In the too few hours she slept on the nights she considered, insisted really, were normal, Thorn's dreams took her where they would. Danced her sleeping mind along the drifts and eddies as they saw fit, as her subconscious mind chose.

And on some nights, they took her along the path of memory. Playfully nudged her in the direction she needed to take for whatever reason. Threw her headlong into sequences she had no recollection of during her waking hours.


"We danced in the darkness and the snow covered our feet."

A confusion as old as man colored the mental whispers of a woman who seemed beyond the ocean of Time.

"Our time together was so short, barely half of a year."

Flashes, post card memories in hazy focus flickering behind the drawn shutters of her eyes. Smiling eyes in deepest blue, rich black hair thickly falling to brush against his bare shoulder blades. The mouth of a poet, the body of a warrior, he had been so much more. There were times when she'd turned to him in the night that she'd felt she'd been born loving him.

"Then he was taken from me."

A grief more vast than an ocean, and as black as the spaces between the stars rose up in a crushing tide to swamp a woman who had been vital, alive. The blow that had taken him, the cut of metal through flesh, she'd felt as keenly as he. Those eyes where impish delight had danced days before, staring blankly to the sky, dead stones with their life stolen.

"And I was lost."

Days blurring, sun and moon blending into one hateful reminder that life continued from the moment a man planted his seed in a waiting woman, as it had since the beginning. The Seasons became one, their joy and sorrow lost on a woman who would grieve the rest of her life. The woman who would mourn the necessity of breathing to her death bed.

"When my End came, the bridges were barred to me."

There is no light at the end of a tunnel, no bright land of Promise after a Journey. Only cold lands, and colder hearths where the wind whistles with the screams of those Earth Bound.

"I had promised. Promised to find him, to go to the After with him when my time came. But I had failed."

Years of searching, through means light and dark, only to have answers slipping through her fingers like sand. He was no where to be found, his soul lost as surely as hers had become. Trapped in flesh not his own, until he'd been brought out of the darkness by a light.

"And so, I continue. My choice was easy to make, so easy there wasn't even a choice. I continue to search."

The quest of a soul, Earth Bound, Flesh Trapped, to free the love that had
forged it, and in the end broke it.

"We danced in the darkness."

Tossing, and turning her nights had become an endless span to be endured on the edge of sleep. Sheets bunching, tangling around her limbs while she sought the blessed quiet of slumber.

The part of her that was Thorn did sleep, after a fashion, though it was the half waking sleep of a person caught in a fever. Petulant, and shallow, stealing away whatever energy and rest it should have brought, draining her as steadily as a wound. Those portions that had once belonged to others were largely quiet, silenced by the age, the grief, the sheer Power of the one who walked now, or simply cut off from everything they sought.

On barefeet she padded through the house, her face not her own. A smile caught the edges of her lips, holding itself firmly in place like steam on glass. A mask nothing more. A shell for someone as old as stone.

High above the moon slid along her path through the heavens.

With silvered light pouring over a facade that shouted Highlands and heather, green hills and pots of gold, a taint of red spilled over hair that was nearly white. Eyes that were amethyst, from frozen to liquid warm, tonight were as green as the ferns that grew in the forest surrounding her. With that dreaming smile holding sway over lips that had become full instead of plump she sang.

The words were old, the language nearly pure, untouched by the hand of time. An old song, one that told of love everlasting, and hinted at so much more. One that suited perfectly the language of the Celts, as it had been one of those tribes that originally gave it voice. The steps of the dance echoed with joy, and promises yet unfilled, tales yet untold.

Beneath the moon, the soul of a woman long dead danced in a meadow bathed in silver light. Centuries, miles, worlds away from the land of her birth, the time of her death.

When Thorn dragged herself out of bed the following morning, dawn was just breaking in the east. As she had for every night for the last two weeks she'd stare in mute horror at the dirt that had been ground into the soles of her feet, the streaks of grass stains on her legs. It had become something of a ritual, the long morning shower where she'd spend nearly an hour scrubbing away every trace of someone else's dreamings from her body. Damp, and still shaking, the sheets would be stripped from the
bed and stuffed into the washer. Another symbol perhaps.

She'd stopped looking in the mirror a week ago. She didn't need to see the shadows that were edging toward bruises under her eyes to know that they were there. Nor did she need to see how pale she'd become to know that her skin had become as transparent as it could be. The lack of sleep, the lack of true rest was dragging her body down, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Thorn didn't need to see the dusty tracks of her own feet crossing the floors to know that she was losing time, even while she should have been sleeping.

She definitely didn't need the high keening in the back of her mind to know that it wasn't going to stop any time soon. Neither did she need the growing weakness in her body, and spirit, or the increasingly often dizzy spells that turned her legs to water to remind her that something was wrong.

Something beyond her control was coming. The silence in her mind, the feeling that the shattered fragments that had begun piecing themselves together were holding their collective breath until the outcome was clear was telling.

The taste of blood and bitter regret at the back of her throat told her that time was running out.

Before dawn she woke, tearing herself out of slumber with a gasp that came close to being a scream. With her head cradled in her hands, fingers pressing against her eyes, Thorn rocked herself for comfort.

And wondered just how much of how many nights of which summer she'd danced through, and had the memories of erased from her mind.