Plot
It begins with brief profiles of each of the Endless, a reference to manga where brief character bios (in statistic form) are often displayed in the margins, and then segues right into Destiny's council. At the family meeting, Desire taunts Morpheus about Nada, the former lover he banished to hell ten thousand years past. Shortly afterward, Death gives him a sound scolding and Dream feels convinced he must go to Lucifer and recover Nada.
Expecting a battle, Dream arrives just as Lucifer is closing down Hell. Upon leaving, Lucifer hands the key to Morpheus.
The evicted dead gravitate towards Death's realm, unexpectedly swamping her in the mistaken belief that they will then be admitted to Heaven. Shortly afterward, Delirium appears, followed by Despair. They soon realize the problem and Death resolves to gather all the damned in one place until Morpheus finds an appropriate solution to Hell's closing, endowing her sisters with two ankhs to help her accomplish the mission.
Meanwhile, in Dream, various deities such as Bast, Odin, and others arrive to contest who will take over ownership of the Hell realm; the events of Season of Mists are told here in a greatly abbreviated version.
Behind schedule on collecting the recently deceased, Death runs out to do her duty, leaving Delirium in charge. She returns to find a raucous party with her little sister serving "Horse Doovers" (sic, hors d'oeuvres) of unusual variety, such as pencils on crackers or green mouse and telephone ice cream. A subplot involves Edgar Allan Poe, one of the deceased staying in Death's home, who apparently has a crush on Despair, his muse. As Death leaves again, the party is rudely interrupted by demons from hell, also without a home, who intend to cause chaos. Upon her return, Death prepares to battle the demons, only to have them disappear as Dream finishes his negotiations in Hell reclaims Nada and hands off the Key to the angels, Remiel and Duma.
Read more about this topic: Death: At Death's Door
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)