A girl appears, wrapped in a brown wool blanket, thirty feet away or so. She is also sleeping.

Her dreams are peaceful, but there is something underneath them.

He notices near immediately, a set of dreams pulled from nowhere, materializing fully formed in the middle, instead of slowly coalescing together from the beginning. Curious. He wonders what would cause that, and then goes to look.

She is wandering through a maze of tall hedges. It's a little overgrown and there are some places where a path is blocked off that clearly wasn't meant to be.

The thing beneath her dreams is - with her, around her, within her, beside her; but it's not there, not really. It can't be seen or heard or tasted or touched. It's woven into the fabric of the dream itself, too, an elusive not-presence, glimpsed out of the corner of one's metaphorical eye rather than seen straight-on.

Something about this makes him feel like a mouse happening upon a sleeping cat, or something larger. Perhaps something more dangerous, though he doesn't know for sure. It is so hard to see the creature while it slumbers, and his view is pitifully insufficient.

He steps into the maze, and he wanders thoughtfully. At some point he'll introduce himself to the dreamer, but for now he'd just like to spend a while with his metaphorical eyes unfocused, try to understand this not-presence that lurks here.

It's... big. But not currently; there is a sense that it has been bundled up small to fit into this mind, tucked away safely inside her.

It's powerful. Alarmingly so, though he can catch only glimpses of its strength.

It's malevolent. Besides power, that's almost the only characteristic he can detect: an urge to bring pain and suffering anywhere it can reach, to torture and burn and destroy.

The dreamer steps out of a small gap in the hedges and onto the path directly in front of him, regarding him with the sort of look you might give someone who sat just slightly too close to you at a bar: not yet convinced of his rudeness, but waiting to see if an alternate explanation presents itself.

"Hello," she says.

Perhaps if she met this man in the real world, she'd find his primary notable quality his blue skin with its strange sheen. In this dream, it's his eyes; the aquamarine irises are clear and defined and penetrating, too-sharp in an ephemeral and changing dreamscape. Or perhaps the better term would be too perfect, too suited for the brighter colors and stronger impressions of dreams. There is something off about this man, in how easily he walks through the maze or how he looks like he belongs.

"Hello," he replies, sketching a formal bow that looks surprisingly sincere.

"Hmm," says the dreamer. "You're... something new."

"I am. As are you. Or..." He tilts his head. "... no. Somewhere new."

"Why are you here?"

"Your dream appeared out of nowhere, fully formed. Not - slowly sketched as one sleeps. I wondered why. I believe you're now very far from where you were."

"...Unsettling, if true. And... what are you? I don't think you're a mara but you're - almost the same sort of thing."

"I'm the son of a Hag," he says, and the word feels - more. It invokes something that feels like a mara, but not. Great and powerful and above all terrible, the sort of thing no one wants to meet, but occasionally does anyway. The interaction never ends well. "More than that, and I couldn't say. Is a mara the being you have locked away?"

She blinks.

"...Yes," she says. "How do you come to be walking in dreams without knowing what a mara is?"

"I was walking in dreams before I walked in the waking world," he clarifies, a little wryly. "And I think you are very far from where you were. This is the first time I've encountered a mara, and I would have expected to even if they were astonishingly rare. They're common, where you come from?"

"...Walking in dreams without knowing about mara is like walking outside without knowing about the sky. At least where I come from."

"I must seem like a delightfully impossible set of contradictions!" He sounds a little too delighted by this.

"You seem likely to be struck by lightning all unknowing."

"I have ever encountered a storm before, but yes, let's avoid sky related mishaps."

"...I don't know how to... explain," she says. "Although I suppose if the only mara here is the one I brought with me, it won't be a problem until I die or lose hold of it. And I know better than to unlock my mara in a chancy situation."

"And if it gets free, it lashes out against all nearby with everything it has available with its large well of power, in a mad attempt to hurt them in every way it can reach?"

"...you're not wrong, but you're missing some details."

"I'd expect nothing less. Which details am I missing?"

"Some mara have minds of their own. This one doesn't, but it's still... more directed than that. A mindless mara looks for people, and when it finds them it pulls them into itself and traps them there and tries, badly, to learn from them how thinking works, and then finds more people and does the same to them, over and over again, growing slowly smarter and more powerful all the while, until someone manages to stop it."