After the eeriest and perhaps the biggest portent of a character’s demise in World’s End, Gaiman pulls all the finished literary embroideries that were the previous story arcs and knits them together into this penultimate volume and apex of The Sandman series, The Kindly Ones.

ABUNDANT SPOILER-ISHNESS! The volume is pretty rich with subplots, but the main premise is this: Lyta Hall’s three-year-old baby, Daniel, is missing. With all the peculiar appearances and statements of the Dream King about “coming back” for her son as seen in the previous volumes, Lyta erroneously believes that Morpheus abducted her kid. She embarks on a spiritual journey to seek for the Furies, the aspect of the triple goddess who takes revenge on blood crimes. The triumvirate seems hell-bent on making Morpheus pay—not for killing Daniel, but for killing his own son, Orpheus (see Brief Lives).

This is perhaps the longest volume in the series. It contains almost all the secondary characters we’ve met from day one, along with their own stories. Here we learn that Lucifer Morningstar (Season of Mists), after abdicating his throne in Hell, has gone to owning a nightclub called 'Lux' and is playing piano there; Remiel (Season of Mists), one of the two angels now in charge of Hell, seeks Lucifer to ask him if he wants his old kingdom back; Rose Walker (The Doll’s House), a former dream vortex, receives a message allegedly from her dead grandmother regarding the retrieval of her heart; and Loki and Puck, tricksters of two different realms, pull off a perilous mischief that predates a downfall of a kingdom.

(Re)reading this far, most of the secondary characters have already found themselves a special place in my heart. A definite favorite would be Matthew with his naturally sardonic sense of humor and his loyalty to Morpheus—or friendship, as I’d like to refer to his relationship with the Dream King. Mervin Pumpkinhead, though appearing as irksome to other characters, is lovable for me, what with his antagonistic jests about his Lord and his other grumpy/funny antics whenever he’s doing errands in the Dreaming (it's a running gag in the novel that whenever he's commenting on Morpheus' bad traits, the latter would come up behind him).

One of the many great things about this series is that it turns the stereotyped adversaries from other mythologies into well-molded, likable characters that lurk in gray shades—not white, not black. Lucifer is a great Machiavellian example. He's cunning, dashing, and evil as a fallen angel can get, but he doesn't get around to be the 'pigeonholed demon', if you know what I mean. Case in point: in Season of Mists, he remarks about how he doesn't like people saying "the devil made me do it" when they do bad things, swearing he doesn't make anyone do anything. His small appearances after his role in the fourth volume represent a free soul, and his thought-provoking epiphany in the end serves as a signal of him being a character who isn't defined by "right" or "wrong". By the exceptional way Gaiman wrote him, I’m not really surprised that he’s got a graphic novel series of his own. The Corinthian is an awesome character as well--I'm honestly relieved to see him "recreated". He's the counterpart of good dreams and black mirror of man's inner after all, and I thought Morpheus should have seen some kind of parallelism earlier in the series, when the Presence asks for the key to Hell back in the fourth volume as Heaven is nothing without Hell. Anyway, no matter how cool the Corinthian is, I still get creeped out by the jagged skull teeth in his eye sockets (don't even mention his penchant for eating boys' eyeballs). But hey, no matter unconventional they may be, nightmares are supposed to be scary.

Anyway, back to the story. Usually, when you say “climax”, you get kick-ass battle scenes and the like. But in The Kindly Ones, you don’t see this. The antagonists-that-aren’t (I told you it’s commonplace here), Lyta and the Kindly Ones, are sort of provoking Morpheus, but the Dream King accepts his fate without putting up a long fight, as he did kill his son not only once but twice. It is apparent that he does not plan on going to his sister Death’s realm permanently though, and has only made the decision when he reluctantly leaves the Dreaming when Nuala summons him to the realm of Faerie.

For the last time Death and Dream interact, and we are reminded of the scenes in Preludes and Nocturnes (last issue, The Sound of Her Wings,) where Death smacks Dream with a loaf of bread for being the brooding, problematic creature that he is. No loaf-throwing happens this time, but there's a rather heart-to-heart talk between the siblings. Deep and poignant, indeed.

So Morpheus leaves his kingdom again, without a definite promise of coming back. But the universe does not in any way permit a vacancy of an aspect as important as Dream, so the next in line—surprise surprise—Daniel Hall, comes up to the throne of Morpheus’ kingdom.

This is a very tiring volume, but not in a bad way. I felt as if I was with the characters while facing the crisis. Needless to say, I love this graphic novel very much.