Sleep
The hardest part is letting go of your dreams... It rang like bells through the Empty. Castiel.
In the section of the Empty known to it’s keeper as Betwixt slumbering beings shifted. Castiel!
Ears perked up. To so many in Betwixt that name was familiar. Some had been sent there by the angel Castiel. Some had followed him when he was the new God. Some had worked alongside him. One of them had loved him. Something in Betwixt shifted, and the denizens felt a sensation like a bedfellow had gotten up and left the room. There was an odd absence that rippled and rumbled through those beings sleeping there, but most were too deeply under, and they slipped back into nothingness. The one who had loved Castiel fought the sensation of sinking back into the subconscious of the being that presided over them. Gedvalorth, Lord of the Empty, slumbered out of necessity. His brand of madness came from existing too long. He enjoyed sleeping because it kept the pain away. The longer he was awake the longer he had to fight the burning that coursed through him. He would have moments of lucidity, but given time he’d slip into hysteria and then into full insanity. He’d be useless, and somebody had to mind the souls here. The Empty wasn’t really empty, after all. There were innumerable demons and angels there. From the war in heaven to some demons who sacrificed themselves for some greater good he couldn’t fathom, Gedvalorth kept them in their places. The demons received his nightmares. Twisted dreams screamed through their rest in flashes of blood, ichor, violence, and gore. The angels received his fantasies and dreams of flying, skies, colorful gardens, and light. In the Betwixt, it was different. Angels and demons were both sorted there because some angels had committed atrocities, and some demons had saved the world a time or two, though their numbers were fewer. This grey area was Gedvalorth’s least favorite. While they got both his nightmares and his dreams they were unpredictable. Several times he had prepared a space for Castiel to rest, but God had yanked him back just in time to keep him on the earthly plane. It caused him a lot of restlessness, and driven him close to losing his control. While the empty was meant to be nothingness, it still was full of the mass of dead angels and demons and needed someone to guard the place. Once, a few millennia ago, those that came to his domain were all awake and they all tried to exist together in a wild new dimension. Keeping the peace was far more than Gedvalorth had been able to handle and he went completely mad. It was then, in a moment of lucid thought that he put all of the residents in a deep sleep and erased everything. He brought back the void that existed before there were angels and demons, and then let himself slip into the drift of all that came to inhabit his world. As soon as a being entered the Empty they would be lulled to sleep and there they would stay for all eternity, feeding into the dreams of the master of the realm. No one had ever woken up before, until Castiel’s name was heard echoing through a place long without sound nor stir. Gedvalorth cursed that name and all of the anxiety that it had brought him. Soon he felt Castiel’s awareness and Gedvalorth knew that he’d have to address this issue. “Hello? Hello! Hello? Hello!” Castiel cried out. He wandered around in what looked like nothingness, being followed by the veiled form of Gedvalorth as he wandered trying to find who it was that could have been calling his name. In just moments he would meet Gedvalorth face to face and have a strange exchange with him. Ultimately Castiel would escape, his presence so abrasive to the lord of this place that he would be expelled. Meanwhile, deep down in darkness the creature that came to call herself Meg had awoken inside a comatose consciousness. Dwelling in Betwixt was strange enough of a fate for her, as she’d never truly considered herself as any bit of good. She’d made a joke about that once before, but Meg didn’t think that the universe would have taken notice of the good deeds she’d done. She’d seen both the good and the bad sides of Gedvalorth’s subconscious, and she felt like she’d been so still for so long. Then she heard, chiming like a miracle, the name Castiel. She reached for that name, and she fought her slumber. Her eyes opened but she found that she couldn’t move. She was awake, but immobile. all she could see was pitch. She knew there were others around her, and that they’d mostly all been there forever. Some felt new, but she was in a pool of weariness. It was all she could do just to keep her eyes open, but she was trying. Whatever passed for her muscles tensed as she fought against the force that was holding her in the place she was. She’d never experienced sleep paralysis, but this was definitely what it must be like. She took one deep, unneeded breath into lungs that were not much more than a concept and jerked upright as she sat up in darkness, only to find Castiel standing before her. “You,” he said, aghast. “Yeah, me. What is this?” she asked looking up to see only more darkness. “This is the Empty, you were in Betwixt, your boyfriend just left. Yada, yada, yada.” She glared at the entity she now realized only looked like Castiel and said, “He’s not my boyfriend. I’m dead. No boyfriends for dead girls.” “Sounds like a song. Well, whatever you were, he’s gone. Time to go back to sleep now, sweetheart,” Gedvalorth stretched and yawned before tilting his head too far to the right. His neck gave a sickening pop and he smiled, showing too many teeth. “Do you like lullabies? Or should I break out the bed time tales?” “I’m not going back to sleep.” She sat herself down with her legs crossed in front of her at her ankles, arms propping her up. “I like this feeling. I want to roll around in it a little. It’s been a while.” “No, you don’t understand, you cannot be awake now. I can’t handle the...pain,” Gedvalorth said pointing to his head. “Oh, golly, mister. Then I guess you just have to send me to Castiel then,” Meg purred. “You and your ilk are more trouble than you’re worth!” Gedvalorth said scratching mindlessly at one part of his arm. “Very well, then. I’ll let you go, but no more! And if you want back in here...You’ll just have to die for it.” “Trust me, that will be a long, long time from now,” she said standing up and stepping toward him. “There’s no place like home, Toto,” she mumbled. In an instant she was in the Empty and then she was in the real world. She stood in a thicket looking around to try to get her barrings. To her left she saw Castiel trudging off toward a roadway, but she was too far out for him to hear her call to him. In what seemed like a blink he was gone, and she was left staring after the point he disappeared into the opposite treeline.
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Kiss the Void
This place is spinnin', spinnin' around into the void. Feel like I'm bein' pulled into a black hole. This crazy feelin's screwin' with my head. I'm overloadin' and my gauges are red.
In the Empty most beings were at rest, but Gedvalorth tossed and turned, in and out of sleep. Something was coming. His most pleasant dreams were now wrapped in anxiety, and his nightmares were repetitive loops of inescapable horrors. Gedvalorth was the glue that held the Empty together. The stability of the place was tied directly to his own mental balance.
In the beginning when Gedvalorth and the Empty had come to be It had just been his own. For what humans would call thousands of years he drifted in the stillness, only him and his dreams. He felt weightless, unfettered, peaceful, and whole. Then they came. Sometimes singularly, sometimes in clusters of hundreds, they invaded his sanctuary. These loud, demanding creatures called themselves angels. They hammered him with questions, they shouted at each other they fought among themselves and they just kept on coming.
Gedvalorth felt his agitation growing. He found himself prone to hysterical bouts of laughter, then just as suddenly he would scream and lash out in rage at the nearest being to him. The ever present nag of the angels in his realm and his consciousness were breaking him. There was no getting adjusted to the new tenants, and just when he thought things couldn’t get any worse, there were new creatures that began to arrive.
These things were called demons. They were dark and menacing and they snapped and snarled at everything and everyone. They fought with the angels and they fought with each other and they coiled around Gedvalorth whispering torments in his ears. They brought violence and gore into his mind and he began to imagine that he saw these things happening right before his eyes. He saw the terrors that the demons went through in Hell and he saw the pain they caused in this place called Earth.
In addition to all of the chaos he began to sense the dimensions bordering his own. He began to feel the cataclysms that was impending apocalypse. He could sense it coming from a few thousand years away. It came to him clearly in messages from the angels and the sense he had of impending doom. He could feel the trembling of differing realities, even as his own threatened to shake apart.
The Empty was so close to collapse. The noise was drowning him. Gedvalorth now flowed from catatonic, to shrieking laughter, to roaring anger. He was out of control, and he could feel the Empty, his beloved home, beginning to fray. In a rare moment of clarity, Gedvalorth focused all of his energy on the occupants of his realm and he forced them all into a deep slumber. With the voices all quieted, Gedvalorth now enveloped them in his own subconscious, splitting his pleasant dreams and his horrific nightmares with the demons. Keeping them all separate and sleeping calmed him and finally he drifted off to sleep himself.
As long as the souls in the Empty slept, he could be at peace and he could dwell within his nothingness in tranquility. More demons and angels entered the Empty, all instantly put to sleep. In his steady state, his curiosity was peaked by the angels that he noticed entering his world who were more wicked than just. He put them in a particular category he called Betwixt. Soon there were a few demons there, too, who had committed some unselfish, kind acts before their deaths. These were even more surprising to him. Still they slept in peace, colorful worlds dancing before them. Sometimes he found it funny that a place called the Empty was, in fact, full.
That is, until something woke the angel Castiel from his sleep in Betwixt. Then Gedvalorth was forced awake and could feel his calm mind begin to twist. He pleaded with Castiel but in the end he was forced to expel him for the stability of his entire domain. He barely had time to blink before a demon woman had taken advantage of Gedvalorth’s weak moment and woken herself. He let her go almost immediately, and as soon as she was gone he tried to fall back into his dreaming.
His sleep was shallow, his mind troubled. He was awake enough to sense an upheaval. Someone was tearing realities open and he felt his anxiousness rise. He could see the wave of darkness coming, and though he would manage to slip under he could not truly rest. Yes, something was coming, and Gedvalorth, mad lord of the Empty, was frightened.