Time to update this pinned post with all of the latest links. I’m currently rereading the entire series (slowly!) as I look for clues and foreshadowing I missed during my first marathon read through. You can follow along by following any of my tags below or by following #sandman book club.
So without further ado:
The Doll's House
On the acting choices for Rose: In defense of Vanesu Sumanyai's acting decisions
Art comparisons:
Jed's Dream vs. Winsor McCay
Season of Mists
Prologue/Chapter 1: Dream's nature, The Fates have it in for Morpheus, importance of Hob and Daniel to Morpheus
Chapter 2: Lucifer/Morpheus parallels
Chapter 3: plot setup and hierarchy of pantheons
Chapter 4: what the heck is Death up to? nature of Hell
Chapter 5: World-building, how Dream's aspects are perceived
Chapter 6: Morpheus' powers, foreshadowing
Epilogue Part 1: the terrible burden of Morpheus taking on so many names and denying himself attributes of those names
Epilogue Part 2: what exactly is the nature of Morpheus' deal with the trickster?
Bonus: At Death's Door: sisterly fluff and a softer take on Despair
Bonus Meta: Endless' relationships as concepts: or what did Nada do to defy Kai'kul?
Art comparisons:
That Ceiling: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Dream's Castle vs Assyrian Lamassu
Destiny's Gallery vs Sir Joshua Reynolds
Destiny's Gallery vs Pinkie
Lords of Order vs Piet Mondrian
Dream's Study vs Koryusai
Dream's outfit vs Mucha (by @notallsandmen)
Distant Mirrors
Thermidor: Morpheus' deals, how human is Orpheus?
Thermidor: Literary reference
August: Dream's ravens, Greek gods, dreams and the Dreaming, A Day to Live
Three Septembers and a January: family dynamics, foreshadowing and another literary tie-in
Song of Orpheus
Song of Orpheus: Orpheus' nature, notes on grief, Endless family, intro of Destruction, Morpheus' relationships, foreshadowing
Winter's Edge
Flower's of Romance: Desire can rock any outfit (or art style), Del's wedding, gods come from the Dreaming
Death: A Winter's Tale: Nature of death/Death, death as a concept, the sibling relationship between Death and Morpheus
How They Met Themselves: Nature of Desire and how they relate to their twin and also Death, an art history lesson on the Pre-Raphaelites and a literary reference
Misc Metas
Hob and William Caxton: some background information on the earliest printshop on English soil
lord of the rings is a fun place to fandom because there's so many options to obsess over no matter what your interests are, but because of that it's also a humbling reminder that different people like different things and that's ok.
like, for me the heart and soul of lotr is the hobbits, and it always bemuses me to see how underrated they can be in fics or fandom like?? you have these funky little fuckers who are really brave and kind and loyal but also have oddball forms of government and eat and party a lot and get into scrapes and have all these hobbit pals and there's all sorts of shipping options and they have interesting nuanced social politics and second breakfast and pipeweed and they give presents on their birthday instead of the other way around so they're always getting presents and they're hilariously weird about their family trees and they led full-scale guerrilla warfare against these bastards who invaded their homeland but also all they want to do is chill and have nice gardens and probably judge vegetable growing competitions and have pretty dances
and instead people are getting super invested in basic-bad-boy-bitch sauron? huh. fair enough. the world is indeed a rich tapestry.
Your boss wants to use surveillance data to cut your wages
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
What industry calls "personalized pricing" is really surveillance pricing: using digital tools' flexibility to change the price for each user, and using surveillance data to guess the worst price you'll accept:
At root, surveillance pricing allows companies to revalue both your savings and your labor. If you get charged $2 for something I only pay $1 for, the seller is essentially reaching into your bank account and revaluing the dollars in it at 50 cents apiece. If you get paid $1 for a job that I make $2 for, then the boss is valuing your labor at 50% of my labor:
Surveillance pricing is a key part of enshittification, relying on three of the key enshittificatory factors that have transformed this era into the enshittocene:
I. Monopoly: Surveillance pricing is undesirable to both workers and buyers, so in a competitive market, surveillance pricing would drive labor and consumption to non-surveilling rivals:
II. Regulatory capture: Surveillance pricing only exists because of weak regulation and weak enforcement of existing regulations. To engage in surveillance pricing, a company must first put you under surveillance, something that is only possible in the absence of effective privacy law.
In the USA, privacy law hasn't been updated since Congress passed a law in 1988 that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
In the EU, the strong privacy provisions in the GDPR have been neutralized by US tech giants who fly an Irish flag of convenience. Ireland attracts these companies by allowing them to evade their taxes, but it can only keep these companies by allowing them to break any law that gets in their way, because if Meta can pretend to be Irish this week, it could pretend to be Maltese (or Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, or Dutch) next week:
What's more, competition laws in the EU and the USA ban surveillance pricing, but a half-century of lax competition law enforcement has allowed companies to routinely engage in the "unfair and deceptive methods of competition" banned in both territories.
III. Twiddling: "Twiddling" is my word for the way that digitized businesses can use computers' flexibility to alter their prices, offers, and other fundamentals on a per-user, per-session basis. It's not enough to spy on users: to engage in surveillance pricing, you have to be able to mobilize that surveillance data from instant to instant, changing the prices for every user. This can only be done once a business has been digitized:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Combine monopoly, weak privacy law, weak competition law, and digitization, and you don't just make surveillance pricing possible – at that point, it's practically inevitable. This is what it means to create an enshittogenic policy environment: by arranging policy so that the most awful schemes of the worst people are the most profitable, you guarantee that those people will end up organizing commercial and labor markets.
When surveillance pricing is applied to labor, we call it "algorithmic wage discrimination," a term coined by Veena Dubal based on her research with Uber drivers:
Uber uses historic data on drivers to make inferences about how economically precarious they are, and then extracts a "desperation premium" from their wages. Drivers who are pickier about which rides they accept ("pickers") are offered higher wages than drivers who take any ride ("ants"):
On the back-end, Uber is inferring that the reason an ant will accept a worse job is that they have fewer choices – they are more strapped for cash and/or have fewer options for earning a higher wage.
This is a straightforward form of algorithmic wage discrimination, using the blunt signal of how discriminating a driver is when signing onto a job to titer the subsequent wage offered to that driver. More sophisticated forms of algorithmic wage discrimination draw on external sources of data to set the price of your labor.
That's the situation for contract nurses, whose traditional brick-and-mortar staffing agencies have been replaced by nationwide apps that market themselves as "Uber for nursing." These apps use commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker sector to check on how much credit card debt a nurse is carrying and whether that debt is delinquent to set a wage: the more debt you have and the more dire your indebtedness is, the lower the wage you are offered (and therefore the more debt you accumulate – lather, rinse, repeat):
Surveillance wages are now proliferating to other parts of the economy, as "consultancies" offer software to employers that let them set all parts of your compensation – base wage, annual raises, and bonuses – based on your perceived desperation, as derived from commercial surveillance data that has been collected about you:
Genna Contino's Marketwatch article on the phenomenon offers a concise definition of "surveillance wages":
a system in which wages are based not on an employee’s performance or seniority, but on formulas that use their personal data, often collected without employees’ knowledge.
This means that carrying a credit-card balance, taking out a payday loan, or even discussing your indebtedness on social media can all lead to lower wages in the future. Contino references a recent report released by Dubal and tech strategist Wilneida Negrón, surveying 500 large firms, which concluded that surveillance wages are now being offered in sectors as diverse as "healthcare, customer service, logistics and retail." Customers for surveillance wage tools include "Intuit, Salesforce, Colgate-Palmolive, Amwell and Healthcare Services Group":
After a brief crackdown under Biden, the Trump regime has been extraordinarily welcoming to surveillance pricing companies, dropping investigations and cases against firms that engaged in the practice. A few states are stepping in to fill the gap, with New York state passing a rule requiring disclosure of surveillance pricing – a modest step that was nevertheless fought tooth-and-nail by the state's businesses.
In Colorado, a new House bill called the "Prohibit Surveillance Data to Set Prices and Wages Act" would prohibit the use of personal information in wage-setting:
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/hb25-1264
This bill hasn't passed yet, but it's already doing useful work. Companies universally deny using surveillance data to set wages, insisting that they merely pay for consulting services that give them advice on how they could do surveillance wages – but don't actually take that advice. However, these same companies – including Uber and Lyft – are ferociously lobbying against the bill, raising an obvious question, articulated by the bill's co-sponsor Rep Javier Mabrey (D-1): if these companies don't pay surveillance wages, then "what is the problem of codifying in law that you’re not allowed to?"
Surveillance wages are a rare profitable use-case for AI, in part because surveillance wages don't need to be "correct" in order to be effective. An employee who is offered a wage that's slightly higher than the lowest sum they'd accept still represents a savings to the company's wage-bill. As ever, AI is great for fully automating tasks if you don't care whether they're done well:
The fact that surveillance wages are calculated by external contractors enables employers to engage in otherwise illegal price-fixing. If all the garages in town set mechanics' wages using the same surveillance pricing tool, then a mechanic looking for a job will get the same lowball offer from all nearby employers. If those bosses were to gather around a table and fix the wage for any (or all) mechanics, that would be wildly illegal, but the fact that this is done via a software package lets the bosses claim they're not actually colluding.
This is a common practice in other forms of price-fixing. We see it in meat, potato products, and, of course, rental accommodations (hey there, Realpage!). It's a genuinely stupid ruse based on the absurd idea that "it's not a crime if we do it with an app":
Speaking of crimes that are implausibly deniable when undertaken with an app: surveillance wages also allow employers to offer lower wages to women and brown and Black people while maintaining the pretense that they're in compliance with laws banning gender and racial discrimination.
In the wider economy, women and racialized people are already offered lower wages and – thanks to the legacy of racial discrimination in employment and housing – are more likely to be indebted:
By tapping into data brokers' dossiers that reveal the economic precarity of jobseekers, surveillance pricing allows employers to systematically lower the wages of women and Black and brown people, who have the highest incidence of indebtedness, while still claiming to offer race- and gender-blind wages. This is a phenomenon that Patrick Ball calls "empiricism washing": first, move the illegal racist discrimination into an algorithm, then insist that "numbers can't be racist."
But this isn't just about lowering wages at the bottom of the employment market. In recent history, the employers most eager to illegally lower their workers' wages are tech bosses, who had to pay massive fines for illegally colluding on "no poach" agreements to suppress the earning power of high-paid computer programmers:
(This is why the tech industry is so horny for AI – tech bosses can't wait to fire a ton of programmers and use the resulting terror to force down the wages of the remaining tech workers:)
Which means that the very programmers who write and maintain the surveillance wage software used on the rest of us are especially likely to have the tools they created turned on them.
So I have a little booklet called “Calliope Comics Presents: Musings”, which had a Sandman Special in May 1993 (yeah, I’m that ancient). And amongst other stuff, it has the most amazing, long interview with Jill Thompson and Brief Lives in it, and I just thought I’ll share bits and bobs for the reread…
JT: Merv Pumpkinhead. I love Merv. [S42 pg5]
ST: I was amazed at how you were able to do this stuff with the expressions.
JT: I love Halloween: It's my favorite holiday [can be confirmed if you follow Jill on Instagram]. And I love carving pumpkins. One year we carved thirteen pumpkins. I always carve one pumpkin that has the traditional pumpkin face: two triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and three teeth. A big smile with two teeth on the top and one tooth on the bottom. To me that's my Merv pumpkin. That face. And a lot of it came from thinking how the animated suit of clothes would look. He'd be able to do everything he wanted with his gloves, but there's no fingers in them. They dont have to conform to the rules of bone and muscles. If they want to hold onto something they can kind of bow to an extreme on either side.
ST: I take it there's a lot of information that's in the scripts that Neil sends you that doesn't end up printed.
JT: Yes. A lot of it is mood. This was my favorite sequence so far [S42 pg8], because the way Neil had written it, he did not mention how he wanted it to be drawn. He said that it's raining and raining and raining, and Abel is bailing out water, and Goldie's right up top on a shelf with a little fishing rod, and the Imp in the bottle is up there with its fishing rod and all I could think of was Winnie the Pooh I was thinking especially of the animated sequence that Disney did with the song that was like, “And the rain rain rain came down down down, and the rain came down down down.” And Piglet's in his tree pumping water out, and it keeps going up. I thought, "I wanna do it in the style of the old Winnie the Pooh books." And I called up Neil and he said, "Oh, good. I'm glad that you rang up because I was really thinking of a-" I can't think of - was it A. A. Milne? He wrote them and someone else illustrated them. Of course, I can't remember the name of him right now. He wanted it to be in the style of that illustrator. And I thought, "Oh my God." That was exactly what I got when I read it. So then I knew [we were really in sync]. I tried to do my pencils in that artist's scratchy style, and I made some Xerox copies of his art and sent it to Vince [Locke, the inker] along with my pencils. And I thought that was a perfect mesh of our styles. Neil described the huge pile of things that Abel was putting his chair on. Well, he didn't tell me exactly what they were but he said it was this impossible gravity-defying pile of things. And he also gave me an illustrator's name: Rube Goldberg. He was the man who created impossible machines that do all sorts of different things. And I, of course, did not know the man's name. I went over to Craig Russell's house and Craig knew exactly who it was, but he didn't have any drawings of it, so he described it a little bit more to me. And then I came home and drew what you see here, and I liked it very much.
[…]
ST: Well, back to Sandman. What aboul all this architectural stuff? [S42 pg10 pn1]
JT: I made it up. Well, Neil described Sandman's castle as, well, a dream castle. It's constantly changing, so it doesn't have to look the same way twice. So I used a lot of stained glass and some kind of gothic hamlet things, and I wanted there to be towns and parks. [The buildings] could be multi-leveled, so | decided there would be a park up on top of [some of them]. And then over here I put a more traditional park with trees and things in it. would have a garden lawn and there would be stairs going everywhere and everything was very bleak.
ST: It was sort of a combination of different architectural styles that you already had in your head?
JT: Right.
ST: Where did these odd characters come from? [S42 pg13-14]
JT: Neil did describe that. He said he wanted a woman with an eyepatch, and he said that he wanted a fairly genie-looking fellow to serve Sandman [and that genie also has vampire teeth btw]. And that's what I saw when he said that. [laughs]
The thing I like about all their galleries is that they constantly change as well. [S42 pg16 pn1] So Dream's gallery looks different from this time you see it to the next time you see it. It was supposed to be in an Arthur Rackham style.
ST: These must be little things that Delirium creates. [S42 pg21 pn1]
JT: Yup. When she doesn't have any control of herself. Delirium's very wonderful. […] And she was the one you knew the least about [before "Brief Lives."]…
Sam Kieth, creator of The Maxx and co-creator of The Sandman, comic book writer, artist, painter and publisher, has died at the age of 63
Sam Kieth was one of the co-creators of The Sandman (together with Mike Dringenberg and he who shan’t be named). And despite his dropping out as the penciller after issue 5 (Passengers), The Sandman wouldn’t be what it is—he has left his mark on everything moving forward.
I’ll leave you with something not many people know: A page spread of issue 4 (A Hope in Hell) that had been originally pencilled by Sam Kieth (inked by Mike Dringenberg and coloured by Robbie Busch). You will only find this in the original first edition (forgive the crappola photo, I took this today from my floppies) because the layout didn’t work for the collected editions, and Mike Dringenberg redid it later on. This is pretty much the only version you find in everything today:
But fans of the first hour remember the original editions, and we’ll definitely remember Sam’s work (which went far, far beyond The Sandman). We’ve lost one of the comics greats…
Over the past two weeks or so, I’ve taken a bit of a break from meta-writing because it was a good point for doing so (it’s Brief Lives from next week onwards, and I’m not well about it 😩), but also because I honestly needed to write fic (maddening hormone-induced insomnia, and it at least prevents me from wearing grooves into the floor pacing 🤣). Fic just resides in a different part of my brain and makes me happy, so thanks to everyone who indulged me and sent prompts, or who has been reading my long fic “The Pillars of Creation”, which has always run separate.
In case you missed any of these (or would like me to write anything for you—I’m still taking requests), here they are in one post. All fics are oneshots except the last (ongoing multichapter).
Morpheus/Bast—And Yet… Five thousand years of sitting beside someone—that's enough time to figure out you weren't supposed to care. And yet, you do… [for @dreamarakne ]
Calliope—The Woman Who Was a River: Calliope is free. And freedom, it turns out, looks nothing like she imagined. [for @tickldpnk8 ]
Morpheus/Alianora—Old Love: Two people. One story they never quite managed to tell each other. [for @tickldpnk8 ]
Dream & Desire—It Binds Both Ways: You can want the end of someone and the undoing of the end of said someone simultaneously… [for @dragonnan ]
Morpheus/Thalia (OFC/reader insert adjacent/canon adjacent)—The Pillars of Creation: Sometimes, the greatest act of love is not in letting go, but in refusing to do so [Chapter 25: Waiting]
Fanfiction is how we give voice to forgotten characters (I’ve still not given up on Alianora and Bast!), explore complicated dynamics more deeply, give characters closure, and create new stories with original characters who can hold their own. So this is also a big thank you to every writer and every reader who makes their vision feel seen.
🖤 And as always, comments and reblogs feed writers’ souls… 🖤
The Death of the Digital Ecosystem: Why Decoupling Notes Destroys Tumblr
@changes (Edit: I already sent this to Tumblr Support under the feedback option. I encourage everyone to send feedback on how bad this feature actually is).
For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.
Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.
Erasure of Creator Visibility
Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.
If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.
On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.
Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly
This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.
When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.
Impact on Collaborative Conversations
Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.
If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.
The Disincentive to Create
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.
For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.
This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.
By making it harder to protect and track one's own work, the platform is effectively telling creators that their presence is secondary to the conversations happening around their work: conversations they may no longer even be able to find.
Hey guys have you ever had completely normal and not intense at all feelings about the sheer amount of terror Dream must have felt every time Orpheus got sick as a kid
Little 5 year old Orpheus asking for his dad to hold him cus he feels yucky and Dream not doing it because he doesn't want to make things worse making Orpheus think he did something wrong by being sick
I mean, this is a good thought exercise because I could totally see those types of interactions starting to happen more and more the older Orpheus gets and the gulf widens between eldritch parent who can’t talk feelings and son who yearns for human connection.
I’m sure anything that can be solved with a little bit of rest, imagination or creative misdirection, Dream is like “I’ve got this! Parenting is easy!” And anything that involves expressing feelings or not being the authority in the house is an unmitigated disaster. He controls himself so much, that I imagine him completely flummoxed once a kid really starts to push boundaries. Of course, if ancient parenting practices are in place, Calliope is likely more on the hook to deal with a young kid pushing boundaries…so Dream has a few more years of being the fun dad than he might otherwise.
I said it before, but it's very insulting to have smug contrarians online acting like you're a big, cringe reactionary for disliking LLMs, when its biggest cheerleaders are out here openly saying shit like this:
They’re saying the quiet part out loud now.
You can't make this shit up. AI bros are outright aligning with the GOP and advertising their product as a way to harm educated, liberal women in the workforce--at a time when right-wing men around the world seek to push women out of the professional sphere and back into the kitchen--but the insufferable squad acts like the Real problem is people who aren't "nuanced uwu" about AI and judge people who outsource their thinking to a chatbot. Give me a fucking break
I'm not saying this turd is right that AI will replace liberal women's jobs, btw. I'm saying that we should be clear-eyed about who's pushing these products down everyone's throats and what their explicitly-stated ideology is!
i do not want to live in the fucking panopticon fuck the camera that blinks above me at work, the tv watching me at the store, the "smile you're on camera" signs, the ring cameras, the flock cameras, the apps to track your child or partner, the activist friends telling me "just assume everything you do in public is being recorded somewhere", the government building protester databases, the teslas recording every move all around them, the knowledge that everything i type or search or save is being tracked and logged, the ads and search suggestions that mysteriously know what i was just talking about, the way biometrics keep creeping into more places, the way my car spies on me, the way my phone spies on me, the way there is nowhere to go to get away from it!!! no wonder the internet is full of vindictive little stalkers and witchhunts when it's the water and the air of society from the culture to the infrastructure
@tickldpnk8 I had actually nearly finished an Alianora one-shot—and then decided it needed a second chapter. Currently putting the finishing touches to it (and I’m still taking requests).
In the meantime, I’m cheating a bit because I had a Calliope one-shot lying in my drafts for ages (since I wrote the poem last year to be precise, but it got sidelined for the Johanna/Calliope fic for Rarepair Fest), and I never got back to editing. And because it somewhat thematically fits, I just did that because I have a soft spot for Calliope, especially if Dream isn’t involved.
So thanks for sort of kicking my butt into dusting this one off 🤣
The Woman Who Was a River
The first story Calliope writes after finding freedom again is a small one, and she expected it to be small in certain ways. But a part of her is also surprised.
She has imagined that she would unleash something… deep after her release. She has somewhat believed that what came out the other side would be proportional to her suffering.
Instead, she sits by a window in a rented flat in Athens. And she hasn’t even rented it herself but moved in with her younger sister Erato, who asks no questions about her imprisonment and leaves figs for her on the counter every day. And while she sits by that window, she writes a poem about a woman who loses a red scarf.
The scarf goes over a bridge railing. The woman watches it go. She laughs and doesn’t try to hold on to it, because what else is there to do.
That’s it. That’s the poem.
Calliope writes it on the back of an envelope and does not show it to anyone…
The city is loud in ways she has forgotten cities could be. It’s different from the noise of past times, a constant electrical hum, traffic and blaring sirens.
And in that loud city, she goes on walks. She has always walked when she is thinking, and she is always thinking, and so she walks for many hours each day through streets that were once different, past ruins that were once not ruins at all but simply buildings where people kept grain.
She does not think about Richard Madoc, in the way you don’t think about something that is printed on every wall. You distract yourself with deliberate effort.
She thinks about Orpheus instead, which is a different kind of pain. She thinks about his voice, and how a song can be the last thing that remains.
A small child drops an ice cream cone on the pavement and cries, and she immediately snaps out of her grief. At least for now…
Erato comes home in the evening, smelling of rose oil and someone else who isn’t her, and they sit on the balcony and drink wine that is not as good as the old wine. Calliope still doesn’t talk about her captivity and Erato still doesn’t ask.
“Are you writing?” Erato looks at her over the rim of her glass while the city is turning amber and the first stars are beginning to show.
“Small things,” Calliope replies.
“Small things ground us,” Erato says, and she pours more wine…
In her dreams, Calliope sometimes stands in a white room that she knows is not a room but rather containment without hope.
She wakes from these dreams calmly. She has expected rage because she earns rage; she has a right to it. She has stored it up in herself for years. And the rage is there, she is not going to pretend otherwise. It sometimes surfaces when she passes a bookshop, but it is… manageable? It’s the word she settles on: manageable. Which is not the same as healed, and not the same as forgiven, and not the same as over. But it is something, and it has clear demarcation lines.
She picks up her pen…
The story she is working on now, and she knows this one will take time, is about a woman who was a river. Not a woman who fell in love with a river, not a woman who drowned in a river, but a woman who was a river and had to hold that shape. Calliope does not think this is autobiographical, but perhaps she is not entirely honest with herself.
But the woman-who-was-a-river is good. She keeps doing things Calliope doesn’t expect, taking turns that require Calliope to follow rather than lead. And that’s a feeling she has missed most acutely in the years of Madoc:
The discovering.
Because a muse does not only give. It’s a lie men have always told about them. A muse finds. She asks, “Did you know this was in you?”
And sometimes the writer says yes.
And sometimes the writer says no and becomes someone they always were…
She thinks about Oneiros less than she has expected. She thinks about him sometimes, because she has loved him perhaps not wisely but fully, and she has always understood what love costs and chosen to pay the price.
A part of her still loves him.
A part of her is grateful for what he did.
A part of her cannot entirely forgive him.
She holds all of these things, and all of them are true.
He is gone now. She has laid him to rest in the way you lay an Endless to rest. Something has ended and something has begun, and the Dreaming remains the Dreaming, and she does not know how she feels about any of this except that it is his story, not hers. And she is done being a character in other people’s stories…
The woman-who-was-a-river eventually reaches the sea. Calliope is writing, and then she is crying, which perhaps doesn’t happen as often as it should. And the woman is standing where the river becomes something else, and she is not afraid of it.
That’s how Calliope knows the story is true. Not true in the sense of This happened. True in the sense of This is what it feels like, the losing of a shape you have carried so long. The liminal, and then the boundless…
She puts down her pen. Outside, someone is laughing at something. The sound enters through the open window, somewhat ordinary, and Calliope sits with it for a moment. It’s the sound of someone alive.
And she thinks: Yes, that.
She picks up her pen again, and she keeps writing…
I somehow feel there’s more where that one came from, because I always wanted to write about Calliope and her sisters post canon, especially since Calliope said she wanted to make sure what happened to her shouldn’t happen again to any of them. Who knows…
To bring in Erato specifically of course was about the sister bond, but also… I don’t know, I just felt there was something there about autonomy. And if she inspires everyone to feel that way and charms the sight, she might as well have fun with it herself (only fair if you ask me 🤣). And conversely, she like no other would understand it’s a gift. But that’s just me rambling of course.
I freely admit I was always a bit resistant when it comes to the women in the Sandman all being very quick to forgive men for what they did to them. I mean, I get the general sentiment of not staying a victim and not letting things poison your soul so you can move on, but honestly? I think they’re allowed to be angry and process what they’ve been through fully, not within the blink of an eye. Enough with the “always serene Mother Mary”-archetype…
In any case, I’m so happy the theme of change etc landed as intended 🖤
I love that she chose Erato to go to. I feel like they must be close given the arts they patron, and it feels like the logical sister to visit to me. I’m picturing them drinking wine and dunking a bit on Clio who might be way too reserved for their tastes. Or perhaps Urania for being way too in the facts to appreciate the feelings that writing can evoke.
Let her be angry, but I love that she finds it manageable: it all just feels very in-character for me given the acting choices in the show. All of this to say that I love it and would love more. 💜
@tickldpnk8 I had actually nearly finished an Alianora one-shot—and then decided it needed a second chapter. Currently putting the finishing touches to it (and I’m still taking requests).
In the meantime, I’m cheating a bit because I had a Calliope one-shot lying in my drafts for ages (since I wrote the poem last year to be precise, but it got sidelined for the Johanna/Calliope fic for Rarepair Fest), and I never got back to editing. And because it somewhat thematically fits, I just did that because I have a soft spot for Calliope, especially if Dream isn’t involved.
So thanks for sort of kicking my butt into dusting this one off 🤣
The Woman Who Was a River
The first story Calliope writes after finding freedom again is a small one, and she expected it to be small in certain ways. But a part of her is also surprised.
She has imagined that she would unleash something… deep after her release. She has somewhat believed that what came out the other side would be proportional to her suffering.
Instead, she sits by a window in a rented flat in Athens. And she hasn’t even rented it herself but moved in with her younger sister Erato, who asks no questions about her imprisonment and leaves figs for her on the counter every day. And while she sits by that window, she writes a poem about a woman who loses a red scarf.
The scarf goes over a bridge railing. The woman watches it go. She laughs and doesn’t try to hold on to it, because what else is there to do.
That’s it. That’s the poem.
Calliope writes it on the back of an envelope and does not show it to anyone…
The city is loud in ways she has forgotten cities could be. It’s different from the noise of past times, a constant electrical hum, traffic and blaring sirens.
And in that loud city, she goes on walks. She has always walked when she is thinking, and she is always thinking, and so she walks for many hours each day through streets that were once different, past ruins that were once not ruins at all but simply buildings where people kept grain.
She does not think about Richard Madoc, in the way you don’t think about something that is printed on every wall. You distract yourself with deliberate effort.
She thinks about Orpheus instead, which is a different kind of pain. She thinks about his voice, and how a song can be the last thing that remains.
A small child drops an ice cream cone on the pavement and cries, and she immediately snaps out of her grief. At least for now…
Erato comes home in the evening, smelling of rose oil and someone else who isn’t her, and they sit on the balcony and drink wine that is not as good as the old wine. Calliope still doesn’t talk about her captivity and Erato still doesn’t ask.
“Are you writing?” Erato looks at her over the rim of her glass while the city is turning amber and the first stars are beginning to show.
“Small things,” Calliope replies.
“Small things ground us,” Erato says, and she pours more wine…
In her dreams, Calliope sometimes stands in a white room that she knows is not a room but rather containment without hope.
She wakes from these dreams calmly. She has expected rage because she earns rage; she has a right to it. She has stored it up in herself for years. And the rage is there, she is not going to pretend otherwise. It sometimes surfaces when she passes a bookshop, but it is… manageable? It’s the word she settles on: manageable. Which is not the same as healed, and not the same as forgiven, and not the same as over. But it is something, and it has clear demarcation lines.
She picks up her pen…
The story she is working on now, and she knows this one will take time, is about a woman who was a river. Not a woman who fell in love with a river, not a woman who drowned in a river, but a woman who was a river and had to hold that shape. Calliope does not think this is autobiographical, but perhaps she is not entirely honest with herself.
But the woman-who-was-a-river is good. She keeps doing things Calliope doesn’t expect, taking turns that require Calliope to follow rather than lead. And that’s a feeling she has missed most acutely in the years of Madoc:
The discovering.
Because a muse does not only give. It’s a lie men have always told about them. A muse finds. She asks, “Did you know this was in you?”
And sometimes the writer says yes.
And sometimes the writer says no and becomes someone they always were…
She thinks about Oneiros less than she has expected. She thinks about him sometimes, because she has loved him perhaps not wisely but fully, and she has always understood what love costs and chosen to pay the price.
A part of her still loves him.
A part of her is grateful for what he did.
A part of her cannot entirely forgive him.
She holds all of these things, and all of them are true.
He is gone now. She has laid him to rest in the way you lay an Endless to rest. Something has ended and something has begun, and the Dreaming remains the Dreaming, and she does not know how she feels about any of this except that it is his story, not hers. And she is done being a character in other people’s stories…
The woman-who-was-a-river eventually reaches the sea. Calliope is writing, and then she is crying, which perhaps doesn’t happen as often as it should. And the woman is standing where the river becomes something else, and she is not afraid of it.
That’s how Calliope knows the story is true. Not true in the sense of This happened. True in the sense of This is what it feels like, the losing of a shape you have carried so long. The liminal, and then the boundless…
She puts down her pen. Outside, someone is laughing at something. The sound enters through the open window, somewhat ordinary, and Calliope sits with it for a moment. It’s the sound of someone alive.
And she thinks: Yes, that.
She picks up her pen again, and she keeps writing…
