Liminal (EBOOK, LGBT)

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ONE OF HUMANITY’S greatest misconceptions about the Night Lands was that they lay in perpetual darkness—cloaked by despair and bereft of all warmth.

Morpheus sat with his father’s eldest brother beneath the rustling branches of a massive oak, drinking wine plucked from the dreams of a Tuscan vintner. Diffuse golden light filtered through the leaves, painting the rough wooden tabletop in ever-shifting dapples. Beyond, a field of red and mauve flowers waved in the light breeze.

“You have to understand—it’s built into them,” Thanatus was saying. “Woven into their beings since they first started walking upright. I’m telling you, Morpheus—if you try making a human immortal, they’ll go mad before the end of their second century.”

Morpheus leaned away from his uncle’s emphatic gesticulations, neatly avoiding the splatter of crimson wine that sloshed out of Thanatus’ goblet. It wasn’t accurate to say that he disliked these occasional spirited debates; merely that his style of argumentation was not always well matched with his uncle’s. Where Thanatus was animated, Morpheus was self-contained.

Wooden, his brother Phantasos might say.
Just like the stick up his arse, Phobetor would doubtless have added.

Controlled, Morpheus might have retorted. Perhaps you should both try it sometime.

He met his uncle’s night-black gaze, raising one skeptical eyebrow. “And yet,” he argued, “I see the humans’ dreams every night when they sleep. Always, they yearn for more time. They fear your approach with every breath.”

The embodiment of death let out a bark of humorless laughter. “In dreams, they long for many things that would be bad for them in the waking world.” He sat back, taking a deep draft of his wine before setting the goblet down on the table with a solid thump. “But here. I’ll make you a wager, nephew. Choose a human. Any human. Pick one who dreams of eternal life. I will withhold my touch from them, and then we shall see what happens. If they make it two hundred years without begging for death, I shall concede that you have won. If they don’t, you’ll concede that I have won.”

Morpheus pondered this proposal for a moment, twirling the thick stem of his goblet between slender fingers. “And the stakes?”

Thanatus seemed to think on it for some little time. “If I win, you will grant me a part of your realm to do with as I wish. Let’s say… the lands between the River Lethe and the cave of Hypnos.”

Morpheus narrowed his eyes. “And what would you do with such a bounty?”

Thanatus smiled, the expression baring a white slash of teeth in his dark-skinned face. “There are many who enter my realm in need of forgetting,” he said, his expression sobering as he spoke. “Some are villains, and they deserve to relive their greatest regrets over and over for eternity. Others are victims, and the dreamless sleep of unbeing is all they crave.”

Privately, Morpheus knew this to be true—and not just of the dead. There was a reason the hills in the Night Lands grew thick with opium poppies. He was not in a hurry to cede part of his lands to his uncle, but even so…

“You haven’t said what reward I might gain, should I be the one to win your wager.”

Thanatus tilted his head. “What reward would you wish for?”

Morpheus considered, letting the silence stretch between them. Eventually, he offered the kind of stakes that would ensure Thanatus’ refusal.

“I would claim one unspecified favor from you at the time of my choosing,” he said.

An unspecified favor from one of the gods was not the sort of thing for which one asked. Not even when one was also a god.

Thanatus scowled, the shadows around his eyes darkening and shifting until they seemed ready to crawl free into the air between them.

That’s it, Morpheus urged silently. Tell me to go to perdition, uncle, so we can both return to our work. This wager of yours is nothing but a farce.

But after a few seconds, Thanatus’ expression cleared. “That’s no small request, nephew. Were I not so certain of the outcome, I confess I might be offended by your presumption. However, today you will have your wager—even if the result is nothing more than a foregone conclusion. Choose your human champion and inform me when you have picked the one you want. We will visit them in the Sublunary as soon as you are ready to proceed.”

Morpheus blinked.

Wait, what?

But Thanatus only lifted his now empty wine goblet in a final salute before he faded away into shadows.

Gone.