“We were ten years old. Lucanis had just read some book about wyverns, and suddenly that’s all he’d talk about. Wyverns, all the time, wyverns.” Illario told the story with fond amusement and an impressive amount of confidence considering that he was slung over Viago’s shoulder and couldn’t find the ground with both feet.

Viago sighed and shifted Illario’s weight on his shoulder as they reached the foot of the stairs to the casino guest rooms.

The casino belonged to House Cantori. Teia had sent the staff home. The windows and mirrors were all temporarily covered with heavy black velveteen to prevent any wandering souls from getting lost on their way. The tables for cards and dice games had been cleared and set instead with lavish floral arrangements of crystal grace for parting and embrium to ease a sorrowful heart. Their perfume clung to skin and clothing, but still wasn’t sweet enough to cover the stench of liquor wafting off Illario Dellamorte. Maker, Teia owed him for this.

“There I was, so covered in prickle-burrs I stuck to everything I touched. Lucanis was nothing but mud from the ears down. Catarina just stared speechless.” Illario laughed. His knees buckled, or he just stopped trying to walk entirely, and he collapsed onto the stairs, taking Viago with him.

Viago cursed under his breath and tried to pry the larger man off the stairs, the smooth dark samite of Illario’s jacket slipping out of his grasp. Viago wished he’d gone with Plan A: drugging Illario to sleep in the lounge and throwing a sheet over him. But Teia’s deep, dark eyes had pleaded with him to take care of the reeking drunkard, and… Viago sighed and cursed again. For a moment, he had a clear, perfect vision of leaving Illario snoring in the middle of the staircase. Except Teia would kill him. Maybe even personally.

“He was my cousin, but we were more like brothers, really. Always getting himself into every sort of trouble. And I was always right behind him, you know? Always.” Illario’s voice suddenly grew thick with emotion. “Now there’s nobody for me to follow.”

Viago let out a sigh, then crouched down and levered Illario off the steps with a slightly pained grunt.

“It should have been me.” Illario sounded bitter now. The rant was approaching the end. He’d repeated this speech like an actor rehearsing for a particularly infuriating play for hours downstairs as his composure crumbled and he looked more and more like he’d fought a herd of druffalo and lost.

Viago lurched up the last of the stairs and fumbled with the door to the closest guestroom. For one hellish moment, he feared he’d have to pick the lock, but it opened. He dragged Illario to the bed and dumped him like a corpse.

“Did I tell you about the time Lucanis took me wyvern-hunting?” Illario asked as Viago wet a handkerchief with a few drops from one of his vials. Before he could start into yet another rendition, Viago covered Illario’s nose and mouth with the cloth, knocking him out.

“Another time.” Viago replied. And he left the room.

____________________________________

other stories:

The Next One By Brianne Battye

Ruins Of Reality By John Dombrow

Minrathous Shadows By Sheryl Chee

We Won't Know When By Brianne Battye

The Flame Eternal By Sylvia Feketekuty

The Dreaming was crowded in a way that it had never been in all the long centuries of Lucifer’s acquaintance with it. Billions of them, everyone drawn into the same shared space without knowing why. They were mortals, gods, creatures from myth, all of them filling the halls and the gardens and all of Dream’s realm.

He knew the faces. Thor stood with a handful of Norse gods like someone who didn’t know what to do with his hands. John Constantine looked exactly as comfortable at a funeral as one would expect, which was to say: extremely uncomfortable, and he covered it with lighting one cigarette after another.

Lucifer took his place among the gathered crowd. He was here because of circumstances that had changed him, and because whatever one wanted to say about Lucifer Morningstar, he paid his debts. Even the ones that were complicated. Especially those.

The cerement was laid out on a stone, and beneath it the outline of Morpheus materialised. And that outline was unmistakable, the angular face and those impossible cheekbones. Even in death, or rather the impression of death, he managed to look as though he were making a point.

Still doing it, Lucifer thought. Even now.

One by one, those who had known Morpheus spoke, and Lucifer listened to the strange and specific ways he had changed every life he’d touched. There was Delirium who had come to see Lucifer when things had already unravelled. She said, in her peculiar fashion, that she had been afraid of Morpheus, and then sad of him. Duma wept a single tear and said nothing, and Lucifer looked at Duma and felt something he recognised from very far back: a brief flash of kinship. It didn’t last long.

When Matthew the raven spoke, Lucifer could see the grief in the bird’s eyes. And it was human grief. “The coolest, strangest, most infuriating boss… friend… boss… I ever had.” The hesitation on that word. Friend.

And Lucifer understood that particular hesitation intimately.

When the moment came he might have spoken, he let it pass because he had not come here to deliver a eulogy. He had not come to be seen to grieve, to make Morpheus’ death into something that had a chapter about Lucifer in it. He had come here to be present because it mattered to be present, and that was different. It was not a distinction he had always been capable of making. He was making it now.

The byre was carried to the water, and Lucifer’s throat tightened fractionally, in a way he would not have predicted and would not afterward admit. It was placed on the back of a swan boat, and the crowd gathered at the banks.

Lucifer stood a little apart and watched the boat move, and he found himself speaking. Not to anyone present except perhaps to the figure lying on the boat, which could not hear him and therefore would not hold any of it against him.

“You were right,” he said, quietly enough that the water took the words. “About the dreams in Hell. I knew you were right the moment you said it, and I was furious at you for it, because you had come into Hell and you were right, and everyone who mattered was listening.” The swan boat moved on. “You showed me the crack in the thing, that it held together only because those imprisoned there could still dream of heaven. That I was ruler of a place whose sole power derived from its failure to be complete.” He paused, watching the boat. “I have told myself many stories about why I left. That I was tired. That I had mastered Hell and had nothing left to learn from it. That I was acting on my own initiative, as I always have, beholden to nothing and no one.” The boat was approaching the great waterfall. “These things are true. They are also not the complete truth.” The boat reached the waterfall, tipped over the edge, and what should have been a fall instead became an ascent, a bright light against the dark, rising toward the stars. “The decision was mine,” he said to the new-formed star. “I want to be clear that I am not suggesting otherwise. But I owe it to you, and I said so at the time. I meant it then, and the fact that it has become somewhat more complicated does not change that.” He was quiet for a moment. “I also said that giving you the key might destroy you. I said it to your face, and you looked at me with those impossible eyes, and you took the key anyway. You were warned, and I hope you understood that you were warned...”

— — —

When it was over, she was waiting for him, and they returned to Los Angeles, where they both sat on a low stone wall in the morning light. Mazikeen got an apple out of her bag, cut it and handed him half. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it.

They sat in silence for a while.

“It’s strange,” Mazikeen said eventually, “to understand a person’s importance only at their ending.”

“Strange, yes. Also extremely inconvenient.”

She just shrugged and bit into her apple.

“I gave him the key,” Lucifer said. “And when all those gods and powers gathered to argue over who should have Hell, Loki was there, with Odin and Thor. Odin wanted Hell to forestall Ragnarok.” He stood up and moved to look out over the waking city. “Morpheus discovered during that gathering that Loki had switched places with a Japanese god, but he let Loki get away with it. I wondered, at the time, why he did. I thought it was his inscrutability, his not stooping to expose petty manipulations.” He paused. “But I think now it was something else, something convoluted that was truly about him. It was the kind of thing Morpheus would do.”

“And then Loki conspired with Puck,” Mazikeen said. “And the child was taken.”

“And the child’s mother summoned the Furies, yes. That is the chain.” He turned back to her. “But a chain has a first link.”

“You weren’t the one to let Loki go free,” Mazikeen said. “You gave a key to someone who had no idea what he’d do with it, and he did things with it that you didn’t design and couldn’t have predicted, and forty steps down the line...”

“I know all of that,” Lucifer interrupted. “And the logic is sound, Maze. The causality is technically indirect.” He sat back down. “But… He stood in my court and outmanoeuvred me in front of everyone with nothing but a question. He humiliated me. I swore I would destroy him.” He laced his hands together. “And my revenge was to bury him in everything I was walking away from.” He looked up at the sky, which was doing one of its mornings. Doing it extremely well, as usual, without the slightest acknowledgment of what had been lost. “I told him, the day I handed it over, that I owed the decision to him. To his question in Hell a few years before. That was true. I owe him my freedom.”

“And?”

“And I gave him a burden that eventually led to his death.” He said it with hardness in his voice, the way he said all the things he could not afford to say softly. “Not directly, but the chain is real, Maze. The chain is real…”

She was quiet for a while. “He chose his own end. Everyone who knew him says so. He walked into it with open eyes.”

“He did,” Lucifer agreed. “He always walked toward the thing that would cost him most. I recognised it in him a long time ago.” He walked a few steps, restless in the way he only became when he could not outthink something. “I suppose I simply did not expect... I thought, if I thought about it at all, that he would always be there. The Dreaming would always be there, and I would always have the option of being furious at it.” His voice lost its cool very briefly. “It is a very… particular thing to lose one of the things you measured yourself against.”

Mazikeen stood up too. “Go and see the new one.”

“Yes. I had thought about it.”

“Morpheus is in him in a way,” she said. “If you have things to say that you didn’t say, maybe that’s the only place they can go now.”

Lucifer looked at the city for a long time. Then he said: “I hate it when you’re practical…”

Jon J Muth, you are my watercolour and ink hero (from “Lucifer: Nirvana”. And I thought I’d put that here because the dynamic seems sound)

Lucifer found Dream in the library, of all places, which he suspected was not accidental, and he stood at one of the long reading tables.

Dream looked young. Less gravity, more openness, a bit like a door left ajar where Morpheus had always seemed to be deciding exactly when to close it right in your face. Lucifer found it unexpectedly affecting.

“You weren’t at the funeral,” Lucifer said.

“I wasn’t allowed, the rites are rather… specific. The new aspect cannot attend the passing of the old. However, I have been told about it.”

“And?”

Dream looked at him with those eyes that were not unlike Morpheus’ eyes but also… somewhat human, with the uncertainty of a young man who had not asked for any of this. “I heard it was the most beautiful thing ever witnessed. And also the worst.”

Lucifer sat uninvited on one of the library chairs. This was, he was aware, a mild rudeness. He did it anyway, partly because old habits died hard and partly because he found it useful to begin conversations with Dream from a position of relaxed authority.

Dream, to his credit, simply sat down across from him.

“I was there,” Lucifer said. “I watched the boat go over the waterfall.” He hesitated for a moment. “He deserved the scale of it. Whatever else can be said, he deserved that.”

“You came to pay your respects,” Dream said.

“I came because I owed him a debt. Several, if I were to be precise.” He met Dream’s eyes. “You have his memories.”

“Not all of them. But most.”

“You know who I am then. To him.”

“I embarrassed you, and you swore to destroy me. And then, when you left Hell, you gave me the key as… I thought of it as a poisoned gift.”

“You thought?” Lucifer quipped with a raised eyebrow.

“I told myself many things.”

“Fine, as you please.” Lucifer frowned. “I want to be clear that when I told him I owed the decision to him I meant it. His question: What power would Hell have if those imprisoned could not dream of Heaven… I had been the ruler of Hell for ten billion years. I had constructed it into something that worked, something that functioned as it was supposed to function. And he came in with nothing. No army, no leverage, no power that was meaningful in that place, and he said one sentence, and everything I’d built cracked straight through the centre. I was furious. And I was also grateful. I am aware that these are difficult to hold simultaneously.” A slight smile appeared on his face. “I have had considerable practice.”

Dream was quiet for a moment. “I did not tell many people that story. At least not the version that meant something.”

“He wouldn’t,” Lucifer said. “Morpheus did not make himself… legible. It was one of his most consistent characteristics and one of the things that cost him most.” He leaned back in the chair. “He was changing, all through the years I knew him. But by the time anyone else could see it, the damage was already done. When I came to him with the key, when he looked at this thing he didn’t want and couldn’t refuse, we were two beings who had both, in our own ways, been given inescapable functions by fathers who had no care for us, and I think we were both aware of that. We were aware of each other’s cages, even if we couldn’t say so.” He looked up briefly. “He was more trapped than he knew. Perhaps I was more free than I thought.”

“I didn’t blame you. Neither for the key nor what came after.”

Lucifer’s jaw tightened. “I know he didn’t blame me. If he had blamed me, it would be simpler.” He stood up, moved to the shelves and ran a finger along the spine of a book without reading the title. “He saw the chain clearly. He also saw every point at which he could have broken it, and he didn’t. These were his choices, made with open eyes. Morpheus was very good at accepting consequences. He was considerably less good at avoiding them.”

“An aspect chose to die,” Dream stated simply.

“He chose not to escape it. There is a difference. I suspect, from everything I know of him, he had reached a point where he could see no way through that did not require him to become something he wasn’t ready to become. And so he chose the exit.” He shook his head slowly. “It was very like him. It was also, and I say this with full awareness of the irony, a complete failure of imagination. The Lord of Dreams could not dream a path out.” He scoffed.

“What if I could?” Daniel smiled, and Lucifer just stared at him in disbelief. “Some of the memories I have are not linear. They are more like… the quality of something. And what I have is… ‘deliberate’. Not resigned. Deliberate.” He met Lucifer’s eyes. “I made a choice. And that choice was, in a manner, complete.”

“That,” Lucifer said after quite a while, “is either the most courageous thing I have ever heard, or the most maddening. I genuinely cannot decide which.”

“I do not think I am supposed to be able to decide either. It seems I thought you and my brother were the only ones in creation who had ever truly left on your own terms. You both walked out. I found that… I do not have a better word than clarifying.”

“I walked out and the door I used was the key I gave him, and the key I gave him was the first link in a chain that ended here.” He said it without pity. “I want you to understand that I understand that. I am not asking you to absolve me. I don’t believe in absolution.”

“Neither did I. I believed in responsibility.”

“Then we at least agreed about something,” Lucifer said. “Because we agreed about very little, and that is still worth noting.” He moved toward the library door, and then stopped to turn back. “He was… exacting in his work. Even when he was destroying himself, he was exacting in his work. And the Dreaming mattered to him.”

Dream looked at him. “I am aware.”

“Don’t just be aware, also be different.” He walked to the door. “He unfortunately valued continuity above most things. But then, he valued it above himself, and look where that got him…”

— — —

The beach in Australia was no different from any other beach. He had sat on it once before, wingless and free, watching God’s sunset with the grudging acknowledgment that the craftsmanship was good even if the craftsman was intolerable. He had been, he recalled, drunk on liberty. Everything had been new, everything seemed possible. The darkness had lifted from him for the first time in ten billion years.

He sat on that beach again now.

The sunset was doing what it always did with that beauty that seemed frankly excessive, and yet, it was fairly difficult to argue with. The waves came in and went out. The sky became violet and then deep and then the stars began to arrive. Somewhere in those lights, or beyond them, or in the space that was neither here nor there, was his star.

Lucifer sat with his arms around his knees, which was an undignified posture he adopted precisely because no one was watching, and he let himself feel what he felt. He had become, over these years of freedom, considerably better at allowing feeling without immediately trying to resolve it into something. It was the hardest work he had ever done, and it showed no signs of being finished.

Yes, the stars were out.

He had made so much of this, before the war, before the fall, before everything that had come after. He had been the light, first and most brilliant, and then the light that fell, and then the light in exile, and then simply himself.

Morpheus had been the dark. The space between stars, the place the light rarely reached. It certainly had not reached him. And yet, he had shaped every single mind with more light than one could conceive.

They had been made for different things and had each, in their own way, spent their existence arguing with what they’d been made for. The difference was that Morpheus had argued in private while everything fell apart. Lucifer had argued very publicly and then left.

What matters, Morpheus had essentially said, in whatever way Morpheus ever said anything directly, is that it is possible.

And Lucifer had given him a key, and a burden, and a prophecy that had come true in the worst way, and the proof that freedom cost more than the act of merely claiming it. But the key had made freedom possible. For both of them.

He looked up at the stars for a long time.

“You were insufferable,” he said. “The most insufferable being I had the fortune of knowing, and I have known many. You were also… you were real in a way that very few things are real. When you were responsible for something, you were entirely responsible for it.” He let out a breath. “I did not understand, until you were gone, how very few things are actually like you. People and gods walk through their existence… hedging. You never did. You simply were what you were, and it cost you everything. And I find that I cannot…”

He stopped.

The waves still came in and went out. Of course they did.

“I gave you the key,” he said finally. “And you walked through the door to freedom it opened. Everything that happened in between was your choice.” He looked at the sea. “I can live with my part. I have lived with worse. I simply wanted you to know that I knew the weight of what I handed you. For whatever that’s worth, coming from the one who swore to destroy you and chose this for himself.” He gestured vaguely at the evening, at the stars, at the sea, at the life he had built.

At the sunset.

God’s sunset still, but Lucifer’s to sit in front of by choice, answering to nothing. And he had paid for that seat and knew the exact price now.

It was still worth it. He had decided that it was worth it.