I dreamed of the tree first. Not the way I remembered it from that night in the cellar, leaves stripping themselves into a circling wind. This was stiller, older, a carving I recognised from somewhere I couldn’t immediately place, broad branches rendered in worn stone, an inscription beneath it in a language I couldn’t read and somehow understood anyway. Eternal, it said, or meant, or simply was, the word arriving in me the way Damian’s memories had, whole and certain without needing translation. The dream shifted, the way dreams do, no seam between one place and the next.
I was standing in front of Cybele’s temple again, the Palatine Hill spread out gold and hazy behind me, and Damian’s hand was in mine the way it had been that real afternoon, and I felt myself trip, the way I actually had, my foot catching some loose stone at the temple’s edge. I watched, in the dream, a single drop of my own blood fall from a scraped toe and land on the ancient step. The stone drank it. I don’t have a better word for what I watched happen. The blood simply vanished into old rock like the step itself had been thirsty for it, and something in the dream understood, with total, dreaming certainty, that this had mattered, that it had never simply been an accident.
Then the ring. Nana Flo’s ring, small and silver, turning slowly in midair the way objects do in dreams, without any hand holding it, the stone at its centre catching light from nowhere at all. Three images. The tree. The blood on the stone. The ring. They began to move toward each other, slow at first and then faster, the way pieces do when a puzzle finally understands its own shape, and I watched them slide together into a single mark, familiar, unmistakable, the same endless golden loop that had wrapped around Damian and me the night his teeth found my throat and something in both of us finally closed its circle.
I came awake with my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my own throat, the room dark and cold and entirely real around me. Damian’s eyes were already open. He was watching me in the dark, perfectly still, the way he went still when something had frightened him too badly to move, and I understood, in the half-second before either of us spoke, that whatever I’d just seen, he’d seen some version of it too, pulled through the same open door that now ran permanently between us.
“It’s all connected,” we said, together, the same four words landing in the dark at exactly the same moment, and neither of us needed to ask what the other one meant.