Brief Lives, Chapter Six: Starting Over…
Brief Lives is many things, but it’s also a story about a quest that Dream didn’t take seriously to begin with having a cost: Bernie Capax crushed under a falling wall, Ruby burned in her motel room, Ishtar’s final dance that took out a whole club, Etain fled, the Alderman vanished. And by issue #46 it’s patently clear that something started for bad reasons (I’m looking at you, Dream, even if your sister asked you to) is paid for by other people. What’s equally important though is whether Dream can be honest about the damage he has caused (and yes, he did, bite me 🤣) to strangers and his sister.
The issue turns on three characters: Bast, Death and Delirium.
What Remains of Gods
We didn’t really get Pharamond in the show, which is regrettable because I think this conversation is actually quite important to show Dream’s change (then again, he was already changed by the end of S1, so what gives 🤐🤣).
Dream then visits Bast in a dream he conjures specifically for her, and he really makes sure that no one knows because he does regret especially Ruby’s death. This is right after the conversation with Pharamond:
[Well, Death once told Destruction they could all know everything and most of the time just choose not to. So Bast is definitely onto something here…]
We immediately get that there is, or at least was, a lot of mutual understanding between those two, and that even in a dream, he doesn’t want to put Bast at risk (hence the complete lockdown in advance—he’s really not taking any chances here). And also that Dream used to be different in the past, and given that Egyptian Gods are not that old in cosmic terms, it does make you wonder…
Bast still maintains her presence as a goddess through the faith of those who remember or are in any way close to her. She is diminished from what she once was, and especially the end of the scene when she wakes up is rather sad. But has anyone ever noticed this (Chloe is the little girl Dream met on the plane):
Anyway, when Dream comes asking about Destruction, Bast receives him with a familiarity that suggests they have been finding their way into each other’s company for a very long time (and also that she wishes they had been lovers, and she still teases him about it. The scene when she asks him to be his Tom and he wonders if she’d really ask that of him is honestly priceless. I mean, what if she’d said yes? Could Dream be talked into something for intel? 🤔🤣).
But not to worry, it turns out that she lied to him during Season of Mists, and that she doesn’t know where Destruction is anyway, but at the end of the day, it’s not really about the information she can or cannot provide I think. It’s rather about Dream’s desperation (that he’d never truly admit of course), because he’s going to a goddess who doesn’t have much power left, and he asks her for help in hopes she knows something. But she doesn’t and hence probably would have been safe from Destruction’s defences anyway…
Delirium’s Closed Realm
The way Delirium closes her realm is distinctly different between show and comics. While show!Delirium does it after Desire tells her that Dream basically doesn’t care about her and only wanted to find Nada, comics!Delirium initially just retreats to her realm because Dream calls off the search for Destruction after Ishtar’s death. She even says she’s available in case anyone wants her.
So it can be assumed her sigil turns black only after she notices that no one wants her, because she doesn’t even know at this point that Dream lied to her about really wanting to find Thessaly (he only tells her this later. And I think it’s important that he tells her first, and that he’s not landed in it by Desire like in the show, which honestly cheapened the whole thing a bit for me).
What makes this a different kind of sad is that Delirium usually doesn’t make clear decisions because that’s not really in her nature (and we only see a similar kind of clarity about something in the next chapter). But this is a fairly clear choice and the message is fairly unambiguous, which means she has been pushed past what she can cope with.
Death Tells Off Dream…
Death is at least partly (and probably fully on a symbolic level) responsible for Dream seeking out Delirium, apologising and then looking for Destruction with her in earnest. And seeking Destruction in earnest is where it all goes wrong (or gets better, depending on how you look at it I guess).
And the scene where Death confronts him about Delirium is one of the most important in Brief Lives precisely because she is Death. First of all: He calls her, not the other way around, and I’ve said it on here many times: The Endless are siblings, but they’re also their function. Always, at all times. And if you ask Death for advice, what does that mean? If Death already gave you comfort in “The Sound of her Wings”, what does that mean? If you already reached for her hand but take her arms instead for now, and she’s visibly taken aback by that (like in the show), what does that mean? [He was always closer to Death than to any of his other siblings (also in the show), and there’s a reason for that 🥺] If Delirium finds you after a bad break-up (and many other things that have destabilised you but you never let on before, but they start catching up with you) and asks you to seek Destruction, what does that mean?
On the sibling front, Death isn’t looking away because it’s literally her function to witness what happens at the end of things. So it’s almost to be expected that she’s also at the end of cumulative consequences, and she tells Dream plainly that Delirium closing down her realm and being in a (even more) unstable state is his responsibility in all the ways that matter: He treated the quest as a distraction/a way to find Thessaly, he betrayed her trust and at the end of it, he abandoned her again.
The call for accountability comes from the sibling who arguably knows him best, and whom he loves most. Which is true but also the most… errrr, unsubtle foreshadowing if you’re not completely blind...
This is the literal kiss of Death (not just a cute thing between siblings), because her basically subtly bullying him into seeing Delirium is one of the central turning points…
The Apology
Time apparently shatters instead of flies/flees/fleets (it’s usually tempus fugit)
Dream doesn’t apologise easily or often (well, in the show he somehow does, but that’s a different topic), although he did apologise to Delirium once before in #42, and he also apologised to Pharamond for the death of Ruby. His pride is a part of him, bound up in his sense of function and duty, and to apologise means admitting you were wrong, which means admitting fallibility. And that generally doesn’t sit well with him. But he starts doing it. Sparingly, much more sparingly than in the show, and it works in the comics precisely for that reason.
In the opening of Brief Lives, he agreed to accompany Delirium because he wanted to find Thessaly. He knew he was using his own sister. And by issue #46, after all the deaths and the lying, he finally admits it to her. Resuming the quest almost reads like a peace offering borne out of genuine care here (a peace offering to Delirium. That symbolism again 😩).
[We didn’t get her threatening him in the show either 😒]
I mean, it’s one of the quintessential messages of Brief Lives, if you will: Dream’s rigidity has never protected anyone, least of all himself him. But he’s starting to bend, and the real tragedy isn’t that he can’t change (it never was, and how some people still say that’s the main difference between the comics and the show is quite frankly beyond me, because he also very clearly changes in the comics). It’s that he changes enough to understand what he has done over millennia (of course he’s been hurt, too, but he’s not just a poor misunderstood victim in this; he’s also a perpetrator), that in any other scenario, he even might have been okay, but that he chose to release his son in one final act of love because he had changed, and that it was just too much to carry. Combined with the burden he had felt about his function for so long, it was simply the final straw, and he chose not to back out of the corner he had painted himself into (he could have, up until the very end).
I quickly want to say something about Jill Thompson’s Dream, especially in the scenes with Delirium. I love love LOVE J.H. Williams III’s Dream, as an example, because he’s both beautiful and almost alien-like, and he’s the quintessential pre-fishbowl Dream for me, in every possible way. You can’t really compare their art styles, but Jill Thompson’s Dream is so much more human to me. He is still dark and slightly otherworldly in a way (although again, definitely the most human-looking, and that’s also for a reason), but Brief Lives is the arc where Dream most looks like… he might not survive his own story, if you know what I mean? And the apology scene in particular so massively benefits from her artistic restraint:
To finish: I didn’t know where else to put this, but this still absolutely belongs here (because of the hint at change and the comedy), and once again I have to say: We were robbed…
