/perspective shift Dream
Dream was... confused. He knew that Tubbo had done the right thing... Hadn't he?
It should have been enough, just doing as much as he could. But he couldn't shake the feeling that he hadn't truly done enough, hadn't done all that he could.
Even Tubbo didn't seem sure. He always had the compass Ghostbur had given him to point to Tommy, until he had lost in in a creeper's explosion. That had hurt Tubbo, and Dream as well.
So Dream sent Ranboo. Once every few days, he would go down to Ranboo's house on the edge of L'Manburg. Ranboo and Tubbo lived together, but Tubbo spent a lot of his time away from the house, while Ranboo spent much of his wandering around inside it, as if dazed or sleepwalking, looking at pictures or items in frames in a forlorn way, as if he was missing something important.
Dream wasn't sure exactly what their relationship was, but it seemed that neither were they. In the end it didn't really matter.
Unless it did.
After all, in Nightmare's own estimations, relationships, connections, attachments, that was what the world ran on. Not armor, not weapons. Connection.
If you had something that someone else wanted, they would always keep coming back.
So Dream would visit Ranboo, and they would talk. Then Ranboo would call Ghostbur over, and Ghostbur would lead him to Tommy's little island of civilization in the wilderness.
Ranboo was... interesting. Unlike many other people on the server, he didn't seem to care whether he was a part of L'Manburg, or anything else. Ranboo seemed to value connections to people over everything else.
So he helped Tommy. Dream heard from Ranboo that he had helped Tommy create a secret chest room underneath his little house. Apparently he called it Logsteadshire, and Ranboo had described it as "nice" numerous times. Within the same report. At first, Dream had tried to keep him on topic, prodding him in the direction of the information that he wanted while trying to remain mostly civil.
But Dream had learned. He needed to pay attention to Ranboo too, not just the information he needed to feel safe. So lately, he had just been listening.
Until one day, when Ranboo came back much sooner than the other days.
He walked into the room that Dream was waiting in and wandered over to the wall, staring at a feather in an item frame, the remains of one of his chickens.
"Ranboo, what's going on?" Dream asked, rising. Ranboo responded in a low, twisted tone, the words strange and garbled, but almost right. Like a jigsaw puzzle with the right picture but the wrong pieces. It wasn't English. Dream hadn't seen it before, either. How strange.
It wasn't the language of enchanting, it was different somehow. Similar, but not the same. Then Ranboo turned around and looked at Dream. He held out a single, glowing eye of ender in his hand, saying something else in the off language. His voice was slightly screechy and scratchy, As if he had been shouting all week.
No, that wasn't it. This was something different. Dream held out his hand, unsure. Could this be the enderwalk state he had heard about? Ranboo was said to sometimes act strangely, in a state that they called the "enderwalk", and he would do things and perform certain tasks without responding to anyone in English. They said he spoke what had apparently been his first language, Enderite.
Dream wasn't so sure that was what was happening now. Something about the language seemed... old. Older than the End, older than the endermen. Maybe even older than the dragon, though no one knew how long she had been alive.
Dream hadn't seen someone go into the End yet. Apparently, there was some sort of god or higher being that would prevent it, so no one tried.
Ranboo placed the orb in Dream's hand. And then Dream was flooded with memories.