Of all the bizarre and weird things that I had seen in Tartaros so far, the library still struck me as the most unlikely to be real. Perhaps that was why I ended up going back there eventually, a while after my conversation with Feather.

I wanted to help her so badly, but if this was nothing but a dream, I had to accept the fact that the only one to blame for her suffering was me. I was dreaming of her, so I had put her in this place. It was a horrible thought and filled me with tremendous guilt, but it also meant that there was a simple solution to all of this.

Conversely, where Feather yearned to sleep to find reprieve from her pain, I had to wake up, to end the suffering of the people in this strange world that only existed in my mind. And then I would find a way to never dream these dreams again, and they would all be safe. Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Even if it meant that I would never get to see Feather, or anyone else again. Even if it meant I wouldn't get to see any more of Dream's card tricks, or listen to Bridge and Arrow's playful bickering. Even it meant I wouldn't get to read any of the books in the library. And that strange, leaden feeling that weighed down my heart at the thought, would certainly go away too, eventually.

All that was left to do was to find a way to wake up. To find the thread, pull on it, and wait for this dream to fall apart.

I walked along the shelves in the library, and let my fingers run over the rows of white linen-clad backs. Upon closer inspection I could see now that there were numerous books that I had not read, or could only vaguely remember. But I recognized the titles, or the authors at the very least, so the explanation that it was all just a reflection of some old memories was still as good as any.

But once more, there was one book that drew my attention above all others. It was the one whose title I had never before heard anywhere, and that did not seem to exist in the database.

Dark Abyss.

I might not have known the book, but something about it made me feel like it knew me. Where it had seemed to repel me before when I had tried to touch it, now I felt as if it was drawing me closer. As if I was really standing at the titular abyss, teetering right at its edge, and peering down into the darkness before my feet. And it beckoned me to lean in just a little further.

My hand froze, hovering over the back of the book. Suddenly, my heart was racing, its every pounding beat felt like a desperate struggle against the iron grip of a sudden anxiety that had taken hold of me.

What's the matter? It's just a book. Just a book you've never seen or heard of before, I told myself. Nothing to be so nervous about. Just a book among books, in a dream. A book that doesn't exist.

I took a deep breath and pulled it from the shelf. For a moment, I waited for something to happen. I had half expected to be struck by lightning upon touching it, or something of similar excessive significance to occur. But nothing happened.

So I cracked it open and flicked through the pages. The font covering them was different from the other books in this place, just like it was bound in grey instead of white. On first glance, it seemed to be a novel, but from the few passages I skimmed over, I couldn't immediately discern what it was about. There seemed to be nothing special or peculiar about it. I flipped back to the very beginning of the book, but just like with the other books in this library, there was no publication date or location given. However, Bianxiao Liu, the author, had written a brief dedication.

For Lucius. Thank you for inviting me down into your rabbit hole.
For Jackson. Thank you for putting up with my bad humor.
For Mary. Thank you for sharing your passion and partaking in mine.
For Cat. Most of all, thank you, for bringing me along for what has become the wildest ride of my life. I love you so deeply, it scares me, and I guess that's why this work has become what it is today.
May you all find the Elysium you seek.

I furrowed my brow as I read the last sentence, and the word Elysium.

What a peculiar coincidence, to come across this word in a place called Tartaros, I thought. I wonder who these people were... If they ever existed.

My musings were interrupted when I heard the door slide open, and footsteps approach behind me. I turned around to find Cloud approaching me with a cheerful smile on his lips. For some reason, I felt as flustered as if I had been caught doing something highly offensive in a sacred place.

"Oh hello there. What's up?"

"Not much," I replied, and quickly put the book back.

My heartbeat had begun to slow down after that strange sense of anxiety that I had felt upon first touching the book. But as he walked over to me and stopped right in front of me, it picked up its pace again. He seemed to be about to say something, when he lowered his gaze down from my face, and his smile turned into a frown and he furrowed his brow.

"Huh. What happened to you?" he asked.

I couldn't tell what exactly he was referring to, but I didn't need to check in a mirror to have an idea what he saw there.

"Your sister," I explained calmly, "She really can be quite... intense."

Part of me felt bad for even telling him that much. I didn't hold a grudge against Rain, and I didn't want to make him think I did. Surely, she was obnoxious and rude, and that was putting it mildly. But whatever this place was, she seemed to see me as an intruder, and lacking any better explanation of how I had gotten here, perhaps she was right. Perhaps I would have acted the same way in her place.

"She did this to you?" Cloud asked in disbelief.

He stepped closer, and my heart skipped a beat as I found myself affixed by an inquisitive look from those strange eyes again - like a pair of iridescent jewels, they were flickering between unnaturally clear blue and light green. They were mesmerizing, drawing my own gaze in like a vortex, puling any remaining coherent thought I might have still held right out of my head, and swallowing my mind up whole, replacing it with blissful blankness.

Slowly, he raised a hand to my face, as if he was afraid that I would shy away from his touch. To what seemed to come as a surprise to both of us, I didn't. There was no jolt of electricity as he touched me this time, gently lifting my chin with a delicate touch to get a better look at my neck. But the moment I felt his skin against mine, a quiet gasp of surprise escaped my lips nonetheless.

I hated that it felt so real. I hated that it felt so good. I hated everything about the shiver that coursed through my body as he brushed away my hair and traced his fingertips over the side of my neck. And yet I longed to feel more. His hands were cool, but his touch ignited a fire. And I hated it, because I knew that it would do me no good, it would only raze me and leave me lost in the ashes of my desperation. I had to close my eyes to escape his piercing gaze, and reminded myself how ridiculous this was. This was nothing but a dream.

Still, I couldn't escape the sensation of his touch, as he lightly put his hand against the side of my neck and caressed his thumb over my jaw bone. It hurt, in the most excruciating way, and not because of the bruises on my skin. But I let it happen, because just for a moment, it let me forget everything.

The silence in the room was roaring, like the blood that rushed through my body with every heavy heartbeat, and so I barely heard his voice as he spoke, in a gentle whisper that did not seem to match the nature of his words at all.

"How horrible of her. I think I should have a word with her about this."

In an instant, my mind was clear again, as if an ice cold blade had been torn through the hot and hazy veil that had dulled my mind. My eyes snapped open and I grabbed his hand to pull it away from my face. Strangely enough, my skin felt cold now where he had just touched me.

"No!" I blurted out, " Please don't. It's fine, really. No need for you to get yourself tangled up in this."

He looked down at his hand, which I was still holding on to, and I hastily let go. I faintly registered that my heart was beating faster than I had thought possible without me just flat-out fainting, and groaned inwardly. Why on earth did I get so worked up about all of this? First a stupid book and then a fleeting touch? In a stupid dream, of all things. What the hell was wrong with me?

"As you wish," he said quietly. "Are the others treating you well at least?"

"Sure. Everybody's nice. Thanks for your concern."

I tried my best to sound normal and relaxed, and failed most miserably. My voice was quivering about as much as my knees. I hated it. It was ridiculous.

"I feel a little bit responsible for you, you know," he explained. He had taken a step back, but regarded me with curiosity. "Back when you first woke up and we spoke, I really could have done a better job at explaining things to you. I should have warned you. About this place, and the things that happen here. I'm sorry that I didn't."

I let out a dry laugh. "I've been here for a while now, and despite all that I've heard until now, I still don't have the faintest idea what's going on. So whatever it is you would have told me back then, I most likely wouldn't have believed or understood it anyway."

Besides, I thought, as I looked up at his exquisitely beautiful face, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters...

The harrowing perfection of his appearance should have made me wary from the start. He was nothing but a fleeting shadow. A figment of my imagination. A beautiful fractal in a kaleidoscope. Somebody who could only exist in my wildest dreams, because there was no way in hell someone like him could be real.

"Well, perhaps you're right," he said and smiled softly. "Still, if there is anything you want to know, anything you need – just say the word, okay?"

I nodded weakly. There were many things I wanted to say, many things I wanted to ask, but none of them found the way from the depths of my mind to the tip of my tongue. And in the end, it didn't matter, because –

With a heavy sigh, I closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to focus.

"I... I actually do have a question," I said, despite myself. "When you sleep, what do you dream about?"

I kept my eyes closed and listened to my own heartbeat while I waited. His hesitation made me wonder if he would find the question too strange to answer.

"These days... I dream... of someone," he finally said. "Someone I once knew, I think"

"Always?"

"Almost every night."

I opened my eyes to look at him again. His face seemed unmoved, but his eyes were darkened, like the sun was passing behind a cloud and a shadow was cast on the surface of a blue-green sea.

"And do you think the person you see is somebody from your past?" I asked carefully.

"I don't know. I'm not sure..." A furrow appeared on his brow, and he gave me a strange look, before he averted his gaze.

Whatever he was thinking of seemed to cause him pain, and I regretted ever asking. For a second, we stood there in silence, but another question was burning on my mind. In fact, it had been there from the moment I had first awoken in this world, the moment I had laid my eyes on him. It was the question I found myself asking over and over again, whenever he had smiled at me, whenever his velvet voice had cast pleasant shivers up and down my spine, and more so whenever he had touched me. And I knew that it was ridiculous, and yet I couldn't help but wonder. I dreaded to know the answer just as much as it pained me to keep that question unasked.

"But how do you know that your dream is just a dream? Haven't you ever wondered... what if this is the dream, and your other dream is reality?"

"Hm, I don't know." He crossed his arms as the thought about it, "I just always assumed that because this... feels more real, and since this seems to make just a tad bit more sense... that this is real."

I let out a quiet, wry laugh. This felt very real, indeed. But to me, it just didn't make any sense whatsoever.

"What about you?" he asked, "Is it because you remember during your dreams? That you're not sure what is real anymore?"

His words caught me by surprise, and I had difficulty finding the right words to answer.

"No - I mean... I don't really know. I'm just trying to understand what is going on," I said vaguely.

"Hm. I see."

He put one hand against his face and regarded me pensively with his head cocked to the side. There was something about that look he gave me, that made me feel like he wanted to say something else, but didn't quite know how. I imagined the growing silence between us would begin to weigh heavy sooner or later, but it didn't. There was none of the discomfort of a conversation staggered to a halt. Rather than feeling like I didn't know what to say, there were a million things I still wanted to say, but the time between us was running out. And yet, that moment of pure silence seemed worth having and preserving. Just a few fleeting seconds of peacefulness, that we spent contemplating each other and the mystery of our encounter in this strange place.

"Do you remember the conversation we had when I brought you here for the first time? The book you picked up?" he finally asked. "And the section you read?"

"Of course. The Metamorphoses. That part about Morpheus and the gods of dreams."

He nodded slowly. "Do you know these stories well?"

"Some of them," I said with a slight shrug.

"What do you know about Hypnos?"

"I... only remember that he is the god of sleep," I replied thoughtfully. "And his sons are the gods of dreams."

"Yes. According to Ovid, the gods of dreams and nightmares are the sons of Hypnos, the god of sleep. But Hypnos also happens to have a brother. A twin, actually," he added, with a hint of a smile.

I closed my eyes as I listened to him tell this story. There was just something about his voice, and the way he talked - he had this gift that his words would evoke vivid images in my mind, and I found myself smiling inadvertently.

"His brother is the god of death, Tanathos. There is a story about a man who outwitted death twice, only to end up in hell anyway when Thanatos finally caught up with him. And in hell, that man was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill that would eventually roll back down, again and again for all eternity. I think the gods chose to punish him with this pointless task as a reminder of the futility of his struggle against death. And now, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how often he pushes the boulder up the hill, it will roll down and he will have to start over – an even more futile task than trying to outrun the inevitable."

Those last words caused a shiver to run down my spine for some reason. I knew these stories and the idioms they had given rise to, but I could no longer recall when or where I had heard about them for the first time.

"His name was Sisyphus," I remembered that, at least, clearly, "And that place you called hell, that's Tartaros in the story, isn't it?"

"Yes. But it's not just Tartaros – in all versions of the afterlife I've read about everything seems to be just... pointless. The spirits of the deceased, or their souls, or whatever you want to call it, continue to exist, but there is no goal, no aspiration, no striving for change or betterment. This eternal stagnation, this existence without growth or change, it's the opposite of life. It's just the same thing over and over again, pushing the boulder up the hill only for it to roll down at the end of the day. No matter how often it moves up and down, the net movement is zero. So isn't that the essence of death? A task without aim, a problem without a solution. And time seems to pass, but nothing changes. So this place... the trials that we're given, the futility of being punished without even knowing why, and the way how everything just... stays the same, every day... It reminds me a lot of that concept."

I opened my eyes and saw that he was running his fingertips across the backs of the books in the shelf right next to me, in a gesture much like my own just before, and I caught a glimpse of the solemn expression he wore on his face.

"So the name of this place is quite fitting, don't you think?" he asked.

"So that's why you really think..."

"That we're all dead?" He cast me a bittersweet, heartbreaking smile. "Perhaps we are. But... that's not what I wanted to say. The last time we were here, you pointed out that the fundamental difference between being in a prison or being in hell is whether you're alive or dead. And now you asked me whether I could imagine this place being a dream, and my dreams being reality. My answer is that between the twins, Thanatos and Hypnos, I don't think it matters who you believe has brought you here. It doesn't change what this place is: Hell. A dream of hell. A nightmare. Call it what you will. This place is all I know, so what's the use of arguing about it? It makes no difference to me if it is real or just a dream. It doesn't matter if we're alive or asleep or dead, if I cannot recall a waking world or a world of the living either way."

His hand came to rest on a book in a shelf right next to me, and he turned to look down at me. The expression on his face had changed back to a look of boundless curiosity.

"But then again, perhaps I'm completely mistaken. After all, it's not like nothing here ever changes. For example, now there's you."

His velvet voice had dropped to a low whisper that caused a tingling sensation to spread out from the back of my neck and all across my body. And as he locked eyes with me, and his mesmerizing gaze drew me in once again, everything else around us slipped out of existence. I wanted to drown myself in the tranquil ocean in his eyes, along with all my thoughts and worries and pain. They were like an unspoken promise of bliss and serenity, a paradise beyond imagination. The heaven to this hell.

If I had thought Rain's death glares, or Feather's crestfallen look of despair, or even my torturous trial in the Well had been hard to bear, this took it to an entirely new level of torture. Bridge was right, forgetting was a mercy. That moment, I wished I could forget that this was just a dream, and just revel in those feelings that were stirring inside me. But at the same time I knew that come morning, when I woke up as Sky, I would wish that I could just forget his face and that look he gave me.

If hell is other people, I thought, then beyond all else, you must be mine.

He reached out, with that excruciating care and tenderness again, when all I wanted to do was to just grab hold of him, to feel him, just to make sure he was not just some intangible ghost. But I stood frozen, until he touched my hand. My hart started fluttering like a bird that was desperately trying to escape a way too tiny cage.

How impossibly stupid can you be? a voice in my head seemed to scream at me. Don't you see how ridiculous all of this is? It doesn't matter-

"But it does matter," I whispered, defying the voice and refuting his words about Thanatos and Hypnos at the same time. He gave me a puzzled look.

"Whether you're asleep or dead. In fact, it makes all the difference in the world. If you sleep, you can wake up..."

My voice trailed off as he interlaced his fingers with mine, and leaned closer. The tingling sensation that spread throughout my body grew stronger with every second he kept his gaze on me . My entire body felt electrified and paralyzed at the same time. The bird in my chest flapped its wings madly, almost tearing my ribs apart from within. My blood was singing in my ears. And my heart was filled with an ache beyond anything I had ever felt before. It was the bittersweet sensation of finding the most beautiful dream at the heart of an impossible nightmare.

"What if I don't want to wake up?" Cloud asked quietly.

"And if that's not up to you? If you're not the dreamer, but the dream?"

A faint smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, in an expression that mirrored my own heartache in that moment. He leaned in closer, and I had to close my eyes to shut out the world around us as it began to spin uncontrollably. My heart seemed to stop for what was no more than a second, but felt like an eternity, as I waited, and only started again when I felt his lips fleetingly brush against my cheek. His breath tickled against my ear, and  I felt my knees go weak.

"Then I prefer to keep on believing we are dead," he whispered softly, "So you don't wake up and leave me again."

"Making friends, I see."

My eyes snapped open, and the bird in my chest dropped dead in an instant. The ice cold voice that had come from the other side of the room caused both of us to freeze up.

I didn't know how long Cloud and I had stood there like that, and neither did I know how long Rain had been standing over there and listening, nor what she was thinking that we were doing here. But she was clearly not happy about any of it. Her face was a mask of perfection as always, but that barely concealed the tension in her jawline, and did nothing to hide the scornful look in her eyes.

Cloud slowly let go of my hand and turned to face his sister with his usual charming smile. He quite apparently did not fear her fury. I, on the other hand, shrunk back, wishing I could merge with the bookshelf behind me. All my sense of empowerment that I had felt in my previous confrontation with Rain in the atrium had been washed away by this brief moment of my weakness.

Ridiculous... Silly. Weak, I chided myself.

"Cloud, we need to talk. In private," his twin said.

She reminded me of Captain Talon in that way – she was able to put forward an utterly normal and even polite statement, but it would always sound like a command. She had the manner of speaking of a naturally born leader.

I stole a glance at Cloud's face, but he seemed perfectly relaxed. He just stood there, half in front of me, as if to protect me, motionlessly. He was still so close to me that it would be impossible for me to walk away without brushing against him.

"You are one to lecture me about manners..." Cloud said.

He was still smiling, but there was something in his voice that I had never heard in it before: anger. And I realized, although they seemed as different as night and day, both of the twins were capable of kindness and anger in their own ways. Just like Rain had consoled me after my trial, and was so overly protective of Feather and the others, Cloud was apparently not just made of charming smiles either. I didn't want to spend too much time on imagining what kind of hurricane would occur when these two forces of nature met.

"I'll leave you two alone, then," I finally managed to put forth.

As I squeezed myself past Cloud I noticed the tension in his body. He cast me a brief glance and seemed to want to say something, but remained silent. Rain followed my every move with her death glare, and when I passed her, standing with crossed arms next to the door, I could feel it linger on the back of my neck until I had left the room and the door closed behind me.

Alone in the atrium, I took a deep breath in a vain hope to calm my erratically beating heart. The domed, artificial sky above me had begun to dim, and individual star-like lights appeared here and there. As I stared up at them, they began to flitter and dance before my eyes, and it took me a moment to realize that it was because my eyes had welled up with tears.

Under the fake starlight, I was filled with false hopes and impossible heartache that felt so violently real that I shivered. Perhaps Cloud was right and it didn't matter what was real and what wasn't. It was a beautiful idea. But it was just that: an idea. A single thought that was not enough to hold together the cracks that began to form, crawling across my mind, spreading, growing deeper with every second I spent in this place.

That was when I knew, I couldn't come back. I could never ever come back to Tartaros, because I was broken already, and the mere thought of looking into those damned eyes ever again threatened to shatter me completely.

I had finally found the thread, and it was within me. It was about to unravel, and once it did, I would fall apart.

_____
A.N.
I guess like to write sappy romantic scences.... does that show? :'D
Sorry that it's a bit longer than usual. I hope you don't mind.
If you enjoyed reading so far, it would mean a lot to me if you could let me know with a vote!