Chapter Text
The boy was born under a moonless sky. A sky with no stars, no clouds. It was a hollow and lightless world, and the first thing his eyes saw was a smile.
Dream had been waiting for a long while. Waiting was not so hard when you quite literally had all the time in the world, but he was growing impatient.
After he slew the dragon, he found it. Gleaming black obsidian, warm like there was something stirring inside it.
An egg.
He frowned. Nothing he had read had made any mention of an egg. He assumed it was the dragon’s, though that assumption was a far-reaching one. The ender dragon was the only one of its kind. A kind that, thanks to Dream, was now most assuredly extinct.
Yet, there it was. Gleaming obsidian. A wealth of possibilities swirled in his mind, what would happen when it hatched? Would it even hatch? When? What, if not a dragon, would crawl out of that broken black shell? What was so fragile it needed to be born in obsidian?
Those answers never came. He decided to never allow them to.
Dream raised his pickaxe. He swung, the blade bouncing off the shell with a metallic sound. He swung again. And again. After a few more minutes it became evident that this egg, whatever it was, wasn’t cracking.
He would learn later that there in fact was no way to crack this particular egg.
There was, however, a way to manipulate it.
It was something he had learned long ago, that souls were not fragile things. They would be bent and twisted and broken many times over before they succumbed to darkness. They took many forms, they had many shapes. Human souls were invaluable, they were something like light made manifest. All the enduring power of hope and faith and warm feeling of the sun was born alongside these creatures. Dream had grown to appreciate them.
His own soul, however, was a different story.
As long as Dream had lived, and it was quite a long time, he had not met another one like him. As far as he knew, he was the last of his kind. There was the pesky traveler, who for a while Dream thought could possibly be like him. But the traveler could bleed. The traveler could age. He learned this after seeing him a few times and noticing that once, he was younger than he had been before. No, the traveler was not like him. Just another human with another sunlight-soul.
Dream’s soul was something he could take and hold in the palm of his hand. He could bend it and shape it and split it into pieces. More importantly, he could take it and press it into things. He’d done this before, every time the item broke the piece of soul he’d imbued it with would simply come flocking back to him. And he would feel the same.
His soul was like he was. It never broke, never died or aged. But it changed. And it would change.
He had never, not once before, put his soul into a living thing.
The egg was supposedly alive. When Dream pressed his ear to it, he could hear a thrumming, the beat of a heart.
He took the egg with him when he left, and behind him, he left a world, more void than anything else.
For a long while, the egg simply sat. It was a trophy. It was a mystery. He kept it with him, through every home and every land he traveled. It was a remarkable thing, how even after decades, there was still a gentle thrum of a heart-beat.
It was a possibility. It was a void, much like where the egg had been found. There was nothing inside it but potential. Potential that Dream so desperately wanted to take hold of.
He wasn’t sure what prompted him to do it. What made him take his soul, and split it in half as he had done so many times before. What made him take that half in the palm of his hand, and press it into the obsidian shell. Perhaps it was simply to see what would happen. Perhaps it was an attempt to make something like him, something- someone who could understand. What would come of it? A monster? A man?
His soul split so easily, and it fell so easily into that void.
It took a long while before he had the idea to bring it back to where it came from.
It took another nine months before the egg began to stir.
The boy was born under a moonless sky. A sky with no stars, no clouds. It was a hollow and lightless world, and the first thing his eyes saw was a smile.
The problem arises when Dream realizes he doesn’t know how to take care of a child in the slightest. He didn’t know what he thought would come of this. A monster? A man? Not a baby, that’s for sure. The problem worsens when the child starts crying, a terrible wailing sound.
Dream sheds his cloak and wraps the infant in the soft green fabric. He’s not sure what to do beyond that. He doesn’t want this. He realizes that soon after. The endermen are taking notice of the child, and Dream wants nothing to do with them. He wants nothing to do with the child, either.
He considers doing something to kill it, something quick and painless. Dream is nothing if not merciful, he tells himself. But the child looks up at him, with red and green heterochromatic eyes, an even split of white and black down his face, and Dream recognizes that green eye. It pulls at something within him, some instinct long forgotten. Some feeling worn down by the sands of time.
Family.
There might have been life within that egg once, but now whatever it was is also half of him. He is half of this boy, and there is no getting around that fact.
He wraps the infant tighter in his cloak.