The road curves through Oneiria in ways that don't follow waking logic. Pasithea walks it anyway, the bag of sand growing heavier with each step. She passes dreamers who don't see her, their shapes flickering between what they are and what they fear becoming. She used to stop for each one. Now she keeps walking. The columns appear where the road splits. They rise from nothing, carved with patterns that catch dreams before they scatter. Pasithea stops between them and sets the bag down. The silk tears when it hits the ground, spilling sand that doesn't fall but hangs suspended in the air. Each grain holds a memory — Morpheus learning to shape his first nightmare, Phobetor's laugh before he learned what fear could do, Phantasos drawing worlds that didn't exist yet. She steps through the columns without the bag. The sand stays behind, glowing faintly between the pillars like a constellation she's finally stopped trying to hold. Her children don't need her to carry their childhoods anymore. They need her to show up without it. Pasithea finds herself at the edge of her son's territory before she planned the words. The dream palace rises in the distance, all sharp angles and deliberate silence. She doesn't send a message ahead. She doesn't wait to be invited. She walks toward the doors knowing Morpheus will notice the absence of what she always carried, and that noticing will be enough to make him open them.

Hope is waiting at the entrance when Pasithea arrives. Not inside where the doors would muffle sound. Not at the threshold where she could retreat. Outside, in full view, like she knew Pasithea was coming and decided the first thing between them should be clarity. Pasithea stops at the archway. The carved stone frames Hope like a picture, and for a moment neither of them moves. Hope stands beside a fountain where columns rise between flowering trees, her hands empty at her sides. Pasithea looks for judgment in her face and finds only steadiness. The kind that comes from carrying your own grief long enough to recognize someone else's. "I'm not here to say I'm sorry he's dead," Pasithea says. The words come out harder than she meant, but she doesn't soften them. "I won't pretend that for you." Hope nods once, slow. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a ring — cracked metal, tarnished beyond saving. "I wore this for forty thousand years," she says, holding it where Pasithea can see. "Even after I knew what it cost me. Even after I should have let it go." She doesn't offer it. Just shows it, then closes her hand around it again. "I'm not asking you to grieve him. I'm asking if you want to sit down before you go see Morpheus. Because whatever you're carrying right now, you don't have to carry it alone the whole way." Pasithea feels something crack open in her chest. Not relief. Not forgiveness. Just the quiet recognition that someone sees the weight without asking her to explain it. She walks through the archway and sits on the fountain's edge. Hope sits beside her, not touching, not speaking. Just present. And for the first time in longer than Pasithea can name, she lets herself rest before the next hard thing.

Morpheus looks past her, toward the poppy in the center of the courtyard. Then his gaze shifts back to her face. "I left something for you," he says. "At the entrance. Before I opened the doors." Pasithea turns and walks back through the hall, Morpheus following several paces behind. When she reaches the threshold, she sees it: a small wooden frame mounted on the wall beside the open doors, glass covering its contents. Inside, a lock of dark hair tied with thread, and beneath it, a single baby tooth resting on faded cloth. She knows whose. She carried the memory of cutting that hair, of Morpheus losing that tooth and refusing to let her throw it away because he wanted to keep it forever. She lifts her hand to the glass but doesn't touch it. "You kept this," she says. Behind her, Morpheus is quiet. Then: "I kept a lot of things. I just stopped letting anyone see them." His voice is steady, but there's something underneath it—not forgiveness, not reconciliation, but acknowledgment. He opens his doors because he chose to. He left this here because he wanted her to know: he remembers too. Pasithea turns to face him. The mist that clings to the palace grounds drifts between them, soft and deliberate, like the silence he built but lighter now. "I need you to see Phantasos," she says. "Not later. Not when you're ready. Now." Morpheus holds her gaze. For a long moment, she thinks he'll refuse. Then he nods once, slow and certain. "I'll go," he says. The words cost him something—she can see it in the tightness around his eyes—but he says them anyway. That's the change. Not forgiveness. Not healing. Just the decision to move. Pasithea steps back through the golden garland archway that frames the entrance, leaving Morpheus standing in his open doorway. She doesn't thank him. She doesn't soften it. She just walks away, knowing he'll follow through because he wouldn't have opened the doors otherwise. The silence between them isn't gone, but it has a door in it now. And both of them just walked through.