Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"It's all been clear to me for quite a while. I know there's no one here except me and you, and that you left this place a long time ago. That which is talking to me is your pitiful residue."
— Impostress, Day 12.

The story always begins with this: two children are in the sandpit playing "Death," because today there has been a funeral.

No one was watching when they filled their toy chest with extra treasures from the house, each child holding a handle, crabwalking about. Some of their dolls are frightful, others pretty, handsome, or drab; what all have in common is they've gotten too boring on their own. Pieces of fruit, seashells, needles, an egg — an empty, glossy jug with an odd shape — and this, the little girl insists, flapping her wings insistently, could be a biiiiig cannon.

"But how would a cannon get there?" "—Oh, like anyone, it took the train!"

What always remains true is that, in Dreamville, everyone loves the train.

First they build a hill, a mound. They pat and pat, until the boy says, "This is its head," and the girl protests, "I thought we're making a town."

The boy pouts, defensive.

"Towns can die."

"Why does that mean it has a head?"

"Well it needs a body to be dead."

The girl stands up, sand falling off of her dress, and takes a few wobbly steps back from the sandpit. She looks critically at their mound.

"Well let's make it an animal, okay? I don't want it like a dead person." She comes and sits back down, and she starts giving the mound a new limb. The boy feels disappointed. He had wanted it to be a person. He had a fanciful thought, already, of sticking the jug's pointed end into the sand, and claiming he could hear their heartbeat. That the dead person had come back alive because they could hear everyone in the town, saying that they missed them. It seemed like a good solution to the problem at hand: since they were supposed to be playing "Death," he was thinking about how he wanted to solve it. He doesn't say: wouldn't it be nice, though, if at least in Dreamville, Mom could hear us and come back to play?

But it would be nice. If he could give everyone in Dreamville only nice things, that's the very first thing he'd say. But his sister— she gets bored, when they play and everything is only ever okay.

The story always ends with this: his sister stands up from the sandpit, first, and leaves.

It does not matter if the contents of the toy chest have been entirely strewn out, made use of, employed to every storyline he can imagine. It doesn't matter if he calls out to her by her play-name — "Mushroom," today, and he'd chosen "Barley" — and it doesn't matter if he's not ready. He sits alone in the sand with the dolls still on his lap, and then eventually he picks everything up again, puts it up into the chest, because if the rain comes later it will all be ruined and they will not be able to play in the same way ever, ever again.

Chapter Text

“We are carrying out a sort of experiment, you see... Inevitability worries and depresses us. We wanted to find out whether the idea of creating a sarcophagus for a miracle was really fallacious. Actually, sarcophagus might be a wrong word – more like a space where the miracle can always come to be.”
— Executor, Day 12.

In Dreamville no one ever really dies.

Their dolls aren’t the residents of Dreamville. Not quite, anyway. The man with the bag sewn to his hand might be a learned man of medicine, one day, or another he’s a mad scientist, an adventurer, or a gambler, or a wanderer of the loose and unformed sands at the unused corners of their playing field…

Though, him, he is always a Dreamchaser. On that point the boy won’t budge. There’s the bag sewn to his hand, isn’t it? He must be traveling. He must be someone far from home.

But anyway, the dolls of course always comes back to play a new role. And the names sometimes come back, the interesting ones or the ones that are pleasing to say.

The only time someone ever really died in Dreamville, it was because the boy made the silly little mistake of giving some serious efforts to the personage of an egg.

Naturally, the egg was doomed to rot, unlike all their dolls, that were made of inert things that didn’t have the memory – or the lost chance – of life, so close to them that it could be taken away. The egg was always going to spoil in its time, no matter how much importance they (he) chose to spend on it.

The egg’s name was – a blasphemy, actually, spoken with a shy glance at his sister, who was not inducted into the secret and thus had no reaction at all. It was, also, three letters long, pleasing in its sound, and easy to carve into the sand with one’s fingertip. He scooped out for it a little nest right where one of the Town-on-the-Body’s eyes might have been, if it were a person, like he’d wanted.

His sister is busily giving it a beak. He scrutinizes her work.

“Now it’s a duck?”

“Nooo, it’s a swan!”

“But then we have to make the neck longer, it’ll fall apart.”

“That’s okay.”

There is a deep frustration building up in his chest. He picks up the egg-that-is-Ena, setting THEM back into the toy chest, safe. And he starts cutting at the mound of sand with his hands, building from the head down the elongated neck of the swan.

The boy has given his favorite doll these instructions:

You are a traveler, a doctor, with only twelve days to save a town.

(For some reason, I just can’t seem to stop telling you this story.)

The name of this town is “Dreamville.” The name of the enemy is “Death.”

(Was that its name? Or was it really “Slumber?”)

There is a bag stitched to your hand. Without it, you cannot do your vital work.

(The town is already long dead, long gone. All that remains is its pitiful residue. The clods and clumps of untended sand threaded through by grasses, so thoroughly claimed and ruined by the rain.)

You must, absolutely, always, will save this town.

Once, the boy tried to fly with only the wings on his head. He tumbled and nearly broke his halo.

He tumbled in nearly the same way, the same chaotic steps failing under his legs as the momentum of his chest and head overtook them... the day he dropped the egg. It scattered apart with such a gusto, as if leaping out of its shell – running from him. From the wrong he’d done THEM, from his clumsy and discoordinate mistake.

The undone thing that was Ena reeks, a smear across the ground.

In a way, he was lucky that this was how it happened. It could have tainted the entire toy-box, left too long within. As is... the children opt to stay out of the sandpit for a while. They spend some time in the garden, instead.

One day in the garden, they find a fallen baby bird.

Chapter Text

There is more life in me than anyone can live.
— Maria Kaina, any day of twelve.

He insists to himself:


In Dreamville, no one ever really dies.

Despite it all, the sandpit is long overgrown, swallowed into grasses that ventured over from the garden next door. There are new plots laid overtop of it, forever and anon.

With the advent of one heartrending sound, their shallow roots are clawed aside. He is dipping his hands by the fistful into sandy dirt. People could catch a disease like this. His fingers brush past tiny, tiny bones. He still remembers her small hands, clinging to his shirt, nowhere to go but to one another's side. The bones of her small hands digging into his shirt, digging into him, feels exactly like the small bones of

A young halovian girl wakes up to bright sunlight streaming through her window. Today is Sunday, a day of rest and respite, in the household she has grown to know as her new home.

That day, the children find a fallen baby bird in the garden.

She says, "Brother, we should let the little bird go free." He smiles at her brightly, says, "You're right. It's a bird… we can't just trap it indoors and hope things work out."

That's not what he said.

She says, "Brother, we should let the little bird go,"

and he smiles brightly at her and says, "////////////////////////////////////////////////"

She says, "Brother, we should let the little bird go."

His face falls.

"Sister, I'm sorry.

I had no other choice."

"There is nowhere left for [THE LITTLE BIRD] to fly to."

"So I built… the most beautiful cage I could…"

"I let every idea I had for its bounds, its beauty, its innards, enter deep into its structure…"

"…I drove it deep as a spike into the dreams of the world…"

"…Because, sister, I needed so badly— I needed so much to be able to see you again, because you are already…"

But That's not

what he said,

either.

The bright daydream leaps out of its shell, smearing on the ground; in no world would her brother tell her his full and ungarnished depth of truth.

The Body-Below-The-Town spoke to him, once, moving its bill and opening wide its wings, streaming with grit.

Son of Order, it told him, we must, absolutely, will and forever save this town.

Chapter Text

During the epidemic, only firm authority is able to provide the necessary discipline. — The Bachelor, Day 2.

Inside the Theater, there is a star with one long, wasplike spike, that is piercing to the heart of the Town. It reigns in cold fire, and melodious tunes. In previous days, the man who holds the memory of the sandpit would stand beneath it, and speak to the masses of the value of their dreams, to bury from them the looming pulse of their death.

The day comes that finally, he will conquest over that final, hideous foe.

He now steps between It, and the Town. It shines in omen, it shines in promise, and it shines through him: that its (the stellaron's) long spike should pierce instead to his heart, act through his hands,

With no sound, no pain, no remnant,

he dissolves away into cold, golden fire, and is unmade as man.

The doll with the doctor's bag stitched to THEIR hand, that cups the lives of humanity in THEIR palm, that can(not) save their tiny bones from dry air and grave dirt, dreams exquisitely, aggressively, and as expansively as THEY can. It is the only way that THEY may suppress the final enemy: that is,

Through the delusion of play, perhaps nothing has to end.

Chapter Text

Reading the future in the entrails, he knows that a body bears semblance to the Universe. His scalpel follows the lines of the body; his steps follow the lines of his kin's fortune. A haruspex that can tell a true line from a false one is entrusted with power. A haruspex who is confused by his path gets buried into the deep black flesh of the Earth.

—Narration, from the beginning of the Haruspex's route.

Then, ███ rent the veil of nothingness, and the radiance of thoughts illuminated the realm of matter.

However, mortals remained unaware of the materialized illusionreality that surrounded them.

They dreamed: exquisitely, expansively, and endlessly.

In the sky there shone only one SUNPath, and it was good.

In the sky there dwelt only one STARStellaron, and it was fulfilling.

In the deeps there dwelt a great susurrus of wingsThe Propagation--

(AND THIS WAS EVIL, WICKED, AND VILE, TO BE DETESTED, A CRUELTYnecessity: IT WAS THE FINAL ENEMY'S LONG SHADOW STRETCHED BENEATH THE SOLE AND GLEAMING LIGHT, INESCAPABLE EVEN IN—)

—You devil. You wretched, despicable dogmaster. Why did you kill her!?AR-214

To prove he comprehended, and did not merely mourn "Death," that boy, obedient to authority, left behind the ruins of the sandpit into a place far darker, buried in the least-touched halls of the Reverie.

When the living become dead things, only then can one trace their life-line with clarity. Even Ena was made comprehensible, attainable, because THEY had died. THEIR will survived in THEIR works, and most of all, within the flesh of whatXipe consumed THEM. To those who knew to look, the countenance of Ena was obvious, within that of the triple-faced soul.

The lines of constructs and insects are similarly obvious. The lines of organic humanoids are more opaque: a furtive nature is necessary to maintain their conscious dignity, to keep the lumpen meat of them obscured from their easily panicked 'selves.' Contained within each and every is a whole worldHumanity.

In the close and wicked darkness of that room, he abruptly understood: this cast-off shell was cracked as if it had been pried open for a banquet. All of itsher precious, irreplaceable self was long consumed.

...To embody ███her, ██he would need to become as Ena.

Chapter Text

"Never mind. I have already thought up a way out. You will see, everything will be fine." — Eva Yan, shortly before her suicide, Day 6.

The story always began with this: two children were in the sandpit playing "Death," because today there had been a funeral.

Everything now is put away. In the aftermath there is sand-dirt under the children's fingernails. On a side table in the lounge just off the foyer, there is a little can of toothpicks, and the boy will always steal over to it, shake out three into his palm, and then bring them over to his sister.

They ought only need the two, it is just that they shouldn't be taking them, they are for guests of the man of the houseDreammaster. Yet, if one of them should be thieving, the boy thinks, it ought to be him, because he's already quite often chastised; he knows he is much worse at being good. Yet — if one snaps in her fingers or falls and rolls away, he likes to have the other to offer right then, so the disobedience only needs to be done, once, thoroughly enough it doesn't strain repeating. When he has just what she needs the moment she first needs it, it's a warm and proud feeling. Sometimes he gets almost anxious for the mishap to happen so that he can soothe it immediately away. She never asked him to do this for her, ever, it is just that he worries about her teachers cutting down all their chances at any playtime if she shows up with grit layered up under her soft nails… so it's important. It's a ward, protection: let me see my sister a little more little longer please please please.

Now,Then,

he shakes the can into his palm and despite all efforts, there is only one toothpick. It's empty, silent. His mind briefly empties out, too, just on spare oh no and then an ice-bath of formless, directionless feeling. He doesn't know where to get toothpicks. From the pleasing woody rattling sounds inside the can it always seemed that there were plenty.

Sunday has remembered his ultimate future for as long as the day of rest has been his name.

It is an irony. A hope. Teaching himself appreciation, for as long as his 'Sundays' stay 'his.' He will be awake, a watcher, an entity separate of all cradles and harbors.

The way it has always happened; the only way it will ever happen. It is written into the sand with the point of a stick by the brother, and sung to sleep forever by the sister.

There is sand-dirt under the children's fingernails. On a side table in the lounge just off the foyer is a little can of toothpicks, and the boy will always steal over to it, shake out (ONE) into his palm, and then bring them over to his sister. He will give her the only one. He will hide his dirty hands behind his back and smile and continue to think about how he has absolutely no idea where to get more toothpicks, and now all those little crimes have piled up, lending power to each other, like a Family working all as one. What wood do they make toothpicks from? It's surely not oak, it'd be so wasteful. Oak is all a treasure, so he's taught, to the tiniest branch, to the thickest trunk.

"Oops, it broke."

She pre-empts him.

Robin strode over to the empty can like she's done it every time. She's perplexed, however, when he begs her, "Wait!", and then more so as she picks up the light and empty cylinder.

"Hmm," she says. "The kitchen?"

He tails her there, swallowing all the different kinds of woe this whole process has invoked in him.

Robin goes on tip-toe, wings fluttering by her ears, searching in the drawer full of cutlery. She digs out from it two forks.

"They'll get dirty," he mumbles. "Someone will see."

"No, we'll just — big brother, we'll just wash them off!"

They always could have, couldn't they.

He almost drops the fork she'd gave him, loose in his hand. His mouth hangs slightly agape.

How — silly, she makes it all seem. It's already too late for all those little wooden slivers. They're trash, instead of something to give a guest (and hosting is important. Above all, in Dreamville, you have to remember hosting is important: it does not have the benefit of a warm core of an earth and miles of lived soil. Without guests the dream eats itself to starving) and here all along was a solution that wouldn't run out underneath him.

Robin was such a miracle. She could never be allowed to fademelt away.