Dear Friend of a Friend | THE SANDMAN

Shadow Man

Morpheus wanted to find this new immortal who Hob told him about. This woman gave Hob a pinch of hope to keep on living. He was curious about her. So he went on his search to find her.

Or he tried to at least. He couldn’t find her anywhere in the Dreaming. Maybe she just wasn’t sleeping yet. So he set his search for the next night.

And once again the woman wasn’t anywhere in the Dreaming. Was this immortal even sleeping? Because otherwise it wasn’t a healthy habit to have.

He looked for her every night but he just kept going back to the palace empty handed.

So Morpheus had two choices. Either he should accept that this immortal woman was dead and his sister took her. Or she was still alive and just didn’t sleep and that was a great reason to find her because not sleeping is extremely dangerous for humans, even immortals.

And it was his job to protect humans from these types of things.

He has been searching for her for about a whole month, waiting for her to waltz into the dreaming but it just never happened.

Not until Jessamy gave him the idea that sleeping wasn’t the only time that humans dreamt. There is a lighter, less strong version of dreaming that humans do.

Daydreaming.

It would be a lot harder for Morpheus to find her through daydreaming because he knew that he hasn’t done it in a long, long time.

So he set up a constant radar in his mind to find this Immortals daydreaming consciousness.

After a couple of times he felt it but only slightly.

But then he placed most of his energy in finding her. To him, it felt like a new obstacle and challenge to him and he hasn't had that in a long time.

Morpheus was sitting on his throne room stairs, reading one of the new books that just arrived in the library. It was quite interesting but then he felt the tug on his mind. He found the immortal woman. Well sort of. He couldn’t exactly teleport to her location while using her daydreams to find her. He could only place himself in her mind.

He found himself in a library, it was small but a lot bigger that most libraries he had seen in the Waking world. He heard movement next to him, on the other side of the bookshelf. He could see through it, in-between the books.

He saw a woman, turned away from him, picking up a couple of books from the floor. She had long, brown hair, braided away from her face, like most women he had seen in this century. But it was when she turned around towards him that's when he saw her facial features. Her skin was fair but there was a small cut just under her jaw. And her eyes were truly sky blue, it almost glowed when the sun shined on it.

She was reading one of the books while packing away the rest and that was how he found her, she was daydreaming about the book she was reading.

She looked up to the book shelf to place the book on it but then her glowing eyes made contact with his dark ones. His presence startled her because she dropped the book and a second later he vanished from her consciousness. Her daydream disappeared and so did he.

How foolish of him to not look around, take in his surroundings to actually find her, instead of just curiously staring at her.

He kept his mind open to her and it didn’t take long for him to find her in another of her daydreams.

This time he was standing outside the library, looking at it from across the street. He looked into the windows and found her sitting at it, reading the same book she was reading the day before.