A young cartographer is sent to chart a distant empire—and ends up mapping the mind of an emperor at the very edge where reality splits.
Morfeus braids true events into a high-stakes fable. What begins as a routine assignment—measure the borders of a far-off empire—quickly unravels into a journey that pulls the reader from the almost-real into a parallel world. With every mile, the coordinates blur, the map slips its moorings, and Morfeus finds himself charting not landscapes but ideas: power, memory, fear and desire.
Guided by a mystery he can’t name, Morfeus follows a trail to the universe’s outer boundary—a frontier that doesn’t belong to us at all, but to another society running alongside our own. There he discovers that his task was never about mountains and rivers. It is philosophical, dangerous, intimate: to explore what unfolds inside a single ruler’s mind.
Part adventure, part meditation on truth and imagination, Morfeus invites the reader to cross forbidden borders and ask: when the map and the world no longer match, which one do you trust?
Prologue
Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, in his fourth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, says every dream belongs to one of five kinds:
- the enigmatic dream — oneiros
- the oracular dream — horama
- the message-giving dream — chrematismos
- the nightmare — enhypnion
- the apparition — phantasma
Cicero sometimes called that last one a visum.
Morpheus is the god of dreams. With his brothers Phobetor and Phantasos he rules the sleeping world. Morpheus excels at becoming human—voice, gait, face, mood, even clothing and turns of phrase. Phobetor shapes beasts, birds, and serpents. Phantasos casts the stage itself—earth, rock, water.
Opening
Late one evening in my hometown of Ringsted, I took a detour past Ib’s place. It was a tiny house, perfectly matched to a man of modest height. Someone had saved all the largeness for his spirit—and that was a blessing.
I rang the bell, as I had so many times before. After a while there was a chorus of sounds: a dog, a shuffle, a clatter, Ib’s voice.
“Come in—oh, for heaven’s sake, just come in!”
So I did.
We sat at the small wooden table in the living room, he on one side, I on the other. I asked if he’d like a glass of wine. He gave a sly grin—of course he would. Ib loved red wine; there was a touch of bohemian about him. The running joke was that his travels had taught him always to offer guests something, and now I’d beaten him to it. He fetched a nimble little French corkscrew and two clay mugs.
Ib packed his pipe. I asked, a bit carefully, if he wanted to hear about an unusual dream I’d had the night before. He did.
As the story went on, I noticed him tamping his pipe a shade harder, his gaze turning inward. I couldn’t quite read it—people have their reasons—so I kept going, a little uncertain. Then, quite abruptly, Ib set the pipe in the ashtray, rose halfway from his chair, peered at me from beneath those pale, bushy brows and, in a low voice, said:
“Forgive me—but I must ask you not to sit there and tell me my dream.”
There was no reason to doubt him. It seemed entirely possible we had shared a dream. We agreed we ought to write it down… and never did. It wasn’t strictly necessary; we worried it back and forth for years afterward.
I’m certain Ib is here now, as I set down the shape of our common dream, straight from the heart.
We understand so very little about how the world is put together—and thank goodness for that. It leaves something for the countless generations to come to discover.