Token Disclaimers: The Sandman and characters thereof belong to Gaiman/Vertigo/DC Comics. The poem included is "somewhere i have never traveled," by e.e.cummings. This is a REVISION of the first chapter – there are a few additions made in an attempt to make matters clearer.
"...the color of its countries..."
In the beginning was the Word.
And, since there must always be an observer, a reader for the word, there was a finger to mark it, and a page to hold it, and an outstretched palm to support the heavy book, and eyes that were not quite eyes to read it.
For such is the way of things, particularly stories.
Destiny grew from the hand up as he came into his almost-life, and when there is life...
Death stepped forth from the void and smiled.
One word linked with another into a stream of consciousness (and unconsciousness) as Dream shivered into being.
But change was required as the universe, such as it was, (and Destiny, such as he was) shifted uneasily, and Destruction plucked up the sword of bright stars and sighted along the blade.
That was all for a long while.
*
See Destiny as he is now: eyes hidden deep within the shadow of his cowl, assuming he possesses what could be considered eyes at all; meticulous and withdrawn, he is the most composed of his family. The Book is chained to him as a child to her mother by an umbilical cord (though what plays each role is uncertain) – it is possible that whatever blood moves through Destiny's body runs in the Book as well, though it is more likely, considering Destiny's current personality, that the dry, dusty, emotionless power of the Book fuels him instead.
It is near impossible to consider Destiny as having his own story. He is the observer, the witness to all lives diagrammed and mapped that is necessary for them to exist, and for him there are no choices to be made that were not engraved from the beginning. He treads a well-practiced dance with every move recorded firmly -- and there can be no story if there is no choice, no chance, no uncertainty.
See the chain: woven from adamantine and a strange grey thread, it runs from his wrist to the Book. Like most of what is ancient, the chain is something beyond itself – a symbol, an icon of sorts. It is the record of a promise, a reminder of a duty as well as and unbreakable restriction that rivals the bonds of Prometheus or Fenrir the Wolf.
None of these were always thus.
*
He walked the green earth, the rough brown of his cowl stark against the soft warmth of the waning day. He carried the huge tome with something like reverence.
So Destiny read and walked (not quite blindly), then stopped abruptly. The wind ruffled the pages of the Book and he smoothed them with long fingers, almost nervously.
"Hello...?" someone said uncertainly, in a woman's voice, as Destiny read the word at the same moment. He didn't look up. He forced himself not to look up, but the words before his gaze became meaningless.
"Hello," he stated, dutifully reading his line. He sensed the dim shape of her on the edges of his vision, the only shred of color in his black-white world of ink and space.
She was beautiful, the Book said, and it did not elaborate. It failed to mention the smell of her, of green earth and crushed herbs and sweet rain, or the twist deep in his stomach that he could not explain. Destiny soothed the pages again, convulsively.
The girl laughed, gently.
"And which one are you?" she asked brightly. "Duty? Depression? Defeat? Danger?"
"Destiny."
She smiled, the Book told him, and tipped her head to one side. He felt he needed to say something.
"Who are you?"
She laughed again, but there was a catch in it that the Book did not comment upon. "I am myself," she said, her voice still clear, but somehow darker. "I've many names, I suppose. But I can't tell you them..."
Destiny said nothing, pointedly.
"You could look them up, in that huge dark book of yours," she said. "But, if you name me, I have to leave. The rules, you see."
He stood very still as something shivered within him. She was intriguing, not for her beauty or light or life, but for... for that hint of uncertainty, of vulnerability sheathed in strength.
"Then I won't," he said carefully, not looking at what he was meant to say, just staring at into the white space between the fixed Words, and he felt an indiscernible tumult of fear and hope quiver inside.
He didn't need to read to feel the warmth of her smile.
*
somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysterious) her first rose
*
Elsewhere:
Two figures existed that hadn't before, one tall and graceful with a whiff of wine and danger, the other squat and sadly fat, burdened with the heavy smell of fog and lead. The first's eyes were the hypnotic topaz of the tiger, lazy and fatal; the second's were the pale sickly tint of a beggar's urine. A hook was clenched in her chubby grey hand, which she dragged absently through her thick flesh. The taller figure smiled, with perfect, candy-pink lips, in a grin sharper than the barb caught in its twin's grasp.
They held hands, the twins, and waited.
Meanwhile:
Meanwhile there were three that were one, that flickered and flashed and morphed and wove long, grey, grim thread with a sound like mirthless laughter and white teeth.
They were not evil. They were not kind. They were themselves, their role, their function, their unreadable and ambiguous darkness.
They were watching.
Waiting.
*
He saw her (in a way) a day later, at the edge of dusk once more.
"Hello, Diversion," she said.
"Destiny."
"Of course." He felt her smile again.
"I was waiting out here," he said unexpectedly, especially to himself. "Earlier." There was an unspoken question in his words.
"This is my time," she said, and Destiny saw the shadow that spread onto his page raise its arms, as if embracing the gloaming sky. "In-between times."
"Who are you?" he asked again, gently.
There was a pause.
"You're beautiful when you smile," the girl said, and he heard the unspoken evasion of the question.
"I was smiling?"
"Yes. Didn't you know?"
He relented. "What can I call you?"
She was silent for awhile, thinking, and he imagined her face (as he thought it might look like, considering that he had never seen a human face) creased in quiet reverie.
"Trivia," she said after a pause. "Yes. You may call me Trivia."
They walked along together in silence under the golden sky. Destiny heard her sigh, quietly, and felt her relax.
"...Were you afraid?" he asked of her.
A pause. "I suppose."
He said nothing, simply waited for her to speak once more.
"I am uncertainty, as certainly as you are duteous, dubious Dignity --"
"--Destiny--"
"--Destiny, of course," she continued. "But I am myself, too; I am subject to what my role entails. So I am uncertain."
He stopped walking as she turned to him.
"Listen," she said gently, firmly. He stared fixedly at her words before him, unable to read.
"I am kissing cousins with Chaos and nearly a foe of Fate. I am part of random chance and unchancey irony... Do you understand... do you understand -- a little more, just a little hint more-- of what I am, now?"
He stood very still, the growing certainty cold within him.
"Maybe...?" he said, hesitantly.
She laughed, a faint, desperate edge in her voice. "See?" Trivia said. "I'm rubbing off even on you..."
And then she was crying.
He swallowed hard, his swimming eyes blind to the words, his finger shaking so badly that he could not find his place even if he could read, as something unnamable hammered against his heart.
And then, quickly enough so that he could not think of what he was doing, his eyes left the page and he looked at her.
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say.
The electric instant of their eyes meeting was.
"Don't," he said, wildly, uselessly, the book falling disregarded from his hands as he reached them to her face. She had gone still with shock, the tears of confusion the only movement on her marble expression. He wiped them away clumsily, desperately, for there was a terrible wrongness in her fierce and passionate grief, a wrongness that put the very universe in jeopardy. "Don't, don't, please don't," he said and kept on saying, his words an involuntary mantra. "Please don't."
She put her hands up and gently, gently lifted his away, her green eyes never ceasing to search his face.
They stared at each other for a long while, too full of detached wonder to feel embarrassed. Her gaze was strangely solemn, and thoughtful, and slightly dubious, as though she was hunting relentlessly for some fatal danger in his eyes.
And in a wordless, mutual movement she was in his arms, still staring up at him seriously, her hands clinging tight to the huge rough folds of his robe. He looked down at her in grave wonder, his eyes devouring her eyes, the way her hair hung round her face, her sharp chin, her delicate and strong cheekbones...
Then, quietly, gently, almost sadly, she rose and he descended into the kiss. He wondered in some still, detached part of him if he was drowning, if she was drowning, if the movement of the lips and tongues was a blind and desperate struggle to their respective surfaces, and Destiny felt her hot, silent tears on his face.
He had somehow lurched from the safe structure of prose to the organic and orgasmic sea depths of poetry, and he was drowning.
*
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
*
Hear it.
Hear the low, throbbing drone of the wheel and the wool and the thread, a humming vibration that rises from the earth to enter your feet and your bones and shake the fabric of your being.
Hear the whisper of hands carding wool, nimbly, perfectly, eternally, rolling it between young fingers, picking out flecks of peat and earth...
Hear the rhythmic creak of the wheel as it traces the waning of the moon, the cycle of the womb, as the grey thread hisses over old wood, carving calluses on the practiced fingers that spin it, shape it, feed it into the wheel of shift and repetition and recreation...
Hear the metallic snickersnack of the scissors clutched in a wizened, knobby claw, the rasp of sharp and merciless edges, and the grim, gay, gleeful cackle of finale, of ending, of cut and fraying yarn...
The Grey Ladies.
White teeth glint like knifes caught in mirthless smiles as rough, course grey hair blends with spun thread that follows the writhing movement of the one (three).
Voices:
The observer. Destiny.
(The clicking of a tongue.) What about him?
He isn't.
Isn't what?
Observing
He's left the book.
But he can't.
A third voice:
It matters not if he can or cannot. He has. He is alive. All living things have their stories.
No, he isn't. He doesn't live. He reads.
It was never said that he lives. But he is alive.
Why?
He loves.
(A silence.)
She calls herself Trivia, as the moment.
(A snort.) Clever.
Ironic.
Her.
Trivia. Ah. The crossroads...
Has more to do with him than her, I'd think.
Not at the moment, no.
(A pause.)
So.
What are we to do?
Something. The universe will unravel if it is unobserved.
What can we do?
The third:
You don't understand. He is in love. That means he is far stronger than we have even known before...
...and that he is more vulnerable than he could ever imagine.
Smiles open like wounds, and the wordless humming throb of her dark work rises again, spinning, measuring, cutting their flawless, thick thread with a sound like the whisper of mortal blood in one's veins.
*
Yippee! Finally figured out how to make text do what I want! (italics, etc.). Of course, all I had to do was actually read the directions on the site, but why should my being stupid spoil my feeling triumphant? Anyways, this is a revised copy of the first chapter with a few things added for clarity's sake. I'll continue this revision with the other chapters, but I don't think I'll post any more of this fic until it's completely written and nitpicked. Please, review and tell me if this has helped any. I'm gonna go edit then next two chapters now... brace yourself...