He had slipped in and out of sleep all night and now mistrusted his state of wakefulness. He stood under a bronze moon in a fortress of stone. It was both impossible and probable that harsh loveliness should descend from the void to tease and taunt him, a wakescape for the dream walker.

In fact he had ceased differentiating between conscious and unconscious, between then and now, between her and him. Everything was dissolving in pools of darkness, tiny meanings and memories swirling around in the same puddle. Why confront anything? As passive as the day he was born, he stood transfixed by shards of time sheared off an absconding planet in a disinterested universe.

Something was not right. Cold sounds blew against his skin. A flapping blackness rained down on the desert, scattering feeble thought. Hovering amid the real and the unreal, screeching shapes overpowered the ticking clock of certainty and dug their talons deep.

The eternal moment moved on, leaving a tableau of figures in a landscape, faces flecked with blood staring at the cruel moon. Could the creatures of his hallucinations cause such grief and carnage? Was this the danger of his imagination come to life?