The world had grown louder since the first fire. Tribes spread across plains and forests, carrying sparks of flame in their hands, carrying stories in their voices. Where once there had only been survival, now there was meaning. Where there had only been darkness, now there was imagination.
Dream walked unseen among them, listening to the murmur of their minds. Their dreams were no longer simple flickers of hunger or fear. They were vast, echoing, filled with shapes larger than life.
A hunter slept, and in his dreams he saw the storm not as lightning and thunder, but as a figure with arms like rivers and a voice like breaking sky. The storm had a face now, terrible and mighty.
A mother dreamed of the earth. She felt its weight beneath her feet, the soil that gave food, the stone that sheltered her. But in her dreams the earth breathed, spoke, reached upward with arms of mountain and fingers of root.
Another dreamed of the sun, not as fire alone but as an eye, watching, blazing, demanding reverence.
Dream stood among these visions as they unfolded, silent and thoughtful.
These were not yet gods. Not truly. But the seed had been planted. Mortals looked at the world around them and gave it form. They gave it will. They gave it power. In their fear and awe, they made the vastness of existence into something they could imagine — something that looked back.
Dream reached out and touched the edge of a storm-dream. The figure of lightning loomed vast, crackling with fury. It turned as though it saw him, its shape unstable, flickering between cloud and man, beast and thunder. It roared, a sound not yet language but something deeper.
Dream inclined his head. "You are not real," he murmured. "And yet you are born."
The storm-god did not answer. It only burned, bright and unshaped, before dissolving back into the hunter's sleep.
He stepped into another dream, the earth-mother. Her form was vast, her embrace both shelter and suffocation. She looked at him with eyes like deep stone and rivers, and though she did not speak, her presence was undeniable.
Dream left her, too, with the faintest trace of a smile.
When morning came, the tribe gathered. The storm broke across the plains, and one hunter lifted his arms to the sky, calling it not just noise but someone. The mother knelt to the soil, pressing her child's hand into it, whispering as though it could hear. The sun rose, and the tribe sang to it — crude sounds, broken words, but more than silence.
Dream lingered at the edge of their circle. The first gods had been born. Not in the heavens, not in truth, but in mortal minds.
And in dreams, that was enough.
Later, in the quiet between moments, Death came to him. She strolled through the dreamscape as though it were a meadow, her dark hair framing eyes that missed nothing.
"They're giving faces to the void," she said lightly, tilting her head toward a sleeper's vision of a sun-eyed figure. "Calling the unknowable by names they don't have yet."
"They seek to understand," Dream replied, his voice calm as ever. "The world is vast. Too vast. So they shape it into forms they can hold."
Death smiled faintly, amused. "And then they'll worship those forms. Fight for them. Kill for them. All for something they dreamed up in the dark."
Dream regarded her steadily, his eyes reflecting the shifting visions of gods rising in mortal minds. "Stories are not always gentle. But they are always powerful."
She leaned against his shoulder, her voice softer now. "And you're the one who opens the door for them."
He said nothing. But as he watched a child's dream of a figure who threw fire into the sky and pulled the sun across it, he allowed himself a thought: gods, too, were only stories. And stories were his domain.
The first myths of gods had been spoken. They would grow, fracture, multiply. One day, they would wear many names — Zeus, Ra, Odin, Quetzalcoatl. Each one a mask placed upon forces that were older, vaster, incomprehensible.
Dream stood in silence, his cloak rippling with the weight of stars unseen. He would not shape the gods, nor guide their birth. That was not his role. But he would bear witness.
For the gods were dreams made flesh, and he was Dream.