The Sandman: Overture #3

"Chapter Three"
written by Neil Gaiman
art by J. H. Williams III

We are, for the most part, no longer people who long for apocalypse.  We are fearful for the end of the world, which comes in awful tragedy and unimaginable suffering, leaves us to die slowly in a devastated landscape.  It is difficult for us to imagine those who would long for it, but those Gaiman gives us.  They are the races come to participate in or observe the death of the universe.  They come with reverence and awe and even love perhaps, but not fear.  The world is ending and they are confident in its beauty and rightness.

The rules are unknown, if they are knowable at all.  In his quest through a desert of skull-rocks and ghost towns, Dream meets the Fates, the weavers of destiny, and yet even they—the spinner, weavers, and cutters of fate's thread—did not see him coming with Cat-Dream.

Spinner:  "Perhaps he will give us his cat."

Cutter:  "What cat?"

Weaver:  "There's a cat with him?  I wasn't expecting that, my truffle-dumpling."

Spinner:  "How can you not expect something?  You spin the thread of their lives."

Weaver:  "I only spin from the thread you give me, my dove-bucket, and I didn't see any cat in the thread.  That's new, that is.  Cats."  (Sandman: Overture #3: 5)

They may each rather travel alone, but it is perhaps their partnership that can thwart their own deaths.  But it is the Cutter's, the eldest of the three, who makes the most tantalizing observation:  "Kindness would be telling him not to look under the bed.  And I'm not going to tell him that" (6).  As soon as the next town, Dream finds her, a young orphaned girl hiding from her father's butchers under the bed, suggestively named Hope.  And she becomes the third of their party.

At the end of the world, we look back on our beginnings, our youth.  After all, "They say every story must be told at least once, before the final nightfall.  And we are nearing the end of the Bridge…" (16).  Dream was captured before, held prisoner in his own palace in Dreaming.  And though he called on all his siblings,  still proud in their youth, Desire was the last and only one to offer aid, a young woman as his lover, a creature of light.  Despite his promise—"My heart.  My constancy. My love for all of time" (19)—Dream, as ever he does, fails as a lover, grows alien and uncaring even as the world made from himself surrounds and oppresses his lover.  He is cruel and cold and unrelenting, but he gives her the rose-quartz dreamstone to make her own world.  And as he remembers Alianora, exiled to a lonesome skerry, he seems to regret.  And he does not tell Hope all his story, perhaps even for shame or sorrow.  Not yet the strangely human Dream he would come to be, but not the entirely cold-blooded abstraction he once was.

[September 2014]