If you can Dream as I can, you can find them.

This is vital: you must make your peace with your friends in the Dreamlands before attempting this sojurn.  You will sacrifice a night's journey to make this bid--decades, centuries of dreamtime.  A difference of one night's sleep may tear away all you have worked for in dreams, all your friends and lovers.  This is not a quest to take lightly.

The comforts of the Dreamlands will not accompany you down the path.  You will walk that path as though you were awake: no prodigious leaping, no indefinite running, no invocations or artifacts to hasten your travel.  Any magic you take with you will fall dormant.  Any food--and you must take food, for your almost-dreaming self can starve here--will spoil if not preserved.  You must stockpile supplies in the Dreamlands before your journey, and they must be closer to mundane.  Traveler's bread will not keep forever, nor will it ease heartache; healing potions may relieve thirst but will leave your wounds untouched.  You must prepare as though for a waking-world journey of six or so hours across hazardous terrain.

You may take the first step of the journey at your leisure.  Time is always treacle-slow before the Gate of Deeper Slumber.  Your journey is not into the Dreamlands, but someplace along the way.  There are many hidden places in the universe, little eternities lost to waking eyes and even the eyes of most dreamers, and this is one.  It is not as hard to find as many, but to reach your jewel you will have to dig through many, many leagues of broken-glass-sharp earth.

Take the seven hundred steps of deeper slumber slowly.  Reflect on each step you take.  Look around you and see the walls.  Around the third-hundred and thirty-third step--perhaps a little more--you will see the beach.

It flows in all directions, its horizon black as a wound, its sky a swirling sea of nuclear ash.  Its sand is gray and gritty as sackcloth; its stones are an obsidian that has never known the heat of a volcanic heart.  It is freezing cold, and there is always a thick mist billowing on the wind, which may be still, as though waiting, or as swift as a legion of chariots chasing after victory.  

Walk off the step to your left, toward the faint light.  Your journey begins.

The beach is long, and to walk its length is to see testament to, in fact feel the terrible weight, of the agonizing death of countless gods and men.  To describe them would turn any sane man aside.  I can only ponder the morbidity of the man who first walked this path, if such sights spurned him ahead.  If you do not walk too far, it may be possible to return to the steps to deeper slumber with only a short time lost in the Dreamlands.  Want of safety is not weakness in this age.

The mists, which freeze in fine pinpricks of frost on the skin, are fed by the waters of the Lethe.  As a fine mist it will not steal the most important of your memories--though it is imperative you never, ever touch the waters themselves, or where they have recently receded.  Stay as far away as you dare without falling under the shadow of the cliffs to your right.

If the graves of the gods should not deter one from further exploration, walk on.  There will be more terrible monuments than the standing-stones and corpses of the Almighty, but at their sight one knows one cannot turn back.  Their secrets are too great to carry home.  The mists of the Lethe are thickest here, a dense fog.  Here it is thick enough to sip way the memories of this place; all that will remain is lingering dread, and a knowledge that the loss of your memories is a blessing.

The beach will be long behind you when you have left the worst behind you.  You will enjoy a long stretch of grassland, and at last come across a cold plain of stone.  On the plains is the palace.  In size it rivals the moon, a black citadel of cold iron and stone.  For want of care, it has fallen apart in the ages since the world shattered, and much of the palace is no longer safe to traverse.  Only the main door is safe to open.  One may discern the main door--its location is not obvious, in fact is inconsistent--by its knob, which is unadorned bone set against an unadorned door.  There are other plain doors and other plain knobs of bone, but only the door with both is safe.  The others opening to treacherous, decayed labyrinths seen by no creature in ages.

Follow the halls beyond; their way is true and plain, but filled with ruin and, from time to time, phantasms from history long worn away by the tide of years.  If you must catch your breath, do so, but do not take long.  Unless you sleep very deeply, you should only have an hour or two of waking-rest left, and it will take more time to reach the daughter of Demeter and the widow of Hades.  This is vital: though we spoke her name once, we must do so no longer.  Her husband is dead, and she has resumed her old title, taken on her older nobility.  She is Kore, the Maiden; she is Nestis; she is the Iron Queen.

You will know when you have found her throne room.

She is always alone, even in the company of Aphrodite.  It is her nature.  She sits atop a throne of cold, featureless iron.  Sometimes Aphrodite is at her heel, sometimes she is elsewhere, but Kore is there for any dreamer who enters her kingdom.  She is beautiful as only a goddess is beautiful.  There are stories of her with rosy skin and fair hair; that time is long past.  Her skin is white as milk, her hair falls down her back in sable waves.  Her eyes are dark as the void between the stars.  She wears a simple gray robe and sandals; her only adornment is her crown, and even that is a simple, cruel construct of iron.  Her smile is a strand of pearls, her lips black and drawn, seemingly always, into a sly smile.  Her favored implement is a live mint plant, formerly a nymph who caught Hades's eye; in quiet, one can still hear her weep.

She will step from her throne, guided by unseen hands to land gently on her feet.  If Aphrodite is with her, she will rise to her feet only when the Maiden has taken three steps toward her guest.  Aphrodite, too, is beautiful, fair and pale, with hair of spun gold and eyes the color of summer-day sea--but she is no longer as pretty as the Iron Queen.  Her hair is tightly bound, and she is nude.  The Iron Queen does not allow her clothing.  She never smiles anymore.  She has lost that part of herself.  She is alone.

Kore is alone, too; that's why she smiles.

The old dream is gone.  The old gods have lived, struggled, and died.  Man has cursed his short life and his weakness; the gods, in their way, are no stronger, sustained, empowered, and enslaved to the worship of man.  Man grew in number--to the billions--and the power of the gods grew in kind.  Rivalries became bitter cold wars.  In the final days of the old dream every city became its own nation, even the pantheons themselves splintering under the need to amass power.  When want of power at last eclipsed want of peace, the Earth and all its children did not last an hour.  And so we are dying: though we are many, we are far, far less than we were.  We are no longer the prized children of proud gods; we are cattle for the empowerment of fearful tyrants.

The old dream is gone.  Even now, your waking body huddles for warmth somewhere you hope is safe from nuclear fire, the scourging breath of dragons, and the ceaseless pounding of waves of blade and bullet and murder-thought slung by demigods.  The Earth's fragments hang in the void, a priceless artifact shattered in the struggle to see who would keep it, and still so many holy armies clash and bleed and die for the honor of ruling it.

The Dreamlands are whole, so long as there are beings who would dream it.  So too are the little dreams, the little infinities that intersect on the roads of the subconscious.  Their brothers and sisters are long dead, slain in the first terrible hours of the end of the old dream.  Here in the Dreamlands they can survive despite a lack of worship, sustained by the ample death and fevered, desperate love of the Waking World.  Not long from now both will starve, the food of love all burned away, the food of death consumed until nothing else is left to die.  In a strange consolation, they will almost certainly be the last of their kind; they will have the kind fortune of seeing the new dream drown in fire.

It is no wonder they are such gracious hosts--and that the Iron Queen is so very cheerful, in her cruel way.

The Iron Queen's wine is sweet and heavy-scented, and she will pour ample glasses for any who ask of her.  It is the finest wine left.  Savor every drop; if one is kind, raise a toast to love.  Aphrodite never smiles, but she appreciates little gestures.  Enjoy the conversation, for their memories are long, stretching far before the holy wars, and by virtue of their professions both have met the most astonishing men and women, mortal and divine.  It would be rude to raise the subject of their siblings, Kore having no interest, and Aphrodite far too keen and painful an investment.  There is one exception: the Maiden takes much joy in describing the death of her husband at her own hands.  The horror of his final moments is equaled only by the shining joy in the Maiden's eyes at her telling.

She knows a variety of subjects, but I have not heard much; no dreamer has enough time for more than acquaintence and a little conversation, and so no dreamer has yet had time to plumb the depths of her experience.  Ask away.  I have discussed her time in the Dreamlands, how she found Aphrodite in the final hours of the old dream, how she passes the time in a dead otherworld.  She spoke with a noblewoman's grace, though with a slight hiss when in a lascivious mood.  Her laughter is melodically cruel.

Inevitably you will feel the pull, as you always do, and little can be done to prolong your stay.  Say your goodbyes, and drink deep of the Iron Queen's kingdom as long as you may, for dreams, no matter how long, are never long enough, and life, always short, is shorter yet.

Few have seen more of the Maiden and Aphrodite.  I have seen this, as I was drawn away from the banquet table where we sat: when my dreaming body faded away, my consciousness lingered.  Aphrodite's composure slipped away until all she had were tortured sobs.  Kore, seated next to her, poured another glass of her wine, then set the bottle aside.  Her hand, iron-firm and soft, slid across Aphrodite's shoulder.  She drew the love-godess close, embracing her.  Aphrodite buried her face in the Iron Queen's shoulder, her long black hair drinking the goddess's tears.

I held tight as long as I could, the light of the distant sun tearing at my sleeping mind, trying to steal me away.  I refused as long as any dreamer would--until no strength remained in my ethereal self.

After a long while in dream-time, where even a moment has the weight of a century, Aphrodite's tears stemmed.  She stayed in the Iron Queen's arms.  She raised her tear-streaked, reddened face, and her bleary eyes met those of the death-goddess.

The two kissed, as though a kiss would take away the new dream and leave the old.

And so I woke, my stomach howling for food, the sun rising over the tatter of mountain I hid in for the night.  In the distance I heard the earth crack and split.  The serpentine roots of Puskaitis, a god-tree of some description, infested the mountain, seeking worship or food and always, always more land.  I gathered myself and ran, leaving the chunk of mountain to fend for itself.  Another day in the new dream.

When next you break your bread, or whatever poor scrap of sustenance you have found, say a prayer for the Iron Queen and her consort.  If you love, love like you do in dreams.