this man, this marble relief come to life.
“Would you truly wish to live forever?” A pale, thin hand sweeps out, gesturing broadly. Thankfully ignoring Hob’s foolish question, for clearly this is not a being so lowly as an angel; he must be a pagan god, some wild and ephemeral thing of the woods. “Here? You have seen the vagaries of this realm. There are no other humans save the dreamers, and they will not always see you. You are alone here.”
Hob thinks of all the things he’s seen over the past three weeks. No people like him, to be sure, but there have been people. Gorgons and grasshoppers, little towns full of lingering ghosts, the smell of bread with no bakers, the ringing of church bells with no parishioners. It’s been lonely, at times, but it’s also been amazing, every day a new sight, a new story. He doesn’t understand the full scope of this place, of this man and his purview, but it has to do with dreams, and he thinks on all the dreams he could ever remember in his waking hours: fantastical dreams of flying with a bird’s wings, of discovering merfolk in the deep sea, comfortable dreams of good food and fair wine in front of a roaring hearth.
Dreams of love, even. A babe in arms, a tender wife. He’s lived whole lifetimes in dreams.
“I don’t think I am, though,” he says, and the man’s frown grows pensive. “Yes, if it please you. I’ve already decided. I’m not going to die.”
The man looks at his sister, who is smiling so widely it fills her whole face with sunshine. The dark head dips down, murmuring to her – she looks smug as the cat that’s got the cream. The man looks first bewildered, and then amused. He looks back at Hob.
His eyes are beautiful, Hob thinks. All those constellations, twisting and whirling. A man could get lost in them.
“Then you must tell me what it’s like.” There is a twist to his pale mouth, a smirk that is beautiful, but slightly mocking. Like he’s seen a stray dog perform a particularly clever trick. “Let us meet again, Robert Gadling, in the dream of your choosing, in one hundred years.”
And he feels like he’s gone a little bit around the bend, because he’s not being offered eternal life – he’s being offered something more. An eternity of exploration, of exotic night markets and dragons and flight, a new experience every day, and in a hundred years he will find this beautiful stranger and once again be allowed to look into those heavenly eyes, to bask in the twilight power of him, and he will tell his story.
“Then I will see you again,” Hob says, “in the year of our Lord 1489.”
And for a moment, just a moment, Hob swears that the man’s little smirk turns genuine.