I sleep truly now, sweet and abyssal. The unseeing idiot demon deep in the Sarcophagus. Beyond these sheltering walls, Machrae Diir grows, and grows, and grows. Years whirl by. Bonds form and fade. I drink the auras and the dreams of this dimension. Free at last to walk outside rulership, to chase my whims alongside my sisters, to dwell outside veneration and know the warmth of a new acquaintance's touch.

My eyes dwell between the rays of every star in all the heavens, looking much and beholding what I please. Dreams, like death, sex, and war, simply are.

Since my eyes first fully opened, I have often seen this same simple dream. It cloaks itself in many layers and stolen words of dead gods, but the empty vessel beneath remains the same. Two children stand opposed to each other. Faces flushed or mandibles chittering, or plasmoids bubbling and writhing.

One speaks an unbreakable shield.

The other punches them in the face.

The child whose shield was never Real goes on to the weeping days, the wandering days.

The child who punches well--for a child--deems their punch perfected already. They go forward and continue to punch well--for a child--and always they seem by some strange coincidence to arrive standing opposite someone who never learned to punch at all.

This dream bores me at first. It has no savor in it. It threatens me with waking. But my sleep is deep and true. And the dream remains mine, so the ending most often pleases me.

The child who punches well--for a child--becomes a grown-up.

A grown-up who continues to punch well--for a child.

A street brawl where the knife comes out.

A drunken bet and boot camp (strangely, this doing-child never does make it through basic).

A strike-by-disease.

A bigger grown-up who punches better--for a child.

Sometimes the grown-up dies in the body. Bleeding out, shot through the head, coughing out their lungs in a heatless box-room on a moldering bed.

Other times, the grown-up dies in the being. Rained on, beaten on, pissed on until the light leaves the shifting eyes.

Every time the dreamed one enters this epoch, I laugh. I laugh so forcefully in my sleep that I dimly feel the little vibrating giggles of me manifesting in the unlit corridors of the Sarcophagus, rippling in the turbine-waters pouring down level by level through the catacombs. I don't know why it's funny. I know this dream has a point. It inevitably does, for the dreamed ones who punch well for children are snared shades of people who always wanted very badly to have a point.

But though I look upon the point, I do not see it, and that is hilarious.

I know someone like this hurt me, once, but the hurt has long since gone.

I am not the child who punches well or the child who spoke an unbreakable shield.

I am the child whose eyes glittered over martensite and fairy tales, so I am the one whose dreams came true.

And I laugh, and slip away to softer, sluttier dreams.