Morpheus

Morpheus was the Greek primordial God of Dreams and Sleep, a dark deity who served as an Agent of Night in the cosmic order of Olympus and ruled the Realm of Dreams. When the sun god Helios was dragged from the heavens, Morpheus moved against creation, though he never met Kratos in person and withdrew the moment the Spartan restored the sun.

A dark primordial#

Morpheus was a primordial god, son of Erebus and Nyx, who had survived the great war among the Primordials in which almost all of his kind perished. He stood as an Agent of Night in the balance between light and dark, working alongside Hermes in the delivery of dreams to mortals. He resided in and ruled over the Land of Morpheus, the Realm of Dreams, a strange world of endless night where imagination and reality converged and time itself was distorted.

Counted a counterpart to Apollo, Morpheus cared little for the younger gods of Olympus and wished to reign supreme in their place. His resentment of his subordinate station deepened over the centuries, and his desire to bring down the gods was shared by Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, with whom he laid his scheme.

The slumber of Greece#

Morpheus found his opening when Helios was torn from the sky. With the sun gone and the gods left vulnerable, he cast the gods and mortals of Greece into a deep slumber and began enveloping the Earth in a black fog. He loosed his minions across the land, shades and banshees and the beasts that bore his name, content to wait, for he knew that given enough time the whole of creation would merge with his dark realm.

He did not face Kratos directly, judging that he had no need to risk himself while his darkness spread of its own accord. But the Spartan reached Helios and returned the sun god to the heavens, and with the light restored Morpheus was forced to abandon his design. Gaia recounted that he retreated into the shadows, withdrawing into his own realm to hide from the wrath of Olympus.

Power and uncertain fate#

As the son of Erebus and Nyx, Morpheus wielded great power, able to lull the gods of Olympus and nearly all of Greece into sleep with little apparent effort and to bend mortal and divine dreams to his will. As a dark primordial he commanded shadow itself, draping the world in eternal night, and being a conceptual deity older than the creation of time he could not be slain save by another god of his order. Yet his strength had its limits, for it was only the disruption of the balance between light and dark, brought on by the absence of the sun, that allowed him to act as he did.

What became of Morpheus is unknown. He was never mentioned again in the affairs of Greece, and it is not clear whether he escaped the reach of Zeus or whether he perished in the chaos that later consumed the Greek world. Long afterward, in the Norse lands, Kratos recalled him as the God of Dreams when speaking of the consequences of darkening the sky.