Work Text:
*Morpheus POV*
She was born with a name.
It was not yet forgotten, but it will be.
Born to quite traditional parents, in a country somewhere.
In life she'd gone to school. She learned many things there.
She learned numbers and how to count them, although nothing good came of it. She learned letters and how they could create worlds. Well, words, the teachers would correct her. But she was right.
She learned of history, and she thought it had a bad ending.
She'd learned that thoughts lead to facts, and feelings lead somewhere else, and facts don't care about them.
She'd learned that thoughts are meant to be shared, but feelings should be kept secret. And so she did. And she was good at it.
She'd kept it a secret when she broke the cookie jar. The cat gladly took the blame, knowing it would not punished.
She'd kept it a secret when she would play dress up games on the internet. It didn't matter.
She'd kept it a secret when she rolled in her bedsheets in the morning, until the blankets surrounding her body became a long princess gown in her mind.
She'd kept it a secret that she thought pink was a pretty color, and that she would wear it all the time if she was a girl.
She kept it a secret when the voice in her body lowered, and the voice in her head remained high.
She never shared with anybody that she forgot her appearence until she saw it in the mirror. Or that she could feel the girl beneath the color of her thoughts.
Even when she'd heard there was a name for her feelings, she'd kept the name a secret too.
Because the name was everywhere. She'd heard her parents talk about it at the dinner table. Her dad and her progressive sister didn't know they were debating her. She would never participate in those conversations.
Debates were about facts. And facts didn't care about her feelings. Not one bit.
She tried to find joy in going through life knowing that the secret was hers. That no one knew who she was but her. She was the only one who knew her name. She thought of herself as a mystery, unknown. Sometimes it helped.
But her real peace was found in observing. In watching the trees go by through the bus window. It was her comfort in waking life, before and after each school day.
She suffered, yes. But she never had nightmares.
In her sleep, she was cradled by fever dreams. Intense dreams of alternate, yet familiar realities. Like a child who'd just been born, she didn't care what shape she had in her dreams so long as she could explore them.
Her dreams took her to the middle of the woods, and to deserts, to lost abandoned castles and to the edges of endless streams, to endless lonely roads, to boulevards of broken dreams. Yet whichever space she found herself in, however dark or bright, however empty, she found joy.
In her waking life she had dreams, but they were distant and frightening promises. Waking dreams demanded action and she was not one to act. While sleeping dreams were harmless, or so she thought, waking dreams could kill.
And they were so painfully distant!... She couldn't reach them if she wanted, not yet.
The people on the internet told her she could. That everything would get better once her years would count to the magic number of eighteen.
She had lived to be thirteen.
She was going to chase another dream. Perhaps she would meet the black haired figure. The only time she'd ever seen a person in her dreams.
Was it a woman wearing black, or a man wearing black? It did not matter. By the time she'd had that dream, she'd known what she wanted to do.
She'd already sent heart emojis to her parents and friends. The jar of pills would take her to her better dream, as they took her grandma to sleep every night.
She realized she had one regret, the only one of her short life. She had never told any of them the truth. She never told them her name.
She died that night, unknown.
Facts don't care about your feelings?
Wrong.
Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths, that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.
And in my realm, her tale had been written.
The child, the girl, the lost one, the traveler. It was all in the library, in the book which I read. That book, only that book, contains her true name.
In her last minutes, she'd found a last place to explore: The heart of the dreaming. The castle.
She first noticed the walls, the stars, the shapes. She'd never felt so real. Never so known. Never so seen.
The man in the throne was a man after all. The same one she'd met in her dreams.
"Your home is beautiful" -She told me.
And I told her she was welcome to stay. And so she chose.
The dreamers call her the Liminal Space, essence of the dream waters, designer of lonely places. The one who comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.
Those who know of loneliness, the unknown, the inadequate, the unwanted, the abandoned, find themselves in her.
They feel her presence as they shape, together, the color of her walls, the dim lights of her thoughts, the mist of her breath.
Lost in her solitude there is no judgement, nor comparison with others, for there are no others. In her it is alright to be lost. She, who lives in your dreams and you do not know her. Even if no one sees you, you are never alone, for she is there with you, and she knows you, as I do. She will never forget your name.