Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

All these years I’ve been wandering around
Wondering how come nobody told me
All that I was looking for was somebody who looked like you!

In the absence of Dream of the Endless, Mari the ghost needed something to do.

“Um, Mister Lucien, may I ask you a question?”

The librarian was holding an armful of books that resembled tabletop RPG manuals, and he paused in re-shelving them as she approached.  “Yes, Miss Mari?”

“Oh, you don’t have to call me Miss Mari,” she told him.

“Then you don’t have to call me Mister Lucien,” he replied, with a more casual smile.  “What would you like to ask me?”

“Do you think… Lord Dream would let me use my boon to do something for someone else?” she asked.

“Someone else?” Lucien responded.

“If… that’s allowed,” Mari said, “I’d like to use my boon to help my brother… and my friends.”

“That would absolutely be allowed,” said Lucien.  “Did you have something in mind?”

“Not… exactly.  Not yet,” Mari said, smirking awkwardly.  “When you can wish for almost anything, it’s hard to narrow things down!”

“Well, what do you want your gift to do for them?” Lucien continued.  “Would you like them to be protected, or perhaps blessed with good fortune?”

“Good fortune?” Mari asked.  “Like, to be lucky forever?”

“If that is what you wish, Lord Dream is more than capable of making such an arrangement,” Lucien replied.  “He could even make it so your loved ones are never again troubled by bad dreams of any kind.  That would be a relatively simple decree, really.”

Mari lowered her eyes in thought, and a gleam of color in the light caught her attention - the charm on her wrist.  “Do you think he could make something like this for them?”

“A tether to The Dreaming?”

“No, a charm of protection,” Mari said.  Her fingers played with the jewel-tone threads, which felt real, because they were real, even in dreams.  “I think… I’d like them to have something.  Something that they’ll know came from me.”

Lucien set the unshelved manuals back down on his book-cart, and he thought for several moments with his hand pinched on his chin.  

“Well… with Lord Dream presently unavailable…”  He took his hand off his chin and looked at Mari directly.  “Why don’t you make something for them while you’re waiting, and then have it given to them as a part of your boon?”

“You really think that’d be okay?” Mari said.  “It wouldn’t be too much to ask?”

“Of course not,” Lucien replied, brightly.  “It would be a trifle to have the delivery of a small gift included with whatever you do end up choosing.”

“If you say so…!”  Mari’s shadow of excitement lessened slightly as more questions came to mind.  “But… what would I make?”

“You asked if Lord Dream might make another charm along the likes of yours.  Why don’t you create your own?” Lucien suggested.  “They wouldn’t have the same properties as one created by Lord Dream, of course, but they’d be from you.”

“Yeah… I like that idea,” Mari said.  “Uh…  Where would I go to find friendship bracelet stuff?  Do you have, uh, materials?”

“Of course,” Lucien said. “Please, follow me.”

He led Mari out of the library and through a series of hallways and stairways until they arrived at a small workshop that resembled a designer’s atelier.

“I believe you’ll find everything necessary here,” he told her.  “There is a broad assortment of embroidery floss in many different colors and materials, and of course all the other typical tools, scissors, needles…  Would you like to know where the beads are?”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll need all of that, but…”  She reached out to touch one of the spools of shimmering thread nearby, and it had a similar “charge” to it like the material of her bracelet, something that got through the numbness.  “Is any of this… real?  Like, can something made here actually be taken out of a dream?”

“Should you wish for it,” Lucien replied.  “You may use anything here, so do help yourself.”

Mari beamed at him in return.  “Thank you, I will!”

Mari didn’t see him as he nodded and departed the workshop; she was already inspecting the rows upon rows of embroidery floss for the work ahead.  As materials caught her eye, she gathered them in her hands, but she eventually had to set them down on a nearby work table to get more.

It was then that she noticed the books.  There were two of them, set in a neat stack next to a backed-out chair, as if someone had just finished reading them and stepped away.

One of them was a book with a sun-faded gray cover and the title “The Chronicle of Captive Spectres”.  The other one was a spiral-bound book with a hard black cover, almost like an oversized diary, kept shut with a strap attached to a strange-looking lock.

The books held Mari’s attention for a moment, before she returned to the rack of embroidery floss for her next round of choices.

When she returned, she couldn’t help but pick up the Chronicle and flip through it a bit.  It had a smell to it - or it made her remember a smell - of a very old book, but without any of the wet kiss of mildew.  It was a dry, dusty kind of Old, like paper stored in an attic.

Mari put the book down.  But not for long.

When she returned with her third - smallest - selection, she sat in the chair and opened the Chronicle and began to read.

Before she was a ghost, Mari loved ghost stories.

She supposed she still did, given how eagerly she was now going through this book, with its true stories.  Stories about people like her, who had gone through similar things.  She was enthralled and entertained, to be sure, but there was also a kind of emotional resonance, or empathy, that compelled her to keep reading.

Time passed strangely in dreams, and Mari didn’t need to sleep any more, so she barely noticed that hours had gone by, and she hadn’t gotten out of the chair, or touched the supplies she had gathered.

She wasn’t worrying about her loved ones for the first time in years.

Then, she reached an entry dated 1987 - the year she was born - and this is the story she read:

1987

 

It is exceptionally rare for a ghost to truly dwell within a dream.  The dead have always mingled with dreams, voluntarily or involuntarily, but never with any sort of permanence.  Even the most powerful shamans with spirits in full thrall cannot force a dream to persist if the dreamer is awakened by outside means; and even the most determined spirits cannot extend a dream beyond the dreamer’s circumstances.  If the conditions for a recurring dream are achieved and a spirit is able to return to a dreamer, night after night, these visitations rarely last for very long.  The case of the dreamer Jed Walker, therefore, is particularly worth exploring and dissecting, and for a multitude of reasons.

Born in 1977 to Bert Paulsen and Miranda Walker, Jed was the product of a broken home, his father gaining custody of him when his parents divorced in 1982.  By all accounts, Bert was a distant and neglectful father, handing off most parental duties to his own father Ezra, a lighthouse-keeper.  When Bert Paulsen died in a traffic collision in 1985, Ezra was granted sole custody.  Later that same year, however, Ezra Paulsen drowned in a storm surge that swept him out to sea, and Jed was passed to the closest next of kin: Ezra’s nephew Barnaby.  Unlike his uncle Ezra, Barnaby had no love for the boy; and unlike his cousin Bert, he went beyond neglect and physically and verbally abused Jed on a daily basis.  This abuse only worsened in 1986 after Jed attempted to escape and contact his mother.  For this he was locked in the basement of the home, only allowed to leave during scheduled check-ins with social services.

Faced with these compounding traumas (the ugly divorce from his disinterested mother, the violent death of his father, the sudden death of his grandfather, and now the abuse of his new foster family) Jed Walker began dreaming in search of an escape from his waking life.  Under normal circumstances he might have found a skerry to host him and his dreams or created an islet of his own.  Unfortunately for Jed Walker, he was instead preyed upon by two of the Major Arcana of The Dreaming, archetypal nightmares with ambitions of their own: Brute and Glob, the embodiments of brute force and base cunning.  Together they were arbiters of nightmares that indulged the most wicked impulses of their dreamers, and they took great pride and pleasure in their work.

Brute and Glob had once been loyal subjects of Dream of the Endless, but following the Dream King’s capture and imprisonment in 1916 the pair grew restless from the lack of leadership and emboldened by the absence of any sort of master over them.  In 1948, like so many other nightmares in this time of trepidation, they left the Kingdom of Dream in search of their own fortunes. And after many years of trying and failing to gain a foothold in the minds of other dreamers, they eventually found their fortunes in the dreams of Jed Walker.

Settling into the boy’s mind sometime in 1985, the nightmares began to construct an artificial skerry completely disconnected from the rest of The Dreaming.  They would not reign as kings or masters in this dreamworld, however, for their plans went beyond the dreams of a single boy.  In their world, they planned to create a new King of Dreams, whom they would return to The Dreaming as a puppet ruler - granting them the highest authority over all other nightmares, never again scorned by higher-minded dreams.

But while they had the means to construct a dreamworld, Brute and Glob lacked the capacity to create true forms for new dreams, having only power enough to project illusions for their dreamer.  To create their King of Dreams they needed to build upon something already in existence… and their answer came in the form of a man named Dr. Garrett Sanford.  Dr. Sanford, a professor of psychology at UCLA, had developed a machine that allowed him to enter the dreams of his patients. The use of this machine eventually left him stranded in between dreams with no clear means of returning to the waking world.  Unprepared and unfamiliar with the state of anarchy in The Dreaming, he was ultimately defenseless against Brute and Glob, who captured him and stole his machine, taking all of it into the dreams of Jed Walker.

Initially presenting themselves as subservient minions to him, Brute and Glob granted Dr. Sanford an illusion of power in the form of a role they had created for him to play: a superhero called the Sandman, defender of children who suffered from bad dreams.  For two years he was forced to endure night after night of adventures with Jed Walker, eroding at his sanity and sense of self with every mission.  The nightmares allowed for him to return to the waking world for one hour out of every day as a reprieve from his duties, though this provided no true relief from the assault on his identity.  Ultimately Dr. Sanford could not bear the ordeal of the dreamworld and he chose to end his life when he returned to the waking world one final time, believing it to be his only means of escape.  And following his death, indeed, the soul of Garrett Sanford was never thereafter held captive in dreams.  That fate would ultimately belong to the ghost of another man: Hector Hall.

Even before the events that resulted in his captivity, Hector Hall was a man of extraordinary spiritual circumstances.  His parents belonged to a grand cycle of reincarnation, but they were also stricken with an ancient curse, older than names: any child born between them, in any lifetime, would be destined to incarnate without a soul.  Instead the curse would seed a twisted divinity in the spiritual void of their offspring, a mortal enemy on that same cycle of reincarnation seeking the doom of the couple in lifetime after lifetime.  The vengeful will of their nemesis would grow beneath the consciousness of their own child until he had strength enough to seize control of the host’s body as his own and bring ruin upon the family from within.  When that day came, whatever identity had developed over the years would be cast aside like a shell and lost forever, without a soul to anchor the legitimate consciousness.  A cruel destiny, but a fate that was avoided for many thousands of years as the cycles of reincarnation kept the doomed lovers apart.  Still, such a child was an inevitability, and Hector was born in 1965 to archeologists Carter Hall and Shiera Sanders, otherwise blissful soulmates unaware of the destiny that awaited their son.

Raised in an environment of wealth and adventure, Hector’s childhood and adolescence was at once carefree and resentful, as his parents’ careers frequently took priority over him.  He replaced their absence with thrill-seeking behavior and like-minded friends, which made him popular in his college years.  Among these friends was Hippolyta “Lyta” Trevor, daughter of pilot Steve Trevor.  An accomplished aviator, Steve and his family were frequent guests at Hall Manor, often lending his services to Carter and Shiera for their expeditions.  Over the years “Hec” and Lyta went from childhood playmates to childhood sweethearts and by 1986 they were engaged to be married.

Later that same year Hector Hall lost both of his parents in a freak accident.  That severance of family support combined with the emotional shock to his system was more than enough for the parasitic entity within him to overpower his consciousness and begin its takeover of his body.  Seeking to further sever his host from humanity, Hector was compelled to abandon his fiancée, leaving their home in the middle of the night with only a note to tell his friends that he was returning to his family’s estate for some time alone.  Lyta Trevor, while understandably dismayed by the sudden move, allowed him the distance, attributing it to his grief.

Upon his arrival at the estate, however, he began to wreck the place, destroying priceless artifacts and eliminating all evidence of Hector’s life, bit by bit weakening the hold of his human consciousness by denying him points of reference.  Within the ruins of Hall Manor the nemesis began to construct a temple to himself, to carry out the rest of his hateful will from a place that had once been so dear to his enemies.  The construction was interrupted by a telegram from his fiancée, checking up on him.  Faced once more with this connection to humanity, Hector was compelled again to go and meet her and forced to declare he never loved her.  Lyta, heartbroken, ordered him to go away and he swiftly did as he was told.

With this last tether to humanity ruined for him, Hector Hall’s human consciousness all but gave up. After that complete surrender, the dark god that had been growing within him stabbed his body in the heart with a cursed crystal dagger, emerging from his host and returning to his full glory, his vengeance complete.  All that was left of his human self was a hollow vessel of skin and hair like a shed exoskeleton, left mostly intact on the altar of the profane ritual.

In early 1987 Lyta Trevor made one last attempt at reconciliation by visiting Hall Manor, hoping to speak to Hector.  Instead she found the husk of his body on that altar, crumbling like sand at her touch.  The god who had taken Hector Hall’s form attacked her then and took her hostage to lure the rest of their loved ones in for the slaughter.  Help eventually arrived, but it was not an act of heroics that saved this day. It was an act of love.

In all of the struggle and pleading that resulted from the hostage situation, he learned that Lyta was pregnant.  She discovered she was expecting shortly after his parents’ death and had planned on telling him the night he broke up with her for good.  She had come back to Hall Manor after beginning her maternity leave, wanting to give him one last chance to be in her life… and the life of their child.  The belief in this fact solidified the nascent tether that had kept Hector Hall’s consciousness from fading away completely and it granted him the resolve to throw off the influence of the dark god, ending the cycle of violence forever by destroying what remained of his own form.

By some miracle of life, the human consciousness of Hector Hall did not fade into oblivion then, as the curse had intended.  His love for his wife and his unborn child had given him something like a soul, holding fast to the wish that he might see them again.  But the ghost of Hector Hall had no intended destination, so he drifted through the subtle spaces between realms, where dreams and realities fade in and out of each other, until... he was found.

Brute and Glob had been on the hunt for a new Sandman, and they had just snagged the perfect candidate.

Seeking to avoid a repeat of Dr. Sanford’s suicide, the two nightmares had hatched a plan to capture a ghost in The Dreaming and use that unfortunate soul as the new “core” for their King of Dreams.  A ghost, they reasoned, could not end their lives and end their time in the dream prematurely… for their lives were already ended.  In the absence of Dream of the Endless, the borders of The Dreaming were not enforced, so there was no shortage of lost and stranded spirits in those days, mostly dreamers who had died in their sleep.  The nightmares’ attempts at approaching these ghosts (enticing them with offers of help) largely ended in failure.  But Brute and Glob were persistent, and their efforts were rewarded when they collected Hector Hall’s unguarded soul in The Dreaming.

Taking him back to the skerry hosted in Jed Walker’s dreams, Brute and Glob began their conditioning by linking up Hall’s consciousness with Sanford’s machinery, feeding him the knowledge of Sanford’s life and works, and granting him the powers that came with the role.  The two nightmares had intended for the superhero persona to override Hall’s objections, smothering his old memories with new exposition, but the love for his family kept his mind mostly intact when he took on his new dream-crafted form. And so Hector set out with much enthusiasm on his first mission in the dreamworld: his first night as the Sandman, defender of all children with bad dreams.

Jed Walker (who had only dreamless sleep while Brute and Glob were searching for their next victim) began once more to dream of adventures with his guardian hero.  Hector quickly developed a fondness for Jed, treating him like a little brother or a surrogate son, looking forward to each new mission that turned up.  None of this could compare to the life he was missing in the waking world, of course. A world he was only allowed to visit for one hour a day.

Hector chose to visit Lyta at midnight so he could watch her sleep without disturbing her.  He saw how she mourned him still and did not wish to burden her with the knowledge of his fate, for there was nothing she could do to help him.  This arrangement only lasted for a few months before he was inevitably discovered and caught by Lyta and her family.  Overjoyed to learn of his strange survival, Lyta accepted Hector’s offer to take her with him into the dreamworld and live with him there as a family.  She could return to the waking world at any time, given that she was still alive and not trapped in a form that was tied to the dream.  They were married a few weeks later in a brief private ceremony, concluded in under an hour by necessity, for Hector could not stay longer.

After that, Lyta Trevor-Hall followed him into the little world of dreams.

She was not seen again until 1989.

Reunited with his wife and unborn child, Hector’s wish had finally come true… and now that they were in the dream with him, there was nothing in the waking world to entice him away from the work yet to be done.  He began to lose himself in the role of the hero, his sense of time and reality slipping away little by little.  The dream conditioned Lyta’s mind as much as it did her husband, keeping her thoughts from all other friends and family, all the wrong-ness of the “life” she was living.  Weeks went by, then months, but their child went unborn, for life cannot be created in a place where death has no meaning.

For two whole years the ghost of Hector Hall, the living woman Lyta Trevor-Hall and their unborn child all dwelled within the dreams of Jed Walker, who was loved like a son by the two captive souls.  Brute and Glob pushed the abilities of the Sandman’s role to greater and greater limits with the missions they sent him on, to test the powers growing within him from their diligent conditioning, each adventure more arduous than the last.  All the while, Lyta waited for her boys to come safely home to her and her baby, whom the nightmares already had an eye on.  If the father did not work out as a candidate, the child was their next choice.

Unfortunately for Brute and Glob, Dream of the Endless returned to power in 1988.  Their plans for a puppet king were almost certainly ruined, but the nightmares worked to keep their dreamworld beneath notice for as long as they could.  They succeeded for a little over a year before their old master found them out in 1989 and personally went to deal with the situation himself.

In the space of moments, the nightmare-crafted world hosted in Jed Walker’s dreams was quickly and violently ended by Dream of the Endless, destroying much of the Paulsen house in the process, killing Barnaby and his wife Clarice.  After condemning Brute and Glob to imprisonment and banishing them accordingly, Dream of the Endless dismissed the ghost of Hector Hall, sending his fledgling soul to his appointed place, not even granting him the dignity of a farewell to his wife.  Paying no mind to the furious grief of Lyta Trevor-Hall in response, Dream of the Endless then declared that the unborn child she had carried in dreams was his to claim and that he would return for it one day.  He then returned to The Dreaming, leaving Lyta alone in the ruins of the basement.

Jed Walker (gone unacknowledged by the true King of Dreams) escaped from the wreckage on his own and hitched a ride in search of his mother before any police could arrive, out of fear that he would he blamed for what had happened.  He was eventually reunited with his mother and older sister, and in their custody he would never again be lost or mistreated.

Lyta did not attempt to escape.  She was eventually rescued by police and reunited with her parents.  She had not aged a day, despite all the time passing, and it took several months to rehabilitate her to waking life.  Doctors could not explain why her child was growing so slowly, but the growth was steady enough to measure.  In September of 1990, over three years past her due date, Lyta Trevor-Hall finally gave birth to a son.

When her son was one week old, Dream of the Endless returned as he had promised and he claimed the child as his successor, giving him the name Daniel.

“Lord Dream… has a successor?” Mari said, but it felt like several words were missing as she spoke.  A familiar forgetting.

“A successor, indeed.”  Lucien re-entered the room with an uncertain smile.

“Wow…”  Mari’s posture stiffened, losing the sense of relaxed entertainment she had gained from the reading - from the true stories she was reading.  “…god, his poor parents.  Not just the curse stuff, but… that dreamworld they were in, that role for him… That was almost like… what I was going through.”  Mari paused, a phantom chill of reality running further down her back.  “If he was born in September 1990…  Oh, then he’s younger than Sunny…!”  Mari’s eyes widened, then narrowed again.  “Why can’t I say his name?  Is he some sort of secret apprentice?”

“You’ve already met him,” Lucien told her.

The words came to her without thinking.  “…that pale boy…?  No, but he…”

A boy so pale, it was as if he’d never seen the light of day.

“When… did he succeed the… previous Dream?” Mari asked.

“New Year’s Eve, 1993.”

A boy with hair like an old man, a boy just-younger than her brother.

“But when we first met, he looked so much older than me…” Mari said.  “Is that all just… an illusion?”

“Our perception of Lord Dream is shaped by how he wishes to be perceived,” Lucien explained. “And he may appear in different forms to different kinds of things.  A cat looking upon him may very well see another cat - or perhaps a kitten, in his present state…  Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘You’re only as old as you feel’?”

“…he really is just a kid.”  The math and the memories were constructing a creeping feeling of delicate sadness around her, like iron lace.  “But what about when he was first starting out?”

Lucien sighed wistfully.  “It was almost easier, then,” he said.  “All his memories and competencies were carried over upon his succession, you see.  In most aspects, nothing changed at all.  He listened to my counsel, he did his duties to the letter, all without any assistance, because he just knew how.”

“So… is he trapped in there?” Mari asked.  “He’s clearly there, I saw him in my brother’s dream.”

“He simply is,” said Lucien.  “And I think the situation with you and your brother has reminded him of some things he… also is.”

So many little things clicked into place.

 

She was a little ghost trapped in a dreamworld, like his father had been.

The dreamworld had come for a boy born in the same year as him.

He would have been born in the same year as her if his mother hadn’t been held captive in dreams for so long.

“So, all those things I heard the Former say…  Those weren’t things he did… but he still feels responsible for.”  The lace of sadness around her grew heavier. “But he couldn’t have done them.  He shouldn’t blame himself for them.  That wasn’t him.”

“Advice that is, regretfully, difficult to give,” said Lucien.  “Even in his absence, there are… some things that simply can’t be said.”

(There was a feeling like something clicking out of place.)

“…this is just like how it was in my brother’s dream, isn’t it?” Mari did not ask.  “My brain would do backflips to keep me on script…  Is he doing that to all of you?  All the time?”  Her voice was quiet with revelation, not because she was scared of being heard.

“I… doubt he is even aware,” said Lucien.  “I only scarcely noticed, before recently, that it was more than just my own… reluctance with… certain subjects…”

Mari exhaled with stalemate frustration.  “This isn’t fair to any of you.  There’s no way he can work through all this if nobody can even talk about it,” she said.  She paused.  “Where is he now?”

“He is… finally getting some rest, in his room,” Lucien said.

“…sounds like he really needs it.  I mean, with all of this on his mind, with me and my brother… reminding him.”  She gestured to herself.  “I wish I could help.”

(She felt like she could.)

“You needn’t worry yourself about such things, Miss Mari,” Lucien said.  “You should focus less on thinking about how you want to help Lord Dream, and focus more on what you want Lord Dream to do, for your boon.”

Mari could feel a challenge by omission in the pauses and stresses of the librarian’s words, a kind of unsaid recognition.

“Well… I’ll start with making the bracelets for my friends, so we have an excuse,” she said.  “I’ll work my way backward from there.  I’ve got some time to decide.”

“Very well, then.  I’ll leave you to your work.  Would you like me to take the books away?” Lucien asked.

“Oh, I wasn’t done yet,” Mari said, picking up the Chronicle.  “There was just a little bit left to read.”

She turned to the last entry, dated 2002, and this is the story she read:

2002

 

It is exceptionally rare for a ghost to truly dwell within a dream.  It is rarer still for these instances of extended occupation to occur in such close proximity, and yet such was the case of Mari Kuroda and the dreamer Sunny Kuroda, both of whom found themselves involved in the game of the Black Pearl dreamstone.  While the rule of the new Dream of the Endless had prevented most further intermingling of dreams and the dead, the involvement of a dreamstone caused this occupation to go beneath his notice until the game within it had advanced to a degree that could no longer be ignored.  What resulted was the longest period of captivity yet recorded, with the ghost of Mari Kuroda held in an unending dream for nearly 43 months.

Despite the exceptional circumstances of her ordeal, Mari Kuroda’s childhood was an utterly mundane one.  Born in 1987 to parents Ichiro “Richie” Omori and Sachiko Kuroda, Mari was raised in a stable and comfortable home environment, supported by her father’s modest but respectable career as a sales manager.  Her younger brother, Shinichi “Sunny” Kuroda, was born in 1990.  In 1992 the family moved to the town of Faraway, where they thereafter resided in relative peace for many years.

In 2002, following an argument with her brother Sunny over an upcoming music recital, Mari Kuroda lost her balance and fell down a flight of stairs, resulting in her death from a broken neck.  The only other witness to this accident was Basil Tillerman (aged 12) a neighbor and friend of her brother.  Out of fear that Sunny would be blamed for the accident, Basil helped carry Mari’s body to the backyard and together they staged a suicide using a jump-rope as the noose.  The two boys then retreated to Basil’s house and Mari’s body was found by her parents when they returned a few hours later.

The events of that day were obviously traumatic for Sunny, who blamed himself for the fall, and for Basil, who feared for his friend’s life.  In response to the trauma, Sunny Kuroda ceased speaking entirely and his condition deteriorated into an almost comatose state.  His only escape from the situation was to dream in search of a world, and that world came to him in the form of a dreamstone: the Black Pearl.  Designed as a questing world for dreamers with unbearable truths, the dream of the Black Pearl would engage Sunny Kuroda in a cycle of games meant to bring him to terms with the source of his pain.

But the source of his pain, his sister Mari, was more than just an unbearable truth.  Her unfinished business had kept her from taking Death’s hand and passing on to her appointed place, and as such she was there when the Black Pearl came to Sunny, and she was taken into the dream along with him.  The dreamworld had no place for her, but it was unable to eject Mari once she had entered.  Out of both necessity and sympathy to the ghost, the resident functions of the dream allowed her to inhabit one of the roles in the quest, rather than let her languish in the void of her brother’s subconscious until the dream ended.  She would be little more than a puppet for the game to speak through, but it would allow her to be with her brother and help him along the way.

The ghost of Mari Kuroda dwelled in her brother’s dreams like this for nearly four years, surpassing Hector Hall’s record-setting captivity by several months.  The ending of the dream was dependent on Sunny Kuroda’s completion of the quest within the dream, a quest he repeatedly tried and failed to complete on his own, unable to accept his unbearable truths.  Mari, central to this unbearable truth, could not be released from the dream until the quest ended, and until the quest ended she would always be there, a reminder of that truth, no matter how much or how little he accepted.  They were caught in a recursive spiral that could not be broken except by outside means, with Sunny’s dissociated mental state keeping him from moving on.

The end to the nightmare finally came in 2006.  Richie Omori and Sachiko Kuroda concluded their divorce in June of that year, the terms finalized by the sale of their house, with Sunny and his mother moving to a new home in another city.  In response to the dread of the impending move, the skerry of Sunny Kuroda’s dreamworld began producing tremors, which caught the attention of Dream of the Endless.  When Dream entered the skerry to investigate, he met Mari and learned of her circumstances, and he personally set to making things right for her and her brother.  The task was far easier said than done, but Dream managed to free her by crafting a charm of protection that tethered her to the True Dreaming and pulled her out of her brother’s dream.  Once she was freed, Dream returned to the skerry to question the resident functions there, in the absence of their dreamer… but in doing so, he was led to a vision of his own unbearable truths.  Unable to accept his truths, he became lost in memories, effectively powerless.

With Dream rendered helpless at its center, the influence of the dreamworld began to rapidly expand, like a cancer metastasizing, worsening the deteriorating state of the Pearl.  It had already pulled in Basil Tillerman (the other witness to Mari’s death) to play a role in the game, and the Pearl was beginning to pull other residents of Faraway into the dream, including the childhood friends of the Kuroda siblings.  Looking after her brother in the waking world, Mari was able to see this manifestation as it spread outward from Basil’s body.  She called for help… but there were none in The Dreaming who could aid her.

Overcome by everything, Basil Tillerman attempted to end the nightmare by attacking Sunny Kuroda, the host of the dream, stabbing him in the eye with gardening shears in the ensuing fight. The boys both collapsed from their injuries and were quickly rushed to the hospital.  Waiting for her brother to wake up after surgery, Mari Kuroda was visited by a keeper of the Black Pearl, who offered to pull her back into the dreamworld so she could try to help.  Accepting the offer, Mari returned to the dream and called upon the powers of her role within the quest to assemble a Memory Palace, rescuing the souls of her brother and his friends, as well as Dream of the Endless, who followed the path she created out of memories.  With his sister by his side, Sunny Kuroda passed his final trial, winning the game and ending the dream for good.

When the dream ended, Dream of the Endless took Mari Kuroda and the Black Pearl both safely back to The Dreaming, where she presently resides, no longer captive to any one dream.

It was a strange feeling, seeing her life distilled into such a clean little narrative, to see the facts laid so plainly bare.

(To see that she had only just lost her balance.  It wasn’t his fault.)

To know that his father had suffered as she had suffered… but she had not been dismissed, like he had been.

…then, a stranger feeling hit Mari: the realization that her entry in this book might not have existed before her captivity ended, and she was freed.

“The ‘Black Pearl dreamstone’…  Was that the thing at the core of the dream?  Where is it now?” Mari asked, more curiously than fearfully.

“Safely in my protection, as commanded.”  The librarian produced the Pearl from his breast pocket.  “Its dreamworld shall not trap another dreamer again, I promise.”

“Thank you, but… what’s a dreamstone?” Mari continued.

“They are objects of great power, each containing some degree of Lord Dream’s essence within,” Lucien explained.  “His Emerald is one of them, and I recall a Rose Quartz with a little world of its own, as well…  And… his predecessor, he… had a Ruby.”

“…so that’s who he saw.  The Former Dream,” Mari said.  “Headspace must have really gotten a hold of him.”

“Thoroughly impossible,” Lucien said.  “The dreamworld is inert in my keeping.”

“No, I mean, the thought of it, what it showed him,” Mari said.  “You don’t need a fancy dream-quest to get a thought stuck in your head that you’d rather not be reminded of.  And that place is really good at getting those thoughts to come through.”

“Ah.  I see what you mean,” Lucien said.  “If that dreamworld’s records are anything to go by, I’m sure you’ve both been shown things you would rather not see… or let others see.”  He took the diary-like book with the strap on its cover and he set the Pearl into an indentation on the lock, like a puzzle.  As he opened the book, Mari could see that it was a scrapbook; there was also a pocket on the inside cover holding a piece of folded white paper.

The very first page of the book was a piece of laminated material, like a preserved letter, written in a careful, elegant cursive:

    For the Dreamer:
  

 

• A Room - Something to play in.

• A Form - Something to play with.

• A Caretaker - Something to return to.

• A Caregiver - Something to carry on.

• 3 Guardians - For challenges.

• 4 Keepers - For directions.

• Weapon of Truth - For the end.

 

    This world may come for anyone seeking relief from unbearable truths.
  

    These truths will be scattered across this world in the form of Keys.
  

    The Weapon of Truth will appear when enough Keys have been found.
  

    When the Weapon of Truth is used the dream will end.