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There once was a Tree. Its branches touched the sky and its roots ran so deep that nothing could ever push it over. There was a special purpose for this Tree. On it grew all the feelings in the multiverse, both negative and positive.
It was guarded by two children, a light one and a dark one. The lighter guarded all good things: happiness, excitement, hope. The other was cursed to protect the evils of the world: rage, sorrow, terror.
It’s no wonder he fell…
He froze the light one in stone and cut down that once-great Tree. Cursed things stay cursed after all. And now he spreads his corruption across the multiverse, tainting it forever because he despises all things light.
But is that really what happened?
He’d always been a quiet child. He preferred sitting under their Tree to playing in the forest, writing nonsense in the dirt rather than chatter endlessly to anything and everything. The two brothers clashed even from the start. They were just too different.
Then the Strangers came. From whence, not a single soul knows. They simply appeared one day on the horizon, walking beside their perplexing contraptions, tearing into the forest to make space for peculiar dens of wood and stone. They brought their strange language and stranger beliefs, filling their make-shift clearing with people and noise. Dream was ecstatic.
Friends, he said. I’ve always wanted friends.
They were not friends for Nightmare.
These Strangers came to their home and filled it with ash and smoke and pain. They brought bizarre customs, alien ideals, outlandish accusations of guilt. Nightmare would rather they stayed in their aberrant lands.
But there was one thing the Strangers brought that he adored. Books. Thousands upon thousands of symbols grouped together to form words, to form stories.
He spent two years working in exchange for an old Stranger to teach him their eccentric language. He collected fables from their book-den. The meaningless symbols he had idly scratched into the soil changed to form letters, his very own tales.
The Strangers cursed and beat him, claiming his existence brought only suffering. His brother questioned why he couldn’t just become one of them. His only escape was the stories, filled with knights and castles and princesses and inevitable happy endings.
He wanted a castle. Castles were tall and fortified and safe. The walls would keep the villagers out. Their Tree would stand in the courtyard, tall and strong and secure. It would be just his brother and him, just them and their Tree, forever safe within the walls.
There would be thrones and beds and rugs and feasts, full of all the luxury told in those tales he dearly loved. Paintings of heroes and windows with real glass would line the halls and servants would supply everything he could ever want.
It was perfect, the kind of perfection that existed solely in fantasy.
Instead he dutifully guarded the tree as the Strangers snapped his bones in two and his brother grew more and more distant.
Why can’t you be good? they asked. Nightmare didn’t know. So he took a golden apple.
It turned black.
As the Strangers screamed profanities, he took a bite and fell.
Their anger turned to fear as sharp corruption tore their flesh. Lost to the haze of vengeful madness, he never noticed that one of the screams was of his brother. He never heard their Tree fall.
He stood at the edge of a dying world, surrounded by carnage, and laughed because nothing could hurt him anymore.
There were other worlds. Darker ones, filled with misery and despair and dying embers of hope. Ones where sentience shrunk as hunger grew, where a possessed child slaughtered everything in their path, where anger and cruelty were as easy as breathing.
He didn’t have access to the lighter ones just yet. There was no real need. The Dark Worlds were sustenance enough.
He tried anyway.
Power meant protection, he knew. And if he had all the power there would be nothing left for him to fear.
He built his castle on a mountain, with turrets and watchtowers and battlements. The walls of stone were high and thick, and the gate was too thick and heavy for any intruder to even dream of reaching the keep. The moat was filled to the brim with the Void itself, and the drawbridge fortified until not even Oblivion could tear it down. Inside, he kept all the stories and luxuries he'd ever desired.
His fortress was the safest place in the multiverse, but there was no brother, no Tree. He’d ruined them both.
Instead he filled it with others like him. Outcasts who had to save themselves. His knights. They were loyal to a fault. He would do anything to keep them safe.
His brother came back, released from his stone prison. They battled, because Dream only ever wanted to help and Nightmare was willing to drive the multiverse to ruins if it meant he’d be invulnerable. They’d stumble away, covered in wounds, with no clear victor.
Dream made a team. The Stars, they called themselves. A symbol of hope.
Nightmare named his own the MidKnights. His knights insisted, and who was he to deny them anything?
He was the Scourge of the Multiverse, a murderer, a villain. He was the King of Darkness and Wraiths. He was the Guardian of Negativity. He was a child who only ever wanted to be safe. And who can fault him for that?