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A King’s Dream, A God’s Nightmare
A dream of Asgard as it never was. The golden crenellations of the outer shield wall flew green banners marked with the slashes of a King who strode victorious over a half dozen wars since his ascent to the throne. The roads were perfumed with rose and apple for the festival, and street magicians, no longer afraid to ply their trade, capered as illusions burst from their hands to delight the children.
The first thing the new King had done was set aside the Old Laws, the ones meant to forbid those like the would-be Witch Queen Karnilla from taking power. The law that meant Frigga herself lived a shadow life, her gifts unshared. No longer, not in this Asgard. The healers’ hands were unfettered now, the alchemists brewed forbidden teas from once-lost seedlings, the gryphon-beasts drew the soldiers’ carts, as once they did in long ago legend.
Today was a mark-day; a memorial the King had chosen. Its purpose was a secret, but its reason was clear. It was a feast to honor all the setbacks that he had turned into victories. Born a monster’s child, the King had purged his blood and become true. Thrust from Asgard, screaming vengeance, he’d returned at the head of a loyal army. Broken, unbowed, forever returning. Left for dead, yet he always arrived in time to save Asgard from the corruption snaking within its heart. The All-Father slept now in eternal silence, watched over by a coterie of new-blooded Valkyries. The mighty Thor had abdicated in favor of the rightness of the new King, gone off to serve mortal needs.
Inside the palace, its own walls bedecked with flower garlands and silver streams of braided wolf-thread, the feast raged on. Jarls from across Vanaheim clanked their mead against the heady brews the Dwarves brought with them. The Elven ambassadors sat politely near the throne, gleaming with magic secrets. Under the King’s eye, their scholars traded tomes with the once-hidden witches of the Aesir and Vanir. Under the king’s black robes, it was whispered, he wore a suit of magick’d glass etched with runes from every corner of the universe. Fae and beast wandered through the crowd, impossible beings of light, aliens of far worlds, all granting tribute, eager for their turn before the throne.
A throne that sat empty. The King did not deign to sit above his crowd this night — this dream. The revelers knew better than to question his decisions. He was close, they were sure of it, and they shouted their pleasure at his rule over their sopping cups and succulent roasts.
. . .
In truth, there was no King in Asgard at present. There was a man among the revelers, his shape half in shadow and his presence unnoticed. His clothes were ordinary, a mortal’s black tee shirt with a scrambled cartoon character on it, for his sleeping mind couldn’t put it together, and a pair of black sweatpants. His face was unsure and unsettled. Loki’s mind was always his own, even in dreams. He didn’t bother to force full lucidity most nights. Enough awareness to prevent the old nightmares served him well enough. Yet this dream came back, over and over again. A remnant of what he once was, probably. Or a warning that he would, one day, return to his predatory search for ‘his’ throne.
Loki walked past Thor’s old friends, Fandral and Volstagg, and they, of course did not see him. He could not make out their whispers, either. In this dream, they didn’t plot against him, but he felt sure they would at least mutter about whatever it was Thor was currently up to. Heroics, no doubt. That’s all his sleeping mind ever assumed.
The throne glinted against his dreaming eyes like a knife, now and again. It called to him, demanding his attention. Demanding his ass be plopped among its royal cushions. It was comfortable enough, he supposed, but it was no longer what he wanted. That realization always caused his stomach to turn over, even in sleep. The sensation rippled through the dream, transformed into the vile scent of a boar yet to be roasted losing its bristles and its outer skin.
Who was he, then, if not a king? When he awoke, where would he be? The question pushed against him, and Loki staggered for a moment against a golden column, hating it for showing him a glimpse of his reflection. He saw it all; his sloppy sleeping clothes, his messy, too-long hair gone wild against the pillow, his pale, angular face that, here, hid nothing of his true Jotun blue in it. That was a newer development, but then, so was knowing he should be skinned up like a child’s berry-sweet in the first place.
Loki turned away in distaste. That wasn’t his true face. Why did his subconscious argue with him? What the hell did any of it mean? Was he really struggling for nothing, doomed to return to being the old Loki, no matter what? He had seen glimpses of the multiverse before, knew his probable outcomes. Madness, despair, despotic rule, and, rarely, so rare it was sacred, transfiguration.
But this dream was mocking him. He sneered at the revelers, looking for the grand double doors. If he could find them — they liked to move; the dream was fond of coaxing him to remain — then he could force himself away, have a cup of tea, and try to bed down again without these dreams.
There were no doors this time. Nowhere at all A flutter of panic raced down his arms, cold gooseflesh in both worlds. Loki turned his attention back to the revelers, looking for a clue. Perhaps he had a duelist demanding he prove his worth. Sometimes that happened, and the thrashing woke him up. No. The Dwarves were leading a chain-song, with sauced warriors adding filthier lyrics as the tune wore on. Grotesque, but not unusual. Ditties from his childhood fed these revelers, feast bards that didn’t think about the pair of pint-sized nobles hearing them sing exclusively about fucking and killing once Queen Frigga left the room.
Flawless Asgard. Loki glanced sharply to his side, as if that would make the doors appear. No, someone was leading in a brace of fat geese for the next course, with golden beaks and bellies full of spirits meant to enhance the taste of their flesh. An Elvish thing, overmuch and ostentatious and, privately, he thought, rather inhumane.
A bellow from the far side of the room made him worry he’d lost control and become visible. But no, they were hauling a drunk out the side door to leave him in the stables lest he vomit all over the feast hall. Normal. Ordinary. Oh, so ordinary. He sighed, looking up for maybe a way to shimmy up to the ladies’ balconies and out the high windows. If I fall, hells, that’s one way to wake up, Loki thought with a grimace. I’ll sweat through my shirt, but that’s a Tuesday.
Another shout made him jolt. “A toast to our King! No doubt he is out halting the raving hordes of the undead! Helheim’s rise will be stopped in its tracks!” Huzzahs met the cheer. I’m vaguely asleep and standing in a pair of slops I bought in a Tractor Supply store three months ago while on a job, but all right, sure, I’m out defending the realm. Loki’s gaze swept the crowd and locked eyes with an equally shadowy figure that seemed to be half a million miles away. A star glinted in the stranger’s left eye. A dead white face emerged from the shadows, its lips pursed in some inexplicable expression.
Loki jerked in his dream when a raven called overhead, knowing it was not Hugin nor Munin. But he was thrust, momentarily, into a twelve year old’s mind, caught by the birds doing something he shouldn’t. “Sorry!” cawed the raven.
“Away, Matthew,” said the shadow, in a voice so clear and sepulchral that the sounds of the feast disappeared. Then they were the shadows, and Loki saw the figure in full. His mind churned over, accessing the facts, ever analytic, even in deepest dreams. The Disappeared One. The Secret. They Whom Wizards Did Not Anger.
Loki knew exactly what not to say, so of course, being in an awkward dream that he did not want, it came flying out of his mouth. There were powers even the hungriest of fools didn’t muck around with, so of course there were rumors a human had done exactly that. “Lord Morpheus, lost of the Endless. There’s been word for a century that something was wrong. That changed?” He tried to rein himself in, tugging at his shirt with a pained expression. “Even Kamar-Taj sensed something was up.” Fuck, I’m an idiot.
“There is nothing wrong, any longer,” said Dream of the Endless, never blinking. His expression, which records said was typically either enigmatic or pissed off, remained enigmatic. A faint whisper of relief hit Loki. The preferable of the two. Shit hit the fan — rather, said the tomes “Beware the emotional immortal, for one should not seek their direct attention in any way” — when the Endless actually acted like they cared.
Then Dream did smile, a tiny thing, a quirk at the corner of the normally pursed lips.
whatdidIdo, oh fuck
“You do not remember,” said the Lord of the Nighttime Realms.
“If I’ve given any offense to your Lordship, my greatest apologies,” said Loki, hurriedly, trying to sound as noble as one could in a pair of $19.99 sweatpants that had already developed a ripped left pocket. “The Dwarves today have a barrel of millennium ale, brewed in the ruins of a collapsed star. Take it from me, if you will, and I’ll happily forget the one time I had a sip of it to honor my debt.”
Dream snorted and looked at the throne as it gleamed under the torchlight, sparks of colorful magic casting brilliant highlights along its edges. “Gods dream so much smaller than mortals do. Their function demands it, but They never see it as the loss it is. A God of strength spends millennia in the same coliseums, with the same beasts, the same adoring crowd, and they are satisfied.”
The Endless lord looked back to him. “A mortal will dream themself into that same coliseum, chased by a loose beast, and run into endless fields where they will find their lost love, ascend to the stars, and find themselves running a bookshop frequented by small, hairy things. A remarkable feat, in comparison.”
Loki said nothing to that. He was busy assuming the coliseum thing was a metaphor for this boring, shitty party he kept throwing for himself.
“That was not meant to be a metaphor, of course.” Dream flicked out a long, pale hand to encompass the room, which now sat in the palm of his hand, a golden miniature while they, two, now stood in a rolling green plain that Loki couldn’t quite name but knew damn well he’d been to before. “You are not a God.”
“I’ve been told that. It keeps coming up for discussion,” said a small god of lies, who sometimes was the god of stories, or of change.
The great palace of Asgard collapsed into sand, filtering through those long fingers.
“Not that I mean to argue with you, Your Lordship.”
Dream closed his hand, opened it again. His palm was clean, as blank as sculptor’s marble. “The Gods I speak of are grand things, created for purpose, locked into narrow lives. They are not mortal, they cannot change, they do not die. They are the ones above, the meta-myths. Let me show you one,” he finished. A cavern’s entrance now gaped next to him, the stone arches melted in places as if scorched by something far worse than lava. “Enter. You will face no harm.”
. . .
Loki wasn’t sure he walked so much as apparated deep within the cave. How deep? He couldn’t be sure, but the weight of the Earth around him felt oppressive. Dream was not there, nor the talking raven. Just a gentle slope going down, down, down… spiraling, speckled with strange pits, bordered by razor-sharp stalactites and a blank void of nothing. His nose wrinkled. Acid damage?
How long was this dream? Minutes? Was it even after midnight yet? The lucid question faded into the background, etched onto the sharp stones as he continued to walk. He could do nothing else. Then he heard the sounds, hissing, feral, implacable. And then the screams.
“I don’t want to keep going,” said Loki, unnerved, still walking.
“It is necessary,” said Dream, though he was not there.
The stalactites grew larger, the void beyond deeper and consuming. It seemed as if there was no ground below him. And then he arrived.
“A narrow dream, a small one, full of rage and vengeance,” said Dream, as Loki took in the scene with dawning horror.
The snake’s body roiled among the stalactites, its broad, triangular head fixed in place above the prone figure, chained to a broken stone altar. Poison dripped from the snake’s mouth, straight into the burned out eyes of the prisoner. Bone gleamed in the empty sockets, burned white. Nothing but incoherent sound poured from the scarred mouth. Hair streamed from the contorting brow, red as flame. The face, though. Narrow. Angular. Noble. Loki saw the etchings of thousands of plans, of insults given and curses shared. He could not look away from its familiarity.
“Sometimes his wife comes to fill a bowl with the snake’s poison, letting his eyes heal. It is unclear if she loves or hates him. It does not matter to the myth. Sometimes he breaks free, and the world ends. Then he is returned to his chains amidst the ruins of what once was, and the screaming starts. That is his story, the God of the final lie.”
“Which is?” whispered Loki.
“That stories end. He is merely another destroyer-God, couched in a cautionary tale of schemes. Charming and malicious. Too sure that his story is the whole story, and so this is his dream. That he is imprisoned for what he is destined to do, and so he does it anyway. Every time, he thinks the cycle is done.” Dream reached out to the screaming God. “It is not. For a courtesy, he does not remember. Each torment is new to him. For him, the story does end.”
“That’s better?” Loki looked at the screaming figure, thrashing against his chains. “This is… it’s not me, is it?”
“ It would not comfort him to know it begins again, forever. Did you wish him to be you?”
“Not particularly.” Loki looked at Dream. “This is what he wants?”
“It is what he must have. To be tormented. To be in pain for all time, punished for a destiny he cannot escape. No kindness granted him, save the brief moments of painlessness. A small tale, a necessary one for the mortals that heed it.” That faint, terrible smile. “A dull one, I suppose.”
“Yeah, if that’s a capital G god, I’ll pass, thanks,” muttered Loki, keenly aware that he was starting to sound far too human, even in his dreams. “This is the Loki the humans believed in. The one that…” he shrugged, unable to finish.
“They made him. That is a secret of the Gods that I will not let you take into morning. They are forged by mortal dreams, little un-god. They gave him a few of your stories, overheard as the All-Father spoke of his children at the old summits of the Vikings long ago, and they made this one into his antithesis. A blood-brother, not a son. A creature of countless taboos, destined to cloak the sun under the darkness of Ragnarok. The humans knew only to be afraid of what these great powers could be, and to be less afraid, they created this small, piteous creature, and gave him the powers of a God.”
The cavern vanished, and the field returned. Dream watched Loki with a look that could, if one was willing to extrapolate from a microexpression smaller than a quark, be interpreted as curiosity.
Loki tried very hard not to look at the Endless, because he was, presently, at a total loss.
“Some would call such an existence the apex of power. A cycle of unbreakable existence, their fates immutable. It is a throne of its own, of sorts. In these small realms, they are resolute. Was that not once your dream, such resolute power?”
A flush reddened Loki’s neck, somewhere between shame and self-pity. “A childish one.”
“Yes,” said Dream easily, which surprised him. “I must show you one more thing. And then you will understand the reason for my visit.” Dream turned away without waiting for an acknowledgment, and the veil of the dreaming tore into pages of a book, flipping all the way back to the cover - the Book of Loki, ornamented with emerald slivers and bound with gold - and then, forward, a handful of pages in.
The words swept around Loki, rushing their sounds into his ears all at once, a cacophony of existence. And then the story began.
. . .
Loki was twelve. Not some fancy Asgardian twelve which actually meant sixty years and three weeks or whatnot, but twelve years of age as the humans would reckon, and already a precocious little shit. Mother had taught him how to focus his innate magical talent at eight years old, two years after he’d started reading. At twelve, he was already on Lorkhin’s Advanced Catalytic Runic Grimoire, which was boring, and Septembrance’s Illusions of Masteful Guile, which was much better.
But it was the thin little tome he’d nicked from Mother’s private storage that was most interesting of all. It wasn’t one of the demonological ones; he knew better than to mess with that stuff. This one was a catalogue of immortals, some of which were so absurd they couldn’t possibly be real. Mostly a kind of bestiary, with plenty of emphasis on not meddling in their affairs. He’d been reading it in secret for a week, and Loki was fascinated by the idea of Powers. Not Gods, but endless creatures who were, down to their bones, eternal, immutable concepts brought to life.
The book offered no proof, and its unnamed author wrote in a rather heavy-handed ‘trust me, bro’ style that the young Prince didn’t care for. But it was the pleas to not try to contact these cool entities that got his attention. Because he was twelve, and a little shit, and dead sure he was on the way to being the Best Sorcerer in the Nine Realms Ever, and so what did he have to fear?
Here in the story, the reader, a man in tearing sweatpants and an old tee shirt, paused to reflect that it must be a universal thing, kids thinking they’re omnipotent and immortal. And that he did not remember this book at all, but he could remember at least six other dumb shit things he pulled before the age of ten and somehow did not die, so, he grimly assumed this was all definitely going somewhere relevant.
The book in his hands skipped ahead a few pages, and he glimpsed a bunch of dumb shit kid prep work being done as they flittered by. Glyphs and offerings arranged; a book of blank pages, a feather from Munin’s tail. Plucked from his nest, of course, not the bird’s own ass. Loki liked having all of his own fingers, at any age. All right then.
The book fell still. The child-Loki stood at the gates of the Dreaming.
. . .
Horn and ivory, towering, unscalable, carved with the writhing shapes of Nightmares and bearing the helm of the Lord of Dreams. These gates opened to the twelve year old prince with a silence that sounded like music. The path unfurled before him, cobbled with silver stones. Green fields sprawled into the horizon, the shirr-shirr of soft, warm wind fluttering the tall grasses.
It was the memory of the first year Loki could walk, brought to Mother’s gardens, which seemed so much more vast and rolling than they were, and the grasses so high. He would totter among the flowers, pretending to be lost while Frigga gripped his tiny hand. Now the reader knew why the green fields that once held dream-Asgard felt so familiar. They were not real. They were better than real, for Mother had given him that memory to keep, even in the dark places he found as an adult.
Little Loki walked the silver path, fascinated, for what felt like an eternity. Asgard was in the distance, but it was strange to him, and it grew too huge as he finally drew close. Where Father’s golden gates stood was a plain wooden door. Where the ravens’ perches sat was a gryphon, and a unicorn, and there was a dragon high above. The trio looked down at him.
“Go home,” neighed the unicorn.
“Go away,” said the dragon.
“Fuck off,” finished the gryphon.
Loki interlaced his hands together and gave a graceful bow. In truth, he stumbled slightly, because he was only wearing one of his bedslippers and the maids had stuffed him into an ancient and too-large sleeping robe on the sensible logic that he would grow into it within a month. Nonetheless, the child believed with all his heart he had the air of a great wizard. “I politely request an audience with the Draum-seer, the Lord of the Dreaming, child of the Endless.”
The dragon uttered a strange noise, a gargling deep in its flame-pouch that passed for a laugh. “On what basis, boy?”
“I am a prince of Asgard, and a dreamer, and I have a request. By the rite of…” Loki pulled out the thin tome out of his robe, where he’d hidden it, and tried to consult the right words to say next. He looked up at the gate guards, aghast. In his dream, he could no longer read the pages. “By the rite of…”
The unicorn laughed next. “This is not the dream you think it is, little one.”
Loki grasped through his dreaming memory, looking for the name, coming up with nothing. “Please!” he wailed instead, desperate. “Please, I just want to talk to him for a moment, please, please.”
The gryphon snorted. “A plea and a cry does not move our lord. He will…” The great beast trailed off and looked at the door, which creaked open. The gryphon spoke again, muted now. “He will see you, boy. There is a path inside. Do not stray from it.”
The dragon craned its mighty head down, coming level with Loki’s. “Do not stray. You cannot be saved from these shadows.”
“Go on, then,” finished the unicorn. “Don’t make Him wait.”
. . .
The path was long and strange and full of clouded Nightmares that do not take kindly to being chronicled. One is between these letters now, waiting for its reader to sleep, and then it will whisper you about all the unpleasant textures waiting for you the next time you eat a piece of chicken, stringy and hard. And then your teeth will bleed, and fall out, and when you awaken, it will be 3:41 AM and the rain will patter against your window, like blood from your cracking jaw falling to the bathroom tile as you scream at your gory reflection and scream and then maybe wake up for real. Maybe.
As for Loki, he saw a throne up a curving staircase, crowned by stained glass that showed him his face throughout the years to come. He stared at them in awe, marking the noble lines of his face, the black hair that framed it like a lion’s royal mane, the closed eyes that held possibility behind them.
In the throne was Dream, who looked up through the pages and saw you, and decided it was irrelevant to the story at hand.
What was it? I’ve forgotten.
“My Lord Dream, king of night.” Loki bowed, a little better this time. When he straightened up, Dream’s expression had not changed a whit. “May I make my plea?”
Dream stared down at him, his eyes now in shadow. From them both, small glints of white, piercing, seeing all. “You are a small god, little one. You have a story ahead of you, one that does not need my word as part of it. Do you know why I am entertaining you in this?”
“Sir?” Loki, feeling very tiny now, a speck of the lord’s sand lost in a sea of nothingness, shrunk his shoulders inward and found he could not look into those galactic eyes. He looked at the glass instead. Did one of these Loki-faces have red eyes?
“You were polite,” said Dream, with cold finality. “Small gods quickly forget their manners. Do not grow away from this training. It will save you, someday.”
“Thank you, sir,” whispered Loki.
“Speak your plea. I may entertain it. I may not.”
“I would like to have a dream, sir. One to help guide me. To my destiny, like you said.” Loki peeked up, saw that gleaming white spark. It burned through him, like fire. Oh, he should not have taken that tome. This was so much more than the foolish wizard wrote about. This was more than a power, this was an incarnation of something terrible, a being that held all the things that lurked beyond the fringes of night. If there was kindness here, it was granted at whim, for dreams held poison even in their delights.
“I said your story.” Staccato. Dead. Terrifying.
“Begging your pardon, Lord Sire. I thought they were the same.”
“You are a child. You believe childish things.”
“But I must be a king someday.”
“Must you be?” asked Dream. “Is that what you want?”
Loki thought about it, all of twelve years old and wrapped in an heirloom robe made from the silk of spiders that died before even Odin was born. “I think that’s what I’m supposed to want. I’m a prince.”
Dream said nothing to this. The silence was worse than his awful voice, heavy yet empty all at once.
“I just… I want something to work towards. I’m supposed to be a leader. I need to find a way to live up to that. Be inspired, so I can… be inspiring.” Loki faltered, realizing how silly it all sounded.
The silence grew. And grew. And then, “Very well. I will grant you the dream you think you want. Such is my purpose, and I am amused to fulfill it.” Reader, he did not sound amused. “And when this dream falters, little one, and does not please you, for your politeness, I will offer this small gift: I will return, and ask you what you thought of your dream of kings.”
. . .
The throne room faded, then the words, then the book.
“Shit,” said Loki, in his sweatpants and ugly shirt, which had a cartoon on it that damned if he couldn’t figure out right then. He looked out at the green fields that had once towered above him, smelling Frigga’s perfume on the warm breeze, and then he looked at the King of Dreams. “Shit. I was an idiot. I am so sorry to have intruded upon you, Lord Dream. I didn’t remember.” He blinked. “I… assume you’re why I don’t.”
“You kept your manners,” said Dream, his voice heavy but perhaps less empty than it was in the book. “They have served you well.”
“Humans are willing to give you second chances if you’re not a little bastard about it, I’ve found. Hard to get over the being-a-bastard part.” He stopped to consider. “And sometimes being a bastard is a bit fun.”
“And what have you thought of your dream of kings?”
Loki looked out upon the fields, empty of palaces and kings and queens, and it didn’t take him long to find what he wanted to say. “May I be entirely honest, yet mean no offense?”
“You may. These were the terms.”
“I wish you’d shown up sooner to ask. It’s become a nightmare, honestly. I stopped wanting to be a king years ago.” Loki licked his lips, pausing before continuing. “Yet I still come back to the revels at night, trapped at the feasts, thinking I’ll have no choice but to want it all again. That it’s my destiny, no matter what.”
“You did not want your myth’s Godly fate. You do not want such small things. We have made sure of this fact, just now.”
“No, but…” Loki gestured at the empty field, understanding now why he’d seen that other-Loki. “It’s been hard to find replacements in my dreams. They’re all just memories, twisted up into half-dreams. Mostly bad ones.”
Dream stepped forward into the green, his long night’s robe fluttering against the warm wind. “I must apologize to the child who asked me, in good faith and with a polite word, for a boon. The dream he requested went on too long. Indeed, it changed, for it was not tended properly. That fault is mine, little petitioner.” Dream looked over his shoulder at Loki, his eye glinting with that same brilliant star from somewhere that never was. “Nothing is wrong, any longer. But there was. And I am still repairing mistakes to the Dreaming that occurred in my absence.”
Loki, who had never read a guidebook about what to do if one of the highest immortals apologises to you, stood there with his hands now stuffed in his jacked up pockets. “Thank you,” he managed, finally. “But the circumstances were out of your control, Lord Dream.”
“They should not have been.” The words came too quickly to hide frustration, the first uncontrolled emotion the Endless showed.
Loki was smart enough to not remark on that, much less think about it for too long. “No lasting harm was done, and I’m… I’m honestly satisfied to know that the dream was just that. It didn’t actually mean any of that was going to be forced on me someday. No, it didn’t please me. It was fun for a while, particularly when I truly thought that was my destiny. But…” He looked up at a star-strewn sky. “It’s too small. You’re right about gods. I like this field better. It has potential, not a firm path.” He shrugged. “Does that make sense?”
“The child changed. Lost innocence, found hope restored.” Dream studied him. “The throne will haunt your dreams no longer. You may keep the field, and what you might find within it. It will be as vast or as small as you like.”
Tall now, taller than anything, Dream looked down on the sleeping god, and gave another one of his odd smiles. “May your new dream take a lesson from the sprawling lands of mortals, little one. We will see.”
. . .
Long ago, child Loki found himself outside the palace, rubbing his eyes, having sleepwalked himself damn near to the palace stables, remembering nothing of what he’d just dreamed about. A scream woke him the rest of the way up, from a startled stableboy, who nearly stepped on the prince on the way to the morning muck-out.
. . .
Now, Loki woke, rubbing his face and remembering vaguely some sort of philosophical argument (if it was even an argument) about where Gods came from. He didn’t remember the answer. Probably plaster built up around a rubber band ball, who knew with dreams. He blinked one eye hard, then another, trying to figure out where the gunk had built up the hardest, then picked at it. Grainy. He’d been way down in his dreams for once. Maybe even past what he could do with lucid dreaming.
Sand. Sleep-sand. He grimaced. Where was he going with that?
Gods. It hadn’t been the festival dream again, had it? He stared across his bed, over the stretched out body of a sleeping cat, and couldn’t remember. That, at least, was unusual. He always remembered that fucking dream.
Careful to not disrupt the cat, who rolled slightly with a murrph and by adding a few more inches to her dozy stretch, Loki slid his legs out of the bed, noting with annoyance that his cheap sweatpants had rolled up to his left knee and was leaving a ridiculous-looking impression on his skin. Suddenly fixated on a need to know, he tugged his shirt out, looking down at the image on it.
Stitch. A white line-art sketch of that stupid blue alien he secretly liked. He’d gotten it for a human holiday. He was too muzzy to think at the moment, he couldn’t remember which one. It was too baggy on him. Perfect for sleeping. Why did that matter? He shook his head and ran his hand through a mop of hair that had gotten far, far too long. His friends were threatening to braid embroidered daisy chains into it, flowers of pink and white, with danglies to make sure the cat went right up his back in a hunter’s frenzy.
He might let them. It’d be amusing. Loki reached down to scruffle the cat’s bared belly, smiling as she yawned in her sleep and then clacked her jaw shut with a snap. One wondered what cats, earthly or otherwise, dreamed about. Did they dream of being kings and queens, masters of all mortal dominions?
Oh, probably, thought Loki as the cat began to purr heavily on her way up to the waking world. Can’t be any worse than what I had in mind when I was a chief bastard.
The cat gave one more stretch, fangs gleaming white in the morning light as her eye focused open to look up with an unseeing sneer that made it seem like she was still eating a mouse in her dreams.
A mouse, surely.
Loki patted her again, and this time, the happy murp she gave him said that a new day had begun, and the dreams were over. For now.
~fin
“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”
~Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, “Dream Country”