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Before he is Dream Sweet and before the Sea becomes Saline, they talk.
There’s little else to do. He’s a fresh-god still, with stars in his eyes and blood between his teeth, and the Sea is his favorite of the great old ones. She’s the last of them now, the last of the gods untainted by mortal hands.
She’s the best teacher he’ll ever have. The Sea dispenses invaluable kernels of wisdom liberally, and he lets none go to waste. He doesn’t know why she chose him—because any fool can see she chose him—but he’ll be reified before he looks a gift horse like this one in the mouth. She teaches him their tongue, their history. She teaches him to know gods before they know themselves, and how to look mortals in the eye. When he’s really very young, the Sea bundles him up, the waves billowing down her back, and she teaches him how to—
But he won’t think about that.
She’s curled up today by the banks of his vast blanket of isle, lapping at the sand. The weeks melt into one another lazily in those early days, and he stretches out in the beating sun, pleasantly warm. Her mane, all seafoam and sunspots and windrows that shimmer, ribbons around her waist. She flashes her tail—just once, languid, all the moon-silver scales catching the flare of afternoon light in an iridescent corona—and props her head up in a long-fingered palm. Studies his face.
What? he asks, suddenly self-conscious. Touches the planes of his awkward, bared skin. He looks nothing like her, as ethereally and breathtakingly and inhumanly beautiful as she is. He’s just flesh and bone and not a few freckles. Envy shudders in him, sometimes. What is it?
You are young, the Sea says contemplatively, but you will learn soon enough. She draws a thoughtful claw down her own face. Or mask, rather—it’s sleek and shines like mother-of-pearl where the sunlight touches it. He’s never seen her or her idols without it.
Your face, he ventures, tentative. He doesn’t like questions he doesn’t know the answers to.
The Sea hums. Skims the seafoam from her skin with an open hand, uncut by her waves as only she can be.
My face, she agrees, or, perhaps, lack thereof. Her movements are deft, delicate; before his stunned eyes she spins a spidersilk glory of a mask, just as white and flawlessly luminous as hers, though without the distinguishing furrows that give her a distinctly draconic demeanor. She taps the center of the featureless disk and says, A god mustn’t relinquish the most important part of who she is.
Her face? he guesses, reaching for the mask and hesitating; taking it with two careful, covetous hands when the Sea nods, running his fingers over its impossibly smooth surface.
The Sea emits a soft, rippling sound like a pebble tossed into a well, light with amusement. No, she says, feathering her claws over his hair. As close to fondness as she will abide. The core of who she is.
The Sea is right. He learns.
Soon after she bestows upon him his mask, she stops visiting—drawn to where the current calls, her retreating shape like an arrow fired under the susurrant blue. He doesn’t mind; she parts the waves for him when he first leaves his land, and she parts them again whenever he comes back, and that’s enough for him.
It’s at the other islands, teeming with bright-eyed players and their advancing technology, that he meets the Shore. He almost misses her because he’s so occupied with the prospect of tackling the heel of soft bread a vendor presented to him without charge. She is tall and commanding and has eyes that blaze like the sun, sweating faintly with the mundane work she’s doing alongside her player fellows. She reminds him of the Sea with all her waterfalling white hair, except—
Your face, he says, feeling awfully like a fresh-god again, bread long forgotten. You are showing your—
“Hey, none of that,” says the Shore hurriedly, scooping him up in her arms and trotting away from the curious, milling players around her. He stares back as they watch her go, taking note of their loose shirts and salt-stained hair. The Shore is dressed the same. She’s comfortingly solid against him, ropy with muscle.
Speaking of the Shore: her arms feel like home, like pine, like summer sun. She adjusts them around him now, then says, low, “Who are you, kid? Who taught you to talk like that?”
He frowns, not that she can see it. The Sea, he says, and almost misses how her hand flinches on his back. The Sea taught me. What do you mean?
“You talk like—” she starts, then subsides. She stops right there in the middle of the pier and sets him on his bare feet, then crouches down so he can see her seastorm eyes. The air around her hangs heavy, smells of the water when it rains. There’s no way she could be anything but a god, and he tells her so.
The Sea would have preened. The Shore hunches closer, and the corners of her lips tuck down like pockets. “Don’t call me that, kid,” she says unhappily.
Why?
“Just,” and the Shore leans in, so fast he doesn’t have a chance to pull away, and tucks a lock of his hair behind his ear. The touch rings out like a struck bell, light lengthening to fill every inch of him. He freezes where he stands, his paper packet clutched in his hands, stunned into silence.
The Shore makes a softer, sadder sound. She does it again—again!—because his unruly curls rebel against his every effort to tame them and they’re no different now. It brings a light smile to the Shore’s face, despite the uneasy gray of her eyes.
“This isn’t a place where you should talk like that,” she says, smoothing down his hair. Her gestures are careless, her palms callused; he flinches with every foreign touch until he grows accustomed to it, the heavy weight of her, and then it’s…
nice.
“Gods like us,” the Shore continues, “the little gods, the gods of the people—we don’t—we shouldn’t.” Her throat bobs. “We… well. It’s the players’ world. We’re living in it. We help them live it. You see?” She peers at him hopefully.
He doesn’t, but like with the Sea, he’s eager to please. I think so, he replies, watches her cringe, and adds, What’s wrong?
The Shore lifts her head. She has a strong jaw. Her horns are beautiful, curled like the shiny nautilus shells the Sea loved to whittle into trinkets, bitty knives, pretty baubles to adorn her claws with. The Shore sighs, the breath like a bellows, and says raggedly, “Call me Puffy. That’s what my crew calls me.”
You’re—
“Puffy,” she repeats, and now her eyes are tipped with intent, point-and-fire. Bolder even than the endlessly elegant Sea and her claim over all she touches. “My name is Puffy.” She taps her chin: he watches her mouth, the way she shapes the words, and she says it again, over and over, and finally, when he opens his own mouth to try, she adds, “What’s your name, duckling?”
I’m— He coughs. The Shore lets him cling to her steady hand as he sputters over and over, all graceless teeth and tongue. I’m— I, I’m, I’m.
“Try a different name,” she suggests gently. “Mine—mine does that too. But… if you invoke something different, that might work.”
His name, his name, his name. His name, that’s one thing, but if he can get the cadence just right, if his ridiculous mouth would just cooperate—
“Dream,” he tries. It comes out staggered, comes out warped, but it’s not what the Sea taught him when he walked out of the sand, and the Shore—Puffy—brightens.
“Good job, duckling,” she tells him fondly, and lifts him, careful, her face beginning to split into a grin that will haunt him forever. “Dream.”
For a decade he travels with Puffy and her crew. Life on the sea—not the Sea, not that Dream will ever tell her that—is peaceful enough. The crew dotes on him, doesn’t bat an eye when he doesn’t grow an inch even as several of them develop great beards of gray and fault lines across their faces. Puffy must have said something.
Puffy is a good mentor, in a different way than the Sea. Puffy is pragmatic to a fault and believes that there is no place for the gods as the Sea knew them anymore, in this world full of new and exciting and dangerous life. She teaches him to cook, to clean, to launder. She teaches him how to upturn a bucket of salt water and scrub the deck till it’s shining, how to tame his own hair, how to polish his mask: how to take care of himself. The essence of being human, seemingly, if being human means lying side by side in the crow’s nest and being taught the names the humans gave the stars, and accidentally putting barnacles in the stew and getting everyone a little sick.
Even though she won’t say it, she doesn’t like it when he slips and calls her the Shore, or even forgets his own name, so he deliberately and thoroughly breaks each of his old, battered lessons over his knee, because he likes when she’s happy.
The whole crew does. Puffy watches the horizon and everyone watches Puffy. Enamored, the lot of them. Clinging to Puffy like a drowning player to a plank of wood, or barnacles to rock, or sculk spores to builders.
Not that Dream can claim any different. It was Puffy, after all, that drew him close one day and replicated on his mask the bright, beaming smile he always reserves for her.
“I’ll come back soon,” Puffy promises, her hands careful on Dream’s shoulders. He has his arms belted around her waist, thick with muscle, his face buried in the soft plush of her mane, and she smells good, like salt and sea air and the last of the fruit she was eating this morning, some kind of melon, and after she finished the flesh she ate the rind too.
There’s a word for this feeling that burns in Dream’s chest like a physical ache.
Puffy hesitates minutely, then she reaches down and scoops Dream up like he doesn’t weigh a thing, just like that nameless day on a pier some lifetime ago. He yelps, and it makes Puffy laugh; she bounces him, once, then settles him on her hip. She slings off her hairband—her white, fluffy hair immediately springs every which way with a vengeance—and drops it onto Dream’s head, right behind his mask.
That occupies Dream for a minute. He feels around the band, the colorful handkerchiefs wrapped around it, the smell of Puffy stuck to it from years of wear, how it dimples his golden curls and makes a home out of them. He pats his head, then looks up at Puffy.
She’s smiling, faint but happy, her cheeks aglow. She mimics his motions, smoothing down his hair, her callused fingers catching behind his ear. Her face so full of fondness Dream can hardly breathe.
“Captain! We’re raising anchor!”
Puffy’s expression shutters immediately. She bellows over her shoulder, “I’ll be there in a second,” then lifts Dream off of her and sets him down. Kneeling before him, she buttons his coat expertly and then pats it free of imaginary dust, and all the while Dream watches her, her hands, her hair, her heart.
“Sweetheart, duckling,” Puffy says softly, so soft Dream can barely hear her, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. By the next snow I’ll be right here, waiting for you. It’s—hey, I—I love you, okay?” and then her fingertips to his cheek, and then she’s gone. She vanishes below deck. The anchor rises with a groan.
Dream watches the ship glide away, its sails shining in the afternoon sun. Sails that he’s buffed and mended a thousand times, surely. “Bye,” he says belatedly, a hand raised as if to wave.
Then he looks down at the waves slapping against the dock, shimmering. The foam and flashing fish. The quiet wrinkle of laughter, there and gone between the incoming tide.
Dream tilts his head, considering, then slips onto his knees and then onto his side, dangling his legs off the dock, then his whole body, just his fingertips on the old wood.
The Sea parts in welcome.
He does go back next winter, just to check. Nobody’s seen Puffy’s galleon.
Probably it’s for the best. Dream’s grown up, grown into his title, or what exists of it. He’s visited islands of every size and shape and color and culture, gorged himself eagerly on foreign wealths of knowledge, the tall tales of heroes and demons and presidents and kings. You can learn anything in a market street running your fingers down a length of cool blue silk trimmed in silver, leaning your elbow over the lean-to of a minstrel with a flat-string fiddle, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with other slurping patrons at a noodle bar players rave about five kingdoms away. Rumors like nuggets of gold he secrets into his palms. Treasures he stows away to sew into the fabric of his own little server. He offers George the books; Sapnap kisses him for the noodles.
Dream still names the island after himself. In case Puffy ever gets her hands on an updated map.
The Sea cannot be tamed, but she can be worshiped. Everybody knows that.
Dream was too young to tell her any such thing. She’s eons older than he’ll ever be and before she was the Sea she was the Stars, and she’s so powerful it’s impossible to deny that she is beloved as both. He sometimes catches himself wishing he could be like her, aloof and brilliant and entirely unpredictable, even though it’s a curse to be anything like the Sea. To try is to fail.
A player on Dream’s land tries.
They say Wilbur Soot, mortal as anything, had a voice so beautiful he charmed the Sea right out of the sand. Before Dream’s territory was cut off in every direction by hungry, dark water, it was a wasted desert: bone-dry, beating sun. When the man was a boy, he sang to the moonlit ocean every night, and one day the ocean sang back.
They say he worshiped her. They say he loved her.
They say the ocean will kill anyone who dares approach.
There is no world in which Dream Sweet will not abhor Wilbur Soot.
Even if the man doesn’t know it himself, he killed the Sea. His old lover, his newfound enemy. His father before him was a godkiller and as though by some massive cosmic joke he’s managed to carry on the legacy he ran away from entirely by mistake. Dream would have to be reified not to have heard of the man with the sword that toppled pantheons, and he would have to be stupid not to recognize the grim, hungry ambition that glints in Wilbur Soot’s eyes.
But Dream Sweet isn’t a god to his hoard—he’s just Dream, the leader of a land with a name no one knows, inviting the weary and the wandering to join the community he’s fostered. The sea, no longer the Sea, was rife with adventure, but what Dream really wants is peace, quiet. He’d have liked Puffy to stay, and maybe Foolish, too. Alas, she had places to be, and so did he, and so: the Dream SMP. The little family. An imperious hunter with strange, foreboding dreams and a literal hellspawn with a winning streak in tussling against Dream.
Word spreads fast. The Dream SMP is a haven; the leader of the land will protect you within reason. They call him all sorts of things they call humans, which is probably very flattering. He does put his foot down when they start whispering about how he has the hand of Bloodlust on him; that’s someone else’s claim, and the last thing he wants is war.
Unfortunately, Wilbur brings with him some child. A firebrand child. He’s belligerent even with his older brother, the good-natured ribbing veering close to antagonism every so often. He glows so bright he blinds, a sunbeam in his soul, and Dream knows instantly, the moment he lays eyes on him, that TommyInnit is going to become a god.
“What’re you looking at, prick,” Tommy snaps when Dream stares at him too long.
TommyInnit, as it turns out, is also going to become a massive pain in Dream’s ass.
They bring war. They bring war. And war, of course, calls none other than the god once born of Avarice and Unsteady Ground.
Word of mouth painted for Dream the visage of a god whose reputation far outstripped him in every regard. He was a man, then a piglin, then a primordial lich of old given flesh. He was scarred, then flawless, hell on hooves, a sharpshooter, a brawler, a warlord, a saint, a swordsman with a blade the size of his steed. Dream learned quickly to just take every rumor with a grain of salt, since clearly, nobody knew what the fuck they were talking about. Alyssa had been adamant that the guy had a helix piercing, but she disappeared within a month of the first skirmish, so that shows what she knew.
The player himself turns out to be unremarkable. Dream, dozing in a tree above the painfully obvious entrance that empties into the pitiful L’Manbergian rebellion, observes Technoblade performing a series of serene katas in the blinding sun. He has a purposeful gait, a deliberate steadiness. He is one of the few people Dream has ever met who doesn’t involuntarily flinch away from his gaze.
But it’s only when they first cross swords—the insensate chaos of the Manberg-Pogtopia War—that Dream finally realizes that everybody was wrong. This player is no god.
“I gave it up,” Technoblade tells him, when there’s finally a chance to breathe. It’s the wake for Wilbur Soot’s funeral. Dream’s sure he saw Tubbo spit on the gravestone. What few of them were willing to stay are loitering around the entrance to the hastily assembled graveyard, twiddling their thumbs. “It was just torturin’ me, y’know? Not great havin’ voices goin’ 24/7, rent-free. Really tanks your mental health. Me, I’m the pinnacle of mental health. Anyway, I wasn’t about to sit around lettin’ a little divinity dictate my life. It’s gone now, most of it.”
“Most of it?” Dream echoes, since he’s nosy as fuck and Technoblade is something of a pushover.
“Eh, some of it’s still rattlin’ around up there. That’s reification for ya—honestly, I got cheated. The powers that be are pretty cringe.” Technoblade twists one of the rings on one of his four hulking tusks thoughtfully. “I’m never gonna be a god again. That’s just the truth. But bein’ a god for however long I was leaves some marks.”
It isn’t the whole truth. If he’d given it up in a single sitting to the most dangerous person on the SMP, Dream would have been sorely disappointed.
He mulls that over as Technoblade nods gravely over some foot soldier’s rote condolences and Niki’s incomprehensible gibberish. When the walkway’s all but empty and Technoblade’s polishing a dagger on his ruffled sleeve, Dream asks, “Why?”
Technoblade looks up. “Heh? Why what?”
“Why were you—did you—become reified?”
Technoblade’s eyes are very dark and fathomless; they slide away from Dream’s as he says, “Eh, I mean. Godhood wasn’t exactly all it was cracked up to be.”
This, too, is a half-truth. Dream knows desire, can read it with practiced ease. Technoblade longs. Bloodlust is not the kindest mantle, but it made him as fearsome as any beast in battle: teeth and tumult and teetering sanity. Not all his prowess was product of his ichor, but enough of it made him invincible, unstoppable, irrevocable. Dream’s read the reports, the terrified journal entries hidden in sunken ships.
It’s okay. Dream readily accepts mangled truths. Besides, he gets the real answer before he even has time to want for it.
Philza Minecraft strolls up to Technoblade. He’s half the piglin’s height, and presses the lightest of fingertips to the crook of Technoblade’s elbow. “Ready to go, mate?” he asks, crisp and cheerful, his whole left wing a mess of snarled sinew. Dream watches as Technoblade melts like butter on warm bread.
“Yeah, Phil,” he rasps, sparing Philza a bracing grin with all of his teeth. It makes Philza laugh in a rusty, surprised way, in the “I’ve forgotten how” way. Puffy—and it’s been years since Dream’s even spared a thought for her—used to laugh like that. “I’ll be with you in a sec.”
“Pog.” Philza turns slightly so he’s no longer presenting his back to Dream. He has a careworn face and very long hair. “Hey, mate. Dream, right?”
“That’s me.”
“Nice to meet you,” Philza says with the barest edge of a smile. The same darkness that seethed in Technoblade’s eyes lives in the glint of Philza’s teeth. “Wish it were under better circumstances.”
Dream looks at Philza’s hand, small and pale and plain, tucked between the slats of Technoblade’s thrice-Thorned netherite arm guards, and finds it within himself to say, “I’m sorry about your son.”
All that time ago, when Dream Sweet walked out of the sand, the Sea taught him something. He was the first godling she’d seen in centuries and was the last she’d ever meet, and she knew then, as all interested in survival do, that she must remake him in her image lest the world lose sight of its idols, its monsters, its spirits and ghosts and gods. She knew if she did not teach him then, she would be the last of the great old ones to walk amongst men.
So the Sea taught the godling from the sand how to become like her.
It is simple, she had said, so simple.
All you need is to want it.
Some knowledge is forbidden on principle. There are laws that hold reality in place, wisdom cordoned off in the name of safety, whole libraries burned to the ground, the heads of the gods on silver platters. In one of the oldest scriptures Dream’s ever read they called the great old ones the Ones Who Walk Away. Liberation demands the forethought of suffering.
Luckily for Dream, the Sea wasn’t very fond of following the rules.
TommyInnit grows into his godhood the way many gods do: violently, with thrashing futility. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, why he’s so hellbent on destruction, why he needs to go out of his way to shatter this well-deserved peace. He doesn’t understand the sword in his hand like an extension of his arm, the snarl of teeth that has made a home of him. Constant and seething upheaval gone unsatisfied.
He even seeks out Dream to demand an answer, which probably says everything that needs to be said. Dream startles awake in the middle of the night because Tommy is literally shaking his tent down, yowling fit to wake the gods long dead.
“Wake up, you green bitch,” he yells, yanking the flap open. Moonlight knifes Dream’s eye, and he groans, rolling over.
“Tommy, it’s three in the morning.”
“How would you know.” Tommy scoffs, unimpressed. “Unless you have a clock—d’you have a clock? Honestly?” Disbelief gives way to opportunism, the player’s instincts honed, sharklike, for blood in the water. “And you haven’t shown me? C’mon, man, that’s not on. Clocks are the latest trend, haven’t you heard? You gotta share these things.”
Dream refrains from rolling his eyes. “No, I don’t have a clock.” His fundament is tied to the Dream SMP; he couldn’t not know what time it is even if he tried. “What do you want?”
Tommy goes silent. If it weren’t for the intermittent wind whistling through the tent flap, Dream would think he’d retreated back out onto the sand, kicking down the castles he builds during the day.
“...I think I’m a wrong’un,” Tommy whispers finally, hushed and hoarse like it’s a terrible secret. “Think there’s—there’s something just wrong with me.”
Dream burrows deeper into his sleeping bag. Even through the thick woolen padding he can taste the godhood coming to be, clear and high and frostbitten, entirely out of place on the huddled beach with its lapping waves and tropical sun and miles and miles and miles of sand.
Tommy’s sentences slur together in his haste to expel the words. “—can’t stop thinking about just, just the house and the fire, and the look on Tubbo’s face, you know, all this bullshit that doesn’t normally bother me, except those are all things I wouldn’t normally do either, I just feel fuckin’ crazy, like I’ve gotta take my skin off or something, or run off screaming, set something on fire like there haven’t been enough fucking fires, isn’t that fucking nuts?” The whole tent creaks ominously: Tommy’s kicked one of the stakes. “Am I or am I not totally losing my mind?”
As warm and cozy as his sleeping bag is, there’s always, always more work to be done. Dream sits up, fastens his cloak around his neck, and ducks out of his tent.
Tommy jumps out of the way, clearly not expecting Dream to appear. He’s scruffier than Dream’s ever seen him, with bags the size of the Bergian Reservoir under his eyes. Clearly all of this is taking a toll on him, both the weight of his perceived sins and his gnawing lack of self-control.
He has no way of knowing Dream is in a similarly sorry state, what with the mask and all. The Sea had been thinking eons ahead when she handed him the seafoam off her back.
“You’ll be fine, Tommy,” Dream says. “You’ll probably feel better in the morning.”
“You don’t know that,” Tommy bites caustically.
“Yes, I do.” Dream steps forward, placid and unmoved, and asks calmly, “You wanna do some breathing exercises?”
Tommy’s shoulders droop infinitesimally—dread or relief, it’s hard to say. Increment by increment he inches forward until the tips of his dirty white trainers meet the dark and dampened sand where the sea meets the shore. He’d poked fun when Dream first pitched his tent, gloating about how Dream would wake up washed out to the water. He stopped when Dream moved his tent further into the tide.
Dream stands before him, almost ankle-deep in the shallows. Another affectation: Saline is not who he remembers it as. Dripping with sentiment, Dream places his hands on his own chest and takes a deep, demonstrative breath in, puffing his whole chest out, the way Sapnap once taught him to.
For all that he looks apt to claw his own hair out, Tommy’s matching exhale is purposeful. This is a routine they’ve crafted together, ever since the first night Tommy was plagued by relentless insomnia and Dream found the perfect opening. Not such a stretch of the imagination for an old friend to offer a shred of mercy, better than the phantom image of his big brother’s proferred blue dye or the cigarettes, tattered from being carried around forgotten in a back pocket for three months, strewn across the sandbar like the sad remnants of a birthday party.
Deep inhale from Dream, deep exhale from Tommy. Like always calls to like, and Dream’s head is full of siphoned and blinding cold: just a fraction of what newborn godhood has to offer, like collapsing into water barely above freezing.
“...I feel better,” says Tommy, sounding like he’s smoked an entire pack. “Thanks, Dream.”
“You’re welcome,” says Dream, divined anew, his throat aching with the cold. “Go back to sleep, okay?”
In the towers overlooking the chasms of New L’Manberg, Dream learns to make his peace with the godkiller and his partner. It’s still jarring to see Bloodlust without the shroud of his hunger behind him, doubly so to see that without it he’s just a beast in human clothing like any other mortal, but Dream thumbs the seafoam edges of his mask and lets Philza fuss over him when the seething spark off of a firework rocket singes his arm.
“There are no gods down there,” Dream says as they wait for the second wave of explosions to erupt, dangling a leg off of the edge of the grid. Technoblade, puttering about with one of his hunting dogs at his heels, pauses. Philza himself continues plaiting his own hair serenely. “Why are you doing this, then, if not for gods?”
Philza’s teeth flash into a brief, broad smile. “Not everything’s about gods, mate. Or for. I’m hardly the type to do the undying a favor.”
“Well, you’re a godkiller—you’re the godkiller. There’s gotta be some reason.”
“You’d be surprised,” Technoblade pipes up, not even bothering to act like he wasn’t eavesdropping. “Phil forgets everythin’. He won’t know what we had for breakfast this mornin’, just watch. Phil, what did we have for—”
“We had rabbit stew, you motherfucker.”
“Man, he got it in one. My ego’s never recoverin’ from this.”
Dream laughs, but he’s still eyeing Philza as he returns his attention to the screaming throngs below. He’s only ever heard tales told about the godkiller, tall as they were tempting, and none of them, not even his own son’s stories, do the man justice. The godkiller was supposed to be monstrous, towering, all sinew and silvery godsblood; Philza is half a foot shorter than Dream, and the only silver on him is the glint of his white hairs. He has laugh lines and crow’s feet. He eats rabbit stew. Dream can see why the Last fell in love with him: a human as proof of life as any human can be.
“...Not everything’s about gods,” Philza repeats, softer, shifting closer so he can press his knee to Dream’s. He pulls his long, shining braid over his shoulder and says, stroking fingers that have strung hundreds of bows and shot thousands of arrows over it, “This is about a bunch of idiots making the same mistake over and over. This is about my son,” venom crackling under the words, “and how even him fucking dying didn’t teach anyone any better. Like he didn’t matter.”
Dream resists the knee-jerk urge to point out, But he didn’t. He was one tyrant amongst hundreds, one madman amongst millions, one glimmer of life amongst trillions. He dreamt of glory and freedom and beating back the rising tide as it slowly, inevitably seamed over his head. He dreamt of escaping the long-reaching shadow of his godkiller father. He dreamt of love, and maybe all of that mattered once, but he’s dead now. He’s not coming back. Surely a lover of the Last knows a thing or two about mortality.
“Of course he mattered,” says Technoblade gruffly, lumbering over first to clasp Philza’s shoulder, then, to Dream’s surprise, Dream’s. The keen, fine-tipped hatred that bloomed in Philza’s eyes drains out blue in an instant, and he shoots Technoblade a tender look as Technoblade pokes at Dream’s shoulder.
“Your armor’s gettin’ worn down. Could trade you for a free repair.”
“Thanks, but I’m gonna keep this favor for a little while longer,” Dream says breezily, standing and stretching his shoulders, his hips, twirling his axe in one hand. Philza claps for the show and Dream grins and bows, all thank-you, thank-you, and the godkiller and the piglin they called Bloodlust don’t have a fucking clue what that favor means to the little longing god named Dream Sweet.
Pandora’s Vault is of blackstone and basalt, but its innermost cell, dedicated only to one being since its conception, is of obsidian and lava and pain. Agony. The sun cannot squeeze in. There is no relief from the heat and the incessant glow.
The Warden thought his commissioner did not anticipate Quackity.
He was wrong. Dream Sweet anticipates everything.
Dream Sweet walks in.
Something else walks out.
The great old ones presided over the oldest of emotions, memories, places and impressions: the things that were before mortals, unmolded. The gods that came after then were those who had been conceptualized by the mortals they touched, and as the mortals lived and loved and lost, they forgot from whence they came, and the power of their belief brought the ruin of the great old ones even as they stayed the reification of the new gods. The Sea, reified, became Saline, but Puffy remained the Shore for so long it sings in her bones even now, and Bloodlust’s chittering voices still titter uselessly at the back of Technoblade’s mind. Of them, Bloodlust was the youngest, a greed gone sour, when Avarice went to the dogs and no one was keeping guard over war and power anymore.
War and power are not the same. Violence and language are not the same.
The Sea once asked her student a question. She asked:
When you lock a god away, cut from the light and the dark and from comfort and satiety both, and you leave it to stagnate with only its ichor for company: what do you make?
In some self-satisfied, dramaturgical way, it makes sense that everything begins and ends with Tommy. He sowed the seed of doubt; his was the tantalizing gap in the armor. Fittingly, foolishly, he opened Pandora’s box.
It’s silly. Violence begets violence. Dream was made of the land but he was really born when Wilbur Soot planted a flag at his feet. How can a thing of bloodshed ever escape it? That’s what he’s thinking, when he grabs Tommy by the shoulder and throws him to the ground. That’s what he’s thinking, when he snarls a fist in Tommy’s tattered shirt and raises the other above his head. That’s what he’s thinking, when he brings it down. Again. And again. And again.
It takes a very long time to beat someone to death, especially when you’re half mad with starvation. Dream pointedly does not lose his head and makes himself stop as soon as Tommy’s gargling breaths grind to a halt. His fingers loosen in Tommy’s shirt. He has to fight to keep them steady, knowing this next part will require a finesse he truly does not know if he’s capable of right now.
The Sea told him that you can’t kill a god in any way that matters. Reification comes naturally, cannot be pulled by any turn of the tide. The Last comes for them all; that’s not the hard part. But Dream had to wait. He had to wait long enough that the players who live here tried to execute him for it—before his best, most intricate, most well-laid plan saw fruition. He could’ve kissed Punz for their timing.
There, between the gore and slop of Tommy’s cooling human corpse, is a gleam of gold. Dream blinks hard as the gilt edges of the godhood he’s been siphoning from Tommy all this time winks into focus between his fourth and fifth rib on the left, just below the reddened heart.
Finally. Finally. Dream reaches out with a skeletal, shaking hand.
The day after Tommy is rescued, the god in the heart of Pandora’s Vault holds the last dregs of the immortality he pulled from Tommy’s ribs in his mouth like an L-pill. He waits until Quackity is there, waits and waits and waits until Quackity has his sword up to the hilt inside his stomach, and he cracks open the guileless godhood between his teeth like an egg with a sun-yellow yolk inside: life, waiting to be made, meeting air and oil and fire too soon.
The earth jumps. The sparks fly.
A dead man walked in.
The Hurt crawls out.
Whatever Techno was expecting when he dropped by to scope out Pandora’s Vault, it was not to see a crater where the prison was, Sam and Quackity tripping over each other in their haste to limp out of the rubble, and a tiny, terrible thing in the dead middle of the wreckage, a ring of perfect nothingness bubbled around its hands and knees, the epicenter of the ruin.
“Heh,” he says. Sam, hands braced on his knees as he gasps for breath, glances up and rears back when he sees him. Good; Techno, for kicks, bares his tusks at the Warden and grins when he flinches. Quackity, on the other hand, garbles out something vaguely threatening and levels a small glinting object in his hands at Techno, as though something that flimsy could even make a dent in—
Techno squints. Are those shears?
Are those shears covered in ichor?
He’s long thrown off the mantle of Bloodlust, but Techno feels all his hackles rise and his lips peel back from his teeth anyway, his nose and the voices recognizing the bitter, burning scent of godsblood on the tool in Quackity’s hand. He blinks slowly down at it, then turns his gaze to Quackity, and whatever he’s doing with his face makes even him, so relentlessly full of bravado and jeer, recoil.
“What’ve you done, Quackity,” Techno demands, Bloodlust a quiet breath in the dying wind, the dying earth around them, as the ichor on the shears and the ichor on his shirt and the ichor splattering every shattered brick of Pandora’s Vault blackens to charred hanks the grass beneath their feet. “What have you done.”
Every breath is an agony he didn’t know he could feel. There is no relief, no absence; he writhes in the wreckage of his bloody birthplace, knowing in the end there was no salvation. This was never about absolution, and he knew the moment he put his axe to Tubbo’s neck that he would never be Dream Sweet again.
He can’t fathom what he’s become, the sheer breadth of it, the monstrous volume of agony. The blind blunt body he inhabits staggers to its feet, and he knows his shape too has been warped by the ordeal. He no longer is the whitewater waves of the Sea, nor the horned glory of the Shore; he’s othered, been othered, made himself another. His eyes a ruse, his mouth something else entirely. What has he done, indeed.
His breath burns. His lungs shred through his skin. His bones scythe his muscle. The wet tissue of the human insides he affected glint in the air; he is simultaneously everything he intended and everything not, the new last great old one, the greatest, one of the oldest, when humans understood the cost of living.
The Hurt claws out of Pandora’s Vault, knowing hope wasn’t left after all. That it killed hope with its bare hands.
hey phil
not to bother but we got a situation
yeah?
capital S Situation
God Situation
i would even go so far as to say
a Great Old One Situation
christ jesus christ
jesus fucking christ
who is it
dont tell me its dream
it’s dream
he’s
okay man listen
i don’t think he’s dream anymore
and i think he knows that
motherfucker
give me ten
hurry
be safe m8
i try.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Phil repeats to himself under his breath, swiping his hat off the peg at the door and, after a moment of deliberation, sliding the diamond sword he slew Wilbur with from under the floorboards. This blade he held to spill rivers of ichor, sealed now with its betrayal of mortality. There’s a pang, one buried deep, as he breathes warmth into the sigils of its hilt and Benihime sings to life in his hands.
A crow lands on the fenceposts as Phil hurries out the door, cocking its head in a distinctly knowing way. “Shit,” it croaks obediently.
“Useless, the lot of you,” he snaps back, kicking the door shut behind him and pulling a compass from his billowing sleeve. “I tell you to keep an eye on Techno and watch the fucking prison and none of you listen. What’s the use of you? Fuck,” he adds eloquently as the server-wide communicator starts buzzing, “shit dammit, word must’ve gotten out—that bloody Vault,” he tells the crow savagely, and the crow bobs its head, sage as anything, and alights upon the brim of his hat as he pearls off toward the Greater SMP proper, sword in his hand and heart in his throat.
Of course the whole server shows up the moment something vaguely interesting, and by vaguely interesting Techno means objectively dangerous, to rubberneck. Of course.
“Do you guys even know what common sense is?” he tells the goggling BadBoyHalo despairingly. “Go home. This isn’t some freak show. What, is this your first time seein’ a god?”
“That’s a god?” gasps Bad, answering Techno’s question for him. “Why does it—they—look like that?”
“Man, now that’s just rude. It’s not like he could go riflin’ through a closet.”
Antfrost, on Bad’s other side, makes a choked noise. “That thing busted the prison,” he whimpers, wringing his tail between his hands. “Shit, that was obsidian and blackstone and—mining fatigue!”
“He’s a god,” Techno tells the guard bemusedly. “I’m makin’ an educated guess, but I think he’s actually a great old one, too, and me ‘n Phil thought those guys died out ages ago. I mean, kudos to Dream for figurin’ it out and everythin’, but I can’t lie, this is pretty bad, and all of you should go home right now.”
Techno’s emphatic warning is lost on the entire gathered crowd, who whip around to stare at him the moment the name Dream leaves his mouth like a hivemind.
“Dream?” demands the Warden, frenzied in typical fashion at the mere mention of his single maimed, malnourished prisoner. “Where is he? How did that thing help him escape?”
“He escaped?” That’s ex-president Tubbo, horrified. “What the fuck, why did nobody say—” He rounds on Ranboo and Tommy, both of whom look at him with huge terrified eyes, and yells, “Get armor, get pots,” at both of them.
Techno pinches the bridge of his snout. It’s at times like these when he regrets shrugging off his immortality; mortals never put two and two together. Just as he’s about to open his mouth and repeat himself for the third time, a new voice cuts in, sharp as a knife.
“Are you all fucking stupid?” Wilbur Soot says, hands in his pockets and unlit cigarette drooping from his mouth. “That’s Dream.”
Stunned silence. Right to the heart of the matter like a bullet through a body: that’s Phil’s son, all right.
The lone god in the crater roars, and ichor spurts every which way. It’s too far for the blood to hit any of the onlookers, but Techno can see the ground where the spatters hits sizzle, eaten away, like acid.
“If that hits human flesh you’re gonna be lookin’ at bone in ten seconds,” Techno says grimly, and a collective shudder runs through the crowd. “I’m askin’ you politely, again. Make me ask one more time and I’m not gonna be as polite. If you don’t know what facin’ a god is like—not metaphorically, if you don’t have any experience at all in dealin’ with a god—”
Techno glares over his tusks. “Get.”
One by one, the mortals of the land once known as Dream Sweet begin to leave. Some make the decision immediately, clearly knowing the value of their own lives: Hannah, Ant, Quackity. Others—more the fool them—linger.
Bad is one of these people. His hands hover over the shards of Pandora’s Vault, over the scorch marks where the ichor of his son’s childhood best friend hit. “You look lost,” Techno tells him finally, when the guy doesn’t move another inch.
Bad turns huge, helpless eyes to Techno, as if he expects Techno to do something about this. “That’s Dream,” he repeats, as he’s been repeating for the past few minutes. “That’s—that’s him.”
“Or what used to be him, anyway,” Techno says, aiming for optimism and probably falling miserably short. Bad’s expression morphs into a kind of horror.
“He’s not coming back from this, is he?” he says, stricken. His voice shakes. So do his hands. His tail curls between his legs, defeated, and Techno can’t bring himself to be too cruel.
He looks over at the great old one in the crater, which is moaning and bleeding and leaving incomprehensible viscera all over the earth. He watches the ichor seep into the ground and brown the grass, leak into the river and poison the fish, the miasma from the burning foliage turning the air bitter and noxious. Nothing will grow here again for centuries.
“...Leave the worryin’ to us,” Techno tells Bad, and forcibly spins him around to face the Greater SMP. Bad leaves him with one last long, bewildered look before he stumbles toward the houses.
The god, as if sensing that it’s been forgotten about, wails, and the sound lashes out with a vicious, inhumane fury. Techno has the good sense to clap his hands over his ears; the nature around him isn’t as lucky, and when he comes back to his senses, blinking tears out of his eyes, it’s to the sight of a flattened ring of trees all around him, the trunks splintered, the branches stripped brutally of leaves.
A second, much more welcome sight slides into view, cupping Techno’s face in its hands. “Techno! Hey, Tech, look at me!”
“I’m lookin’,” Techno tells Phil woozily, rubbing the stars from his eyes. “Took you long enough.”
“I ran as fast as I could, you motherfucker,” Phil says, far more tenderly than his words would suggest. His eyes rake critically over Techno, taking stock of any injuries, then he leans in to press a fierce kiss to Techno’s brow.
“Hey, I’m fine.”
“I told you to be safe, you oaf,” Philza mumbles. “None of you ever bloody listen to me.”
“I’m fine,” Techno insists, sitting back and letting Phil pull him to his feet. And he is fine, he really is—no damage done but a killer headache and some funny colors in his peripheral vision. Not bad for taking on a great old one all by his reified little self. “You should see the other guy.” He spots a lone figure behind Phil, all white rolling hair and curly horns, and starts. “Hey, what—”
Puffy, as it turns out, is looking at the other guy. When Phil draws close to look too, as if hypnotized, Techno can see her hand is over her mouth and her eyes are something like Bad’s: a devastation as wide as an ocean. Phil sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth, and Techno winds a fortifying arm around him.
“Duckling,” says Puffy, aghast.
“Little fool,” Phil breathes. Techno’s hand tightens involuntarily on Phil’s hip, over the hilt of his blade.
The thing that used to be Dream makes a sound Techno’s pretty sure he’s not supposed to be able to hear. It seemingly jolts Phil to life—he flies into action, pulling shields out with one hand and potions with the other, as a faraway fleet of crows lace the sky. “Puffy, take these—are you staying?”
“Y-yes. Yeah, I, I am—”
“Okay, take these, it’s two Regens and an Instant Health, and then there are Insta-Damage and Poison in here.” Phil shoves a satchel at Puffy that she fumbles to catch as he continues, “Tail me, but pull out if you have to, understand? I know you were a god, but that’s an emphasis on the were, and given a choice between the two of us I’d rather the one with more experience took the lead. Techno,” and Phil turns to Techno with something unreadable burning in his eyes, “Flank me. Same as it’s always been, understand? I’ve got your pots right here, and—you’ve got your sword?” Techno flashes the blade of the Orphan Obliterator at him. “Good. If I drop out you take point, I’ll follow up behind you with my bow.”
“I know, old man,” Techno interrupts, grinning, reaching out and catching Phil’s trembling hand in his own. “Same as always, right? No need to be anxious.”
A smile steals across Phil’s face, gone in the next moment; his hand darts out and snags Techno’s forearm. He drags him close and knocks their foreheads together, eyes squinched shut, fierce as any prayer.
“Come with me when I go?” he asks softly, over the terrible shrieking from the heart of the ruined prison. His fingers are small and fragile where they press to the cluster of veins in Techno’s wrist.
Techno swallows against the lump in his throat, the faint fear that makes the voices lining his head hiss in response. “Of course,” he tells his partner, the godkiller and his bloody benefactor, so quietly Phil has to press closer to hear. “Of course. Always, Phil. Always.”
And of course it’s the battle of centuries. Of course it takes a night and a day and a horn ripped from a skull. Of course the members of the Dream SMP huddle and cower in their homes with their loved ones as the godkiller and the god once of war and the god who mothered this land slaughter the Hurt. Of course. Years from now, this is what the storybooks will say.
But because storybooks are storybooks, there are things they will never mention:
Like the pale and peering faces, the frightened people one and all creeping out of their shelters with their jaws locked tight, reaching out to smooth their hands over the cheeks of friends and lovers, remembering the screaming, just how terrible the screaming was;
Like the dark, gaping wound in Puffy’s hair, the whole right side of her face glistening red-gold under the sunset, pressing a shaking hand to the open hole as she stumbles to the site where Philza struck her child down one last time;
Like the living wreckage Technoblade leaves in his wake as Bloodlust breathes down his neck, every step scarlet in the gray rubble, his robe torn down the middle and singed where the Hurt had snatched him up and wailed, red-eyed;
Like the crater, just the same as the one the Hurt left in its bloody birthplace, where Philza sits now, legs folded beneath him, the tatters of a god that was, now vanquished, in his lap.
“Little fool,” Philza rasps again, this time for just one person to hear.
Dream, a scattered heap of blackened entrails and spindly limbs, smiles back up at him, his face impossibly fair and mane impossibly gold and eyes impossibly green. His cheeks are dotted with freckles. His teeth are stained with ichor.
“None of this was necessary,” Philza tells him, smoothing a tender hand over Dream’s curls. “Not the wars. Not Wilbur, not Tommy, not anybody you hurt. Not you. None of this was worth sacrificing.”
Dream no longer has the necessary bones and muscles to shake his head, but the sentiment is there as his head lolls in Philza’s lap. No, he says, and surprises himself with the ring of gods long gone in his voice; he’d thought he no longer remembered their tongue. It was necessary. Of course it was.
“Look around us, mate. Was it really?”
The Sea was right, Dream replies, loyal to the fading memory of his first teacher. Humans have forgotten us, and they left her to die, and I thought maybe I could make them remember.
“Revenge?”
No. Philza blinks down at Dream in surprise. Nothing so simple as revenge. But nobody ever loved me like she did. Not even the Shore. Everyone who loved me had a reason to. The Sea, flighty and careless; how he misses her, every day, endlessly. She didn’t. She loved me just because.
Philza’s eyes are squinted shut against the pain Dream is projecting. Dream doesn’t have the energy to restrain himself. Another failing. “Mate…”
I know that death doesn’t hurt. Dream’s quick to reassure. Being alive hurts. Don’t I know that better than anyone?
“It’s worth it,” insists Philza. “It is. Dying doesn’t make it stop, it just—just makes it harder for everyone but you.”
Spoken like the mortal, human lover of death incarnate. Nobody loves me, Dream tells him gently, liking the flash of pressure as Philza’s hand spasms on his shoulders. The white-hot agony is gone; his bones crumble faintly in the dirt. There’s a pleasant, vacant warmth to the way he’s being held. That is why I did this. This is the part that I was waiting for.
Philza stares down. His eyes are a garden of thorns. He has never looked more like a god. “Dream.”
I’m ready to call in my favor, Dream says.