A crack in my vision appears, showing the near blankness of faint sunlight filtered by closed lids. Go back to sleep…
The cat-like thing brushes past my feet, always circling me, protecting me. My eyes glance down, and I see a knife in my hand, sleek and shining. But the tip is rusted in blood, and the cruor drips past the wooden handle of the blade. I see my distorted reflection in the steel, then the scene in the knife shifts lazily to the woman before me. Her. You. Your face is beautiful, unharmed, nary a scratch to be found, but the neck is a mangled mess of blood and cuts, the most prominent being a deep gash, evidently slashed repeatedly in the same spot. Blood has poured past your dress, drenching the silver with red. Even your feet are stained with the crimson liquid. And I want to yell, scream, tear the feline ghost of a dream apart, because it cannot protect me when there is something far more precious to guard, the shadow of a memory saturated in vermillion, stripped free of the liberty of life by my own hands, the palm gripping this knife like it is the red string itself--and then the claret fades to ash once more, and I look to you on the path but the monochrome you is simply an illusion--you, you monster, depriving me of truth, misleading me once more, and I ask of you, plead of you, did I draw this knife against your throat so many times to make it so sanguinely blooded like that… and… and did I really enjoy it, as you write in your eyes, the thousand shades of indecision?
In the foggy hours just after the sanguine tip of dawn, a strangely familiar warning calls, steady, shrill waves of alarm, and I must turn to travel back down the clouded path. The steel gray blade is still grasped tightly in my hand, the red string stretching dangerously as I run, then breaking into two parts, human and ghost, then the knife drops from my guilty hand, shattering to dust, flying away on the morning breeze. Though the pathway fogs thickly, I hear a slight sound, then turn back, eyes searching, seeing through the clouds. Forever I wait, craving a glimpse of the source of the voice that had called me so forgivingly, then, something moves through the fogginess, something, there is something there, lips raised in a smile of farewell, dismal tears flowing past the mouth from the monochromatic eyes, a cat-like thing disappearing from me and haunting the feet on the bone-white path, something there. I see something there, a final breath of your memory there. I see you there.