Twenty-Five
- Sandman, Daniel-Dream and Hob Gadling
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Oh, if Hob was honest with himself, he'd admit that it does change. Walls go up and walls go down, fortunes rise and fall, and through it all both he and the White Horse survive, changing their appearances and their names, but always in the end remaining true to who and what they are. Sometimes he wonders if the same fortune that touched him also touched the tavern, made them both immune to death, just so that he and his friend would have a place to meet every hundred years. Sometimes he doesn't wonder. He just knows that it's true. Like how you know things to be true in dreams.

He isn't sure why he's here, now. After all, the man is dead. Long live the man, he completes in his head, once in English and once in French. Almost a hundred years dead, and the world has moved on. Hob will have a drink or two to honor his memory and honor the tradition, and then move on himself. Maybe next century he won't bother to come back.

And so he does. He takes a table by the fireplace, remembering a time when they sat thus, and orders two beers. One for himself and one for the empty chair opposite him. "Here's to us," he murmurs, and clinks his glass against the other, and drains it quickly. It is too much, or rather it is far too little, and he cannot stay, and so leaving the other beer untouched on the table he tosses a handful of plastic bills onto the table and stands so quickly he upsets his chair.

When he bursts out of the door he collides with a tall young man sheltering from the sudden rain in the overhang, and he mutters an apology he doesn't really mean before he looks up and he sees. Hob Gadling finds himself with nothing to say.

"I am here, Hob Gadling," says the young man, looking out into the rain and then down at his own arms, crossed on his chest. "Even though your call was not meant for me."

"No, it wasn't," Hob says, reaching up to rub his temples. "You aren't my friend." And he mutters "I don't know who you are," almost as an apology, or a denial.

"I am myself." The young man turns to look at Hob at last, a faint green spark flickering once in the blackness of his eyes. His white hair is brushed straight back from his forehead, slicked down, trimmed short. "I will not presume to be your friend, Hob Gadling. I am merely... fulfilling an obligation."

"An obligation," Hob repeats, numbly. Rain blows in under the overhang and spatters at the sleeve of his shirt.

"You came here hoping against hope to see him, despite having attended his wake and spoken at his funeral." There is a pause, during which even the rain slackens. "I am not him, and you know that, but you cannot accept it. It is the way of men ever to deny what they know." Another pause, longer than the first, and then his gaze focuses on Hob and Hob finds he cannot look away. Far away in the blackness of his eyes green witchlight burns. "Look at me, Hob Gadling, and see me clearly, and know me for who I am and am not, and know that this is a true end to your tradition, if not to you, or to the White Horse."

Something like a door slams shut in the back of Hob's mind, and suddenly he finds himself angry, furious, and before he can stop himself he grabs a handful of the young man's vest, knotting it in his fist. "Damn you! Couldn't you have left me even that? What harm does it do to come back to a place once every hundred years and have a drink? What harm was I doing to anyone?"

Daniel-Dream's expression does not change, but Hob knows it for anger anyway, and one slender white hand knocks his grip free. "I brought an end to your tradition because the call your heart sent out was disturbing my work, Hob Gadling. And I have no patience for this, or for you, because as you have said, I am not your friend. Go from this place and do not return."

Hob took a step back, out into the rain, and then spun on his heel and fled into the street. Dream of the Endless watched him go, his expression inscrutable.

Two months later the White Horse Tavern closed down, a victim of vast consumer disinterest, and within the year had been torn down and replaced with a neat row of flats.