The universe was never truly silent.
Beneath the hum of stars, beneath the pulse of time itself, there was always a softer sound — the murmur of dreams.
It began as a single thought.
No one remembers whose thought it was. Perhaps the first sentient being. Perhaps the last. Perhaps it was the universe itself, dreaming of what it could be.
And in that thought, the Dreaming was born.
But the Dreaming was without a master.
Until him.
He was no king, no god, no chosen one. He was nobody. A wanderer between worlds, a man whose name had already been forgotten.
And yet, the Endless chose him — or perhaps the Dreaming did.
It began with the Essence.
A fragment of something older than matter, older than light. It had no shape, no color, no sound… until it found a host. Until it found him.
When it touched him, his heart stopped.
For one heartbeat, he was nowhere — not dead, but unmade.
And then he opened his eyes.
The world was different.
No — he was different.
The night sky rippled as though it were paper. The moon swam closer, not in orbit, but as if the dream of the moon had taken a step forward to greet him. He could see the sleeping minds of every being within a hundred miles — every flicker of fear, every warm spark of hope. And when he looked closer, he realized he could change them.
He took a step, and the ground beneath him became a corridor of stars.
He spoke, and words bent reality.
He thought, and it was.
He learned, slowly, what he had become.
Not merely a dreamer, but Dream itself — the Endless thought, the master of story, the hand that turns the pages of reality.
And the Essence whispered its truth to him:
You are the spine upon which every story rests. You are the ink in the blood of creation. Without you, there is nothing but a blank page.
He tested this power in small ways at first.
A despot awoke from sleep convinced of mercy.
A crumbling city remembered the dream of its own greatness and rebuilt itself overnight.
A god who defied him found its myths rewritten until its worshippers forgot its name.
But there were darker uses, too.
He could whisper a nightmare into the heart of an immortal and watch them crumble in terror.
He could erase a person's story altogether, pulling the thread so that they had never been born.
He could bend the laws of physics in the waking world because the waking world was nothing more than a dream that had convinced itself it was real.
And always, the Essence whispered:
This is not power. This is authorship.
For every life was a story, and every story was his to read… or to end.
Soon, he realized the terrible truth — he was no longer the man he had been.
The Dreaming was not a place he visited. It was his body, his mind, his soul. Every dream, every nightmare, every hope and dread in the multiverse was a part of him now.
Even the other Endless would one day bow to him, for what is Death without the dream of what comes next? What is Destiny without the imagined future?
He was the page and the pen, the dreamer and the dream.
And as he stood beneath the paper sky, watching the constellations rearrange themselves at a thought, he whispered the only truth that mattered:
"I am the story you cannot wake from."