Chapter Three: The Dream of Fire and Blood

Elias drifted somewhere between sleep and waking, in that hazy borderland where the mind wanders free of reason’s chains. Shadows folded and unfolded. A glow like fire pulsed behind his closed eyes, and the warmth of it became too sharp—searing, choking, as if he were standing inside the blaze itself. He inhaled smoke. He smelled blood.

When he opened his eyes, he was not in his bed. He stood on dirt, scorched earth cracking beneath his boots. The air was thick with ash, falling like black snow, and the wind carried the harsh tang of salt and burning tar. The night sky above was blotted out by clouds of smoke, and the settlement around him burned. Wooden homes collapsed in thunderous crashes as their beams split and fell. The cries of men, women, and children twisted through the inferno, a desperate sound barely rising above the roar of the fire and the dull, endless crash of the sea. Terror, pain, and rage swelled together like one endless scream.

And beside him—She was there. A woman. Tall, proud, her hair matted with sweat and streaked with soot. She looked young, her face smeared with ash and blood, but her eyes shone like something he had known all his life. There was a familiarity in the way she stood near him, as if she belonged at his side, as if she had always been there. The sight of her pierced him with recognition so sharp it hurt. He could not recall her name, but his heart knew her, the way flesh knows its own blood. He loved her. He was certain of it.

Her hand gripped a sword, its edge dark and dripping. His own hand tightened on another blade, slick and warm, the metallic scent of blood rising off it. Around them lay bodies—their people, their enemies, it was hard to tell in the blur of firelight.

“They came from the north,” she said, her voice steady even as her chest rose and fell with exhaustion. “If the palisade falls, everyone inside dies.”

He wanted to answer her, but the words caught in his throat. He nodded, and that was enough. She understood.

From the smoke, figures emerged. Outsiders, marauders, their armor mismatched, their faces painted with strange symbols, teeth bared like beasts. They carried torches, axes, crude blades. They howled as they charged, hunger and fury dripping from them like venom.

The woman raised her sword. Elias raised his. Together they rushed forward.

The clash of steel rang louder than the burning houses. Elias met the first man head-on, parried his strike, then drove his sword under the ribs. The cry was brief, cut off by the gurgle of blood. Another attacker came. Elias twisted, barely dodging the arc of an axe, and struck again. His arm ached, but his body moved as if it remembered a thousand fights, a thousand deaths. Each motion was instinct.

Beside him, the woman fought like a storm. Her blade flashed in arcs of light, cutting through enemy after enemy. She was fearless. She was beautiful in her fury, her face lit by fire and determination. She screamed something—a name, maybe his, maybe a cry to the gods—and her voice carried through the battlefield like a bell.

For a moment, Elias believed they could win.

But then it happened.

He did not see where the arrow came from. One moment she was striking down another attacker, the next she staggered. Her sword dropped from her hand. He turned just as the arrowhead jutted from her chest, blood soaking through her tunic in a sudden bloom of red. Her eyes widened in shock. Her lips parted as if to speak, but no words came out.

“No—” Elias’ scream ripped from his throat.

He lunged to catch her, but another group of attackers surged between them. He swung wildly, screaming her name—he knew her name in the dream, though it slipped from his waking memory even as he cried it. Every strike was fueled by desperation, by the terror of losing her. But the distance widened. He saw her sink to her knees, her hand pressed to her chest.

She looked at him one last time, and in her gaze he saw sorrow, love, and farewell all at once. Then she fell.

The world collapsed around him. He howled, dropping his sword, stumbling toward her, but the fire roared higher, and the attackers swarmed. He couldn’t reach her. He couldn’t save her. All he could do was watch as the flames swallowed everything—her body, the village, the night itself.

Her name burst from his lips again, but the sound twisted into smoke and silence. The fire consumed all. And then there was nothing but darkness.

Elias woke with a gasp.

His body jerked upright in bed, drenched in sweat, his chest heaving. For a moment he was still there—the crackle of fire ringing in his ears, his heart ripping out of his ribs. A wave of nausea rose in his throat. His eyes darted wildly, but the room was dark and quiet. No flames. No screaming. Only the weight of silence pressing against the walls.

His hand reached instinctively for his chest. His skin was damp but unbroken, his shirt clinging to him. His fingers trembled. He forced himself to breathe. In. Out. Again. Again.

The clock on the nightstand glowed faintly. 3:07 a.m. The thin red digits looked like embers in the dark.

Elias fell back onto the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. His heart was still pounding, his mind replaying the dream in fragments: the woman’s eyes, the sound of her sword, the moment of her fall. He pressed his palms over his face, trying to rub it all away, but it clung to him. The smell of smoke, the sting of ash in his lungs, the heat on his skin. It felt too real.

He whispered into the dark, “Who was she?”

No answer came, only the quiet tick of the house settling, a pipe creaking somewhere, the faint drone of the refrigerator downstairs.

But he knew—he knew—that the dream was not just a dream. It was something else. Something old. Something buried deep in his blood.

His mind flicked back, unbidden, to the conversation he’d had yesterday. Dr. Maren, with her calm, steady eyes, sitting across from him in her office. He remembered the way she had spoken, the hesitation when she asked if he had ever considered the idea of reincarnation.

At the time, he had laughed it off. A polite chuckle, a shake of his head. It was absurd. He didn’t believe in such things. He was rational. He trusted science, not superstition. But now… he wasn’t sure of anything.

The dream’s weight pressed against his chest like a stone. The woman’s face lingered in his mind with painful clarity, as if she were still alive, just out of reach. He felt the bond with her even though he didn’t know her name—the grief he felt was too sharp to belong to a dream alone. He held his head in his hands; the pressure was building in his skull to a point of fracture.

“Reincarnation…” he whispered into the dark, testing the word, letting it echo.

How could it be? Could he have lived before, fought before, loved before? And if so… had he just relived the moment of losing her? Or was he simply losing his mind?

His skin prickled, though the room was cool. He turned onto his side, staring at the faint outline of the curtains, the shadows cast by the streetlight outside. Sleep was gone, banished by the storm in his mind.

He thought of what Dr. Maren said—souls can carry unfinished stories... and they resurface when it’s time to remember.

Elias swallowed hard. Was this his unfinished story?

He closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to see if he could catch even the faintest image of her again. The curve of her jaw, the firelight in her eyes, the sound of her voice telling him they had to defend the palisade. He clung to it, desperate to remember more.

But it slipped from him like water through his fingers. No matter how hard he tried to hold on to her image, it faded, edges dissolving into shadow. Her voice was the first to go. Then her face blurred, her eyes dulled, and finally even the outline of her body vanished. Only the sense of her remained—that piercing, unbearable recognition, as if his soul had been torn in two.

He groaned softly and sat up again. Sleep would not come back. The dream had carved a wound too deep. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, pressing his palms together to stop the trembling. His breath came steady now, but his heart still beat like a drum against his ribs.

The silence of the house pressed in. No flames, no screams—only quiet. He tried to be grateful for that quiet, but it felt wrong, hollow. As if the house itself had been stripped of its heartbeat.

His eyes wandered across the room, and they fell—inevitably—upon the framed photograph on the dresser. The photo had been there for weeks, untouched since the funeral. His wife. Clara. Her smile caught mid-laughter, eyes squinting with joy, her arm wrapped around his shoulder. In his weary, haunted state, the lines blurred—for a fractured second, he saw the woman from the dream in her face.

His chest tightened.

The woman in the fire was a stranger. And yet she had felt known by heart, her presence woven into him in a way he could not explain. The realization struck him as a betrayal—of Clara, of his own grief. A wave of pure guilt rolled through him, twisting his guts. “Why?” he whispered, the word scraping his throat. “Why her, and not you?”

The question cracked his voice, and he hated himself for it. He should be dreaming of Clara, holding onto every memory before it slipped away. Instead, his mind conjured another woman—one who had never existed in this life, whose death shook him as fiercely as losing Clara.

He dragged a hand down his face and whispered her name again, but nothing came. Not Clara’s. Not the dream woman’s. Only silence.

The betrayal dug deeper. He felt it in his gut. What kind of man was he to feel such grief for a phantom?

But no—it wasn’t just a phantom. He knew that. The memory of the fire was too vivid, too raw. It was not like any dream he had before. He could still smell the blood, hear the clash of swords, feel the weight of the blade in his hand. His body remembered. His soul remembered. But how was this possible?

That thought chilled him more than the dream itself. Because if Dr. Maren was right—if this was reincarnation—then the woman he had lost in that burning village was not a stranger at all. She was his love. A love from another life.

Elias shuddered, pressing both hands into his hair, pulling at the roots as though pain could ground him in a reality that no longer made sense.

Two loves. Two lives. Both lost. And somehow, impossibly, both his.

He stood abruptly, his legs restless, and paced the room. Shadows shifted with each step, long and thin against the walls. He wanted to escape, but the house followed him with silence, with memory. The red digits shifted, silent but merciless, each minute burning away like an ember.

He stopped at the dresser. His hand reached out and brushed against Clara’s photograph. The glass was cool beneath his fingers. Her eyes stared back at him, full of a warmth he would never feel again.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

The guilt gnawed at him until his stomach clenched. Was he betraying Clara by even entertaining the dream? Or was he betraying the woman from the dream by forgetting her name the moment he woke?

He closed his eyes, forehead pressed against the frame. In that stillness, he tried to reconcile the impossible: that love could stretch across lifetimes, that grief could nest inside grief, one burial layered over another.

Maybe he had been wrong all this time, and life was more than just a coincidence. Maybe Dr. Maren was right. Maybe souls carried unfinished stories, and this was his.

But what did it mean? Why now? Why her face, her death, searing itself into him only weeks after Clara’s?

He pulled back from the dresser, his hands shaking, his throat tight. The question burned inside him: was this dream a message? Or was it punishment—for losing Clara, for failing this other woman too, for being powerless in every life he touched?

The night stretched on, heavy and suffocating. Elias sat back on the bed, leaning against the headboard, staring into the dark until his eyes blurred.

And there, in that liminal hour between night and dawn, a strange resolve crept into him.

If the dream was a memory, then it meant something. If that woman had lived, and if she had died, then she was part of him. Part of his story. And Clara was too. Both of them—souls he had loved, lost, carried.

Maybe, just maybe, remembering was the first step to understanding why he was still here.

The thought did not bring peace, but it steadied him enough to breathe. To wait. To see what the next dream might reveal.

The silence thickened again, but it no longer felt hollow. It felt like the pause before another chapter.

And as the clock crept toward 4 a.m., Elias stared at the ceiling one last time and whispered, almost as a vow: “I will remember you.” Then, finally, he closed his eyes.