Dream landed in the rain.
He looked around, confused. Where had he fallen from? Was this real or was it something else?
A hallucination? A dream? Or something more?
Dream didn't know. He looked around, and then, for the first time, he felt the light sprinkle of rain on his face. He stood frozen for a moment, shocked. It had been so long...
Days climbing, running, fighting... Laughter, swords make out of sticks... The innocence of youth.
Dream didn't think he'd feel it ever again. He had resolved never to take his mask off. But now...
Dream looked to his left, and there it was. Somehow he knew it would be there.
Black on white.
A smile and two eyes.
It was just paint, wasn't it?
But no. It had always been more than that. Even in the beginning.
Dream remembered vividly when he first put it on.
His brother had given it to him, and made a matching one himself. That was when it started. When Dream had become Dream. At that moment, the boy was gone.
But...
But here he was. Maskless. Was he a boy again?
No. That innocence could never be regained.
Dream took the mask, and then he heard a soft sound. A sob.
Turning towards it, Dream saw him.
Wilbur.
But no, it wasn't Wilbur. It was Ghostbur.
He was crying in the rain, sitting on an obsidian beam. Dream felt a vague feeling of recognition, and then a gut reaction, a feral terror, crawling up his spine like a spider up a wall.
Then he looked down. His mind briefly imposed the structures and lake of New L'Manburg over the space, but there was no denying it. Everything was gone. All that was left was a crater, even larger than the one they had originally filled with water.
"Why?" Ghostbur asked in a quiet voice, unable to force himself to speak any louder. Dream winced, and then he heard a sound. A laugh.
His own.
And then the memory was over.
Swirling lights and darkness took the place of concrete objects, the world around him shifting to hues of blue, red, and yellow, intermixed with shadows.
In moments, he was somewhere he recognized on an internal level, though he had never seen it before. A hall of memories. His own. Dream was inside his own brain.
Dream wandered through his mind, each memory locked behind a door. Some were glass, but most were hard steel of thick wood. He could see what he had known, and those doors that were glass had small displays in front of them describing the event that they depicted in his present life.
But there was something strange here.
At the end of the massive hall of doors, there were three that stood out.
Spaced along the wall opposite the entrance, each door was identical in form. Not even a single pair of doors had been the same so far, until now. Dream walked over to the wall cautiously.
What was this? It certainly wasn't natural. Or, at least, it didn't fit. It was unlike every other door.
Unless these doors weren't different at all. What if they were all the same door? What if they all went to the same place, simply separate because they were each taking a different path?
And then Dream realized what this was.
Death.
The end of his life. The doors would lead him to the same place. This world wasn't for him. He wouldn't live after his goal was reached.
Dream had already known this, in some capacity. The doors were the same memory, the memory of his death. That's why they were the same. But they entailed different experiences, so they were separate.
But now...
What were the paths? What did they lead to? He would have to find out.
And so, taking a deep breath, Dream pushed through the first door.