Fracture

I stopped being able to tell.

That was the thing. The line between the dream and the waking did not blur. It ceased to exist. I would be in the bed and I would be talking to Elena and she would be beside me and her hand would be on my chest and I would close my eyes and open them and the bed would be empty and I would be alone and I would not know which had been real. Both felt real. Both had weight. Both had temperature and texture and sound. The dream Elena touched me and I felt it. The waking silence touched me and I felt that too. There was no hierarchy anymore. No way to sort the true from the false. My mind had given up the distinction because the distinction required energy I no longer had.

I was dying. I understood this the way you understand weather. Not with thought. With the body. The deep animal recognition that the systems were failing, the slow systematic shutdown of a thing that has been emptied and cannot refill. My hands shook constantly. My vision tunneled. I could not stand without the room tilting sideways and dumping me back onto the bed. The wounds on my neck, the original marks, the ones Elena had made, had not closed in days. They stayed open, raw, angry, weeping a thin clear fluid that was almost but not quite blood.

And they burned.

Not the old sweet ache. Not the pull. A burn. A low persistent heat that had started in the marks and spread outward, into the surrounding skin, into the muscle beneath, into the tissue, and the burn was getting worse. It pulsed with something that was not the old frequency. Darker. Heavier. A signal I did not recognize, broadcast on a wavelength the marks had never carried before.

When the gold came now, in the dreams, it was wrong. Not the clean bright light of Elena's feeding. Tinged. Tarnished. The color of old honey, of amber, of something that had been clear once and had gone thick and dark with age. The gold came and it did not soothe. It irritated. It fed the burn instead of cooling it and I would wake from the dream with the marks blazing and my body rigid and the hunger compounded, worsened, the salt water effect multiplied a hundredfold.

The elder came more often.

I did not always know she was there. She moved in the periphery of the fever, a shape at the edge of vision, and sometimes I thought she was part of the dream and sometimes I thought she was real and I could not sort it. But she was there. In the chair by the bed. Standing by the door. Sitting on the edge of the mattress with her hand on my chest, and in the dream Elena was sitting on the edge of the mattress with her hand on my chest, and the two images overlaid each other and I could not separate them.

Her voice was different. Softer. She said things I did not expect. My name. Not Elena's name. Mine. She said it the way you say a word you have been turning over in your mouth for a long time, tasting the shape of it, and I heard it through the fever and I thought, Elena is saying my name, Elena is here, and I reached for her and my hand found a cold wrist and the wrist was wrong, the bones too fine, the skin too smooth, and I let go and the hand found my face and held it and the voice said my name again and I turned into it because it was cold and I was burning and cold was what I needed.

She said things. In the dark. Low. Confessions maybe, or explanations, or the murmurings of a thing talking to itself. I caught fragments. Centuries. And nothing like this. And I did not expect. And the fragments did not assemble into meaning and I did not try to assemble them because trying required a clarity I did not have.

The dream Elena was changing. She was becoming more solid, more present, more consistent, and the wrongness was getting harder to dismiss. Her face was not quite right. Her voice was not quite right. Her hands were not quite right. And I was reaching for her anyway, desperately, because she was all I had and the alternative was the burn and the hunger and the dark and the dying.

I noticed the scent.

The dream Elena had started to smell like old stone and deep water and time.

I noticed this in a moment of terrible clarity, a gap in the fever, a second of lucidity that cut through the haze like a blade. I was lying in the bed and the dream Elena was beside me and her hand was on my chest and I could smell her and she did not smell like Elena. She smelled like the elder.

I sat up. The room tilted. The dream Elena was gone. The bed was empty. The room was dark. The candles flickered. The marks burned.

I pressed my hands to my face and I breathed and the scent was in my memory, not in the room, and I told myself the fever was playing tricks. I told myself the dream had borrowed details from my waking hours, the elder's visits, the elder's scent, and had woven them into Elena. I told myself this was what dying brains did. They mixed signals. They crossed wires. They took the familiar and the recent and mashed them together and produced something that was neither.

I told myself this and I almost believed it and the part of me that did not believe it, the part that had been watching from the shadows my whole life, the part that noticed things and filed them and waited for the pattern, that part was screaming.

But the screaming had no words. The screaming was just alarm, formless, directionless, and I could not shape it into a question because I did not have the framework for the question because the question was too vast and too terrible and I was dying and the dying took precedence over everything.

The lucidity faded. The fever closed back over me. The dream Elena returned, and she was solid, and she was present, and she smelled like old stone and deep water and I turned into her because she was all I had.