After killing Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts

I went to bed early last night. I was not feeling fantastic; I made an effort to get some rest. And instead I had one of those experiences where you hit dream sleep immediately and then wake up and feel like a bus just ran over your brain. In this case, I dreamed there was a plague. It was characterized as such in the dream, not a pandemic or an epidemic, but a pestilence, something millenarian, a destroying angel. I had taken refuge in a subway station with a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people—as though a virus could be sheltered from like the Blitz—some of whom were strangers, many of whom were my family. There were little camps down the tunnels, pallets and fires. I remember a small child in a smoke-stained fireman's helmet, salvaged as we fled. But no one from my real life, although they do turn up sometimes in my dreams; we were all intermarried dynastically, like pharaohs, and enough of us had already died that we were beginning to worry about making matches for the next generation, carrying on the right bloodlines. At least the most important pair were untouched, the man whose role was closest in this world to a sacred king, although mostly he looked rumpled and middle-aged and desperately afraid for the rest of his family, and the thing that was the other half of holiness, submerged behind glass in a silvery liquid that slapped and broke far too thinly for water. I do not remember if this was its natural environment or some precaution against the plague, but I remember how many arms it had, the color of ambergris, jointed like a crab’s legs and very soft to touch, and I remember that most of its eyes were centered at the flower where they joined. Toward the end of the dream, he was leaning up against its tank with at least one of its limbs folded across his chest and both his arms wrapped around it, holding on for dear life and shamefaced because he felt he had no right to comfort when so many people were dying around him. No one would have criticized him. They were the pair that kept everything going, the engines of the sun and moon, and if one of them had died, we might as well all have gone up and wandered around until we coughed our lives out on the deserted streets. And the last thing I dreamed was standing on the steps that led down to the turnstiles, looking at the two of them. Will the Sirenia Players please answer the phone next time? I cannot keep taking your calls.