Moments later, Dinah is standing on a hill, tussocks of grass thrash in the wind under a rumbling sky, thunder and lightning that splits the world in half and shakes the earth beneath her feet. Clouds the shade of a dirty artist's jug. The castle is behind, knee deep in mud from the battlefield, holding its ground. There are cries, terrible cries of fear and confusion. Alden, with his cruel, leering face. Where are his eyes? Because they are gone; nothing but a furnace that burns in the empty sockets of the mask.

A battlefield surrounded by dense trees; a forest. A melodic beating of a heart and its sound, so loud, so ugly; but it is as if one looks through a glass pane at a life that is not theirs. She can lose Alden on the battlefield, but the soldiers are everywhere.

Dinah trips and sprawls on the grass, their hearts turned with revenge and the darkness that eats at their souls destroy all in their path. They are spirits, the ones who get off their horses and form the circle around Peter. As they near, she can no longer sense the sounds and smells of the battlefield. She cannot hear the screams, or the splash of mud on her face. All Dinah can see is the grey churning sky above and the crows. Crows so black... Is this her nightmare or his?

A soldier leaps from his horse and staggers forward, reaching for his sword. He holds it high, ready to strike, the sunlight reflecting, so bright, so pure. Through his helmet are two pinpricks of yellow, like cat eyes in the dark, inhuman. But the blow doesn’t fall. The soldier explodes into a cloud of dust before he can strike. Peter is injured, she can tell. This is not a game, or ‘training’. It is a battle for his soul. She has to navigate them both through this chaos, she has to bring him home. This is her purpose.

The soldiers crumble one by one as she surges forward, using her new-found power to imagine creative ways for their demise. The almighty roar shakes the land and makes the mud tremor. A figure pounds through the battlefield holding nothing but a lance and riding a horse frothing at the mouth with the same pinpricks of yellow for its eyes; as the soldier with his sword, ready to strike.  But he is not here for her. An axe ricochets through the air and strikes another rider through the skull. The land is littered with broken metal, corpses like shards of china pieces.  

“Dinah.” Peter is pale, bruised, but, thankfully alive. He smiles faintly. “Where am I?”

“This isn’t your average dream.”

“How is this possible?”

The ground is bending, folding, slotting and reforming themselves like a giant chessboard. The dribble of rain slides down the branches. Silence descends on the forest. The more she strains to the darkness, she realises there is a shimmer of light, a moon, just above her line of vision.  So perfectly round. A digestive cookie. But Dinah fancies it is the lid of a glass bottle. One twist and all manners of horrors can rain down from the sky.  

“I don’t know how to explain this but, imagine we’ve been issued a visa to the land of nightmares, and now, that visa is revoked.”

“What does that mean?”

“The border back to our world is closing. The real world. You have to wake up…”

“How? Stabbing doesn’t work…trust me on that. I always knew he was coming for me. I just didn’t know what form he would take, the man in the shadows.” Peter shakes his head, his face crumpled with a steady resignation she had not seen before. “But I saw you with those soldiers, how could you do that, disintegrate them into nothing?”

“Come on my darling, is that all you’ve got?” Alden, demented with hair flying and mouth slashed into a murderous grin is holding a sceptre stained with blood. He navigates the ground as if he were born to defy gravity. “You can't escape this world. Peter believes in Dream Devils more than you. Why is that?” He taunts. “Oh, Dream Devils lie, and they cheat, they swallow you up in your sleep.”

The trees frame his form like satanic shadows, as he shifts and changes to a prehistoric creature, snarling and big as a building. “Beware the dream devil in his lair, he will hunt you-” His form changes again; Frankenstein's monster.

Dinah imagines the land to buckle and shear open like soap, to bulge and cower, undulating ridges in the rock like clenched bird claws. The ground opens into a chasm, a fissure, stopping Alden's advance.

“Clever.” With a flick of his eyes, the soil under her legs breaks away and crumbles. He staggers forward, gliding over the mud in an advancing fog, only to be met by glass.

She has put him in a glass box. How to contain a monster with no sensibilities, no weakness? There is no stopping Alden, for he has the secret of living in dreams and he cannot be killed. Dinah will be part of his project to preserve life. That he is certain of. And even as he shatters the walls of his temporary prison, he knows the one thing that will keep her in his domain forever. It is set in motion. A crafty smile tickles his cheeks.  

“This is insane…I need your help,” Dinah says in alarm, reaching for Peter’s hand, “my imagination is a bit rusty.”

“What do you need me to do?” His forehead is beaded with a fine layer of sweat. He hadn’t felt this way since he had food poisoning back in December, a nauseous wave like his body can’t quite decide whether to keep everything inside or reject it. His heartbeat like a symphony of chaos in his ears…maybe this is poison. The trees, why are they moving?

“Something that will stop him…think about all those horror movies you’ve seen. Something about how to kill monsters?”

“I’ll try.”

It is almost as if a butterfly is walking on the tips of her consciousness. She is a vessel channelling. Alden’s kneecaps break with an unnatural CRACK, it happens in seconds, folding in on himself, a rather strange, limp ragdoll. He sinks into a viscous, sticky quicksand, dragging him further into the depths of hell. And through all of this he is laughing, with his grotesque mask melting like a waxwork figurine. The cackling, it fills the forest even as his body is consumed in flames, larger than anything else in the forest. It is everywhere. He is the forest, bouncing off the tree trunks, vibrating through the soil, leaking through the cavities of the stillness. They could trail in inescapable circles through this land, and not find their way out. The dream world cannot be trusted.

The same voice that calls her through the maze, that guides her to the dead girls in the castle, the same voice, whispers to her now. The sweet enticing whisper like sorbet; tripping off the tongue and melting like candyfloss. It’s already done. The darkness is a limb, an extension of her being, when she breathes, so does the darkness. And through the flames, further into the swirling depths of an image, it grows in focus, blue walls, white bedsheets. Peter, lying in his bed, a world away…and his parents, screaming.

No, this is not real. It is a vision made to taunt her. All it is, is a long, horrifically drawn out nightmare, even more intense, even more vivid than the last. That’s all it is. But even as she tries to convince herself otherwise, she knows the horror of what has been done. She has failed. Peter is pale around the edges, losing focus. But all through this ordeal, she can feel her hand gripped tightly in his. Somehow, miraculously he is still there. She will not let him go…she will not. Dinah stares into this strange oblong, of a time passed, a time, when she had been too distracted fighting the Dream Devil, too distracted circling the battlefield, a bitter aftertaste of a memory.

“Can you tell the difference between your dream world and your reality now? Perception is a strange thing. Your perception gives you power.” The desire to see her break, makes Alden feel uncomfortable pleasure in his stone heart. No, he does not want to see her broken.

He wants her awareness, but most of all, her belief.  But in order for Dinah to believe in him, she has to believe in herself.

And even as she screams into the night, obliterating the trees, the skyline in a tsunami of grief, she feels it surging through her veins.

Power.