The Dream King did not like witches. He did not trust them.

Not until the eighteenth century—when you arrived.

By all rights, he should have been furious. You had tricked Death, his sister. You had made yourself immortal through a spell torn from a book you should never have touched—a book from his library. You had dreamt your way into his realm and stolen it from him.

And yet… he had not confronted you then. If anything, with each passing decade, his curiosity deepened.

He began to visit you—often in dreams, less often in the waking world, in that old house of yours.

And gods, what nights they were.

He was not proud that he allowed you to draw him to your bed. But he did not regret it. Quite the opposite.

For a time, he was your lover—an Endless who haunted your sleep and worshipped your body in your waking hours.

Then came Roderick Burgess. And for nearly a century, Morpheus vanished.

You remained. Bitter. Angry. Alone. In your house deep in the haunted forest, trying again and again to slip into the Dreaming—only to be met each time with a barren, dreamless night.

So you turned to what you could control.

Clients.

Lonely women asking the tarot to reveal their fates. Anxious teenagers peering into tea leaves for signs of cheating lovers. Goths seeking ghosts in the crystal ball. Grandmothers buying incense “for health.” Lonely men searching for more than a tarot reading.

They came and went.

The loss stayed.

And tonight, as you sat on the purple carpet, cards spread before you, candles burning in their circle, you felt it—

That shift.

The air grew still, heavy. Darkness thickened in the corners. A chill crept across the room.

And then— The soft crack of a wooden floorboard.

“You have not been sleeping.”

came his voice—low, strained, as though he were a trespasser in a place he once knew intimately.

“I checked.”

An old habit, perhaps. He had always kept watch over your dreams… waiting for one that might be of him.