Yestereve, riding a train through a green and rocky gorge, watching my face cut out of sharp shadow, I got a notion for the next book, to actually make Paper queen of Dreams - for a very little while. A week or so. And like the scenes in Gorgonaut in the beginning, where at first every minute of every moment drags and she cannot wait to do anything else, towards the end there is urgency and strive - for some reason; I don't yet know what. It was just a thought. Paper so dislikes the idea of having to rule with impunity, but what if? What if? What could possibly go right?
I was fucked.
One week.
I fashioned an hourglass out of specks-full nothing, out of the metallic sawdust in the air from old crowns that never were, and now like the most precious wheat field it swayed and circled downward drain, counting the moments. One week.
I sat on the throne, wearing a costume. Largest of throne rooms open before me, architecture unnaturally swag. The costume was sentry. I wanted to wear something I can hide behind and then take off and return it to bone dust in the air after shift, like a surgeon who lost a patient at midnight. My skin and meat and smell and weight had no business here. I wore a LOT of costume. As much as it was possible to still be able to bare my hands and face, so as to make sure people can see I am sitting very important and am in no mood for being forced to move. The dress and wig and crown, it all went to the sides if the chamber. Had I not been king, it would crush me.
Time meant nothing, it was sand in a sandbox for me to run my hands around, soft, cool, clean and it didn’t stick. Lovely fingernails protruded from jewelry. I wanted to talk to some other Gods, but found nothing to say, they were … I was driving around in a hot desert and came upon forlorn gas station, the single solitary clerk there bored, polite, with nothing in common with strangers. Few words about the weather, about the natural state of affairs. I looked at mortals, singular grains. Hot women, hot men. Sleeping, dancing, fucking, crying. Dying. Without a story, they tasted like nothing. There would have to be a story to make it worthwhile, feathered a halcyon, a hyperon, a harlequin. Me dressed as an eagle, them a young prince ripe for rape. Without biology to suggest reproduction is worth something, it was depressingly otiose.
I looked at my living blood relatives. From afar they didn't exist and from too close their lives were none of my business. There was soothing apathy in knowing nobody missed me enough to go looking for me; if at all they missed me perhaps just enough to look forward to me coming back one day, with a story. Some half-meant prayers peppered the air, but what kind of a life is improved by a prayer answered? Humans are foolish. They would believe anything a God tells them, such a thing is better never said. Learn to solve your own damn problems. Find a better explanation to offer virgin sacrifice.
I looked at the legion of Oneiroi, their naked black wings fluttering everywhere. They had nothing to say to me. None of them needed my assistance.
I looked at myself again, from all perspectives at once. What a stranger.
Every sip of tea and coffee on this and every planet taken right now was mine to taste. I desired for nothing. Suspended in free-fall. Every moment of every moment I thought only if this is how Marowit felt when it happened to him. One moment he drooled though a bog and drowned kids in a swamp and ate raw chickens, the next he ruled auxiliary creation. Only he didn’t have it for a week, he just had it. No wonder he didn’t kill us. This was so lonely I was about to start naming and talking to ants, only I had to make some first.
Trying to sit here was like trying to chew gum and walk at the same time. I held onto the armrests and refused to breathe. It was making love while worried you filed the tax returns wrong. Like eating pasta while watching a documentary about the Body Farm. My brain wanted to be calm and … calm, but there were stars forced to be born within it, I could hear the scraping of every pen on every paper at the same time, all the typing, all the prints thumping relentlessly. I could hear every book being read at the same time. All the creative thinking, all the lyricism of a lover’s chatter. It sounded majesty.
If I wanted, I could zoom out so far the universe was laid before me and everything that dreamed glowed a little bit. If I wanted to zoom in, I could watch any dreaming head from a breath away. And I didn’t have to focus on any of that. I was doing it all at the same time. It was majesty.
I was literally existing because of it, filled to the brim, energized and enthralled. I would exist if there was no light of dreams - I arranged it to glow greenish, my color - but I would be starved and heartbroken from another awfulness of vacuity.
Specs played in the light which shone wonderfully though wonderful windows of a wonderful house. I imagined myself a ninja, a spry cat, being able to jump from one glimmer to the next and be illuminated in each color differently because of the stained glass window.
“Your face,” warned a seneschal. He appeared without a sound, so a servant ought.
I touched my face. It was vaguely feline, whiskers and fur. Guess I thought about cats too closely.
“Deliberate,” I muttered, frowning. “Who’re you?”
“The housekeeper, your majesty.”
“Right. You’re retired.”
“Uh, no, I am…”
“I’m serious. Find a spot you like, build a house, take on sheeping, or take a two week vacation, I don’t care. Just get out of the house. Take everyone with you. I don’t want to have to deal with a single living thing while I’m here.”
“You’ll have to eat.”
“I’m twenty five, I think I can turn my own pancakes.”
“There will be callers. You can’t sit here and hold your breath for two weeks, hoping that--”
“Don’t talk to me like we’re fucking. You’re not Hydeo. I would know if you were, you would have a tattoo going down your dick. Leave. Now. Return when you’re asked for by somebody else.”
I pitied the first caller to drift in asking a favor, though, who ventures willingly into a Dream’s solid hall to think something will change for the better … Surely I will be cruel to them and flippant, if not downright dismissive. Whom will drift in to be humiliated and abused by a bad queen? Whom, hm?
Then I remembered Amis Amanty and all the other warm creatures in chains proverbial or otherwise and thought what if someone comes and I can actually do some good by being strong and clever? Are they all going to be restless phantoms? Was that all that Marowit did all day, settle ghost scores?
What would Marowit do?
Heck, I needed advice from Anduin Wrynn. Maybe he won’t remember me. I should add layers to the costume. Where was Morpheus’ bacchanalia mask when I needed it?
