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The estate was silent, steeped in the velvet hush of night.
Inside, the halls slumbered. No footsteps echoed, no voices.
Within one of the upper rooms, Arthur Blackwynd lay still. The sheets twisted around his waist, his chest rising and falling slowly, evenly. His eyes were shut. But sleep… sleep was different for him.
In the shadows of the room, near the tall, arched window, a presence formed, graceful, quiet, inevitable.
He did not step into the room. He simply was there.
His cloak moved like fog. His eyes held galaxies. His face, carved of quiet thought and solemnity, regarded the sleeper with the patience of eons. He was neither man nor shadow, neither god nor myth. He was Dream of the Endless.
He stared.
"I do not wish to pry," he murmured to no one. "And yet…"
He extended a hand.
"Let us see what he dreams of."
His fingers barely brushed the air, and the Dreaming opened.
Except...it didn't.
There was no color. No landscape. No emotion given form. There was no thread of memory or figment of desire. No nightmares, no hopes. Just black. An eternal, undisturbed void. No wind. No whisper. No echo.
Dream frowned, a subtle movement of his brow, like a cloud drifting across a perfect moon.
"…Curious," he said, his voice like ink falling into still water. "He sleeps. But he does not dream. He should dream."
He stood alone in the abyss, robe untouched by anything, because there was nothing.
"This absence," he said, voice tinged with poetic melancholy, "is not silence… it seems like it was constructed."
His eyes narrowed.
"You do not belong to my sister," he said, not as a question, but a conclusion. "Nor do you walk the halls of my realm. What are you, then?"
The void remained silent for a heartbeat.
Then it pulsed.
From the black, two eyes blinked open, violet, alive.
They stared across the void at Dream without fear. No sound, no movement. Just a presence.
Then, slowly, a figure emerged humanoid, but indistinct. Cloaked in flame-wreathed darkness, he walked like a god who had full dominion of his surroundings.
A voice, deep and solemn, echoed without echo.
"What am I you say?" the figure repeated Dream's question, like tasting it. Then added, "I am Ashborn. The brightest fragment of brilliant light."
Dream's lips curved faintly, neither smile nor sneer, but the mark of curiosity wrapped in doubt.
"Brightest light," he echoed gently, like testing the weight of the words. "Yet you stand in a darkness that resists even my reach. Brilliance, you say… but I recall no angel bearing that name."
The figure tilted his head.
"Then you may call me, Master of Death, Darkness and the Monarch of Shadows."
Dream's voice shifted, touched with wry disquiet.
"Master of death… An unusual claim. My sister has never bent knee. Not to time, not to god, and certainly not to one that I've never encountered before."
Ashborn smiled and said nothing.
Dream studied him again, as if parsing a riddle across the canvas of eternity. "You do not dream," he said softly. "But have you dreamed of your end? Or has the idea never visited you?"
Ashborn walked, slowly around Dream. The shadows followed, trailing his steps like loyal hounds.
"I ended once," he said. "That made me who I am. So, no. The idea of an end has not crossed my mind ever since. For It already happened."
Dream's head tilted, intrigued. There was no fear in him, only fascination.
"Then what of the human named Arthur?" he asked.
Ashborn's eyes flared brighter. He turned, walking closer. The darkness around him peeled away, and his face began to change refining, reshaping, becoming more human. Until he stopped just short of Dream, eyes locked with his.
"I am him," Ashborn said. "And he is me."
Now it was Arthur Blackwynd's face that stared at the Prince of Stories, even as the violet glow still smoldered behind the gaze.
Dream said nothing for a long moment. He simply regarded him, then slowly nodded.
"I understand now, Monarch of Shadows."
He took a step back, his robes coiling around him.
"You are not from this plane of existence," Dream said, not as accusation, but as confirmation. As understanding. His voice was soft.
Ashborn replied calmly "But I am."
And as those words fell, the shadows peeled back just slightly. His helm fractured revealing not the eldritch hollowness of the deathless, but the living face of Arthur Blackwynd.
Dream raised a single brow, expression unreadable save for the faint curve of his mouth amusement, perhaps.
"I got my answer, Ashborn," he said, folding his hands behind his back. "At least my elder sister was right. As she often is, especially when it matters most."
Ashborn's face remained still eyes glowing faint violet, Arthur's features held with certainty.
"If we are done here then, Dream Lord…" he spoke, "it's time for you to leave."
He raised his hand not in aggression, but in dismissal. A casual, effortless gesture. With a snap of his fingers, the darkness unraveled like a tapestry coming undone. The void groaned, then folded in on itself.
A moment later, Dream stood alone.
Gone was the void between realms. Gone was the endless dark that answered to no god or Endless. Now Dream stood in the heart of the waking world once again. in Arthur's chamber.
Curtains fluttered softly as the wind from the open window danced through the room. Moonlight spilled in, silver and indifferent, casting long shadows across the polished floor.
Arthur Blackwynd lay in bed, unmoving.
Dream of the Endless stood at the foot of it. Motionless.
But within him, the storm raged.
It was not anger that gripped him. Nor fear. But awe, the kind that only came when something defied your understanding of how the universe should work.
He had gone beyond the borders of his realm.
He had looked into the eyes of the Ashborn.
And the Ashborn had cast him out, with a simple gesture. A mere dismissal, as if Dream himself were nothing more than a wisp of fog intruding on hallowed ground.
Dream's gaze lowered, studying Arthur's sleeping face. There was peace in it. Tranquility. The man slept like the dead, dreamless… still.
"Two souls," he whispered to himself. "One vessel. Or perhaps…"
He tilted his head, as if listening to the rhythm of fate itself.
"…one soul, fractured into light and shadow."
"I thought I knew everything there is to know already" Dream told himself. "Not truly it seems."
Dream stepped closer, his feet gliding soundlessly over the floor. He tilted his head slightly, watching Arthur.
There was no ripple of dreaming around him. No veil, no threads to pull or watch. Just… a wall. A wall that should not exist. Not around mortal minds.
"I did not leave because he made me," Dream said aloud now, softly. "I left… because he allowed it.. He really is something."
He raised his hand, staring at his pale fingers the same hand that once shaped the realm of dreams, that had sculpted stories. That hand had been useless now before Ashborn.
That… being had no way to defend himself if Dream had full dominion. No tricks. No brute force would work and yet..
"He spoke with certainty and confidence..." Dream murmured, more to the room than to himself now. "As though what he was stood outside not just my domain, but all of us as well."
He glanced up, where the shadows deepened in the corner.
A flicker of thought passed across Dream's face. A memory. A theory he did not yet dare speak aloud.
"Well, Arthur is no mere mortal dear sister. but I'm sure you've already figured that much."
Arthur stirred faintly in his sleep his hand twitching as if brushing aside some unseen thought.
Dream turned slowly, one final glance at the man in the bed.
"I will watch you Monarch of death," he said softly.
Dream stepped into the dark, and in the space between one breath and the next, he was gone.
/-\
If you Like this story! Check out my other stories! Solo leveling in Westeros.
&
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/FrenzyAren"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want