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The Vault has its claws in him. He knows it’s bad when he starts seeing God.
Dream can’t remember the first time all that clearly, but he thinks he was collapsed on the floor, right arm lying several feet away, while Q ran to fetch more health potions from the Warden. Someone was standing over him then, a hazy faceless figure, watching him with eyes it did not have. Dream thinks the spectre might have picked up his arm, examined it, then placed it gingerly down on the floor of the cell again.
Someone was here, he told Sam, speech slurred from blood loss, when the Warden came to stitch him back together again. Somebody was in the cell. But Sam had only shook his head sadly and prattled on about the hallucinatory effects of long-term solitary confinement.
It’s a relief when Techno can see it too: a thing in the shape of a man, face rendered featureless by ragged, puckered scars that obscure the face. Sandy mop of hair, feet that don’t quite touch the ground, and the twin halos slicing through the air as they move around the head in constant blade-like rotation.
“Y’know,” Techno had said, turning to look between them, “That’s actually something I’ve been meaning to ask you — how come God looks exactly like you?”
But all Dream could think was, It looks nothing like me.
It’s a long time before he sees God again. At least, he thinks it’s a long time. Time has stopped working in the Vault, even before the clock went away for good. Dream thinks, sometimes, that he’s figured out a way to tell time by listening to the steady dripping of the weeping obsidian and measuring the distance between each droplet. Once, he spent what he thinks was nearly twelve hours marking the rhythm down on paper, until Sam interrupted him with a random search and a lecture.
God stands in the cell.
It’s not floating this time, and its presence feels…easier to cope with, somehow, now that its got its feet planted on the floor. It looks down at Dream like it’s waiting for him to say something. Dream tries to watch God back, but looking at the thing head-on is still difficult — like watching your reflection in a wonky mirror, or trying to catch a glimpse of a face at the bottom of a pond. The light thrown by the twin halos refracts weirdly in his deteriorating vision, pearlescent and slippery.
Dream tries to think, but thinking is hard when you’re kneeling at the foot of a god. Last time, this thing appeared because he and Techno had summoned it, right? They’d summoned it by doing…something. Dream grinds the heels of his palms into his eyelids. No good. He doesn’t remember. The details of Techno’s visit are fading, dissolving against a backdrop of blood, lymph, darkness.
“Do I get to make another wish this time?” he tries, eyes flicking toward Techno’s bell where it quietly gathers dust on the opposite side of the cell.
Above him, God is silent. The air around it buzzes slightly when it moves.
“What,” Dream starts, “What do you want?”
The thing cocks its head, puzzled. Like it doesn’t even understand the question. Bullshit. It turns away from him then, performs a casual, jaunty sweep of the room, leaning over the lip of the cauldron to peer into the brackish water or flipping idly through an empty notebook.
“My sister’s a god too,” Dream adds, a tad resentfully. “If you even care.”
God does not look up from examining a dark stain on one of the walls, and it has no mouth from which to speak, but its voice rings distinctly in the cell, reverberating eerily when it says, almost smug, “And how’s that working out for her?”
Dream’s smile feels nasty and crowded in his mouth, like it’s got too many teeth. Sometimes he thinks all the health potions are recalibrating his cells, rewiring something in him that forces his mouth to grow extra canines, molars where they shouldn’t be, a ninth or tenth incisor. Or maybe he’s imagining it.
“I knew you could talk.” He follows it up with, “Can you see me when you’re not here?” because he’s curious and because if he’s gonna be subjected to divine visions, he might as well get some info out of them.
To his surprise, God replies. “I see everything, mostly.”
“Oh.” Dream blinks. He’s not sure what he expected. “Weird. Wait, what’d you mean, mostly?”
God doesn’t answer that one, which is interesting. Dream is struck just then by a notion, glowing small and desperate in his head like the last ember of a dying hearth — that if he asks this thing enough questions, eventually he will be able to build something out of the ones it doesn’t answer. An idea, a prayer, a clue. Something he can use.
Dream rolls his shoulders. “So how do I convince you to help me get out of here?” Casual. No eye contact.
“You can’t,” says God.
Figures.
Dream scoots back to rest against the wall. “I could…give you something?” This is a risky play, he knows, but hey — whatever favor a god might ask for, surely that will tell him a lot, regardless of whether he’s capable of fulfilling it. Right?
God turns to him with its full moon face and says, “You have nothing to give.”
The noise Dream makes is half-sigh, half-laugh. “Yeah, now. I don’t have anything now. When I get out— I’ll have stuff! Gold. Power. Allies.”
At that, God cocks its head again. Its mannerisms remind him of a wind-up doll. Sure, it wears a man’s shape, but it acts like an automaton, studied in human speech and habit but a poor pupil all the same.
“Why do you want to leave?” it asks.
The question knocks all the wind out of him. Whatever composure Dream had before, he feels his grip on that control loosening up. A clenched fist pumped full of muscle relaxers.
“What—” Dream stammers, “What kind of question is that?”
XD shrugs. Dream has taken to calling it “XD” in his head, because the place where its halos cross looks like a face haphazardly drawn-on by a child.
“God is here,” it says. “Why go somewhere God isn’t?”
“Well, you’re. That’s.” Dream nearly bites his own tongue. “You’re not always here.”
“Wrong.” XD turns away, reaching out to drag a fingertip over the ledge of the desk. “God is always here.”
“Oh, come on, that’s— that’s dumb.” Dream exhales loud and fast. “That’s just stupid! I had this place built.”
“Hm. Maybe.” XD turns back to him, having exhausted its apparent interest in the cell. Dream can’t blame it. Not much here to work with. “I can help you escape, but I cannot help you leave this place.”
Dream frowns. “That doesn’t make sense.”
There’s a definite smirk in XD’s voice when it replies, “I think you’ll find it does.”
Dream runs a hand through his hair, resisting the urge to pound his fist against the black tile below. “I’ve had it with the riddles, alright? Get out if you’re not going to talk straight.”
God towers over him. Dream wishes it would cast a shadow like a normal person. He could always use some shade in here. An extra patch of darkness, away from the lava and the glowstone and the Warden’s eyes.
“I could turn you into a mouse and you could gnaw your way out,” says God. “Or a snake. You could slip out through a gap in the flagstones. I could turn you into a tiny particle that cannot be seen. But know this: I will change your shape but once, and never again. Mice become dinner for owls. Snakes become breakfast for foxes. Even tiny specks of dust get breathed in and breathed out. Nothing is safe from pain. Nothing is safe from oblivion.” Here, the creature pauses to regard him. “What will you do with your freedom? What will you do with your gold when you are a mouse? What will your power matter when you are a serpent in the long grass? Will you even remember the names and faces of your allies when you are a speck of dust floating in a beam of light?
Dream doesn’t have much to say to that.
Wearily, he stands. It takes great effort, and he has to dig what’s left of his fingernails into the cracks between the stones, letting the obsidian hold him up, but he manages to stand and look XD in the face. Turns out God is exactly his height.
“So,” it says, “Would you like me to turn you into a mouse?”
In that moment, Dream can only be sure of two things: firstly, that he doesn’t want this thing to see him cry. He can’t say why it matters, but it does. Secondly, he knows that one day he will get out of this place, and when that day comes, he’ll do it without God’s help.
Dream replies, voice dry and sight clear, “I’ll pass.”