“What do you really look like?” The dark haired woman looked over at the boy sitting in her window sill. His eyes were older than his body. She noticed this as he rested his head against the window pane, watching the falling snow.
He instantly began wringing his hands, but he didn’t answer her for a moment.
“There are more scars,” he said, “than what you can see. Some people wish them invisible. They don’t like to see them.”
The woman nodded. “People hurt you?” She asked this as if she was speaking to a child, because to her he was. To her eyes he looked to be only eleven.
But, he laughed like a jaded adult. “Yeah. They hurt me, but some are trying to help.”
“Can I help?” She took a small step forward, her step echoing off the stone floors and walls.
“The ones who help are the ones who hurt me the most. You have to be cruel to be kind, in the right measure.” He laughed at some joke the woman in the Victorian dress did not understand.
She walked up and sat down on the other end of the window seat. She could feel the cold seeping in through the welded seams of the glass. She folded her hands in her lap.
“Tell me your story, Jinni, so that I may know you better.”
The whole story would take too long to tell, but he had been commanded, and he began to feel the unsettling pull in his stomach. If he didn’t direct it somewhere, it would cause him to word-vomit out everything until he was commanded to stop. The woman had ordered a story, anyway, not a play-by-play, so as any good story-teller did, he catered to his audience. He left out the boring parts- a thousand years of nothing, or that time when he lived peaceably for nearly a decade masquerading as a fisherman’s nephew in Prince Edward’s Island. Instead, he told her tales of treasure-seeking and adventures- people who wished to travel to other worlds, or the moon, or the farthest star. But, he left out the spaceships needed to get there, because her world and time didn’t even have home electricity yet. He didn’t waste time trying to explain to her the concept of a light-year. He took out the parts that were too indecent for her sensibilities as well; the ones with rape, brutality, torture, and Stockholm syndrome. And he avoided the parts too hazy from time to remember.
His retellings made him shiver, made him cry, and he told her those were the tales, “...easiest to tell. There are worse, far worse memories that I can’t-”
She put a delicate hand on his. Her touch didn’t comfort him- it sent electric splinters all through him, but he couldn’t flinch away. Her eyes latched onto his, “In time.” She patted his hand, “All in good time. Do not think you need to protect me from your stories, young man. I too have tales which may terrify you, and I know from experience that stories can heal. You can tell me anything you wish and nothing more.”
He would have rather told her nothing, but it was too late for that.
She stood and walked back towards the fire. “Do you even know what you truly look like?”
“No.” He answered, “People wish me into convenient forms, so I can blend in, or suit their needs.”
“How have you not gone completely mad?” She pondered to the fire rather than to him, and so he didn’t answer. He resumed wringing his hands.
He had gone mad and back several times, because people had commanded him to stop being crazy or act like a normal human being, and other people with good intentions told him just don’t think about it, focus on the now, don’t dwell on the past, just think happy thoughts. Their good intentions helped our hero for a moment in time, but just because the bad thoughts, the haunting memories, the anxious habits weren’t at the forefront of his mind, didn’t mean that they were dormant. Beasts like that blossom in the deep.
“I do not wish for you to hide your true self from me. I will accept you as you are. Form is freedom.”
He glanced up, terrified of what her good intentions were about to subject him to. Things had happened to him in his hellish dimension that hadn’t affected his form outside of it. So many marks had been wished hidden away- brands of ownership, piercings of servitude, scars from punishments- not gone, just hidden.
He didn’t get the chance to protest.
“I wish you to have the form of your true self.”
As the wish was granted, he tried to fight it, tried to misdirect it to be symbolic of his true-self, like how he felt on the inside, but then he realized that wasn’t much better or very different from what the magick was already doing. And this was a big wish. It took big magick, which was not something he could muster enough strength to fight.
He felt his actual bones cracking and moving. He grew taller, but more twisted. Teeth came loose and fell into his mouth. Muscles deteriorated. His wrists withered and disjointed. There wasn’t a spot on his flesh that he could see which hadn’t been marked by owners, or fire, or time.
He crumpled off the window seat and fell to the floor as his body convulsed under the magickal restoration of him. He choked and kicked as aeons of not eating, or drinking, or living took from him the toll he owed.
The woman sank down next to him and held his hand to comfort him during his transition. To be touched was the last thing he wanted. Centuries of hands had left him marred.
She cooed to him, and shushed him, and hummed lullabies to him until his rattling breath became less labored, and his twitching died into a light, all-over tremor.
“It’s okay.” The woman said, “I’m here, and I don’t judge you.”
Our hero’s vision went black for a moment. These were the words of The Darkness. It was here.
“I think you are beautiful just the way you are…” she whispered, her voice cracking, “Scars and all.”
Our hero decided she had read Frankenstein too many times as he looked at his knobbed and bent, quivering fingers.
She over-associated herself with the lonely monster of myth- The Doctor’s Experiment, The Minotaur, Beowulf, the Jinni. All she wanted was to be seen and loved for all her scars. It was only human.
He was nothing but tattered skin, like a skeleton, like Death.
With one hand, she pet back the few strands of wiry hair that he had left, and picked up his broken teeth off the floor with the other.
He knew what happened next. She’d keep him safe in the sewers below like the Phantom of the Opera, or in a bell tower like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. She’d hide him in the basement of the manor, and he’d live there and sleep inside the walls. Or she’d sell him to whatever version of a circus existed in this time and place.
But instead, she helped him into the spare bedroom across the hall, his feet too deformed for walking.
Instead of sleeping in the walls, he’d be sleeping in a bed, reflected in the large oxidized looking-glass of the adjacent vanity. She stood him in front of it, and his stomach dropped. He might have dropped too if she hadn’t been cradling his frail elbow.
His already rattling breath seized, and his heart trembled at the sight of the monster in the mirror.
The beautiful dark haired lady next to him smiled. “Do not be afraid of your true self. God has created you to be just as you are. You are special, magickal. This experience will give you power as you learn to embrace yourself. You have lived through all of this.”
She waved a hand towards his reflection. He stared in horror at a face laden with piercings, eyes that were red with burst blood vessels, misshapen lips framing a nearly toothless snarl, patchy spots of discolored hair. His skin was raised and rough from tissue damage, and there were growths where there wasn’t pitting.
“And in that way,” she said, “you are free.”
She left him alone in the room after a time, for him to settle into himself. He maneuvered from the bed, where she had placed him, to the floor, where he cradled himself in a corner until the coals of the fire were barely aglow.
Just before dawn, heavy footsteps approached him from inside the room. Before him, he saw two heavily buckled combat boots and Dream’s leather trench coat bunched up on the floor as he knelt down.
“Hey, Mate. How’s it going? Remember me?” He was beaming, and seemed unphased by our hero’s new appearance.
“What’s the matter?” He asked in earnest.
It had been an age since Dream had first made an appearance, and since then he would materialize in Dreams to take him away from hell or his new possessor for a little while. Our hero, though, could only ever remember him when he was in Dream’s realm, never before entry, and never after leaving. The memory of him only ever existed at the edge of his waking mind.
“You wanna get out of here?” Hypnos asked, and our hero nodded.
The Dream King held out his ringed hand, “Come on. Let’s go.”
Our hero reached out his hand, no longer withered and knotted, and he firmly grabbed a hold of Dream’s wrist. Dream hoisted him up, and they were no longer in the manor, but on a ship, with full black sails and a polished black deck. It was sailing in a sea of stars.
“Now, I’m Captain, and you’re me first mate, savvy?”
“Savvy,” he replied, but he was too preoccupied with the sight of his own hands. “It’s gone.” He said.
Hypnos looked back at him. “What is?”
“My…” He flexed his fingers. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“Listen,” Dream almost laid a hand on his shoulder, but stopped, and pulled it back, remembering his best mate didn’t like to be touched, and realizing he had just given him a command. “Alright, I might know what you’re talking about. Not gonna lie, but…”
He couldn’t tell him it was his soul that mattered; that was just as scarred as his body. Magickal symbols are more than just skin deep, and mental scars are just as permanent. He couldn’t promise it would go away or that time heals all wounds; that would have been a lie.
“In a way, the crazy lady’s right. You are who you are because of what you’ve been through. It’s the current which has brought you to this place, where mermaids sing, the horizon is the limit, and the rum is a-plenty enough to drink our filthy black guts out! Just don’t trust the mermaids. They bite. You know how to sword fight?”
Our hero managed a fake smile. “Yeah. I know how to fence.”
“Great! Work out that frustration!”
A cutlass appeared in the Jinni’s hand.
“En garde!” Hypnos flashed around his own cutlass, which had also magickally appeared.
Our hero looked out at the sea of night sky and the billowing sails. He heard the call of a mermaid and shrugged. “What the hell…”
He raised his sword, and dreamt he was a pirate.
After many hours of playing keep-away with the mermaids, they had a small run-in with the ghost crew who had previously sailed the dream ship. The Jinni and Dream won the battle, two against seventy-five, and headed to the captain’s quarters for victory drinks.
