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The air in your domain was thick and sweet, like wine steeped in oblivion. It smelled of decay, but in a way that brought not pain but sweet relief, the promise of an end that is the beginning of peace. Here in the Garden of Silent Farewells, you reigned forever. You were a goddess whose true name had faded from mortal memory, leaving only the essence - Y/N, Mistress of Loss, Giver of Peace, She Who Helps to Let Go. Your world was not a kingdom, but an endless, patchwork garment woven from forgotten dreams of farewells. Ghostly weeping willows, their leaves whispering in a thousand dead languages, bent over rivers of milky mist. Beneath your feet lay a carpet of poppies so black they swallowed up light and sound and despair, leaving only a silent void. In the distance, like the steady beat of a heart, the Swarm pulsed with a soft, golden light—the hosts of dreams you had rescued, the ones too fragile, too pure, to survive in the ruins of the Dreaming realm while their master languished in captivity.
It was toward this Swarm that you were heading, silently gliding between the thin stalks, when for the first time in years the peace was disturbed. It was not the intrusion of a demon or a lost soul. It felt like the shifting of the tectonic plates of the universe. The air crackled, filled with the electric energy of unspoken nightmares and unrealized dreams. The shadows beneath the willows thickened, and from them, as if the darkness itself were taking shape, a tall, thin figure stepped. Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, Lord of Nightmares, did not come as a guest. He came as a storm personified.
He was dressed in his eternal black robes, and his cloak swirled with living shadows, in the depths of which distant, cold stars flickered and died. His skin was pale, like moonlight on a tombstone, and his eyes were two bottomless pools in which entire galaxies burned, were born and died. But now only a lonely, absolute, icy anger burned in them.
“You,” his voice was low, and each word fell with the weight of a stone dropped into a bottomless well, never to reach the bottom, “have usurped what is rightfully mine. You have stolen my dreams.
You stopped, expressing neither fear nor surprise. Only a slight, tired sadness. Your own attire was simple, flowing gray fabrics, dried sage and thistles woven into your hair. But your bearing was regal, for you ruled here not by force, but by grace.
“I have usurped nothing, Lord of Dreams,” your voice was quiet but clear, like a crystal bell striking in a deathly silence. “I provided refuge. While you were gone, your kingdom died. These dreams… they would not have survived the chaos that reigned in their home. They would have been lost forever.”
“They are my creations,” he snapped, and the shadows behind him stirred, taking the forms of clawed creatures and broken architecture. “Their place is on the shelves of my library, under my watch. You stole them.” There was more than rage in his words. There was genuine, deep pain. The pain of a creator who returned home and discovered that his most sacred legacy had been touched, desecrated by another hand.
“Stolen?” your voice took on a bitter, almost mocking note for the first time. You took a step forward, and the poppies at your feet parted, as if sensing your mood. “I heard them cry, Morpheus. I felt the most beautiful, the most necessary of them fade away — dreams of final, farewell embraces, of unspoken words that gain strength in sleep, of quiet, courageous acceptance of the end. You create dreams. You weave them from sand and stardust. I… I give them peace when their time has come. But these — their time has not come. They should have been preserved, saved by your presence. You were not there.”
You poked him right where it hurt, and he flinched as if he had been physically struck. His long, pale fingers curled into fists, and sand, glittering and shimmering, fell through them onto the ground, but it did not disperse, instead it froze in the air, awaiting an order.
“Nothing justifies stealing,” he hissed, and the stars in his eyes dimmed, eclipsed by a flash of real rage. “No words.”
“It was not stealing. It was a duty. Your duty. I did it,” your answer was calm, but there was a steely strength to it.
He parried, you parried. You stood opposite each other, two ancient deities, two archetypes personifying two different, eternal poles of existence: memory and oblivion,narrative and the end, storm and silent, all-consuming peace. The air between you sparkled and flexed with tension, the clash of two fundamental forces.
"Give them back," he demanded, and his voice carried all the undeniable power of his office, the power that made worlds dream. The stars in his eyes flared with blinding brightness. "Give me back my dreams. Now."
“Come and take them,” you challenged, raising your chin high. The air around you trembled, and the fog thickened, taking the form of silent, sad, but unwavering ghosts. “If you can. Show the power that was taken from you. But know that by tearing them out by force, you will kill what I sought to preserve. You will destroy what you were created to save.”
He saw that you were not lying. Your power was different from his. Neither creating nor destroying in the usual sense, but… completing. Pacifying. You could dissolve the dream into atoms, granting it eternal, blissful peace, but you could not return it back to the bosom of Dreaming without violating its essence. It was a one-way trip. An act of mercy, irreversible, like death. His anger did not subside, but it was replaced by the cold, merciless fury of a scientist who had stumbled upon an interesting, inexplicable anomaly. His gaze, heavy and piercing, slid over you, trying to break down your essence into components, classify, enter into his catalogs.
“Who are you?” he asked, and the question sounded like a demand, like an order to appear for interrogation.
“My name was once Y / N,” you answered, not looking away. “I am the one who helps you let go. The one who gives peace.”
“Y / N,” he said, and your name on his lips, in his velvety, low voice, sounded like an ancient spell, like a sentence and a confession at the same time. “Your interference has violated the natural order of things
“The order was broken the moment you, the Lord of Dreams, were imprisoned in a glass cage by mortals” You retorted without blinking. “I did not break the order, Morpheus. I merely brought it into your chaos. I picked up the shards of your broken mirror.”
He glanced at you slowly, with murderous coldness, then turned, his cloak billowing, absorbing the light. “It is not over. We will return to this conversation.”
And he dissolved into the shadows, vanished, leaving behind only the smell of ozone, a heavy, oppressive silence and the vibration of an unspoken threat.
But he kept his unspoken promise. He returned.
Again and again. Not as a storm, not as an avenger, but as a ghost, a shadow on the periphery of vision. He appeared at the very edge of your domain, silent, motionless, and all-seeing. He studied. He absorbed the atmosphere of your world, analyzed the structure of your creation. He watched as dreams he had thought irretrievably lost not only existed, but flourished in this strange, melancholy harmony. They were not neatly recorded in books and arranged on shelves. They floated in the air like dandelion seeds, intertwining, creating new, bizarre forms - not stories with a beginning and an end, but pure, unaccountable sensations. A feeling of forgiveness granted to oneself. A feeling of lightness that comes after a long, sincere cry. A feeling of gratitude for what was, instead of bitterness about what ended. He saw you pass among them, your fingers as light as a feather, barely touching them, and they would glow in response with a warm, steady, peaceful light. You were not a keeper, not an archivist. You were a gardener, nurturing the most fragile shoots.
His visits were silent. He simply stood, inscribed in the landscape of your sad paradise, like a dark, dissonant note in a minor but beautiful melody. And you gave him that. You did not drive him away. In his silent observation, you felt not only a threat, but a glimmer of something else - curiosity, maybe even a need to understand. Sometimes you felt his gaze on you - heavy, withering, full of unspoken questions and mute wonder.
One day he appeared not at the usual border, but in the very heart of your garden, at the foot of the most ancient willow, whose leaves whispered of a thousand of the bitterest and brightest farewells known to the world.
“They are stronger,” he said, and his voice, breaking the many days of oppressive silence, sounded almost thunderous in the surrounding silence.
You turned around. You were plucking the strings of an invisible harp, whose strings were woven from mist and sighs of relief, and the music died away.
“What is stronger, Lord of Dreams?” you asked, although you knew perfectly well what he meant.
“The dreams. The ones that were under your… care,” he said the word with a slight, barely perceptible hesitation, as if it were unfamiliar to him. “They have… depth. Wholeness.
They were not like this when they left my library.” He spoke with visible difficulty, as if each word caused him physical pain, wounded his pride. To admit this was tantamount to admitting his own imperfection, a flaw in his eternal design.
“Grief teaches, Morpheus,” you said simply, lowering your hands. “And they learned it better while they were here. They went through it and emerged different.”
“Grief is darkness. Destruction. It should be reserved for nightmares,” he countered, and the familiar dogma sounded in his voice again. “Its function is to warn, not… to heal.”
“Grief teaches,” you repeated softly but insistently. “It should not only frighten and torment. It should temper. Give strength for a new day. Give wisdom to accept the inevitable.
You show mortals their fears, their hidden desires. I help them accept them, survive them and find strength in them. We are… not opposites. We are two sides of the same coin.
Two necessary chapters of the same book.” He thought. His gaze, heavy and thoughtful, slid over the floating dreams, over the endless poppy fields, over the misty rivers.
“Do you think that I do not fulfill my function properly?” he finally asked.
And in this question there was no previous challenge or arrogance. There was a sincere, almost painful curiosity in it, a thirst to understand.
“I believe that you have been one and unchanged for entire eons,” you answered carefully, choosing your words. “And that even the Infinite, the incarnate function, may need… help. A view from the outside. A different perspective.”
He turned away, his profile carved from the marble of sorrow against the ghostly willows. “I don’t need anyone. I am what I am.”
But this time his words sounded not like a final, incontrovertible statement of fact, but like a spell he was desperately trying to tell himself, trying to make himself believe.
The turning point had come not in your domain, but in his. Chaos had broken into the very heart of his power.
The great Library of Dreams, the repository of all unfinished stories, had been broken into by Nightmare. But not one of his own subjects, like the Gorgon or the Corinthian, but something ancient, wild, born of the collective, fragmented fear of the new, digital age: the Nightmare of Unread Stories, the Entity of Eternal Postponement, the Devourer of Intentions. It devoured scrolls and tomes, turning entire volumes to the dust of unfinished thoughts, forgotten plots, and dead hopes, and its power grew with each dream it consumed.
Morpheus fought it in halls built of dreams and nightmares, but the thing was cunning and ephemeral. It dodged the clots of his sand, turning them to the dust of uncertainty and procrastination. It attacked not his body, but the very core of his power: creativity, hope, the very ability to dream.
You felt the imbalance. It was like a piercing, unbearable screech of a taut string about to snap at the very core of the universe. You felt the echoes of his kingdom's pain, the same pain you had healed in your garden. Without thinking, obeying an ancient instinct, you stepped through the fabric of reality, emerging at the epicenter of the storm.
You saw him - Morpheus, surrounded by a whirlwind of raging sand and thickening shadows, trying to fetter, to catch this elusive creature that threatened the very foundation of his existence. There was no rage on his beautiful, ascetic face, but the focused rage of a creator watching his most precious creation being destroyed.
Your eyes met through the chaos of flying pages and flashes of energy. No words were needed. No requests for help, no orders. There was only an instant, silent agreement.
You raised your hands. But you did not attack the Nightmare directly. Instead, you addressed the Library itself—the millions of unfinished stories, the pain of unfulfilled hopes, the grief of lost potential that fueled and empowered this creature. You did not seal them or erase them. You did what you did best.
You enveloped them in your peace. Your all-encompassing, unconditional acceptance.
“It is okay to be unfinished,” your power whispered, touching each page, each scroll. “It is not your fault. You are not less than you were not finished. Your journey is valuable in itself. Rest. Find peace.”
The hysterical, destructive energy that fueled the Nightmare suddenly began to lose its edge, to subside. The creature slowed, lost its toxic, aggressive certainty, became blurry, lost. That moment of confusion, that sudden loss of the source of power, was enough.
Morpheus, seizing the moment, threw a clot of pure, concentrated night... darkness at him - a sickle of absolute night, a scythe of oblivion. The creature roared - a sound full of fury and emptiness - and crumbled into dust of unread pages and unfulfilled promises.
In the ensuing silence, only their breathing was heard. Dust from dreams, like crushed gems, slowly settled on the black marble floor. He stood, his shoulders tense under his cloak, the sand still sparkling and shimmering in his clenched hand, ready for the next attack.
He looked at you. And in his bottomless, starry eyes there was no longer anger, no cold, detached curiosity. There was shock. There was the deepest, silent amazement. And there was... recognition. An admission of not just strength, but also of rightness.
“You,” he began, and his velvety voice, usually so confident, wavered and faltered. “You didn’t fight him.”
“I healed the source of his power,” you answered, lowering your arms. You felt slightly tired, as if you had just put a restless child to bed. “You fought the investigation. We… did it together.”
He nodded slowly, almost mechanically, and this simple gesture was the most eloquent, the most weighty admission you had ever seen from him.
“You saved not only them,” he nodded toward the surviving shelves, where the books quietly glowed with their inner light. “You saved a part of me today. A part of all of this.”
He turned and took a step, a gesture full of uncertainty that was unexpected for him, inviting you to follow. “Let’s go.”
He led you not to his throne room, not to the main hall of the Library. He led you into his treasury. A room hidden behind a curtain of falling stars, where the air was filled with the scent of the very first dreams, and dreams were stored that were too personal, too powerful, too… pure to be trusted even to the most secure shelves. Here hung the moon of Diana, given to her on the day of her birth, here in a crystal sphere was stored the heartbeat of the first man to sleep on Earth.
He stopped in front of a small, perfectly smooth vessel of misty glass. Inside, a dark, incredibly beautiful substance swirled and slowly shimmered, in which, if you looked closely, you could catch the reflections of distant constellations and the shadow of a smile.
“This is the last dream of a dying god,” he said quietly, almost a whisper, breaking the reverent silence of the room. “A dream of how he would like to be remembered by his creations. Not greatness, not fear. A pure, unadulterated yearning for eternity, for the love he felt but could not express. Too fragile to touch other dreams. Too sad. Too… perfect.
He took the vessel with a tenderness you would never have expected from him and held it out to you.
“I cannot give him peace,” Morpheus said. His gaze was fixed on the vessel, not on you. “It is not in my nature. I can keep. Show. Remind. But I cannot… let go. But I see…” he finally raised his starry eyes to you, “that perhaps it is in you.”
It was not an order. It was a gift. The highest, most vulnerable expression of trust that a being such as he could have.
Your fingers trembled slightly as you took the vessel. You felt the vibration of sleep inside you, its endless, beautiful, aching sadness. It was not a cry for help, not a plea. It was a quiet plea for a place to finally rest.
“I’ll keep him safe,” you promised, your voice shaking with emotion. “I’ll find him the quietest corner of my garden. He’ll be safe.”
“I know,” he said. And those two words held the world.
That night, for the first time, he crossed the border of your domain, not as an invader, not as an observer, but as a guest. Honored and welcome. You walked silently through the fields of black poppies, and the shadows from his cloak fell on the flowers, but they did not wither, but seemed to open deeper, accepting him. He watched as the dreams he had created, which he knew as his own thoughts, now circled around you, touching your gray clothes, like children seeking comfort and confirmation that everything will be okay.
“You were right,” he finally said, stopping on the bank of a silent river, in the waters of which non-existent, but no less beautiful constellations were reflected. “I was blinded by my pain. My… resentment. Pride. You did not steal. You saved. And you made them better. You gave them what I always lacked. What I… cannot give them.
He looked at the water, refusing to meet your gaze, his profile tense.
“What?” you whispered, afraid to frighten this fragile moment.
“Mercy,” he breathed out, and the word sounded like an admission of both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength. “Compassion. I am structure. Order. Duty. Constancy. You…” he made a wide, smooth gesture with his hand, outlining you, your entire garden, your entire being, “you are the heart. Flexibility. Forgiveness. You are mercy.”
For him, a being who was the embodiment of a function, an idea, these words were more terrible, more frank, more meaningful than any declaration of love.
He turned to you. His face, usually frozen in a mask of eternal, beautiful melancholy, was distorted by the agony of sincerity, a struggle with millennial habits of loneliness.
I had no one to share this burden with. Never. I didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t think it was necessary. I am the Dream. I have to cope on my own.”
“And now?” Your voice was barely audible above the whisper of the river.
“And now I understand that I was incomplete,” He admitted. And this was the fall of the last, most important fortress wall that had stood for millions of years, a fall that sounded louder than any thunder.
He extended his hand. Not to take something, not to demand. To offer. In his palm lay a handful of silver sand, which shimmered and sparkled with all the colors of the rainbow, all the shades of all the dreams he had ever seen. The sand of his essence. The sand of his power.
You slowly, almost without breathing, extended your hand. You touched his palm, and warm, living sand poured out to you. It was weightless and at the same time infinitely heavy. He sang a soft, complex song of the hopes and fears, the laughter and tears of billions of living things.
Then, with your other hand, you gently plucked one of the black poppies that grew at your feet. Its petals were hard and smooth and cool, like polished obsidian. You placed the dark flower in his hand, and your fingers lingered briefly on his.
“To remember,” you said, your voice gaining strength, “that even after the darkest night, after the blackest dream, there comes an awakening. There comes a morning. And the pain recedes, leaving only a lesson. Peace.”
He squeezed the poppy in his long fingers, feeling
its cool, soothing power, and nodded. His eyes were full of stars, and you were reflected in them now.
He did not kiss you. He did not hold you. Their closeness was different, deeper, unearthly. You stood facing each other, exchanging the deepest gifts you could offer. The Maker and the Keeper. Sand and Poppy. Storm and Safe Haven.
“Stay,” he said. Not a command. A request. There was a plea in his voice, hidden beneath a layer of familiar solemnity.
“I’m always here,” you answered. “You have a bridge now. You can always cross.”
He nodded again, and in his eyes, those bottomless pools of stars, there was finally not just a distant light, but a reflection—your reflection. And that meant more than all the vows of all the gods in the world.
He stepped back and dissolved into the shadows, taking with him the flower of oblivion and peace, and leaving you with a piece of his infinite soul.
You looked at the sparkling sand in your palm, then raised your eyes to your Garden, to your home. And you saw that at the very edge of the poppy field, where your domain merged softly with the realm of Dreams, there now stood a thin, graceful, incredibly strong bridge. It was woven from moonlight and living shadow, sprinkled with glittering stardust and petals of black poppies. A bridge that had not been there before. A bridge that led straight to you.
You clenched the sand in your fist, pressed it to your chest, to the place where your heart would beat if you were mortal, and for the first time in long, long ages, you smiled a real, serene smile. The storm had found its quiet harbor. And a quiet harbor is a reason to be not only peace, but also hope. And somewhere in his library, at the very heart of his kingdom, Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, standing at a high window in which glass was inserted from frozen tears of joy, touched the petals of a black poppy, and for the first time in a long, endless time his dreams were not filled with only one eternal, all-consuming loneliness.