Chapter one: Conception
The walls, rock and bone and dampness, are hung with thick black drapes that absorb every sound. In every part of Dis someone is screaming – because they feel too much or because they do not feel at all anymore. In this deepest, blackest part of Hades' realm, the sounds of the helpless souls of what were once the living are shut out.
The gates are open. She cannot remember a time when they were not: somewhere, someone is sleeping, always. Her brothers and sisters walk around solemnly with feet that barely touch the ground, their faces drawn and pale. She has never spoken to them. They were born in the darkness of their mother's distant love with unseeing eyes. Their father thought it unwise to give them voices.
Morpheus is sleeping though he doesn't breathe. It looks as though he's been dead from the moment he was born. The poppies around his bed ripple in a non-existent wind and cast a ghostly red glow on his face as if they're burning from within. The blood of the dead dripping from his skull.
No sound, except the soft whispers of her siblings leaving the gates and coming back. The ones coming back through the golden gate carry the smells of sweat and the remnants of screams – while she cannot hear, she feels.
She herself has not been given a name. Nyx's daughters are as numerous as her sparkling jewels adorning the sky. Hypnos, having filled every crease of his wife's black wedding gown with his seed and sinking back into his stupor, didn't think it necessary to give their children names. Nyx shook her lover from the wide spread of her limbs and named Morpheus, Phobetor and Phantasos herself. The rest she judged unimportant. She covers her children with her darkness, that is concealing yet cold and blind. Nyx was never the motherly type.
Her daughters have no task but to serve their brother. Yet, Morpheus needs no servants, is sustained by the influx of dreams that refill him on their way back through the gates. His face is constantly cloaked in the mist of the oneiroi, tinged red with poppy's light. He shapes all humans in every dream. His body might be on his bed, but his conscience is divided over all of the earth – telling Hero that Leander has died, spurring Aeneas into action and away from Dido, visiting Aphrodite as Adonis from the grave. His sisters linger around his bed, trying to touch his face all of their lives. They know he must not wake; but there is nothing they could do that would stop that from happening. The poppies burn their wispy hands.
They don't sleep themselves, the ultimate proof of their father's indifference.
It is one night, or it is one day – the difference doesn't exist in Dis – that Nyx's daughter burns her fingers on the poppies and feels something dissolve inside of her. Like a flame that eats her up. She pulls away from her brother, who sleeps like he always does, and moves with whispering feet to the gates, where her other, nameless brothers take themselves to the outside world. Morpheus sends them; they change shapes to fit in the humans' heads.
In Nyx's darkness, there is barely anything to see, but a strange desire seizes her daughter standing there by the horn gate. It shakes her. She has never felt anything before (only the remnants of the screams clinging to the dreams' seams).
She wants to fly.