Long ago, when all the worlds were new, it was never safe to sleep. Dream, when it began, was all and only Void and Flame, eternal sleep and raw sharp magic, and all who slept and dreamed might lose their souls to shadow and fire, caught and held and fascinated. And while their minds turned to flame, their bodies slept and did not wake, wasting away in the grip of Dream.
Long ago, when one of many worlds was new, there lived a sorceror in a great city, whose daughters were lost to Dream, whose lover hung herself from sorrow. He threw himself into his work, choked with grief, mourning by growing thin and pale with lack of sleep; and when he finally found a way to open a door to shadow and fire, Void and Flame, he had only a single day to live. In life, he had no time, and so he stepped across and let the door fall shut behind him, closed forever. To this day, they do not dream in that place.
The sorceror drifted, shadow surrounding and caressing him, fire in his eyes and ears and mouth, and yet he did not lose himself. Within the endless formless space of Dream, he remained embodied, became himself. Eyeless, Dream saw him; voiceless, it asked, why have you come?
"You have taken everything from me," he said, as fire washed his tongue, as shadow sucked away his words. "I have come to give you everything, that you may not need to take it unasked." And in his soul, Dream saw: worlds with shape and form, worlds in which the living could walk, worlds that had sun and sky and stone and sea. Silently, endlessly hungry, Dream stretched itself to take that vision from the sorceror, reached out to devour it.
"You may not have it," he said.
Why not?
"Make a pact with me," he said.
Very well. And Dream flooded into the man's shape, taking from him the senses it lacked, the form it did not have. It devoured him and left him whole, flowed in his blood and flexed beneath his skin, and from the place where the sorceror was, Dream bloomed outwards, remaking itself into the form it saw, now that it could see.
The man, cased in a skin of brilliance like the carapace of an insect, said, "Now we are whole, and what we take, we may return, and what we see, we may become; our children, and the children of our children, will carry in their blood this pact that we have made, and walk in Void and Flame unscathed."
And it was so, and it is so, and it will ever be so.
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