along their journey to close hell down, lucifer and dream pass by many gates which he locks up personally. one of these gates is a short wall made of stones going on for seemingly forever, with only a small break in it, which lucifer locks up.

so, yeah there's a question here. could this possibly be Wall of the village of Wall [stardust]? from what i gather in the sandman universe, bits of faerie were either sold/stolen/naturally merged with hell. the portal in wall links to a meadow in the beginnings of faerie.


uhm, so thats my theory. thoughts?

If it makes you happy, sure, why not?

Though I don't recall Hell being accessible from Wall. And Lucifer was locking up the Gates of Hell, not the Gates of Fairy.

But by some symbiotic echo, it can be a part of the wall of Wall if you like.

I see that short wall as a boundary of many things. I like to think of it as the boundary between heaven and hell.

As far as I can recall, regarding faeries, the old myths - Mr Gaiman's perennial sources - tell us that the Faeries were those angels who, when Lucifer rebelled, refused to take sides. Deemed no longer good enough to dwell in heaven, but not evil enough to be cast into hell - the first conscientious objectors, really - they were given a realm of their own, adjacent to the material plane of Earth. As a consequence, hell exacts an annual tithe upon them - and I know this is mentioned directly somewhere in the Sandman story arc, perhaps in World's End - whereby 7 of the fairest and most delightful Faeries are taken down into the infernal regions. As far as the wall goes, I'm not so sure. According to Dante's Divine Comedy, hell is comprised of 9 circles, so the wall could be a boundary between two of those regions. It could even be a subtle reference to the film Children of the Damned - or the book, can't recall the author, but I think it's the same man who wrote Day of the Triffids - where the evil alien children are defeated by the hero when he erects a mental wall of bricks in his mind to deflect their telepathic powers and hide from them the fact that there's a ticking bomb nearby planted to destroy them. That may be a bit of a conjectural stretch on my part, but all the Sandman books are so full of literary, cinematic and mythological references that it's mind boggling. And Hy Bender's Sandman Companion is far from comprehensive - that's no criticism, mind, it would almost be impossible to catalogue every reference and potential reference in the series, considering that almost every frame contains something that refers to another work.