Blackened Magic

I have been The Sandman for as long as I can remember. That is a long time. I am supposed to provide dreams to the children while they softly sleep, so that they may remember all their little lives the magic of imagining. I have always thought I have done my job well.

Until I had a dream.

I am not supposed to dream myself, I just hand them out to others. Gentle, strange stories, mundane but soothing.

I fell down my stairs. As I lay cursing, my pouch of Sand spilled across me and, splayed on my floor half-elevated, inverted, I instantly slept. Having spent my last sane waking moments cursing in anger seemed to change the magic of my Sand however, because I did not just have a dream. I had a nightmare. The First Nightmare.

The dream was long. The darkness never-ending. I dreamt of wars and pain and desolation and crying children and lurking strangers and fires burning and ash falling and the end of all things. I dreamt of alleys and loneliness and creatures of the deep and dark recesses of the earth. It was a nightmare that made all nightmares.

It broke me.

When I woke, I still had my Sand. But it was no longer gold. It had blackened. If I had seen such darkness but still awakened, perhaps there is a different kind of magic the world ought to see.

I still spread my Sand in the eyes of children, and watch night after night as they morph into creatures of insomnia, nocturnal beasts keeping me at bay with story books of their own. I can wait.