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The issue with having to remain in an obsidian box of five meters by three without any distractions nor visitors except your torturer– well, one of the issues is that there isn’t much to do.
Dwelling upon your own thoughts gets maddening. Bad sleep breeds sore muscles. Tiredness lingers but unspent energy builds up anyway, and it all gets frustrating with the insufferable heat.
With a grunt, Dream folds one of his legs over the other. He pinches at the skin under his foot, mottled with purple stains. Months of walking and sitting and lying on crying obsidian has tainted his body and a small part of him quietly wonders if those “bruises” are ever going to fade away.
(If the real ones ever will.)
He’s sitting down back against the wall and his whole body hurts and he’s been trying to ignore the numbness crawling up his thighs in hopes that it will keep up until it reaches his head so that it stops fucking throbbing–
“Please stop ringing the bell.” Dream abruptly sighs. “It’s giving me a headache.”
“That sounds like a “you” problem,” Technoblade comments.
The light flickers. Dream brushes it off as a visual hallucination. Techno keeps ringing the bell.
Dream mechanically riffles through the papers scattered around him. Chicken-scrawled notes on the prison and what he knows about it, what awaits him outside. (Who awaits him outside.) He usually keeps it all organized in a leather-bound cover but he thought having an overview might help him find the slightest hint of a way to get out of here, and now…
Now…
Dream blinks.
There is a sense of wrongness hanging in the room. Amorphous black dust scurrying away in the corners of his field of vision like dark ghosts he can’t quite catch. A weight pushing heavily on his shoulders, as if something too big to be contained is trying to forcefully shove its way in.
The light flickers again.
Dream raises his eyes at the roughly-shaped glowstone chunk stuck in the corner, frowning. This… shouldn’t be happening. Glowstone does not simply flicker. It constantly emits light, small crystals slowly breaking down inside and burning forever with a subtle hum–
“Yooo he’s back!” Technoblade says excitedly as Dream scrambles to stand up, stumbling because of his numb legs.
In front of them stands DreamXD. Engulfed in a thick billowing cloak, the god holds his hands joined together. Dark green fabric hangs from his shoulders, hiding the rest of his body and gently rippling – either from the hot air or the tear he made in the dimensional veil. There’s no shadow under his feet (and not even feet to begin with!). It makes it seem like he’s hovering just slightly above the warm floor and Dream hates it all the more.
The god sharply tilts his head towards him while Technoblade rambles.
“… and I just wanted to say thank you for the bell, man, it’s really– I, I, I appreciate it, you know.”
Emotionless, DreamXD nods. His face is still covered by his hood and his mask, eerily similar to Dream’s yet so different, perfectly white material cracking in an X shape next to a carved-in D. And Dream used to enjoy the fact that he looked like his god, grew convinced that he was one too when magic surged between his hands and played with life and death, but now he’s just tired.
It’s hard to feel in power when someone comes every day to torture it out of you.
“Get me out of here,” Dream tries to beg, quietly, desperately.
And for a second, he’s persuaded that the god is going to leave right then and there. That he’s going to say that he already granted them a wish and that Dream is being greedy. That he’s going to warp back to wherever he came from, clothes rustling, air swiftly swooping to fill in the empty space.
An enchanted netherite sword silently takes shape between DreamXD’s hands.
“… No, wait, no–”
“Uhhhhh,” Technoblade jumps in, a bit alarmed, “now I know that words can be interpreted in various ways and that, uh, canonically dying is technically a way to get out of prison, but I’m pretty sure Dream meant something else–”
Lava spatters inside the cell, splotches fuming for a few seconds before the crying obsidian puts them out. There’s not a single noise on the opposite side, no trace of the Warden. Dream swallows, trying to step back and flinching when his back hits the wall. There’s nowhere to go. No one to save him. Not even Techno, who looks back and forth between the two of them, for once unsure of what to say, what to do.
The purple blade dangerously glints as the god slashes.
And the last thing Dream hears before passing out is a monotone voice saying “well, that happened.”
---
There’s something tickling his cheek.
His tongue is numb.
It tastes like something died in his mouth.
His eyelids are heavy.
The longer he’s awake, the louder his heartbeat thrums in his chest.
Dream opens his eyes and throws himself up with a gasp.
He frantically looks around, hands groping at the ground and throat closing up on nausea.
He calms down somewhat when he realizes that he’s in the middle of a wild plain, green blades of grass trapped between his fingers, and that no one’s there to hurt him. There are trees reaching for the sky, bugs lazily buzzing, animals peacefully grazing in the distance. A small rudimentary house that looks unoccupied, nearby. He doesn’t really recognize the area, but the Dream SMP shouldn’t be that far away if someone built a house here. He can probably find his way back in due time, and then–
“You’ve done enough.”
Dream startles, clumsily hurrying to stand up and turn towards the god hovering behind him.
“Wh– What?”
His voice is hoarse. He coughs. Confusion and anger and fear all wrap around his stomach as the memories rush back in. Where am I? What happened? Did you kill me? Or did you teleport me?, he wants to ask.
But gods don’t like repeating themselves.
Dream opens his mouth.
Rustle of fabric. Swoop of air.
He’s alone.
That’s fine. He can figure it out by himself, that’s fine. He just needs to gather enough materials, make a whole set of armor and weapons, and then he can get back to the Dream SMP. He’s done that at least a thousand times, he can do it again, that’s fine.
He walks towards the woods, intending to search the house afterwards, but a few meters in he bangs into an invisible barrier. He freezes, then tries to go through, only to hit himself again. His palms feel around the surface, patting the cold for any crease, any flaw in the perfectly smooth wall.
“No,” he whispers. “No. No. No, no, no –”
He runs, hand trailing along the barrier, but it keeps going on and on and on.
His breathing quickens as he slowly understands, as panic seizes him.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck–”
He’s stuck.
He’s stuck.
The last words of his god echo in the empty plain. Peaceful, but far, far away from the Dream SMP, far away from its players and far away from Pandora’s Vault.
You’ve done enough.