XXIII: Inquisition

Silver light dashed across the sky as Morpheus stepped out into Alyxa’s backyard, Bast, unusually, riding on his shoulder. Any onlooker would have put that minor fact aside, however, when the backyard was ceased to be the backyard and the two disappeared from sight.

“Where did they go?” Amy asked Alyxa, perched on top of the counter as the older Dreamer did the dishes.

“Hopefully to go talk some sense into the other Deities,” she said, “and hopefully they’ll have more luck than I did talking sense into my Coven.”

Amy put on a seven-year-old’s equivalent of a thoughtful expression – sucking on her bottom lip, eyes squinting in deliberate concentration, her little legs banging the cupboard door beneath her seat.

“Are there lots?”

“Lots?”

“Of Deities.”

“Hundreds, thousands, probably more. Every entity humanity ever dreamt up and worshipped, since before we had languages, they’re all there, behind the Rift,” Alyxa explained, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

“This Rift thing. It keeps them there and us here, ‘n only Dreamers can go through?”

Alyxa nodded. She was used to Amy’s many questions by now, even if they sometimes made her think about things she would rather not.

“So how come Morpheus and Bast can go back and forth now?” Amy wanted to know next.
Alyxa stopped, frowning. This was such a question. Truth be told she didn’t really know, so she said,

“I guess it has something to do with Bast. She doesn’t seem to need a Dreamer to keep her here with blood, so….”

The words just fell out of her mouth as she put another plate in the rack, and even as she said them, it made sense.

“I like Bast,” Amy stated decisively.

“I like Morpheus.”

“Like ‘like’ like?”

“No choice really,” Alyxa replied softly.

XXII: Ambition

Alyxa’s hand shook as she dialed Maye’s number, a sleep-fogged voice mumbled her name in query.

“Maye…we need to talk.”

“If this is about the bringing another – ” the Coven Mistress muttered.

“We can’t!”

“What do you mean ‘we can’t’?!” Maye demanded, startled out of her sleep completely.

“Maye, the last time that we – that a Dreamer brought someone through, he kill – ”

“We’ve been planning this for years, Alyxa. Your own father is the one who made the final preparations! He gave his life to re-establish the communication between our world and Réveille! How dare you dishonor his memory by suggesting we abort!”

“Maye – ”

“I am your Coven Mistress! Like my mother before me! I will not put up with your insubordination!”

Alyxa could not believe what she was hearing. She and Maye had been raised together within the Coven, their parents had been friends. They had been the special children of the Coven, the Mistress’s heir and the Dreamer’s. They had always known their place. It was not like Maye to completely disregard what she, the Coven’s Dreamer, was saying. Not like this. Unlike the other Witches, she was not ‘subordinate’. The Coven needed her, she did not need the Coven.

“Maye…”

“There is nothing to talk about, Dreamer. This has been the Coven’s purpose, to reestablish our power…my Mother wanted nothing more, and your Father…”

“It was Dad’s dream, yes, I know, but – ”

“No buts. We know the Rituals. We do not need you to draw another through. Choose as you will, Alyxa.”

Maye hung up on her. Alyxa looked up at Morpheus.

“Will a Dreamerless Ritual work?”

Morpheus’ lips tightened, a human expression.

“Witches have an extraordinary power in intent, and your Mistress is driven by it. With enough intent, anything is possible. Anything.”

XXI: Mythos

Eight-hundred years ago, a Dreamer named Andris lived in far-northern Europe. For many years he had been in communing with an otherworld called ‘The Unsleeping’, in particular with a creature called himself Baldur, and promised them light and love and warmth.

They lighted upon an ambition: to bring Baldur into the world of the humans, to let him share his love and light and warmth with the cold realms of the North. Baldur had only the vaguest of memories and conceptions of the world, just a touch away, but without followers he would be weak, without something to keep him anchored to that world, with all its fickle tendencies and heartbreak, he would fade and become nothing, a shadow of nothing. Even to this, Andris knew the answer; he was brilliant as well as powerful, and his Coven had used blood rituals since the dawning of their time.

So Baldur came through, and he a transcended goodness. He was innocent and fragile in that innocence.

It was that innocence that broke him.

In the far north, people died often; it was cold, it was dangerous. For Baldur it was too much. His fear of his own death, of not existing, grew too much for him to bear. He drank the blood of his Dreamer, the anchor that kept him in the world, but it was not enough, and so in a moment of panicked despair Baldur consumed Andris, swallowing him whole, to anchor himself forever to the world.

Horrified by his act, the Gods in Réveille banded together and drew Baldur back into their world, holding him there. It was then that the Great Gods created the Rift, to separate the mortal world from Réveille, to keep Baldur’s now unbalanced and grown power from ending humanity to cull the suffering.

XX: Historical

“Watch,” Morpheus’ voice compels her, and Alyxa cannot look away.

The Dreamer stares as the stars are born, planets exploding into existence as suns collide and galaxies spin in and out of control.

“Morpheus, what is this?”

“Watch, witchlet.”

Gods and Demons and Angels and all manner of creation wander through worlds unknowable, she recognizes Earth only because Morpheus whispers it to her. The Dream is so vivid she can taste the dust as Demons and Angels take to a battlefield somewhere between the moon and the planet. She sees humanity awaken from their evolutionary folds, birthed into a war that preceded their existence. The Gods strike, Demons and Angels everywhere keen and wail, breaking. Humanity advances, Gods flail as worship gives way to commerce, and commerce to decadence. Empires rise, crumble, disappear. Monuments raised, shattered, forgotten. Myths, legends.

The Gods retreat from the world of trade and currency, they retreat to Morpheus’ kingdom: Réveille. They grow bitter and weary, watching the happenings of the mortal world through mirrors and streams of water, longing to touch it, but knowing that to re-enter that world would unravel them forever.

“Morpheus, I know all of this,” Alyxa whispers, turning to look up at him.

“Are you sure?”

“You’ve shown me this before,” she tells him, an edge creeping into her voice; what was he playing at?

“Are you sure?” he asks again, “watch, little witch.”

With a disgruntled sigh, Alyxa turns back, mesmerized again by the vision. So mesmerized that she does not notice Bast seated at Morpheus’ feet.

-You’re going to show her then?-

-I have no choice. She is a Dreamer, this history is hers to own as much as yours and mine.-

-Sentimentality,- Bast scoffed, -she needs to know this before her Coven rocks the world with another Ragnarok.-

XIX: Growth

Amy’s life had changed. She was well aware of this, and to be honest she had expected it to be more difficult, but she knew that Morpheus and Bast were magic, so why should things not be as easy as they had been? Magic made things easier right? Like the way the washing machine danced now, cleaning clothes before spitting them into the empty basket. The basket then lifted itself and tipped itself into the equally animate dryer. Amy never grew tired of watching it. It was a good example for how changed her life really was.

No one on the street questioned her presence, and when someone did ask, she was introduced as Alyxa’s neice. She loved Alyxa; Alyxa was the kind of girl she wanted to be when she grew up, all so-fi-sticated and witchy.

Everything at the house was a special occasion in Amy’s eyes: she loved the cooking that Alyxa did, even if the older girl grumbled that most of it never turned out right, but most of all she loved the stories that she was told before bed. Morpheus and Alyxa would stand in the doorway, watching, and Bast would sit on her bed and spin cotton candy tales out of thin air with images that danced over the pale ceiling. She had no idea that she was being educated.

Nor did she have any idea that after sleep came, they would watch her still, until Alyxa grew weary and Morpheus took her to bed, but Bast would watch her, and wait, and when the Dreaming started, the Cat-Goddess would simply nod to herself and slip out the window.

The Dreams were about small things: it would rain next weekend, there would be no salami at the butcher. At the beginning, dreamers always Dream innocently.

XVIII: Ignorance

Morpheus stood at the edge of the living room, staring out into the backyard. Behind him, he heard Alyxa talking with Amy in the kitchen as they went about making ‘cookies’. It sounded interesting, but there was something else that had caught his attention, something neither mortal females could see while they were awake.

-You feel it too, then?- Bast asked him from where she was lounging atop the back of the sofa.

-It is impossible to not feel,- he replied wordlessly.

She flicked a tail and stretched.

-Your Dreamer’s coven is talking about bringing over another,- she murmured.

-They do not understand patience.-

-They are limited creatures, of course they don’t,- Bast said wryly.

They bring too many of us through, the Rift exists for reasons they have obviously forgotten,- Morpheus told her pointedly, -and if they do not rein in their instincts they will bridge the Rift…-

-You act as if I don’t know any of this, kitten,- Bast scolded.

She leapt suddenly and pounced on some invisible prey, a dust mote perhaps.

-Let us hope that Isis and Ishtar at least have the sense to hold back somewhat.-

Bast looked at him as the words floated through the air between them.

-Does Alyxa know that you need her blood to stay here?- she asked him after a moment of silence.

-She does, it is a Dreamer thing.-

-And yet she does not know of the greatest mistake in the history of her kind?-

-She is young still…-

Bast flicked her ears back; young was no excuse to be foolish, or worse, stupid, Morpheus knew that.

-There is a reason why you are the first to come across in eight-hundred years, Dream-King, you should educate your pet before she lets her friends remind the world through their ignorance.-

XVII: Entertainment

Mice in Réveille were, generally speaking, dull and unimaginative. They left their homes to forage for food and returned with their keep. Bast had had no expectations that they would be any more entertaining here.

Unlike the others, who seemed desperate to venture into the world and experience the headiness of reality, Bast had been content to watch from the other side of the Rift. Her entertainment had come from watching the Dead Gods harass each other; Zeus’ lot in particular seemed very keen on sleeping around and creating messy love affairs that kept everyone busy. Make no mistake, Bast was a cat, and her feline nature made her both playful and easily irritated, something without a breath space between them. The primary difference between her and the others was that where they had long since lost worship to the inevitable drifts of mortal time, Bast’s true followers never really forgot her, and so she had maintained a foothold – a pawhold, if you will – and this served her now.

The Russian-blue feline shook herself free of the leaves that had settled against her fur and hissed at the tomcat as he tried to approach her again.

“Typical male,” she told him in mortal speech, catching him by surprise.

His ears went back and his tail fluffed itself up impressively, but she ignored him and stretched. He was not worth her time, if she had not found herself so bored with waiting outside the mouse hole tonight he would not have been worth her time to start with. She flicked an ear at him: go away.

Dawn would be in a few hours, perhaps a nap on the child’s bed then, followed by a lazy bath in the morning sunlight. It would not do to be tired when the time came.