An Echo in the Blood

Prompt: At eighteen, you begin dreaming of a stranger who feels like your other half. When they finally appear in real life, everything you thought you knew about love and reality begins to shift.

For eighteen years, my dreams were my own. Then, on my birthday, a stranger invaded them.

He was a ghost in my sleep, a presence so real I could feel the warmth of his hand and hear the rumble of his laugh. I never saw his face, but I knew him. He was the piece of me I'd been missing. For two years, he was my secret, my beautiful, sorrowful other half.

Then I looked up from my textbook in a crowded library, and he was standing right in front of me.

Meeting Caleb in real life was a miracle. We fit together like we'd been designed for it, sharing inside jokes and coffee orders from a life we couldn't remember. But as our love bloomed in the waking world, our dreams curdled into nightmares. The soft mists cleared, revealing a brutal pattern: in every lifetime, in every era, we find each other, and we are torn apart.

A battlefield. A sinking ship. A train platform. The endings are always the same.

Now, the love that feels like fate feels more like a curse. Every shared glance is stolen time, every touch a reminder of an impending goodbye. We're not just falling in love; we're reliving a tragedy, and the memories of a hundred deaths are bleeding into our perfect present.

The question is no longer if we'll lose each other, but when. And this time, I'm not sure my heart can survive saying goodbye to him again.