Every night now he dreamed the same dream.

He was cutting his way through a forest, sword in hand. The foliage was so dense that he had left his horse behind, and his progress was slow, every step an ordeal of clearing and tearing aside, of making a space for his head, his arms, his feet. He was tired, and bruised, and in pain from a wound in his chest. But he was dogged, for he was looking for something, something desperately important, and it seemed at long last that he was about to find it.

He began to see the blue-grey stone of the castle through the thinning foliage before he came to the clearing. And, in his dream, he had a sense of relief, an easing of pain so profound his throat ached with it and tears filled his eyes. He knew this was the place he had been looking for all his life, and that within lay his heart’s desire.

Now his path seemed easy, light, joyful, for although he felt almost at the end of his strength, his heart’s desire seemed no more than an arm’s length away. But when he stepped out into the light, leaving the clinging trees behind him, he saw a terrible thing – so terrible, and so unexpected, that he could barely grasp it.

The castle was in ruins.

And as he stood staring up at this most beloved of all places, ravaged and overgrown and jagged and leaning crazily, he heard the most awful sound of his life.

Somewhere in the ruined castle, something was crying.

He felt rather than heard the sound – a keening of such utter vulnerable desolation that it was all but unbearable to hear. He had to stop the creature’s pain. He had to find and console it or go mad. He ran in through the ruined door; into the great stone hall, which was open through its damaged roof to the sky. He darted from room to room, down this hall and that, but all of them were empty – ruined stone with grass and dandelions poking through the cracks, nothing more.

And yet the sound went on.

It was a child, a girl, he knew it. She was crying inconsolably and the sound was killing him. He needed to find her, to comfort her, to rescue her. But where was she?

He started up the ruined steps and, as he searched on and on through galleries and chambers and interconnecting doors, down halls and up staircases that seemed to lead nowhere, through room after room after room, he began to suspect a terrifying, impossible thing. The flow of his blood seemed to slow at the thought of it. And yet he felt he had known, underneath, all along.

He had entered a place that had no end. The interior of the castle was, in some crazy way, infinite.

And in this infinity his heart’s desire was lost.

She was both everywhere, and nowhere. He would never find her, never console her, and yet she would always be present, needing him.

Her need. His search. Forever.

He awoke sweating, sick with an emotion so intense, so appalling, that it seemed impossible that what he had just experienced was not real.

And he knew he had been dreaming about Deirdre.