The dreams returned, sometimes repeated, but every night it seemed they were there, waiting for her like another world.
Her diary was filled with tiny scraps of them, dying stars, his name written so many times, the black and the red. Yet for all of it, she had no idea what it could mean. Only that she felt lost in them, drawn in directions she could not begin to understand in a world that seemed to be dying at the edges, a peace that came of that dying that sank into, or perhaps exuded from the very stones themselves.

In this dream, she found herself walking, a garden of sorts, no, a field that rose up where walls fell away like forgotten children’s toys. Pillars tumbled down and forgotten like they were what was dying rather than the garnet star.
But the swaying grasses, and the bright red faces of poppies seemed to offer a strange hope, rebirth through decay, a light in the ‘dark’. It was not so dissimilar to the ‘duality’ of her nature. There was a single tree, an old plum, its branches gnarled and dark like arthritic fingers that twisted, grasping at the sky and towards the ground in places as though they sought salvation. A handful of dark branches offered up the starts of leaves, the fullness of blushing blossoms and their sweet perfume that hung thick in the air.

In the shadow of this wizened tree, like a sage offering sanctuary to a young and weary traveler, stood a simple font of natural stone, the water burbling down its craggy dark face, pooled briefly in an alabaster basin who reflected, mirror like, the world around it.
She placed her hands to either side of the basin, in her dreams; it seemed her skin not unlike the basin, eerily white like paraffin, traced with the soft blue branches of veins beneath the skin of her wrists. She leaned forward to peer down into the bowl, as though she might use it as a looking glass to see this strange woman whom haunted her.
But before she even gazed down she knew she would not find her answers, the water turned pink within the basin, darkened to a swirling knotted crimson as the font continued to flow, and as her own blood mixed with it like a precious wine.

Caine’s fingers, his claws sank into the flesh of her wrists, but when she turned her head to seek new answers, there was only terrible sadness in his eyes. In a moment she knew he was dead, lost to her, no dream but a nightmare even as he whispered in the curve of her ear something that was lost to the edges of consciousness.
Perhaps a whispered ‘I love you’, for the blood that covered their hands, hand become red silk cords, tying them forever, together, destined.