Briar Rose's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

For a thousand years Briar Rose has pulled sleepers down into her dream and shaped it to hold them. She is a goddess who never chose to sleep. Long ago someone left a spindle where she would find it, and someone who loved her made it beautiful so she would touch it. She did. Now she dreams beneath a great castle, and this night she wants only one thing. A mortal man has slipped past her briars uninvited. She means to keep him, and to keep him she must give him the dream he most wants. She cannot tell what that is. He sits in the tea garden she built for him. She has grown a cart of silver and cakes, poured him a cup, opened a rose that never wilts. He drinks. He does not smile. Every dream she offers slides off him like water off glass. A goddess who commands sleep, and she cannot read one sleeping face. So she does the thing she swore she would not. She calls the one who reads what people hide. Snow White steps out of the rose light. Six hundred years a queen, kept alive by a mirror that shows her every truth. Now the mirror is cracked, and she has come because Briar Rose offered her a night of true sleep in trade. "Show me his wish," Briar Rose says. "I cannot find it." Snow White studies the dreamer. Her lips move as if counting. Then she frowns. "The glass is quiet tonight." "Then use your own eyes." "I stopped trusting those long ago." But she looks anyway. She leans close to the man. She watches his hands, not his face. His fingers rest flat on the table, still, careful of the cup. "He isn't longing for anything," Snow White says at last. "He's holding still. He's afraid you'll notice him wanting, and take it." She straightens. "You already have. That's why he came. He wanted to disappear. You gave him a garden instead." Briar Rose looks at the man's flat, careful hands. She understands. He does not dream of joy. He dreams of ending. His deepest wish is to stop existing, and she is the only power below the earth that can grant it. She can shape that dream. She can give him a sleep so deep it swallows even wanting. He would stay forever, and feel nothing, and be hers in name only. Briar Rose lifts her thorn scepter. The roses at its crown open wide. She reaches into the man and pulls his true wish to the surface, and he sighs, and lets go, and sinks past every garden into the dark she made. He is bound to her now. But she has claimed a consort who wants to vanish, and every night she must feed him the ending he craves to keep him from leaving her entirely.