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setaripendragon · 6 months

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Cress - Part 3

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 I really enjoyed writing this one and playing about with just the entire concept of dreams and the Dreaming and... I love the world building in Sandman so much, okay, and playing in this sandbox is just -happy author flailing- The Princess of the Dreaming comes home.

The Dreaming is in ruins. Ever since the library disappeared, there’s been nothing for Lucienne to do except watch the rest of the Dreaming crumble. She’s tried, as best she can, to hold it together, but she’s only a dream of a memory in the end, even if she has been favoured by their Lord. She hasn’t got the authority to order anyone to stay, and she doesn’t have the power to shape the dreamstuff back into what it was.

It’s an exercise in futility, and though Lucienne has never fallen prey to the fear that their Lord has abandoned them, has always believed that he will return when whatever is keeping him is done, she still finds it all exhausting. Even just existing these days is exhausting. The dreamstuff that makes her up is just as inclined to crumble back into its base state as the dreamstuff everywhere else, and holding herself together has become its own chore these last few years.

“Uh… Loosh?”

Lucienne sighs, and turns away from her consideration of the ruin of her Lord’s castle to face Mervyn with a forced smile. “Yes? What is it?” she asks. Back to business. Someone has to try and keep order while their Lord is away, and it might as well be her.

Mervyn makes a sound like clearing the throat he doesn’t actually have, and looks down. “We’ve got a new dreamer,” he tells her. Lucienne grimaces. Once upon a time, that wasn’t even an event to be remarked upon. These days, it’s an ill omen. How broken must everything be, for a new dreamer in the Dreaming to be a bad thing?

“Well, we may as well do our best to make them comfortable while they’re with us,” Lucienne says briskly. It’s the last kindness any of these dreamers will ever know. As the mortal world has – presumably – grown better at dealing with people who cannot wake, they survive longer, but they still haven’t discovered a way to convince the Dreaming to let them go again. So many dreamers have died in the Dreaming in the last seventy years, and if their Lord were here, perhaps that would grant them a second life here in the Dreaming like it had for Lucienne, but… There is no Dream Lord to claim them, and so they can only go with Death when she comes for them.

“Yeah…” Mervyn sighs. “That’s gonna take some work with this one.”

“Oh?” Lucienne prompts, suddenly wary. “Why is that?”

“Cause it’s a baby, isn’t it?” Mervyn asks, shoving his hands into his pockets with an air of deep discontent.

Lucienne doesn’t blame him one bit. She closes her eyes against the news. They’ve seen their fair share of children, toddlers, and even infants since their Lord left, but it’s never gotten easier to bear. The Dreaming is meant to enhance the lives of the dreamers, not steal their entire span of years away from them.

She caves to a moment of weakness, and takes her glasses off to rub at her eyes. She’s a dreamthing; she shouldn’t get tired. And yet. “Where?” she asks on a heavy sigh.

“The shores,” Mervyn tells her, and so off they go; leaping across the rubble and fragments of the bridge, across the now barren plains where Fiddler’s Green once lay, through the Gates of Horn and Ivory, which blessedly still stand, and out onto the soft shores of the Dreaming. Raw dreamstuff stretches out endlessly, waves of the Sea of Sleep lapping at its edges, and Lucienne finds she doesn’t need a guide any more.

The sight before her punches a soft ‘oh’ right out from the depths of her lungs. She’s not sure if it’s joy or sorrow. There’s no missing their new guest, because she’s wrapped up in a dream. A soft-edged infant’s dream of rainbows, bright primary colours fuzzing into each other, making strange shapes as they drift around their dreamer, tipping the babe from one vibrant cradle to another and sending sparkles of pure joy into the air.

Lucienne hadn’t known any such gentle dreams yet survived.

“Huh. Thought the little ones were all gone by now,” Mervyn says, echoing Lucienne’s thoughts with uncanny accuracy.

“I suppose we missed one,” Lucienne says helplessly.

She doesn’t know how long she stands there just watching, unable to bring herself to interrupt and end this moment. It’s such a small thing – such a small dream, for such a small dreamer – and yet that tiny thing lodges in her chest and grows until it threatens to burst. So she stands and watches as an infant dreams of rainbows, until quite suddenly, the babe is tipped from amorphous blue to bubbling orange, and falls right through the bubbles and into nothing.

Mervyn swears, covering the sound of Lucienne’s gasp.

“She woke up,” Lucienne says dumbly, staring as the dream twists in on itself, condensing down into a little blob of ever-shifting colour. It shifts, sliding around on the dream-sand of the shores, as though it’s looking for its absent playmate.

“Ah, damn. Come here, you,” Mervyn says, striding – more like staggering – forward to catch the attention of the dream. “Better get you somewhere safe, before you dissolve like the rest. What’s your name, then? I don’t recognise you t’all.” He sounds very indignant about that last part, which is fair enough. Mervyn was generally well acquainted with most of their Lord’s creations. Perhaps this one was made right before he left, and it never had the chance to become known to the other denizens of the Dreaming.

The dream fluctuates indecisively for a moment, and then turns a startlingly uniform shade of vibrant yellow. “Aureolin,” Lucienne says, when Mervyn flounders. The dream sparkles. “It’s very good to meet you, too,” Lucienne agrees. “I’m Lucienne, the Royal Librarian, and this is Mervyn Pumpkinhead, the… Royal Caretaker.” Mervyn humphs, but doesn’t contradict her “Now, let’s get you settled somewhere a bit safer, shall we?”

Aereolin agrees, and dutifully follows along behind as Lucienne turns her steps not back towards the Castle, but further into the Dreaming, towards the Houses of Secrets and Mysteries. These days, it’s safer there than it is in the Castle. One never knows when another set of rooms is just going to disappear in there.

Abel is absolutely overjoyed to see another dream, while Cain is significantly more disgruntled about being asked to babysit. Lucienne, having expected this, blandly suggests that if it’s too much for him-

“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s not as if we’ve got anything else to do around here!” Cain snaps, cutting her off before she can even begin to suggest Aureolin comes to the castle with her, and Lucienne smiles smugly.

“Of course. Thank you,” she says indulgently.

“Gregory! Look, Gregory, a new friend for you!” Abel calls to the gargoyle nesting on the roof. Gregory chirrups in confusion, and hops down, scattering roof tiles as he goes, to nose at Aureolin curiously. Aureolin blooms into a riot of colours in the air around Gregory, who yelps and rears back, turning on his hind legs to try and look at everything all at once, only to fall back on his rump when he overbalances.

Aureolin flares around him in a riot of sunshine yellow and neon orange and crystal white. Gregory shakes himself, then wriggles with more intent. Abel has just enough time to shout, “Gregory, no-!” before Gregory pounces. He catches most of Aereolin under one large paw, right up until Aureolin bleeds itself into the ground, turning the grass coquelicot and heliotrope and gamboge.

Then it springs back into the air like a mist rising out of the ground, coalesces into a rainbow, before darting off into the trees, a rippling ribbon of colour against the dreary Dreaming, with Gregory in hot pursuit.

“Where’d you find that one, then?” Cain asks suspiciously.

“On the shores,” Lucienne says blandly.

“What was it doing down there?” Cain demands.

“What we’re all doing these days,” Lucienne says, a little harder now. “Getting by.”

Cain harrumphs, but ceases attempting to interrogate her. Good, because Lucienne does not want to see what frenzy the last few residents of the dreaming might be driven to by the notion of a dreamer who isn’t stuck. They’d swamp the poor child, and probably cause no end of trauma.

She returns to the palace, for want of anything better to do, and catches herself looking mournfully at the once-vibrant stained glass windows of the throne room. They’re dull, these days. Even if there was more than the watery light of their non-weather, the glass is no longer jewel-toned and ready to glow at the touch of the sun. Lucienne hasn’t seen colour like Aureolin’s here in the dreaming for at least the last twenty years.

Somehow, she’s not surprised when Mervyn comes to fetch her again what feels like mere moments later.

“She’s back, Loosh.”

And so she is, when Lucienne goes back down to the shores to see. The child has called Aureolin back to her, and they’re playing on the sand together. And it happens again. And again. Lucienne begins to track time by days instead of years again, keeping an eye out for the infant. Sometimes Aureolin doesn’t come, and Lucienne will pick the child up and carry her back through the gates and into the palace, just because it’s better than leaving her lying on the dream-sand.

Some many days and nights later, Lucienne finds the infant on the shore again, and while Aureolin isn’t there, another dream is. Or, rather, a nightmare. An infant’s nightmare of cold and sharp, with no finesse to its form. To Lucienne, it looks a little like a soap-bubble, covered in pulsing spikes like shards of broken glass, surrounded by a glimmer of diamond-dust.

The infant is being cradled by the spikes, and her tiny little hand keeps closing around one, and then letting go with a whimper, and then trying to close around it again. And the nightmare, for all that it is what it is and it’s fulfilling its purpose in allowing the child to explore these things that scare it in a safe environment, is being so incredibly gentle with her as it holds her aloft, shards tip-tapping over the infant’s skin as it explores in turn.

It is not… typical, of her Lord’s creations, she has to admit. Neither is Aureolin. Even the children’s dreams and nightmares have had forms beyond their function, as far as Lucienne can remember. Human dreams with human shapes, the better to know those they’re meant to serve, and to communicate with the aspect of their Lord in charge of them.

These… are not human.

Perhaps, Lucienne dares to think, this is the Dreaming beginning to heal around their Lord’s absence? After all, their Lord is the Dreaming, and the Dreaming is him. It is not a creation that bears the mark of her Lord’s experienced hand, but… it must be of him, else it could not be. So perhaps they have simply been born of some part of her Lord that is… less than intentional. Impulse over artistry.

It keeps happening, too. The child grows, and as she does, more complex dreams bloom out of the dreamstuff as she needs them. Tesseract joins Aureolin and Dearth, as she discovers shapes, as she grows strong enough to operate her limbs properly and finds the world has substance, and then Schism, as she begins to walk and learns to fear falling, learns to dream of flying.

The first new dream to have a recognisable form is a spider, large enough for a small child to ride, covered in a thick fuzz of glowing white fur, and graced with a pair of magnificent translucent wings coloured like stained glass windows. Its eight eyes are all different sizes, from huge and liquid to small enough to be freckles, all of them black as night, all of them with eyelids far more like a human’s than any kind of insect.

The girl rides it across the dream-sand, sometimes shrieking with glee, sometimes yelling in triumph, and sometimes talking to it. Lucienne exchanges a look with Mervyn when they realise. It’s been a very long time since either of them has been around children. She’d forgotten they start talking that young.

“Should we…?” Mervyn asks. Lucienne looks to the girl, and after a moment of teetering indecision, nods sharply. Mervyn grumbles a wary agreement and, together, they start across the sand.

No matter where she is when she wakes, Lucienne notes, this girl always returns to the Dreaming here, on the shores, where all is raw dreamstuff like shifting sands, nurtured by the shushing shores of sleep. It’s curious, because most dreamers used to slip straight to whatever dream or nightmare called to them that night. But this girl never appears in the Houses of Secrets and Mysteries, nor in the palace rookery where Schism had taken to nesting, nor in the library where Tesseract tends to follow Lucienne around like a faithful hound.

They always come to her, instead.

On spotting them, the girl gasps in delight and immediately makes grabbing motions in their direction. In response, the dream immediately begins to skitter in their direction, wings flapping hard enough to lift it off the sand by a few feet, and then stopping, and then starting to buzz again.

“Pun’kin!” the girl cheers, as the glowing white spider skids to a stop at their feet, kicking up a cloud of shimmering golden dream-sand. “Birb!”

“Hello, little one. Little ones,” Lucienne greets, smiling a little tightly in her confusion.

“Hi! Hi, hi, hi,” the spider returns in a truly beautiful voice, while spinning around in a circle in its excitement.

“Up, pease!” the girl demands, raising her arms. Lucienne sighs, then bends down to pick her up and settle her on her hip. The spider scuttles up her legs, around to her back, and perches there like a backpack, front legs clinging to Lucienne’s shoulders.

Lucienne takes a moment to study the girl. She looks, perhaps, to be from somewhere in the Mediterranean; with warm skin, eyes such a dark brown they look nearly as black as the spider’s, and hair as glossy black as a raven’s wing. Mervyn leans in to study her, too, eyes narrowed. “Did you call me Pumpkin?” he asks.

“Pun’kin,” the girl agrees.

“This is Mervyn,” Lucienne corrects, refusing to laugh only because she knows it would annoy Mervyn. “And I am Lucienne. Who are you?”

“I’m Kess,” the girl says firmly. “Kessida!”

“Cressida?” Lucienne guesses. The girl nods in a full-body bobble. “That’s a lovely, name,” Lucienne tells her. “And who’s your friend?” she adds, turning her head to try and look at the spider still clinging to her back.

“I’m Arthur,” the spider announces sweetly.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Cress, Arthur,” Lucienne says entirely by rote.

“Luffly t’meechu, Looshen, Merfy,” Cressida echoes dutifully.

Mervyn winces. Lucienne doesn’t blame him. That’s a little bit too close to one of their Lord’s names to be anything but painful at the moment. “Maybe stick with ‘Punkin’, kiddo,” Mervyn suggests dryly.

“Kay,” Cressida agrees.

#The Sandman #Lucienne the Librarian #Mervyn Pumpkinhead #The Dreaming #kid fic #next gen OC #dream OC #nightmare OC #is it significant that Cress's first sapient dream #is a spider that can fly?#yes of course #she's the daughter of Eloquence Dreams and Hope #of course her first intentional creation is a Weaver with Wings

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