Chapter Text
The stale air of the apartment hallway vanished the moment Death pushed open the door. It wasn’t locked. It wasn’t anything. Stepping in behind her, the first thing that hit me wasn’t a smell, or a temperature change, but a profound, unsettling stillness. Like the air itself had been holding its breath for days. This wasn’t the quiet peace of an empty house; this was the silence of a vacuum, sucking the sound right out of the world.
Death stopped just inside the threshold, her usual calm demeanor tightening almost imperceptibly. Her dark eyes scanned the small living space, there wasn’t much to see, only a worn sofa, cluttered coffee table, bookshelf overflowing, a modest flat-screen TV mounted on the wall opposite. Sunlight struggled through half-drawn blinds, dust motes frozen in the stagnant beams. Nothing looked violently out of place, yet everything felt… wrong.
"Where are they?" I whispered, the words feeling clumsy in the dead air. "Shouldn't you… feel them? Like a beacon?"
Death didn’t answer immediately. She took another step in, her boots making no sound on the thin carpet. Her gaze swept the room again, slower this time, more deliberate. A tiny furrow appeared between her brows.
"I should," she finally said, her voice lower, flatter than usual.
That unnerved me more than any spectral wail could have. Death looked… puzzled. UShe moved further into the room, her movements still fluid but lacking their usual effortless grace. It was like watching a master violinist suddenly struggle to find the right note.
What could possibly unsettle death herself?
My eyes darted around, trying to pinpoint the source of the wrongness. The apartment looked like it belonged to someone who lived alone, mismatched furniture, stacks of books and papers cluttering every surface, a half-finished mug of something long cold resting beside a sketchpad on the coffee table. The only movement came from the TV, its screen alive with frantic, hissing static that bathed the room in a sickly, flickering grey light, casting everything in an unsettling, ghostly hue.
Then I looked closer. It wasn't just static. Within the chaotic dance of grey and white, shapes flickered. A blur of green, a smear of red, the distorted curve of… a bumper? A tire? It was fragmented, chaotic, but horribly familiar. My non-existent gut clenched. It was a car crash. My car crash? Or someone else's? The images stuttered, looped – the green blur, the screech of tearing metal implied by the hiss, the smear of red, then back to the static chaos. Over. And over.
"Death," I started, my voice tight.
But she was already focused elsewhere. She’d stopped near the center of the room, facing the hallway leading to what I assumed were the bedroom and bathroom. Her posture was rigid, her hands loose at her sides but radiating tension.
"Martin," she called out, her voice clear and resonant, yet strangely muted in the thick air. It was the first time I’d heard her use a name. "Martin Sallow. It's time. Come to me." The words held that familiar, irresistible pull I’d felt at the bridge, that gentle, undeniable command to let go.
I held my breath.
Nothing happened. The static continued to hiss, low and relentless, as dust motes hung suspended in the flickering light. The muffled silence thickened, pressing in heavier with every breathless second.
Death’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"Martin," she tried again. "Your journey is complete. Step forward."
Silence. Absolute, unyielding silence.
“Does that happen often?” I asked.
“Never.
“Like never never, or never as in once in a while…?”
“Never as in this is the first time, Alex.”
A muscle flickered in Dee's temple.
"Something is shielding him," she murmured, more to herself than to me. "Interfering. This… shouldn't be possible."
For the first time since I’d met her, less than a day ago but still, I saw a flicker of genuine frustration, quickly masked but undeniably there. She was not used to being ignored. It violated the natural order.
While Dee concentrated, radiating a quiet, potent energy that seemed to beat against the stillness, my attention was drawn back to the coffee table. The sketchpad beside the cold mug lay open. Driven by a morbid curiosity, or maybe just needing something else to look at besides the looping nightmare on the screen, I drifted closer.
The top page showed a charcoal sketch. It was rough, visceral. A figure – male, gaunt, wide-eyed with terror – was tangled in what looked like thick, thorny vines. The vines seemed to be growing out of a cracked mirror depicted in the background.
This one was shattered, but instead of reflecting the room or the tangled figure, shards showed glimpses of impossible landscapes: a desert of black sand under a bruised purple sky, a forest of crystalline trees, a vast library with endless, shifting shelves. It was chaotic, disturbing. And the thorns… they looked sharp enough to draw real blood.
Without thinking, acting on an impulse I didn’t understand, I reached out. My fingers, pale and translucent, hovered over the paper. I wasn’t even sure I could touch it. But the need to understand, to see what Martin Vale saw, was overwhelming.
My fingertip brushed the charcoal line depicting a particularly vicious thorn.
The apartment vanished.
One moment I was standing over a sketchpad, the next I was falling.
It was cold, so cold it almost burned, a searing ache that wrapped around my ribs and squeezed. Breathing felt impossible, each inhale scraped raw, caught beneath something massive pressing down on my chest. Thorns dug into every inch of skin biting deep, coiling tighter the more I moved.
I couldn’t see at first, only feel: the velvet blackness wasn’t empty, but smothering and alive, thick as wet cloth soaked in oil. It crept into my lungs, silenced my thoughts, stole the edges of my awareness.
I felt the panic surge but thrashing only made the vines clamp down harder. Pain sliced through my shoulder; I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound escaped.
“Let me go,” I tried to say, though it came out as a breathless tremor more than words.
The vines answered with another twist.
Shapes moved in the gloom, shadows.
The cold sank deeper, past flesh, past bone, until it whispered to the marrow that this wasn’t just darkness, this was what came after stars died.
Above me, through a break in the choking vines, I caught a glint of movement: a mirror shard floating midair, reflecting not my face but a vast black desert beneath a sickly purple moon.
Mesmerized, I stared, unable to look away.
A figure stood atop a distant ridge, tall and impossibly thin, crowned with antlers or branches that curled into the air like smoke. It turned slowly, and empty sockets met mine through the shard, through the vines, through the dark, through me. I felt its gaze land like a brand, silent and absolute, digging into the soft parts of my mind.
Terror erupted in my chest, a scream clawing to escape, but the vines crushed tighter, sealing my ribs, choking the breath before it could rise. The cold thickened. The watchers leaned closer. The mirror shard pulsed once with sickly light–
I was back in the apartment, gasping, staggering backwards. My spectral form felt icy, violated, vibrating with residual terror. I clutched at my chest, where the phantom pain of thorns still lingered.
Death was instantly beside me, her hand on my arm. Her touch was warm, anchoring, burning away the invasive cold.
"Alex! What happened?"
“He’s…” The words caught in my throat, tangled in the panic still scraping at the edges of my mind. “He’s not refusing you,” I said, sharper this time, the truth hitting like a slap. “He’s stuck.”
I staggered back a step, my hands trembling. “There were thorns, biting deep, and a cold so sharp it felt like pain.”
My gaze snapped to the sketchpad on the table, its pages splayed open like a wound. I pointed at it with a shaking finger.
“In there. He’s in that picture. Or it’s… it’s inside him. I touched it, and I was there.” My voice broke. “I felt it.”
I was almost waiting for her to break into a laugh, tell me how much I lost it.
Instead Death’s gaze snapped to the sketchpad, then to the static-filled TV screen still looping its fragmented crash. Her expression shifted from concern to something darker, colder. A storm gathering in her usually warm eyes. She stepped towards the coffee table, her focus entirely on the drawing.
She didn't touch it just yet. She studied it, her gaze intense, seeming to peel back layers of reality I couldn't perceive. Her lips pressed into a thin line. The air around her crackled with unseen energy, the oppressive stillness of the apartment recoiling from her presence.
"The thorns… the cold… the shifting dark… the black sand," she murmured, each word dropping like a stone. "I knew it!"
She looked up, her eyes meeting mine.
"He's dreaming, Alex. Even now. His soul is caught, anchored in the Dreaming."
A chill that had nothing to do with Martin’s nightmare crept through me. "Dreaming? But… he's dead. You're here."
"Exactly." Dee’s voice was low, dangerous. "This is Dream's realm. His territory. Dead people do not have their place there. He shouldn’t allow…"
Dream, I recalled, one of the siblings she mentioned earlier. She gestured sharply at the frozen room.
“Why would your brother do this?”
“I don’t think he is doing it. It’s not like him… He probably hasn't even noticed this soul tangled in his domain's thorns. This…" she gestured at the sketchpad, the TV, the oppressive stillness, "...this is a snag. A tear. A dream that hasn't ended when the dreamer died. It's festering. Holding him."
“What about Martin then?"
"He can't hear me. The dream has him too tightly. It must be severed."
Death raised her hand directly above the open sketchpad. Her fingers curled slightly. The silver ankh at her throat seemed to glow with a cold, inner light.
A soundless snap reverberated through the fabric of the room, felt more in the bones than heard. The charcoal lines on the sketchpad blurred. The thorns seemed to writhe briefly on the paper before dissolving into meaningless smears of black. The shards of the mirror in the drawing fogged over, then cleared, reflecting only the blank paper beneath them.
Simultaneously, the frantic static on the TV screen collapsed inwards. The hiss cut off abruptly. The screen went completely black.
From the hallway, a soft, ragged gasp echoed.
Death lowered her hand, the light fading from her ankh. She moved swiftly towards the hallway. I followed, shaken.
In the dim bedroom, an elderly man lay in bed, covers neatly pulled up. Martin.
His eyes were closed, his face slack. But where before there had been that unnatural stillness, now there was… emptiness. The vital spark, the stubbornly dreaming soul, was gone. Above his body, for the briefest fraction of a second, a faint, fractured wisp of light flickered – pale, insubstantial, trembling like a dying candle flame.
Dee stood by the bed, looking down at the empty shell. She reached out and gently closed Martin’s eyes, a gesture that now seemed less like guidance and more like… an apology. A final courtesy to the vessel.
"He was already fragmented," she said, her voice rough. "The dream… it tore at him. Held him past the point of cohesion." She turned away from the bed, her shoulders tight. "It shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't be possible."
She walked back into the living room, past the now-blank TV, past the smudged sketchpad. She stopped by the window, staring out at the mundane street below, but I knew she wasn't seeing it.
"This isn't the first anomaly," she said, still looking out the window.
“No?”
She looked at me knowingly.
“Are you talking about me?”
She shook her head, saying no but I had a feeling she was.
“Something is wrong,” she said again.
She took a deep breath.
"I need to speak to my brother."
"The moody poet one?" I asked, the words slipping out before I could stop them, laced with the cynical armor I was rapidly reconstructing.
Dee’s gaze snapped to mine. Her voice, when she spoke, was barely a whisper, yet it filled the dead apartment with its terrible weight.
"Dream," she said, the name resonating with a gravity that made the dust motes shiver, "has been missing."
Outside the window, the ordinary world continued, oblivious. Inside, standing beside the embodiment of the End, I felt the first true tremor of something vast and terrifying unraveling.
“I think it’s time we go and free him.”