EXCERPT TIME WUT.
SO I GOT BORED. AND WHEN I GET BORED, WRITING HAPPENS.
Title: The Crystal Room
Author: pax_morgana
Rating: G (for now)
Summary: A science-fiction take on Morpheus of Greek mythology. Plot is very much unrefined. This is just what I have written so far.
They say that when he's asleep, the world is dreaming. They say that no man in a thousand years has ever seen him awake - not in the real world. He's in all of our dreams. We may not always notice him - he's usually just in the background, someone in the audience or the crowd - but he's always there, watching us. Monitoring our dreams, the rumors say, to keep the nightmares from flooding into reality. I've spoken to him once, in a dream I had over many days and nights. He told me these things, confirmed the stories as truth, of a sort. He warned me against his own waking.
In the dream, I was in a room with walls made of crystal. I saw myself reflected a million times in tiny little facets in a million directions. So much whiteness and clarity ought to have been blinding, but it did not faze me as I walked across the wide room to meet the figure on the opposite side. He sat cross-legged on a bed of the kind you see in hospitals, dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt that came only to his knees. He was skinny and white-haired, but there wasn't a wrinkle on his face. Something about him seemed ageless, eternal; his eyes were pale and intense as they watched my every movement. At the same time, there was something familiar about him that I couldn't place. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, yet it bounced off of every facet of every wall to get to me.
"I was hoping someone would come here," he said as I approached him. There was a chair beside the bed, and I sat down without invitation; I knew it was there for me.
"Where is - here?" I asked in a whisper; my voice lacked the rich reverberation of the man's. He smiled gently, almost as an adult would a small, simple child.
"Why, it's a dream," was his cryptic answer. I studied him, and he me.
"Is it my dream? Or yours?"
"You people are always so full of questions. Often, they are ones to which you need not know the answers. Rarely do you ask important questions." He leaned closer, his eyes sparkling with what appeared to be a childish delight even though the rest of his face was serious, even grave. In a whisper I had to strain to hear, he said, "It is neither."
I nearly asked what he meant, but, recalling his remark on questions, held my tongue. I fancied I saw him nod approvingly. He watched me in silence for a few short minutes, as if he were taking my measure, then smiled a great, toothy grin that made my heart stutter with its beauty. This, or so I thought, was the countenance of a god.
"Close," he chuckled in response to my unspoken thought, "But not quite. I'm a man like you, but different. Altered." Saying the last word, his expression changed completely: his brow furrowed, his lips tugged into a troubled frown. I reached out to him before I could think to stop myself, and laid my hand atop his. The difference in coloring was stark and shocking, the dark copper of my skin clashing against the china white of his. Again, he smiled, sadly this time, and turned his hand so that our palms were touching. I felt a shiver run through me then, and a glimpse of something strange passed through my mind - not thoughts, but images, yet not quite images. It was alien, but also heartbreakingly familiar: a room not unlike that of a hospital, and a bed nearly identical to the one the pale man was sitting on. Lying in it was the pale man himself, sleeping or comatose, with a tube down his throat. Doctors were milling about, this one checking the man's pulse, this one opening his eyelid, then all of them scribbling things down on clipboards before leaving the room as a group.
A single word, or, rather, a name (vaguely familiar, though I couldn't place it just then), flashed through my mind: "Morpheus."
When I returned to reality, the pale man - Morpheus, I now knew - had his lips pursed and his eyes closed, as if he were in pain. He was muttering under his breath and holding my hand tightly. I couldn't catch all of what he said, but I could have sworn I heard the phrases "not yet" and "no time". Slowly, his eyes fluttered open and he relaxed his grip on my fingers. I opened my mouth to speak, but he shook his head.
"What you saw just now was the source of your dreams, the dreams of all of mankind."