Amurehna

I liked that the twists were surprises. I usually have a tiny thread of lucidity that makes me meta the hell out of my dreams.

Anyway. My starting point was a little confusing. First I see a wounded Damon Salvatore, on the phone with Elena. It's night, he's crusted with blood and looks ten kinds of awful. The camera pans over and I see a white figure standing at the corner of the frame. I' m worried because the thing looks like a threat. But then Damon says something about running into a Sarvati (the white figure, now wringing his hands). Elena asks if he's alright, because apparently Sarvati are dangerous.
"It's fine." Damon says with his trademark smirk. "I persuaded him to help." he pauses. "What about you?"
"Getting a little help of my own. Maybe." She says, and I finally see her. She's in a barn, the moonlight shining through the open door. "I have a plan, I'll let you know if it works." She seemed hurt, too, but it isn't apparent how. Hanging up the phone, opens her mouth wide and lifts her wrist. I assume she's going to feed on herself to heal...and I'm doubtful that would even work.
The camera pans out and I recognize the setting.

In this version of the story, Stefan became like Michael and only fed on vampires. Also being a ripper meant he hurt many people before his friends were able to subdue him. Weary of fighting his hunger, he allowed himself to desiccate and made a deal: he would sleep until they found a cure.
There he lay, under a bare foot of soil, in a weathered wooden crate. Elena meant to feed Stefan. Of course.
For a moment I am irrationally angry with Elena. They had promised him! And here she was, at the first sign of trouble, waking Stefan to his torment. It seems so selfish and, only for a moment, I hate her.

They will need him, though. He is a definite ally in a sea of mistrust. There's a new creature in Mystic Falls. They are vampire/zombie hybrids. In the early days of their Turning they drink the blood of humans, but then require flesh to survive. They can walk in the daylight and may subsist on human food for a time, if they are disciplined. Though the first was the result of a spell cast by a powerful sorcerer, it could be spread via saliva. So, naturally, the first Turned would be a whore of a football player.
A girl named Sandra who looked like the actress Annalynne Mccord is the only one who really notices that the school is slowly slipping into chaos. The faculty are nowhere to be found and sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, certain people have ashen skin. She used to be a cheerleader but has since lost her taste for it. No one knows that the hiatus she took from school wasn't a vacation, she actually went to a care facility for anorexia. There are students milling around, crowding the halls, and debris on the floor. Sandra walks into the locker room, uncertain, arms crossed over her abdomen. She spots Stacy who looks gray, talking to a chubby, blond, blue-eyed Davina Claire. Stacy asks her if she's thrown in her lot for the party food, that they were thinking about ordering pizza, but she has a better idea. In her hands is an advertisement for a company known as Meal A day. Sandra knows it well. Upon release from the hospital, Meal A Day had delivered healthy meals to her door three times a day, she checked her progress after every meal and they took the plates. Each seemed a small victory over the illness.
"So have you signed yet?" Stacy asks.
"You know me." Davina says, "Always hungry."
Sandra intuits that Davina is bulimic. She isn't sure if she can trust a near stranger with her secret, but it would be worth the risk if she could help.
The students don't realize that they are signing up to be the food and their dietary preferences will determine who will be consuming them.
Their hunger is a quiet, fervent energy, a slowly building frenzy. They are cunning in their design.
"I put a spell on you. You're mine now." A male voice says.

I return to the barn where Stefan shakes dirt from his hair. His eyes are an unnatural golden brown, he wipes Elena's blood from his mouth. Still disoriented, he asks how long it has been.
I loathe Elena's sheepish look, wishing she'd just left him alone.
"You've been down for a little over a day."
His expression twists in wry amusement, tinged with pain. "What's happened now?" He asks as she helps him stand.
"I'll explain on the way, we don't have a lot of time." Elena replies. She hopes Damon won't be too angry, he wanted to honor Stefan's wishes.
"I'm assuming you didn't bring a car?" He says this with an air of contained amusement that is achingly familiar. She smiles, casting her eyes to the dirt floor and dipping her head. He grins suddenly. "You always did love to run."
They had always loved to run together.
Yet, this is not a reunion of lovers, just friends who were lovers once upon a time. Their love has since mellowed into fondness. They exit the barn into the soft summer night. Lucidity here is a sweet thread that pulls me through Elena and then back out to observe. They are so happy to be together. Their hasty separation, though it seemed longer to him, had worn on them. This reunion is like the giddy absence of pain amidst torture. For a time, they don't think about what they will face when they arrive at town, or that Stefan will return to the ground when this new threat is stamped out, only that they are here again, running together.

The moon's cloak of clouds pulls apart to reveal swathes of landscape. The grass is deep blue-green, knee high and soft against my legs and bare feet, Elena is wearing a flowered dress. They run almost human slow. Then I am her, smiling as he draws up next to me. His silhouette is immensely comforting. I trip, tumbling into the sweet grass. I fall and roll, we laugh at my clumsiness. And like a dance, he is there to take my arm and help me up. I have been explaining the threat. This fits seamlessly with the male voice speaking at the end of the last segment. Elena tells him about what the sorcerer said.
"He didn't." Stefan says, smiling.
"He didn't even get it!" Elena laughs, then they share a joke, singing "I put a spell on you, and now you're mine." and express their disbelief that their new villain said it in all seriousness. I separate from Elena and pull back as they reach the river and leap across, as graceful as deer.

I watch Vampire Diaries but I've never been invested in Elena and Stefan as a couple. So it's a mystery to me why these two pop up so often. The dream stories revolving around them are always bittersweet, about the inability to choose between love and duty. A sad slow spiral away from each other but unable to stop reaching.
So this is how it began:
The world is washed out, tinged yellow with storm light. The world is beginning to fall apart. Elena and Stefan sit facing each other, knees touching, in a scattering of dead leaves. Cupped in Elena's hands is an ugly ring. The metal is thick heavy silver. The fitting is a threaded hole about half an inch wide. The stone is the size of a crystal door knob with an eight-sided cut. It looks like tarnished mirror with flashes of iridescent pink. Where she touches its surface magenta sparks leap into the air then disappear. They have to make a choice between each other and doing what is right.
Elena grimaces and unscrews the stone from the fitting. This is not without risk, they are linked by the stone and whoever discards it will begin to forget the person it links them to. She will even forget where she has hidden it.
She rises from the ground and walks away, Stefan still sits in the leaves staring forlornly at her as she retreats. It seems so terrible. The world is dangerous and they could die, he doesn't want her to die having forgotten him. Still. This is necessary. There is more at stake than their own lives.

There is a lapse. Elena has hidden the stone and taken up with a woman who should be her ally. I'll call her Kara. I don't get a good look at Kara so I can't describe her. Elena is leading her somewhere. It's dark outside and she pauses, unsure if she has lost her way. Kara pulls a long glowing knife from thin air and presses it back against her forearm. Elena senses it and knows she's been betrayed without turning around.
My mind rallies for a moment and thinks incredulously "You're formidable! You can't just stand there and let her knife you in the back!"
Elena narrows her eyes and pretends she doesn't know what's happened.
"Oh please, I've been deceiving people since the beginning of existence, don't insult me by pretending you don't know. Turn around and stand still like a good little girl." Kara says. Elena tries to remember why it's important to fight, why bother? It would be so easy to stop.
As she turns to face her enemy, Kara's knife flashes out. Her reflexes decide for her and Elena only just dodges, then ducks under another swing. The knife cuts through the fabric of reality leaving a glowing slash in the air. Elena turns on her heel and slips between the world into the Nevermind.
It's almost like a physical representation of her memory. The world here looks a little like where she left Stefan, but she can't remember that. There are thick white swathes of fog obscuring sections and black text is typed into them 'nevermind'.
She escapes.

There's a lapse and I see Kara standing in front of Stefan who is still sitting in the dead leaves. She pulls the stone from her pocket and smirks down at him and watches the conflicting emotions play across his face. He looks horrified and delighted. He only just keeps himself from reaching out for it. If he takes it and somehow finds the strength to discard it, he will forget Elena as she has forgotten him.
"Oh, look at you." Kara says like he's the cutest thing she's ever seen, "Resisting so hard. Here. Let me help." Kara has a walking stick with a silver handle, she uses the end of it to turn his hand over and then presses the stone into his palm.
"nnnoooooo." he moans.
"Yes." She smiles and pats him on the head. "I sincerely wish you all the luck in the world with that precious little gem." She sounds too smug to be sincere.

There's another lapse. I see him sitting on the ground. He's doing a voice over narration, telling the story. I've missed part of it, so I focus and the scene pauses then restarts. A text log even pops up so I can read what he's saying.
"So what do I do? I still have an option to cast it away. If I do I won't even remember that I've done it. Where is the loss in that? Can I miss her even if I can't remember?"
As he's thinking this, he stares down at the thick ugly band without its stone. "I couldn't stop myself. What we had was like a drug, I could not choose to cast it aside. Not again." His expression is equal parts resolute and sickened, he begins to screw the stone down into the fitting.

As this is happening random dialogue starts to pollute the text box like it's a chat room. It really annoys me because I can't read what he's saying. I notice there's music playing. Someone says the song is perfect and someone else asks who the band is. Another person says the band name is "Mm...Perhaps the Fish?" It seems to fit them exactly. They kind of sound like their underwater and at one point make a 'glub glub' noise.

My alarm woke me.