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ginoeh · 2 months

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Welcome to my entry for the @the-centennial-husbands-bigbang 2024! Art was done by the amazing @lalaithquetzallicaresi ! You can find her over at Deviant Art as well!

Biggest thanks go to @tharkuun for tackling the task of pruning the purple out of my prose 💜! Thank you so much, friend!

Special thanks go to @chaosheadspace for allowing me to annex parts of her idea and doing my own thing with it! Without you this would be a different story altogeher...

To The Edge of Night

Explicit | Hob Gadling/Dream of the Endless | Part 1 of 3 | 11k

Part One Part Two

*** *** ***

Chapter One

It is quiet beneath the water’s surface.

Hob hangs there, suspended and weightless, beams of light filtering down through the cool liquid and refracting on ascending bubbles. In the back of his mind, there is the animal fear of nonono you need to breathe and no not again I don’t want to drown, but it is a muted, sizzling static barely more than white noise and easily disregarded. It is only the well-known echo of an old nightmare, so familiar by now that it is almost a friend.

He should probably breathe soon, a sluggish and strangely calm part of his brain remarks, more out of obligation to observe the usual human behavioural pattern that is tattooed into everyone at birth and less because he feels he needs air. The larger part of Hob’s brain is preoccupied with becoming self-aware enough to recognize that he is dreaming.

Below him, in the unseen black depth of whatever body of water his unconscious mind has made up, Hob detects a pressure change. More bubbles rise towards the vaguely defined surface, each of them carrying a world in them, a scene, a mind. Hob rips his eyes away from them; they are ephemeral, they’ll pop upon reaching the surface, like iridescent soap bubbles releasing their dreams into the ether once the dreamer awoke.

He frowns, vaguely aware that he shouldn’t know this, even as he observes the unknowable blackness underneath him. He knows what will happen next. This isn’t the first time he has this dream, after all. As if on schedule, the cold currents that swirl around his toes and bare calves grip tighter, sneaking up his thighs, then hips, grabbing and tugging until they find purchase.

The first time, Hob had struggled, the old drowning nightmare trying to reassert itself. He’d woken gasping and in cold sweat with the uncomfortable feeling of having done an injustice to some nameless, pleading thing. In hindsight - if such a concept can be applied to something as illogical as dreams - he hadn’t felt threatened by the odd dream, per se. He’d been feeling vaguely guilty about it for days even when the actual dream had started to fade in the daylight hours. Dreaming in and of itself had become such an unusual concept to him over the 20th century that feeling like he had rejected one out of such an old fear had nearly made him want to apologise.

Hob had laughed at himself at that and made it a point to openly anticipate the still, black waters and cold undercurrent. He’d felt like a child, pretending the monster under his bed was actually a nice fellow and just wanted some company.

The same dream had come again and again after that, not often but insistently, over weeks and months. He’s become strangely protective and appreciative of his only recurring and lucid dream.

The worlds glinting in the air bubbles are a new addition, though.

Intrigued, Hob casts one more look at them before reaching with his hands into the tugging cold water, trying to bend down towards the depths where the emerging bubbles shimmer like silvery pearls before they rise. Then he is gripped - by fingers belonging to something like a hand, emerging from a body that was like his own but not, a dark mirror with sharp teeth in its smile - and ripped downwards, head first.

The current tosses him like a ragdoll, down down down, buffeting him from all sides until Hob is twisted and bent in a way no human could possibly survive, were they in the real world. The humanoid shape that has gripped him is long gone, replaced by a cold riptide that carries him along more bubbles and dreams and worlds - over there is a glimpse of a candy coloured sky, here the view of a breathtakingly impossible mountain range, there an impression of creeping horror in a run-of-the-mill office setting -

Curiously, with his waking mind lurking at the back like an observer behind a screen, Hob takes stock of the images and scenes he is drawn past. Different dreams, he acknowledges with the certainty of the sleeping, not his own but contained in these waters with him anyway. Suffusing them all, there is an emptiness; a yearning and a barren longing for something absent, something alien and all-encompassing. It is an empty night sky missing stars; cracked-dry earth missing the rain; a vibrant picture bled of all colours; a gaping maw of undirected wild dreams that threatens to swallow everything in its path -

Then, Hob is sucked upwards, the dream bubbles becoming indistinct blurs of colour and sound until only the impenetrable dark of the deep sea remains.

Finally, he is spat out.

It feels like waking up, only in reverse.

He doesn’t know how long he lays there, or if time even has any significance in this strange place at all. He isn’t wet, for all that he thinks he’s travelled through water. Underneath his fingertips he feel the grain of age-worn wood, a solid surface that dugs into his back reassuringly.

Suddenly, in the way of dreams, there is someone standing over him. Dark skinned with close cropped hair that shows off elfin-like tipped ears. The being observs him over its glasses, curious and mistrusting.

“You are not my Lord.” The voice is female.

Hob can’t really fault the assertion. This has to be the most interesting dream he’s ever had.

“No, I’m not,” he says, and doesn’t make a move to sit up. It doesn’t feel prudent to try seeing as he is, in reality, laying in his bed fast asleep. “But if you see him, tell him that his dreaming waters are really pretty turbulent, won’t you?”

Hob isn't particularly sure why it is those specific words that want to be said but it tracks with the whole knowledge that this is, in the end, a dream and therefore he’d better go along with the script. The curious woman’s lips twitch and something a bit warmer than perfunctory curiosity enters her eyes. It might be amusement.

“I will, dreamer. As soon as my Lord is finally back again.”

Hob frowns, sinking further into the wooden plank beneath him that suddenly feels much too soft and comfortable and warm. He thinks of the insistent pull of the currents, of the uncanny knowledge that the waters are too rough, of the insistent yearning.

“That’s not good though, is it? Him - not here, missing.” He casts his eyes into the sky - grey and drab, but is that the edge of his wardrobe emerging over there? - before trying to focus again on the woman. “Who’re you, anyway? And why am I here?”

“I am Lucienne, the Palace Librarian.” She sounds far away. ”And you, dreamer, need to wake up.”

*** *** ***

It all started by chance.

At least, that was what Hob would reconstruct much later. He'd been a morose, pathetic bastard in the mid-nineties, so he was loath to call it something as trite as luck, or even bad luck.

He'd nearly cancelled his plans in favour of going on another drug-fuelled bender dose of inadvisable substances the night before, nearly took a right turn to get home faster. But then, entirely on a whim he’d decided to stick to his vague plan and turned left despite it all. However unlikely it was, he'd ended up at the rundown storage unit in The Middle of Nowhere, USA, when night was falling. There was a single light on in the manager's container, but instead of the old and brusque guy he'd talked with on the phone a week prior, a stressed-out twenty-something sat at the desk.

The office itself was a dump and the person manning not in a largely better state.

The air was heavy with too sweet perfume, but not enough to completely disguise the smell of mould and sweat. Mismatched boxes littered most of the floorspace and heaps of paperwork nearly swallowed the flimsy plastic desk as well as the androgynous tween behind it. Shadows burrowed grooves along their premature stress lines. They was staring blankly at a stack of folders. Hob thought they might possibly be a woman. Or - might have been born a woman, in any case.

“I'm sorry, I don't know what Da’ was thinking. This is a fu- a freakin’ mess.” They shoved strands of shortish black hair behind pierced ears and nervously tapped a pen against a page of unreadable handwriting.

Hob regretted not cancelling his plans. His head pounded something fierce and he thought longingly of the plastic bag of white powder underneath his passenger seat. He could have had a date with sweet delirium instead of standing here in the dark, trying to organize his next life. Mildew stared at him from the upper corner of the office container.

“Look, it doesn't matter. We can just pretend I was never here-”

They looked up, panicked and pleading, and interrupted him.

“No! I - we can make this work! I can-”

“Kid, if it doesn't work, then it doesn't work.” Hob sighed and started to turn around. The smell of the perfume itched at the back of his throat. He felt wretched. This whole damn decade was wretched.

“Please, wait. We- we …” They trailed off and Hob had to strain his ears to catch the despondent rest of the sentence. “...We need the money. Da’... Dad had an accident and - there's the hospital bills and… and the funeral bills now and…”

Hob pinched his nose, suppressing the rising nausea, and cursed his bleeding heart. He just hoped to every god that the actual storage units were in better shape than this office.

“I need three storage units at the very least, kid. Can you get me those?” He needed four or five to store all the debris of his past lives, to be honest, but he could be nice about this, just once.

“I, um. I have two that are empty.” They sounded so carefully optimistic and thankful that Hob felt nearly wretched at his uncharitable thoughts. “And… there's one you can… just have anyway?”

“What?”

The kid worried at their chapped lips and looked up at Hob with a grimace.

“Like, there's one where the owner is a… kind of a felon? And it's like, we're overdue rent by about three months.” They frowned. “Da’ has a phone number here about payment and stuff but, like, it's disconnected.”

And so it was by pure chance that Hob, on an all around awful and rainy night, hungover and itching for a fix, gained the keys to the storage unit of a convicted felon and found something that would change his life.

The kid fiddled with the keys before finally just handing them over to Hob and showed him the way. It wasn’t far from the office at all. They hung back as Hob ducked inside, coughing at the wave of dust kicked up by the fresh air.

“I c'n have someone trash all this stuff next week, if you want!” the kid yelled from the entrance of the musty storage unit stuffed with shelves.

Hob, though, didn't hear any of it. At the back of the cluttered space, on a heavy duty shelf at about chest height, there was a small metal box that drew his eyes. A deep red light spilled from between its hinges and from underneath the lid like beckoning fingers. The weirdest feeling of familiarity tickled his memories.

When he prised the box open, he found in it a red gemstone that looked very familiar.

*** *** ***

The ruby - though Hob didn't know if it actually was a ruby, and he had no intention of having it checked - got a place of honour in Hob's bedroom. It was a sad state of affairs, if Hob was to be honest with himself, to cling to something just because it reminded him of the stranger that had been his only constant for nearly 600 years.

He wasn’t even Hob’s friend after all.

Still, he couldn't free himself of the notion that the ruby needed to be kept close. It was pathetic - this couldn’t be the same gemstone his stranger wore to all of their meetings - and yet… he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it. It exerted a hypnotic pull over Hob at times, scrambling his thoughts and dreams even when he was otherwise completely sober, and when the nineties segued into the noughties and Hob found sobriety a not quite so unappealing prospect anymore, he decidedly closed the metal lid on its box.

Looking at it hurt.

The thought of getting rid of it hurt more.

Out of sight, out of mind, he thought. As it turned out, it wasn’t quite that easy.

*** *** ***

Hob wakes up on wooden planks beneath a slate grey sky.

Or maybe those are the wrong words. He certainly becomes aware there, with water that isn’t actually wet caressing his hair and strangely indistinct clothes. It whispers as it runs down in rivulets to join with the darkly opaque waters below the walkway Hob sits upon. As far as Hob can see, the wooden bridge extends over the softly lapping waves until it vanishes into the distance. Thunder rumbles overhead.

This is a dream.

Slowly, he stands, cupping the last drops of dry water carefully in his hands. It swirls in glittering strands, reflecting shadows and muffled screams. Hob recognizes something of the old nightmare that kept visiting him faithfully.

How odd a dream this turns out to be.

Behind him, the sea of dreams and nightmares stretches infinitely until it melts into the horizon.

“Where did you bring me, little nightmare,” Hob whispers as he lets the droplets join with the body of water below.

He doesn’t get an answer.

*** *** ***

His new life, back in London again, greeted Robert Grant with the enthusiasm afforded to any post-graduate student of the Humanities, which was to say, with depressingly little.

It didn't matter all that much, really, because Bob, as his fellow students found out, wasn’t one for overt enthusiasm either - at least when the matter at hand didn't concern his immediate interest, which anything rarely did. Who in their right mind would voluntarily make ‘The peasants’ life - agency and social standing in late 14th century Europe’ their thesis subject, after all.

Hob didn't mind.

After the drug-fuelled mind-fuck he’d made of the prior decade, he could do with a bit of academic solitude. Most of the people he had associated with were dead - or by now old and ill enough to soon be close enough - and sometimes he thought melancholy hung around him like a heavy cloak of shadows that he didn't know how to take off. Hob tried, though, he really did. Not meeting his… his stranger, suddenly becoming a truly unknown particle in an ever-expanding world will not be as world-ending as his 17th century had been, surely.

Hob only had to get a grip on himself again. It couldn't be that hard.

If he sometimes found himself suddenly awake at night, mindlessly caressing the scratched metal box with the ruby lookalike, then that was between himself and his well-loved nightmares.

*** *** ***

The wooden walkway looks the same every time Hobs comes-to on its planks. He's always alone at first, the feeling of travelling through turbulent waters still rushing in his ears while he gets his bearings. Some of the water likes to linger on him, in the folds of his clothes or in the hollow of his collarbone. Hob thinks it might be his nightmare, the one he's had on and off since the early sixteen hundreds, of drowning again and again. He smiles a little and pretends he doesn't see the not-wet water sluicing off and dripping back into the sea of nightmares below the walkway.

Sometimes the sky above him is grey and stormy, sometimes it's the blackest night Hob has ever seen, without one star to be found in the endless expanse above. It makes him uncomfortable, because something is missing.

The woman that had greeted him on his first arrival in this surrealist landscape, Lucienne, doesn’t turn up again. He's alone, except for the nightmare that clings for longer and longer each time before joining back with the rest of the dark waters.

So eventually, Hob starts walking.

It's not easy, seeing as how there are patches of planks that are loose or broken. Sometimes, he takes the time to try and put the boards back into place and fix them so they don't slip off again. But he has no nails or hammer or any other tool on him whenever he wakes on the walkway. All he ever has with him are the clothes on his back; rarely his pyjamas, thankfully, but the truly horrible amalgamation of different styles - leeched of every colour except for the washed out remnants of greys, blacks, and sometimes a hint of red - aren’t much better.

But Hob persists, and every time he puts another plank back into place, he thinks they feel eager to get back to where they belong. Next to him, the liquid pre-form of his little nightmare lingers and watches and gains consistency.

“Am I doing this right, then?” he asks, not quite looking at the slowly undulating form of the watery nightmare creature beside him. Beneath his fingers, the bleached and worn grains of wood are soft and nearly warm. The plank that he holds wants to be set back into its frame, after beingn loosened and having gone askew with time and weather.

Carefully, Hob slips it back where it belongs and does his best to press it down into the supporting structure without the aid of any tools. It fits nearly too perfectly.

Then again, this is a dream. So of course it would.

“How long does this path go on, then?” he asks next, and the tiny, misshapen creature shivers at his side. Hob looks behind him, over the endless stretch of the meandering walkway. It's so long that the farthest reaches of it, the place where Hob once got spewed up and out of the dreaming waters, are lost in the twilit dark.

It's in much better shape now than when he started this journey.

“As long as it takes, huh? Well. That’s not really helping me much, little nightmare,” he mutters, and then turns back around again, facing the mirroring path before him. Above, grey clouds start to skitter across the depthless black sky.

Hob has no idea how often he has visited this strange strange place - time is a curious thing in dreams, after all.

“Let’s go on then. No use waiting forever. Someone clearly needs to make sure this road is safe. Wouldn’t want that Lady Lucienne falling and drowning after all, would we?”

Hob walks on.

*** *** ***

Robert Grant was having a bit of a shite time of it, if he was being honest. He wasn’t, of course, but there was no one around to tell him off for it. Martin the barkeep might, but the old chap thought that old Bertholt Grant, Hob's supposed uncle, was somewhere off gallivanting in the US and doing nothing more than forking over loads and loads of pounds to keep up the lawsuit against the demolition of the White Horse.

Martin the barkeep, therefore, had no idea at all about Robert Grant, who was very much not in the US but rather squarely in London, and his current troubles. For if Rob - or Hob to his closest friends, of whom there existed exactly none at this particular early time in his new life - hadn’t been absolutely sure that his last substance-fuelled descent into delirium had been more than half a decade ago, he'd think he was maybe on a particularly long and weird trip.

He was of course vaguely aware of the arcane - of the supernatural and the magical - in the same way any immortal who had taken part in a few (more or less) genuine seances, spirit walks, and summonings would be. Apart from the whole being-immortal business, which all in all had surprisingly few magical components to it, as far as Hob had seen. Nothing in his vast spectrum of experiences offered an explanation for his recent troubles.

At times, the reality Hob found himself in felt strangely transient. As though there were an iridescent veil of rippling water behind which other things waited - things that had no business existing in a world where Hob was very much awake. Whenever he closed his eyes on the odd feeling, the shadowy depths of the sea of dreams and nightmares lapped eagerly at his consciousness. His frequent lucid dreams were a curiously consistent comfort as well as a source of mystery.

Thoughtfully, Hob traced patterns on the small, plain box that held the ruby pendant he'd found in the storage more than a decade ago. It was the only thing that had followed him into this new life from his last. Outside, early autumn rain pattered against the windows of his cheap two-bedroom apartment. On days like this, he really didn’t feel like going out at all.

As if in admonishment, the annoying ringtone of his Philips flip phone rang through the flat.

Groaning, he set the worn box back on his bedside table and went to grab the blasted thing from the faded linoleum kitchen counter. The cartoon sound of a rubber band grated on his nerves when he flipped the casing open and looked at the caller id on the greenish screen.

“What's up, Emily?”

There was an exasperated silence.

“You forgot, didn’t you? A-gain. Oswin was right.”

Hob stared blankly at the garish novelty clock on top of the microwave and wracked his brain about deadlines his deskmate in the library would call him up about. He drew a complete blank.

“Forgot what?”

“Ohmygod Bobbie. How are you even- “ She paused and took a deep breath that sounded tinny over the warbling connection. “We're at the Red Lion. The quiz is starting soon. You promised by all that's holy you'd come this week.”

Hob could hear the quotation marks in her words. And he still drew a blank on what - and more importantly why - he'd promised.

“Which Red Lion?” he dared to ask after a pause in which he could hear Emily silently despair.

“Are you shitting me? The one across the street behind the old archives building, of course!” She sighed. “Will you still come? Please? We can order something for you already. You’re not gonna be that late, Bobbie.”

It was the undertone of resignation that finally convinced him to give in against the lethargy and dissociation that had been creeping up on him again. He cast one last frown at the unassuming box that hid the ruby and ascertained once more that the rain-washed windows were truly only looking out into equally rainy London and not, for example, into the depths of an ocean he had only ever dreamed of.

It made him feel truly unhinged for one disconnected moment.

“Okay. Order away.”

At the other end, there was silence.

“I- really? I mean. Yeah, sure, Bobbie! You want anything in particular?” Emily sounded equally as surprised as happy. Hob immediately felt guilty about rebuffing so many of her previous attempts to get him to socialise.

“Not really. I don’t know, some fish and chips will do. And a lager.”

If he didn’t know any better, he’d say that Emily was scribbling down his order religiously as he spoke. Dependable note-taking was something he knew her to be really good at. They’d spent the better part of the last semester sharing lectures and a library table, so he was pretty sure he had her quirks memorised well enough.

“Though I’d rather skip on the apples and chocolate digestives, if you don’t mind too much,” he added, careful and with an exaggerated playfulness in his voice. She’d plied him with both for many months now, keeping up a constant litany of how she never saw him eat.

It was… endearing, in a way. Even if it made him uncomfortably aware that there was something wrong with him that extended beyond his lucid dreams and the vague sense that there was something hiding behind the reality he perceived. He rarely felt hunger, these days.

Maybe immortality was finally catching up with him, after all this time. Mad Hettie hadn’t gotten her nickname for being entirely sane, after all, and she was many times his junior.

On the other end of the line, Emily laughed a startled breath.

“I don’t think this dump serves anything as uppity as apples, Bobbie,” she joked. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be content with salty chips and oily fish. I’ll get you some apples on Monday, though.”

“See you in a bit, Emily. I’m on my way.”

“Yeah, laters!” She sounded happy, and Hob stared at the phone after disconnecting the call. He hadn’t realised she cared that much.

Beyond the window, evening started falling, and the water running down the glass panes looked like waves on the sea of dreams. Hob threw one more look back at the ruby in the box. For a second, he imagined a shimmer of red light spilling through the cracks. It was only an illusion, of course.

He shrugged on his jacket, grabbed his umbrella, keys, and wallet on the way out, and braved the English weather.

It was time to make some friends again.

*** *** ***

Then, one night, he reaches the end of the walkway.

Before Hob, a landscape of sandy hills, scraggly shrubs, and dark moors rises from the silvery mists.

*** *** ***

Chapter Two

Hob sits, feet dangling close to the water's surface, at the edge of the dock. The sea below his feet is silent; breathless. Above, clouds whip past in jarringly fast swirls. The sight mirrors the uncomfortable feeling lodged in Hob's stomach. Behind him is the way he came, with the sea made of dreams and nightmares and the endless path beneath an empty sky.

It’s familiar.

Hob’s nightmare creature slinks around at his periphery, its form still not quite stable. Its surface is rippling as though agitated, and sometimes it has eight long legs, sometimes only four. A few of them look like tentacles, or nets, if Hob looks as closely as he can. It dips in and out of the still water, equally unable to commit to leaving the sea behind as Hob himself. Or maybe it’s just mirroring Hob’s own indecision.

On one hand, he’s always keen on exploring the new. The landscape beyond the dunes that block Hob’s view beckons him with mystery and intrigue - where would the next path take him in this dreamland? On the other hand, he’s grown pretty appreciative of what he’s seen so far. There’s something tranquil about being alone, held between the sky and the sea, caught at the interface between a mirror and its image.

But maybe he’ll like the rest of this odd country, too. Maybe he’ll meet more strange creatures, like the one that’s been travelling with him so far.

On the horizon, far behind the dunes, the dark storm clouds gain a lighter edge.

Sighing, Hob pushes himself off the wooden boards and splashes into the water up to his calves. He leaves no ripples in his wake. The water looks and feels as though it's a blanket cocooning him. He gives a perfunctory pat to the walkway.

“Okay then, ‘t was nice having your support,” he jokes before making for the shore.

He wades out of the water’s hold. It laps at his feet when he leaves, sluices off him as smoothly as real water doesn’t and drips into the opaque black sand in shimmering impressions of faces and fears, screams and dreams. The sea starts churning suddenly, as if remembering that it’s actually supposed to be moved by the winds that still whip past them, and not by its own alien design.

Behind him, his little nightmare slinks along, trailing water and legs and fur and a hundred other things that vanish into puddles. It still doesn’t have a form, Hob thinks as he wiggles his toes into the cool and dark sand, observing it covertly. Maybe it’s trying to find one. Hob thinks it should be something sleek and small; agile.

Slowly, they trek across the beach toward the dunes. They are made of the same forebodingly black sand as the beach. Hob stays close to the shore for as long as he can. The ever-growing waves try to lap at his feet. His nightmare gamboles in the surf but doesn't ever actually go back into the sea.

The walkway behind them is never out of sight. Like one of those portraits whose eyes seem to follow the watcher, the path Hob once walked seems always to be staring at him. But even so, the draw to explore the land beyond never lets him go, either.

*** *** ***

Hob’s new life was slowly starting to lose its alien feel. It didn’t quite fit yet - like a new coat that was too stiff at the collar and too tight at the elbows until it got properly worn in. Hob recognized the crisp feeling of newness even though, usually, it came with the shine and sparkle of beginnings and promises. This time, he kept fighting against a feeling of constriction that sometimes veered concerningly close to panic.

He fought against it, of course. He just needed a bit more time to settle into a new routine, without the constancy of regular centennial meetings. That was all.

“This is it,” he said one uncommonly sunny September evening.

“What. This ramshackle hut? It looks like it’s gonna topple over if I look at it wrong.”

Oswin, an archetypal Humanities post-grad, took a deep drag of his cigarette - self-rolled, of course - and settled his other hand into his hip. His patterned shirt made Hob dizzy just from looking at it - it should probably have stayed safely hidden in someone’s forgotten 70’s wardrobe.

“I dunno, mate.” Hob shrugged and hoped it looked casual enough. He couldn’t quite look at the sad sight the White Horse made without nearly breaking into tears. “My uncle’s totally gone on the history of this pub. Anyway, that’s not the main point I’m trying to make.”

“C’mon Bobbie, you promised us a pub and good ale!”

“That’s all you’re here for, Ossi? I’m hurt.”

Oswin just rolled his eyes and handed another cigarette to Emily.

“Anyway, that’s not really what we’re here for. Come on!” Hob turned his back on the crumbling skeleton of his past and took down the street, his friends behind him. “I just came here to show you the why. I’ve still gotta show you the what..”

Emily groaned. “You’re terrible, Bobbie. You’re such an old man, the way you try to lead us on.”

“Me? Leading you on? Never in my life!” The more he had made himself brave the company of others, the easier it became to fit in. Right now, he was only maybe forty percent pretending and already sixty percent genuinely enjoying himself.

They trekked across an overgrown meadow until they arrived at a quaint two-storey building. It wasn’t even half as old as the White Horse, but it did have some history lined in its timber-framed construction.

“It’s another old and closed pub,” Oswin said.

“I think I stepped ‘nto dogshit,” Emily muttered around the smoke between her lips.

Hob couldn’t stop the laugh even if he’d wanted to.

“It’s my old and closed pub, if you wanna know.”

That shut them up at once. Property didn’t come cheap these days, after all. And Hob hadn’t exactly pretended to be well-off.

Emily abandoned her attempts to scratch the suspected dog poop off her combat boots with a twig and leaned on his shoulder, eyes narrowed. She nodded thoughtfully.

“Yeah… I can absolutely see it.”

“You can?”

“Sure, Ossi. It’s at least as old as Bobbie’s soul, can’t you tell?”

Hob summarily abandoned the shit-talking couple as soon as another figure turned the corner and made straight for the steps of the old building.

“Hey, Martin!” Hob jogged up to meet him. “It’s me!”

Martin Ross was someone whom Hob had taken great care to avoid so far. He’d been ‘Berthold Grant’s’ most staid friend, after all, and he’d been careful to let a decade and a severe makeover pass before even considering taking this particular course of action.

“Dinn’ae think you’d recognize me that easily, Bobbie.” The man gave him a pat with one large hand where Hob was bent over in exaggerated exhaustion after running across the street. It was a calculated move - Hob didn’t feel entirely secure in managing his expression at first, and having a healthily glowing face with wild hair was the opposite of what Martin knew his friend Berti to look like.

As soon as he straightened again, the bartender gave him a thorough lookover.

“How’s your uncle doing? My god, ye’re his spitting image at that age…”

“Thanks! Well so far, I guess. But you know how he is…” Hob trailed off and offered an awkward shrug, letting Martin fill in his own conclusions.

“Aye, don’t I ever,” the man muttered. “Give me a mo’, Bobbie. I got your keys right here somewhere.”

Martin had gotten terribly old. He hadn’t been young by any means back in 1989 but now, fifteen years later, Hob again realised that very soon, he’d be mourning another friend. He’d known of course that Martin had celebrated his 71st birthday just months prior. Now, his age slapped him in the face with all the soft wrinkles, liver spots, and his head of gleaming white hair.

“There you are, little bugger.”

With a self-deprecating grin, Martin handed Hob a set of four keys.

“Thanks for doing this, Martin.”

And Hob was really, awfully thankful to the old man. He’d taken to Hob as ‘Bert’s’ representative as jovially and earnestly as he’d taken to being ‘Bert’s’ friend in the first place. It wasn’t a good feeling to deceive his friends -past and present - like this. But it was getting harder and harder to come back to the same area within less than a generation and take over for his past self. So this was a good solution, even if he knew it was going to hurt him and his friend for a while.

Hob wasn’t ready to let the White Horse and everything it stood for simply vanish into the mists of time and so here he was again, barely one generation later, still hoping that his Stranger would one day find him here. The last time he’d clung to a place and its memories this recklessly, it had gotten him drowned as a witch.

Something must have shown on his face, because Martin’s smile dimmed a bit.

“Ye’re a good lad, Bobbie. I ‘ppreciate what ye’re doing for Bertie here.”

There was a ripple somewhere in Hob’s mind, like a pebble thrown into a mirror-smooth lake, and in that disturbance, Hob thought he saw his own face as it was in the nineties: sunken eyes, bloodshot with too little sleep and too much crack, something resembling a grin on bloodred lips, an unhealthy sweat on his brows.

“I just hope ye’re not planning on walking the same road as ye’re uncle in other matters.”

Hob resurfaced, confused, and realised he was staring. The rip in reality reflected in Martin’s eyes and refused to vanish no matter how much Hob blinked.

“Uh. Yeah. I mean, of course, Martin.”

What the hell was that.

Martin left soon after, promising to keep in touch concerning staffing and management questions and Hob mutely opened the door to his new, old, pub. The image of Hob’s own ravaged face reflected in Martin’s eyes stayed in Hob’s mind. Was that what Martin feared? Dreamed about?

“Ohhhh, look at that!” Oswin crooned into his ear and sashayed into the dusty, empty taproom. “Our Bobbie got himself his own little kingdom!”

“Kind of. I’m supposed to fix it up for my uncle and get a cut of the revenue. It’s supposed to become - a friendly space. For everyone. It’s… kinda personal.”

Emily shot him a look he had trouble interpreting. There was maybe something like hope there. He let his messenger bag flop to the truly awfully dirty floor and rummaged through it until he had unearthed the three bottles of the cheapest ale he could find for sale.

“There. The ale I promised.”

Emily took hers with disgust written in her face but unclipped the bottle opener from her dangling keychain obligingly.

“You’re actually a terrible cheapskate, you know that? I hate you.”

Oswin simply opened the bottle and made a show of taking an obscenely deep swallow.

“Yep,” he said, settling cross-legged in the dust. “This is exactly as disgusting as the state of this dump. I love it.”

“It doesn’t taste like goat piss,” Hob offered, and opened his own.

“And on that concerning revelation, let us speak a toast!”

They clinked their cans and Hob couldn’t help the smile when it all devolved into more friendly bickering. There were so many possibilities held in smiles and new beginnings.

*** *** ***

The dunes, when he finally reaches them, are barren except for scraggly grass and thistles. Overhead, the stormwinds rage on. Behind, the vast churning sea, dangerous and beautiful, dips out of sight at last.

Immediately, the world grows silent but for the shifting grains of sand.

Hob kneels and burrows his fingers in the cool dampness. The grains are lighter here, less black and more whitish opaque - a bit like ground glass. They stick to his fingers and underneath his nails like cold and sharp glitter. In between the dunes and the thistles and yellowed stalks of grass, there are the signs of a long neglected pathway.

“Oh, we're not in Kansas anymore, are we?”

Hob chuckles, and the sound falls strangely onto the remnants of the white pebbled road. It slips between the cracks and soaks into the egg-white rocks. Maybe here, each step and every stone will bring him closer to his goal as well, whatever that might be. He doesn't think there's an emerald city at the end of this road, though.

Something sleek and black moves at the corner of his eyes.

“Are you coming with me, then? I'd be grateful for the company, if you'd care to join me.”

The shape moves closer and stays still, as if daring Hob to finally take a look. So he does.

The nightmare is small on its four paws and elongated body. It looks nearly emaciated, but its fur is sleek and glimmers wetly, more black in colour than the brown of its earthly brethren. Otters, in Hob's limited experience, don't usually sport such iridescent, nearly oily looking fur. Its too large eyes are an unnerving black from corner to corner and Hob can feel its intent gaze on him like the caress of cold water.

Hob stays quiet, sitting still on his knees with sand between his fingers, and slowly stretches out one hand as he would in the waking world when trying not to spook an animal. He's not sure if the same principles apply here, though.

“There you are,” he murmurs as the creature comes closer, not shyly but cautiously; assessing him, Hob thinks. “Have you decided how you want to look?”

It cocks its head and Hob gets the impression that it's meant mockingly. He doesn't really know why. It swerves around Hob's hand and hops onto the white pebbled path that promises to wind through the dunes and further into this strange, strange land.

It looks straight at him and bares needle-sharp teeth that are much too long.

“Yeesh, I got you. You want to come along. No need to be so impatient, little nightmare.”

In answer, it twitches its tail and scrapes long and obsidian black claws across the pebbles.

Sighing, Hob acquiesces to the demand and, with his hands, sweeps the mounds of sand away from where the path begins. He rights the edges where the round stones, no larger than his fist, have become loose and pats the restored section of the path obligingly.

Something like a small shock travels up his arms right then, a warm, static zing that races through him and lodges behind his sternum and tints his vision red for the blink of an eye. He rubs his chest, today clad in something like a fading beige jacket with frayed sleeves, but there is nothing there.

The otter grins with black lips, its teeth glimmering forebodingly.

“Oh, you're a real nightmare, aren't you.”

He laughs a little at the thin otter-lookalike and follows it into the dunes between the thistles and thorny brambles.

*** *** ***

Interlude:

Dream of the Endless startles.

Something has changed.

The cold of the glass sphere is as inconsequential as ever beneath him; the basement with its mockery of the night sky and badly hewn stones is as ephemeral as it always was - only to human minds these walls seem insurmountable and timeless.

A guard, Dream cares not which of the several that man the post, shuffles her feet and turns the pages of her paperback book.

There is a tiny grain of loss at the knowledge that he does not know this book, nor its creator.

Everything is as he is accustomed to, in Burgess’ paltry fortress.

And yet.

He slowly lays his fingers across his chest, where usually his ruby would rest. It is not there, it has been taken and hidden from him many decades ago.

He lets the hand fall away again, presses the pads of his fingers against the unforgiving glass, thinking. Someone is using a part of his power for the Dreaming’s benefit.

He wonders which of his creations has faithfully brought his stolen power home. They are one and the same, after all, Dream of the Endless and the Dreaming. To strengthen one, is to give loyalty to the other.

There is a smile tilting his lips when he returns to watching the guards.

*** *** ***

“Oh. My. God.”

Emily’s voice cut through the background of the radio’s quiet blaring and Hob straightened from where he was bent over the side of the bar counter.

“Oh my god,” she repeated and picked her way between tools and boxes towards him, “this looks absolutely fab, Bobbie! Where have you learned to do this? I wish I could learn to become a carpenter.”

Hob stepped away from the freshly sanded and glazed wood of the White Horse’s old and saved bar counter and pushed his safety goggles up. Instantly, his eyes started watering at the sharp chemical tang that hung in the air.

“Ah damn it, can you open a window please?”

Emily gingerly edged around some precariously stacked tables and leaned over to quickly push one of the creaking windows wide open.

“Good thing you’re wearing a mask.” She laughed and pulled up the collar of her red turtleneck to hide her nose behind. “You’d prob’ly be high as a kite otherwise.”

Hob threw the brush into the designated painting can and managed to squeeze through the assembled detritus of the unfurnished New Inn towards Emily.

“Let’s sit outside. I could do with a breather, to be honest.”

He grabs a couple of lemonade bottles out of a nearly empty case. They settled on the porch steps where the late winter sun did its level best to make them feel like it was early spring already.

“Cheers!”

The silence was nice, companionable. Until, of course, Hob made the mistake of watching his friend from the corner of his eyes. He shouldn't, he knew that. He’d learned better over the last few months than to look too closely when these strange wisps of whimsy and water started to peek through into reality. Martin had been only the first of many instances where he’d… seen things.

He was going crazy. He was just going round the bend that was all there was to it.

Emily turned her green glass bottle, hands compulsively tightening. There was a frown caught between her brows. He'd noticed it often, for a couple of months now; there was doubt in the way her eyes had lingered on him and Oswin, indecision and apprehension in the set of her shoulders.

He'd noticed then, too, the little thoughts that shimmered around her, the little fears she nurtured. He'd chosen to ignore them, at the time. It was nothing, surely. He was just - seeing impossible things.

But Hob wasn’t ever good at simply letting things go once they had caught his interest. He’d never been one to back down. But maybe…maybe there was a way to find out, after all, if any of it was - real.

He cast a sideways glance at her and laid a hand over hers where it gripped the bottle too tightly. All or nothing.

“Hey there’s no need to worry, Emily. Oswin won’t care. Neither do I, by the way.”

Emily stopped twisting the poor bottle.

“What?”

She stared at him, uncomprehendingly.

There was his chance to take it back, a way out. He could just laugh it all off. Then again, Hob had seen those same fears and thoughts crowding around Emily day after day for so long now - more in impressions than in visual images, a bone deep knowledge when he looked at her that she was afraid. Emily feared what her best friends would do and say when she’d finally dare to tell them.

Still, he was tempted to back out. He could still pretend nothing was wrong; tell himself that his dreams were just dreams and those visions and insight were nothing more than the product of a too old mind.

All or nothing, he thought again and forged forward, as always.

“Love is love, Emily. I don’t care if you’re not into guys. I won’t abandon you. Or judge you.”

Emily froze and Hob was immediately sure that what he knew, what he’d learned of her by whatever strange kind of magic this was, was the truth of her fears and nightmares. It sisn’t feel like the good kind of validation at all.

“How did you-” She stood, aghast, and stepped neatly out of the range of his hands.

“Emily, please.”

“No Bobbie. What the- how did you kn- How can you just throw this at me like that?!”

Hob winced and held up his hands in surrender.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, Em!”

“Uncomfortable?! You just - You just outed me without even-” She violently scrubbed a hand through her short bob. “I haven’t told anyone, ever! There is no possible way you could have simply-”

She gestured wildly and if it weren’t for the tears that she was furiously blinking away, he’d be counting on getting slapped and summarily left. Instead, she calmed down by herself. She was still tense when she settled back down next to him and shakily lit herself a smoke. There was a cautious distance between them, now.

“Thanks for trying to support me. However ass-backwards you went about it.”

Her voice remained clipped and she didn’t really look at him but something in the set of her shoulders had relaxed all the same. The impressions of fear around her became lighter, nearly see-through if they had been visible in the first place, their substance more ephemeral mist than dark water.

“Stop staring.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are. It’s creepy.”

“I’m creepy?”

“Oh god Bobbie. Yes you are,” She laughed and it sounded a little less warm than what Hob was used to hearing from her. He’d earned that, most likely.

“It’s really no wonder you’ve got a hard time making friends,” she said, “I did notice that you’re.. strange, sometimes. Too intense, I guess. But it’s all part of your charm. At least as long as you don’t overdo it.”

“I swear I won’t.”

“Sure thing. Just - do me a favour and don’t randomly out people without a by-your-leave. There are a lot of us that have actual nightmares about that kind of thing.”

She stomped her cigarette out and got up again.

“See you later?”

“Of course.”

He watched her go, steps surer and shoulders straighter than when she’d come.

“Nightmares, huh.”

*** *** ***

Beyond the dunes, the land transforms into an inhospitable moor. White sand, each particle hard and cold like glass, becomes earthy and deceptively soft. Dead plant matter clings wetly in little slippery clumps and squelches uncomfortably loamy underneath each of Hob's steps.

Perpetual twilight falls and fog lies over everything.

It caresses the black pools of brackish water, winds around spindly plants and dying trees and stretches its cold, translucent fingers into Hob’s face. His nightmare nearly vanishes, its black fur becoming one with the waters of the ponds when Hob doesn’t look.

The path of white pebbled stones has long since melted into a footpath that winds around and around. Sometimes, there are the remnants of old bridges that cross softly murmuring streams and little pools. Other times, wooden walkways cross over soft peat.

It feels like-

It feels like home to Hob.

He kneels, neglected and decomposing wooden slates in hand, at the edge of one bridge. The dampness creeps through his trousers - this time some ludicrous, wrapped things of fading black. The handrailing is long gone and Hob doesn’t know if it will support his weight if he tries to cross it. Carefully, he fits the slates back into place.

“When I was a kid,” he murmurs, “there was a place just like this a few miles behind our village. We used to go and cut peat there, my Da’ and I and my older brother.”

In the pond next to him, the Otter floats with its head barely above the surface. There is a red shine to its eyes as it keeps them focussed intently on Hob.

“After, we’d sit at the fire and the men would tell stories. Of wicked souls and lost children. Of the little ghost lamps they’d light up at night to lead wanderers astray and drown them.”

Hob looks back at the bridge, and as he had thought - as had happened so many times now - the part he has repaired, the whole of the bridge even, has regained a structural integrity that’s most certainly not due to the few slats Hob has put back into place.

He smiles a little, content. The path already knows what it is supposed to look like, he thinks. Hob is just providing the material.

And the faith.

“We were told to always trust the paths, and to never leave them.”

He stands and pats down his sorry excuse for trousers. The wet dirt clings stubbornly to his clothes and hands, though.

In the distance, barely visible, the dark shade of a treeline rises. There is yet a sea of mist and bog to wade through before he can reach it and as he takes his first step onto the new bridge, trusting that it will hold him, a light blinks into existence, an eerie yellow shine distorted through the fog.

Hob can’t help the grin that steals across his face. It’s been a while since he felt so young. There aren’t any moors like this left in England - precious few across the world and none that feel as familiar as this one. He takes a deep breath, then another.

“Let’s go,” he says in the direction of his nightmarish companion, “Let’s see where these paths want to lead us.”

Another light blinks on, and then more and more shine through the mist. They follow him, he thinks. Overhead, the perpetually setting sun throws pale red light against the cloud cover. It looks exactly as Hob remembers from a world long lost to time.

*** *** ***

The morning dawns with the unrelentingly gentle insistence of early spring. Rain drums a beat against the window panes of Hob’s bedroom and gurgles down into the earth through too old pipes. Hob blinks away the lights of the ghostly lanterns in the moor and tries to hush the quietly bubbling brooks that he thinks he hears echoed in the rainfall.

He sits up slowly, not really sleepy at all but still caught in the tail ends of his dream all the same. The old and drafty floor to ceiling windows show nothing but his own reflection, distorted through the water washed glass.

Soft thunder rumbles over the skies and a flicker of red flits across the smooth glass panes.

Hob frowns and straightens. It's not really bright, despite the daylight outside but he can't discern at all where the eerie glow comes from. He stares at himself, distorted and see-through, with red light hollowing his throat and cheeks and reflecting in little pinpricks from his eyes.

His breathing is too loud in between the bouts of thunder.

Then, his reflection wavers, shudders - and vanishes.

“What…”

The rain sounds like waves crashing onto the shore.

Hob stands, drawn upright by invisible strings, and stumbles towards the offending window.

This is a dream, he thinks, half-delirious. It must be, even though it feels neither as present and sharp as his recent bouts of lucid dreams, nor as soft-edged and fuzzy as the ones that came before.

No matter how often he blinks, the vision doesn't change. Hesitatingly, he presses his palm against the flat and cold glass, comes closer and closer until his too-fast breath fogs over the panes and smears the edges of the impossible view.

There is a world behind his windows that has no business existing outside of his dreaming mind - an endless sea as deep and unfathomable as the depth of space, and beyond, if he looks closer, there rises a vast landscape in gentle hills and slopes until it bends towards its centre. For a mere moment, he glimpses an impossible palace.

“Just a dream.” He lets his sweaty forehead thump against the fogged-up window and screws his eyes shut hard. When he opens them again, the window is simply a window into London’s dreary weather again. He turns, feeling oddly wrung out and disappointed.

It's only when he slumps back onto his bed, that he notices the other incongruity. The box with the ruby is open on his nightstand. The stone is glittering invitingly. It's the same shade as the smattering of colour before. Carefully, he reaches for the precious stone.

He freezes half-way; there is dirt in the groves of his hands and underneath his nails.

“This is impossible.”

He scrubs at the smears and wracks his brain for another explanation - any explanation really, other than the one that’s staring at his face in invitingly gentle, red reflections. There are none, if he’s being honest. He hasn’t left his flat for more than a day and he hasn’t owned any plants since one life over.

The dirt and mud are still there, despite all rationality assuring Hob that it should not be so.

“Did you do this,” he whispers to the inanimate stone.

It’s surprisingly warm in his palms when he finally dares to take it out of the box. It draws his eyes and mind and it feels like he’s slowly slipping into the centre of a dizzying vortex. Still, he can’t stop looking. In its facets there is the same landscape that pretended to exist beyond his windows.

“Are you the real thing then?”

If this is a magical jewel - more, if this is truly the ruby his Stranger has worn on each of their meetings, then what does this mean for him? How did it come to be in a run-down storage unit of a convicted felon? Is this… a test? A task? Or just coincidence? There’s really no way to tell, for now.

He presses the ruby against his chest, where he remembers the Stranger wearing it. It feels like it’s pulsing slowly in time with his heartbeat.

“You’re the thing that makes me see people’s fears, aren’t you. Even when I’m not in your vicinity.”

And isn't that a dismaying revelation. Hob doesn’t think he has the will to get rid of the ruby, now that he’s nearly sure that it is the real thing, the Ruby. He hasn’t even managed that before he knew, after all. And yet… he doesn’t want his new … skills to isolate him. He’s aware that his inborn sociable nature clashes horribly with them.

After the near disaster with Emily, it hadn’t gotten easier. Hob knows he thrives on friends and laughter and love but - currently, he keeps making people uncomfortable because he gets too close and personal too fast.

He knows too much about them, after all, while they don’t know him at all.

Slowly, he sets the stone back into its lacklustre housing. It’s probably not a good idea to carry it on him. For now, at least.

“Looks like we have to learn to get along somehow, doesn’t it?”

*** *** ***

Hob doesn’t know how often his dreams have brought him into the moors, how many paths he’s tread and repaired, how often he’s been turned around and beckoned to another part of the twilit landscape. As with the sea of dreams and nightmares, he’s not sure if he wants to leave - and he feels like the moors don’t want him to leave them either. It’s in the caress of the fog, the soft murmurs of the brooks and the faithful light of the soul lamps.

His Otter moves swiftly through the dark pools alongside Hob and sometimes he thinks he sees other shapes with him - skinny and scrawny things of spindly limbs and crooked spines. Nightmares, Hob hazards a guess, all of them and perfectly at home here.

“If they want to, they can come with us,” Hob says during one night, not quite looking at the crawling shadows that populate the twilit mists. His Otter lies a few metres from Hob’s bare legs, his dirty linen breeches sensibly tied up around his knees.

He’s doing the whole middle ages peasant thing this time and wears a matching threadbare tunic above it. He thinks there might be a pendant or something hanging at about chest level but whenever he checks, there’s nothing there. It’s a confusing sensation, akin to what he thinks feeling a missing limb might be like. Hob rubs his hands across the empty space again before snatching the hand away.

The Otter lifts its head. It’s gotten less emaciated, Hob thinks, even though he’s never seen it eat. He doesn’t know if dreams and nightmares even need to eat, in any case.

It leers at Hob with its needle sharp teeth and Hob feels he knows the answer.

“Okay then. But they can, if they decide to change their mind, okay?”

The nightmare lies down again and doesn’t turn his stare from Hob. Hob doesn’t know what to make of it.

“D’you think we’ll get to the forest next time?”

He thinks of the Ruby lying in its box and of the unanswered questions about his Stranger. Hob doesn’t get to find out his nightmare’s response, though, because the next time he blinks, he’s lying in his bed again.

*** *** ***

Waking up isn’t disorienting or jarring at all. It is, if Hob had to put words to it, almost disconcertingly natural and smooth - nothing more unusual than stepping from one room into the next. While one might be surprised by a new piece of furniture or disproportionate chaos, it isn’t anything that really defies any fundamental expectations or perceptions.

And in this normalcy, exactly, it feels significant in a way that waking up really shouldn’t be. Sometimes, there is no dividing line between his dreamworld and his waking one any longer.

*** *** ***

Then, finally, the muddy ground of the bog makes way for a firmer ground, the land rises out of the water logged plains that had started behind the dunes of the nightmare sea. Hob’s steps resound on springy earth, covered in the debris of old leafs and fragrant pine needles.

The forest is dark and still.

The tall trees enclose Hob in a hall of shadows as rich and teeming with possibilities as he remembers from his youth. If he looks closely enough into the underbrush,he thinks there are eyes staring back at him. Screams live underneath these branches, and things with too many teeth.

At times he thinks that underneath the quiet murmur of the forest, he hears the rumble of the sea of all dreams and nightmares. There are nightmares in these woods as well, after all.

The path his Otter treads with him is narrow. The trees and bushes reach into and over it with long and arching fingers, man high ferns brush cooly along his arms and hide the sight of spiderwebs that seem entirely too malicious to be anything other than an amalgamation of subconscious fears. Hob never sees any spiders, though, not outright at least. But sometimes he thinks they scurry along in his shadow.

When they pass the first small clearing, Hob stops and stares, old memories rising unbidden. There are flowers strewn across the clearing, all of them unknown to Hob. All of them, he thinks, might be nightmares of poison and danger.

In the middle of the clearing, there is a ring of white and yellow flowers.

“We were warned about the fae circles, did you know? People have all but forgotten about them, these days.”

He bends and takes a single flower between his thumb and forefinger. It’s a small blue thing, with fragile petals that make for a deep calyx with an oddly glistening stem.

His nightmare looks - not really out of place with his black coat and black eyes but in contrast to the nearly natural habitat it had in the bog, the field of flowers makes it look oddly incongruent. Still, it stays still and watches Hob intently.

More flowers join the first, in reds and whites and all of them make Hob think of poison and pain and disregarded warnings spoken in soft voices. The flower crown comes together easily underneath his nimble fingers; no matter that he hasn’t made one in longer than a century.

The flowers are preening under his attention, twisting easily together despite their thorny stems and tissue thin petals.

“My mam - I got a little sister when she was already too old to safely bear children, I know that now. But back then, we didn’t. So my mam had one last daughter. She was a sickly child from the first second, too quiet, didn’t drink right. My ma got down with fever alongside her after giving birth.”

He can’t quite recall the colour of his mothers hair or the shape of her face any longer, but he’s never forgotten the sound of her voice. He’d been barely ten when she’d passed in childbed. He turns the flower crown thoughtfully in his hands. This is a story he hasn’t remembered in so very long, hasn’t told anyone about, ever. The Otter at his side stares at him attentively as if it’s absorbing his stories. The forest is quietly listening as well.

“The little one died within a week. Ma was so sad but - then she sent us others off to gather flowers. Made little flower crowns out of all of them and told us to leave them at the large stone at the fairy gate. Where we usually weren’t allowed to go.”

He had quite thoroughly forgotten how he’d left flower crowns for all his brothers and sisters when they’d been taken by the plague, uncaring of any fae or fairies. He’d done that, on and off, for decades even long after the hurt had faded. He bends and picks a few leafy greens - weeds he thinks most would call the delicate plants - and winds them around the flowers.

“She said that if her daughter had been switched with a changeling that had died, she at least wants to give her real daughter something beautiful to wear for Queen Mab’s court.“

He shows off the finished crown to his companion.

“There, what do you think? Is this something that’s worthy of the royal court of the Queen of Dreams?”

The otter levels a long long look at him and Hob gets the impression that it’s equal parts amused and ravenous for some unnamed thing. There is a decision that Hob feels but doesn’t see being made and then the nightmare springs into action, swerving off the overgrown footpath and into the darkness of the looming trees. There it waits, expectantly.

Hob doesn’t need to think before he follows.

There are the nightmares of old lingering where he runs, the cursed clearings, the ever-twisting paths, the ominous sounds that are too close behind. There are also the fears of the fairy tales: malicious wishing-wells, the howling of were-creatures and forebodingly shadowed shrines.

His Otter slips between trees and shadows like a ghost. Hob has no trouble following; they’ve been travelling together for so long now, that Hob can nearly feel his little nightmare. He feels the other creatures in the dark as well, their interest, their hunger and their hope.

They pass fae circles, shinto trees and little shrines, fairy gates and cursed ponds. Hob slows down to build up a trollstone who’s upper layers had toppled down with time and neglect, sets a forlorn bucket back onto the encasement of a wishing well. In his wake, he thinks he sees them gaining substance and presence.

They slow down, finally, at the edge of a dark pond.

The conifers and ferns crowd close around it and reach over its blank and empty surface like a protective cocoon. His Otter doesn’t make a single move to step into it. Instead it waits at the water’s edge, clearly expectant. Hob looks down at the crown of deadly flowers and thorns he holds, then back to the pond.

“You’re asking me… to make an offering, aren’t you?”

The Otter does a curious mix of a wiggle and the shivering of a shadow. It looks completely unholy and is probably the closest it can get to the equivalent of an enthusiastic nod. It’s a bit endearing, really.

The pond looks like nothing so much as a reflective door into the depths of space. No matter how close Hob comes, the water stays entirely still. Hob contemplates the flower crown again. While he doesn’t understand most of this world, he thinks he recognizes some of it from times long before the modern age; where wishes were magical, faith the most powerful and dangerous thing, and where one never offered a name to the creatures of the forests.

What he’s asked to offer now is made of his past, lost stories and preserved love. It would be… powerful, most likely, in this world. And he wouldn’t mind giving it. He looks around himself, takes in the pervading sense of wear and neglect that has been following him ever since he arrived, thinks back to the eager ease with which each stone he set and each plank he righted transformed back into what they were supposed to be.

This world is magical and Hob is - fond of it. He wants to see what it would look like, whole and restored.

“For you then, my Monarch of Dreams. May you wear it or bestow upon someone worthy.”

He gives a wry grin to the Otter, who has his eyes so wide open that Hob thinks he ought to be able to see their whites, and lays a careful kiss on one of the poisonous flowers. He knows his courtly manners, after all.

Then, he throws it into the pond.

It would have landed smack dab in the middle, too, if two arms made of water and smoke hadn’t reached out and up and caught the crown securely in their clawed hands. The flowers shimmer in the dark, suspended, before they are swallowed into the water.

Within seconds, the pond is entirely black and still again.

“What was that.”

His Otter doesn’t move. It’s pressed to its belly and doesn’t look at Hob at all. Carefully, he braves the shore of the pond. Where water meets the springy earth, he hesitates before discarding his fear and stepping into the water despite the tattoo his heart beats against his chest.

There are no ripples in the water. It feels exactly like the sea of nightmares and dreams had. It’s then that he becomes aware of his reflection below him. It’s nearly familiar.

It wears his face and his body but it’s too lean, too tall. Where his eyes are brown, these eyes are as black as the ones his little nightmare has. There is a red sheen to them, a refraction of light that shines from underneath the shadows his other self wears for clothes. It pulses in time with an unheard heartbeat. Hob thinks it looks like the Ruby.

On its head rests the crown he has just thrown into the pond.

In the second before Hob gathers his wits enough to stumble back, a ripple shivers across its face and he thinks he sees his stranger, thin, pale and naked behind glass, the crown on his wild hair.

Then it’s gone and Hob rears back.

“What,” he repeats, wheezing, “was that?!”

Around him, there are creatures scuttling about the edges of the small clearing. His nightmare Otter sidles up to him, calm and expectant. It looks healthier than Hob has ever seen it, all shining fur and gleaming eyes. Instead of providing an answer, no matter whether it’s entirely nonverbal as always, it scurries up onto Hob’s shoulders and drapes across them like an unholy sable fur of sharp teeth and sharper claws. It’s a strangely comforting weight.

Slowly, Hob gathers himself. His heart hurts. Why had he seen his Stranger; why now, like this. At long last, he starts walking again, uncaring of where he sets his feet. It doesn’t matter anyway, as he discovers quickly.

Because the forest is different now. The shadows aren’t any less deep, the screams are still eerie but Hob still thinks he sees - more, for lack of a better word. Where before, there was only one path bordered by sinister wilderness only traversable in the wake of his nightmare companion, now there is a way wherever he sets his feet.

The nightmare forest, it seems, welcomes him wholly.

*** *** ***

Interlude:

Dream sits motionless in his cage of glass and steel. The painted Stars are dulled in the flat glow of the yellow light bulbs. The tinny sound of a radio echoes uninvitingly from the stone walls. His guards, two men this time, make no move to look up from their card game.

If they had, they would not have seen any change and gone back to their game, not caring to spend one more second on observing the naked entity in the glass sphere than is absolutely necessary. The devil does not change, after all.

They would have been wrong.

Dream sits, cross legged and still, and feels the warmth of stories flowing through his limbs. He sees, in the distorted reflection of the molten sand that keeps him captive, the uncommon blush that colours his lips and his cheeks. There rests a weight on his brow that feels like a crown of petals and memories.

Slowly, he lets his eyelids flutter shut and cradles the unexpected touch of his realm and power and condenses it where a human heart would reside. It tastes like faith and vibrates like hope. An offer to Morpheus, to Dream and the Dreaming.

It feels like gentle care beneath his crafted skin.

Where usually stories and dreams sing in his ears, there is only the nightmare scream of vengeance. In time, he will leave this prison of ambition and greed. In time, he'll find his way back into his realm and reward the one who so staidly attends to a duty above and beyond expectations.

He is endless, after all.

He can wait.

*** *** ***

When Hob finally reaches the treeline, he sees the first well-tended landscape unfolding before him. The valley that lies to his feet holds several tilled fields that cluster around two houses. They are old and crooked but smoke curls from their chimneys and Hob spies movement behind one window.

Above it all, a shape circles in the air that looks like something out of - well, of a dream. Hob chuckles quietly.There is a golden shimmering Gargoyle flitting through the air like an overgrown hummingbird.

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