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Dream is drawn to a dream.
It's something that doesn't happen often, and so he finds it immediately peculiar—the way he feels pulled like iron to a magnet.
He follows the pull, of course, because if there is something odd going on in the dreaming it is his responsibility to investigate. The energy doesn't feel particularly malevolent; but then again, good intentions don't automatically rule out a threat. Dream has been through enough universes to know that. He is drawn to it like a horse towards water; like a bolt of lightning towards a particularly tall tree in the middle of an open field.
Upon reaching the dream, he finds himself on the shore of a great lake. It's a beautiful place; the shore, and the lake as well. A falling sunset turns the water to golden liquor, shifting and shimmering in the fading daylight with something ephemeral. It reminds Dream of Fiddler's Green: just as beautiful, and just as alive, too.
At first, it strikes Dream as a place of unparalleled peace: what a beautiful dream, and such a wonderful reminder of what human minds are capable of. But there is something under the surface—a sort of thrumming energy which is only just contained. Anticipation trembles through the ground, the grass, and up the trunks of the great regal trees. Even the flowers, which surround Dream in waves of pink, orange, white, and periwinkle, appear to be jittering.
It's as if the whole glade is lying in wait.
At the center of it is a man. From a literal standpoint, he is sitting off to the side, his feet buried in the warm green grass as he casts his gaze out over the rippling waters, but Dream along with any self-respecting Endless would know that it is from him that it all originates. It is no doubt him that drew Dream here, for his energy is so odd—so palpable and bold—that the dream lord nearly takes several steps back when it hits him. If he knew no better, he'd say this strange man was an Endless; but that cannot be. Dream knows all his siblings, even the missing ones, and this is none of them.
His second thought is that the man is a wayward dream, which—seems even less likely, somehow.
The man turns his gaze from the lake to Dream, his eyes—blue, and yet something else, something other—sparkling with the same golden light as the water he'd just been pondering. He smiles.
"Ah," he says, with the same welcome one might use to greet a long-awaited guest. "I was wondering when I'd be meeting you. Lord Morpheus, is it?"
Dream frowns, brow pulling low in the center of his forehead. "I did not make you," he says on instinct.
The stranger throws his head back and laughs—a bright, bell-like laugh, the whole glade swaying with him.
"No, I don't imagine you did," he says.
"How do you know who I am?" Dream asks—because if he did not make this man, that knowledge is indeed concerning.
The stranger peers at him with an expression lingering somewhere between incredulity and amusement. "Well, with as many years as I've spent in your realm, I'd be hard-pressed not to, wouldn't I?"
Dream frowns again. Although that technically counted as an answer, it didn't give him half the information of a proper one.
The stranger raises an eyebrow, a grin working its way across his wiry face. "You're not much of a smiler, are you?" He asks. "Odd—I would have expected the King of Dreams to be more... congenial, I suppose. Then again, Death is hardly what anyone expects her to be, so it's not too surprising that you'd be a subverter of expectations yourself."
Dream's mouth twists in alarm. Death—that gives him another possibility of what this man is, at least; another instance of a ghost hiding out in the dreaming, avoiding their assigned afterlife. And yet, this man seemed not the type to run or hide from much of anything, and Dream had never known a ghost to hold such vibrance after their life had run out. Hector, he recalls, had been little more than an apparition—all the meaningful bits of him fading more and more as the days went by.
This man is far from seeming like too little for the dreaming; rather on the contrary, he almost seems like too much.
He pats the grass beside him good-naturedly, in the manner of someone patting a comfortable couch cushion. "Sit, sit!" He says happily. "If you like, of course. Could I interest you in some tea?"
Dream does not sit, but he does step closer, barely managing to keep the shock from his face as the stranger procures an intricately-decorated ceramic teapot and pair of delicate little teacups out of—seemingly—nowhere. A lucid dreamer, then; and a rather skilled one, too. He sits the teacups beside him in midair as if on an invisible shelf, and when he lets go of their tiny handles, they simply stay there. The teapot, meanwhile, pours something smooth and honey-colored into each of the cups, one of which floats up to Dream's startled hand. It doesn't seem perturbed when he doesn't taken; only settling beside him on an invisible shelf of its own.
Dream blinks as the spectacle continues. It's rare that he finds a human with such power in the dreaming; even rarer for them to be anything other than a vortex when he does. He's fairly certain that, if he were to try, he could simply wave his hand, declare 'this dream is over' as he always does, and it would all go away—but the simple fact that this man has managed it in the first place mesmerizes—and, admittedly, scares—him enough that he finds he doesn't want to. Not yet, at least.
"You've... met Death?" He inquires slowly.
The man sighs, leaning his weight back into his arms. His teacup—which, unlike Dream's, has had a few sips taken out of it—prances daintily back to its midair perch.
"Oh, lots," says the man casually. Dream feels abruptly like one of those old human record players, scratching and rewinding on the spot. Lots? "She's quite nice—it's a shame she can never stay around very long, though. She always sits with me until my body's healed enough to put it on again. We've had many good chats, she and I."
Dream stands more frozen than the trees, more stagnant than the air in a cold room. He thinks, suddenly, to Hob; his "pet project" as Death so likes to call the man, alive merely by virtue of her never claiming him when she ought to. Whoever this man is—if he is to be believed—then it isn't Death keeping him alive. It's someone else.
The Lord of the Dreaming's voice is dangerous and quiet when he asks, "Who are you?"
It is not anger that swirls within him, but a close enough cousin to it: cold, indignant righteousness. Who is this man, to defy an Endless? Who gave him the capability? Who is he, to walk through the realm of dreams as if it is he who owns it, and not the Lord before him?
And the man—the stranger—smiles; a simple smile, small and yet somehow so much more powerful than his beam from before.
"I am Emrys," he says.
Emrys. Suddenly his voice is not one, but many; suddenly the grass is whispering with him, suddenly the rustling of the breeze in the trees' leaves spells out a name, suddenly the flowers lift their sweet heads to the sky and sing, Emrys, Emrys, Emrys.
Emrys, for immortal. Emrys, for everything.
Dream sits down in the grass. The name, so golden, so light, pushes its way under his skin and settles there.
"Of course, most mortals know me by a different name," the stranger—Emrys—continues, completely oblivious to the torment his words have sown. "It's how I know myself most days, as it's the name my birth-mother gave me—but I don't use it much on account of the fact that it's all but faded into legend. If I pranced around using my given name willy-nilly, people would start calling me crazy." And then he grins. "Not to mention, I've got to change it in the records every eighty years or so, to avoid people figuring out I don't die."
"Currently," Emrys says, "most of the people in my life know me as Morgan. It was a bit disconcerting, at first, all the new names; I found myself wondering what the problem was with my own. I got used to it eventually, though—I'm sure you understand. You've got a good deal of names yourself, don't you?"
Dream can't find it in him to respond and so simply stares in bewilderment.
"I think I'm related to you, somehow or another," Emrys continues, unperturbed. "You know the Triple Goddess? The Kindly Ones? The Weird Sisters? The Furies? Hecatae? Morrigan? It seems you and I aren't the only ones with several names, good grief—"
"I know them," Dream answers gruffly, not liking what those words imply. "The Three-In-One is above mortal attachments."
Emrys snorts. "That title always makes me think of shampoo. If it hasn't quite escaped your notice, I'm not very mortal myself; started out that way, I think, but after my first run-in with Death things got a bit wonky and now I'm stuck here for good. Anyways-- the Triple Goddess is my mother."
Dream's mouth drops open with the intention of saying something in protest, but Emrys barrels on quite before he can manage it.
"Or, well, not my mother-mother," he amends. "My real mother—the one that gave birth to me and raised me and all that—died a long time ago. She was very human. Unfortunate, that. The Triple Goddess, though—she's the reason I exist the way I do. She's what granted me this immortality of mine, made me so hard for the world to get rid of."
"Why?" Dream finds himself asking. Why indeed? Why would the three Fates, beings whom before now he saw as simply existent, bent on never interfering with mortal or Endless wiles alike, take interest in a simple mortal boy such as this? Bestow him with a title as powerful as Emrys?
Emrys shrugs. "There was a balance to be restored. Heard of the Great Purge? Some thousand-something years ago, that King Uther prat's whole petty vendetta against magic? Well—" and he spreads his arms wide in a great big 'here I am' gesture— "I'm her solution to that. Magic, given human form. Quite like you're dreams given human form, I suppose."
Dream's lip curls and he darts his eyes out across the still-golden water. "I am no human," he says.
Emrys tilts his head at him, imploring. "You aren't, are you? Nor am I, if I think about it for very long. I used to be—and I still eat, still drink, still breath and have a heartbeat. But I've never known which of those things I need to do and which are just habits I haven't broken yet."
Dream is silent for a while, and then, finally, when his curiosity tires of beating on the walls of his brain waiting to be let out, he asks another question: "Who are you waiting for?"
Emrys smiles again, although something about this one strikes Dream as being sadder than the last.
"A friend," he says softly. "An old, old friend, who died some time ago. His return was prophecised, though; said to rise from this very lake." He rises from his reclined position and wraps his arms back around himself, small again and yet seeming comfortable that way. "I used to dream of him—when times were worse, when I missed him more. When I couldn't bear the loneliness Destiny had cursed me with.
"I'd dream of him—and sometimes we'd be sitting on the shore of this lake, sometimes we'd be safe and happy in a little cottage, or sometimes we'd be at the pique of the golden age he died too soon to bring about. And other times—" (Emrys swallows; Dream watches it in the bobbing of his throat, sees it as his eyes grow glossy.) "—I'd relive his death, over and over again. Cursing myself for failing him. Failing all of them."
Emrys dips his head with a bitter smile. "The good dreams were nice, for a time, but they weren't the same; it wasn't really him. I felt bad, you know? Driving all those dreams of yours away, when they were only trying their best. But I thought it better to wait, than to sadden myself with dreams that might never be true."
Dream looks again over the golden lake, which has stilled somewhat in soberness. His untouched teacup remains beside him on its invisible shelf, even having sunken down a few feet to meet him where he sat, and in absence of other things to do he takes it, stirring the tea around with a small silver spoon he conjures into his right hand.
"What is a Golden Age without dreams to inspire it?" He says. "What is missing someone without dreaming of what it would be like if they were there?"
Emrys lifts his damp gaze to the horizon. "Yes," he whispers, so softly it's barely audible. "Yes, king of dreams, indeed you are right."
A silence stretches, in which only the murmuring of the water and the laughter of the wind in the trees can be heard. Then Emrys unfurls, like a butterfly from its cocoon, wiping the wetness from his eyes and grinning widely:
"No matter," he says, looking down at Dream. All at once their dynamic has shifted: Dream sits in the grass and the strange Emrys stands above him, bright as a summer breeze. "I won't have to wait much longer. His time is close; can't you feel it? It's why I've returned to this dream again. The whole of the earth is readying itself for that great ruddy prat's return."
Had Dream not had six siblings, he would not have been familiar with derogatory names being spoken in such an affectionate manner. As it is, though, he is more familiar than most—although something tells him "siblings" is not quite the word one would use to describe Emrys and his "old friend".
"I bid you adieu, Lord of Dreams," Emrys says with a theatrical bow. "I believe I'll be waking up soon—maybe to a world closer to this one than I'm used to. Perhaps I shall see you again some day."
The corner of Dream's lip quirks upwards. "Perhaps," he agrees.
And then the dream is gone, and Emrys with it: swept up in a twirl of sand and smoke.