The Empty World | The Empty World Sequence [complete | rewriting]

Nine (these events are Ten in the revised scene list)

Raven laughed as if in apology and walked across the room to scoop the boy from the floor. She scolded him in French. He screwed up his face, as she tried to brush his hair away. "Speak American to me, Mama," he said.

It became evident the boy's name was Thierry.

They sat on Raven's couch, she on the floor. Morpheus was embarrrassed to take the seat, but then Mother smiled at him, saying, "She's always preferred floors."

Jose was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He had extraordinarily long fingernails, and also there was something about the bones of his face, the way his eyes and eyebrows sat on his face...he wasn't a Human. He brought the sandwich to Thierry who picked the meat out of it and bolted this down.

Thierry approached Morpheus, and stood staring at him. The boy's skin was rather dark, compared to his mother, but his eyes were a very bright aqua and his hair, though dark, was red. He was wearing a very small version of a velvet dinner jacket with red cotton tee and shorts. And he wore sandals. "Are you a faerie?" he asked.

"I'm a Three-quarter-Angel," Morpheus said, "but I suppose I'm also Sidhe, because Opium is."

The boy blinked slowly. "I know that. I mean one of the faeries," said the boy putting a strange whine on the word.

Morpheus shook his head. "What do you mean?"

"They're famous. My papa's a faerie and he's famous."

"Scoot!" Raven said suddenly. She spoke loudly, changing the subject. "I know where Jean-Daniel is!"

"Jean-Daniel? He's alive?" Opium asked.

"And still young, Maeve's...." she gestured to her breasts.

"I don't believe that," Opium said, "He was probably already immortal when we found him, probably abandoned by some Human woman."

Raven shrugged. "He was in France the whole time they were hunting us, he's in New Orleans right now! We could call; he would fly over in a plane."

"Wonderful!" Opium said. "Oh, Murph, you'll just adore Jean-Daniel!"

Raven made the call from a cheap videophone with a very small screen. Jean-Daniel answered right away. Raven told him Opium was there, but said she had embraced her, so she couldn't come on the phone. Jean-Daniel mentioned a caldron.

They met Jean-Daniel at a cafe that night for dessert and coffee. Raven took out her braids and brushed her hair then slipped into a white dress identical to the one she had worn before. Thierry made her wear sandals; she wanted to go barefoot. Thierry dressed himself all in black, including his velvet jacket, and he put silver charms about his neck on thin chains and silver hoops in his ears. He was at four, tall as most six-year-olds a precocious talker and better able to dress himself for public than his mother. Jose stayed in.

Jean-Daniel was, as it seemed Halfangels tended to be if their parents were not from very low orders, tall and slender. Actually even the diminutive Halfangels were also slender, and never heavily built. Morpheus thought it might be metabolic, the fact that Humans foods just weren't rich enough to fatten them. But, besides this, he was also rather beautiful, appearing dressed in a red velvet jacket with no shirt beneath and a black kilt. It did not seem terribly out of fashion then, given the other patrons, except for the absence of an undershirt. He had rich brown hair and bright violet eyes, one might actually say lavender; he couldn't be all human.