The Same Dream Twice

“Are you not scared to die like them?” the stranger asked her.

She smiled, soft and sad. “This is not when I die,” she replied.

“It is if I say so,” the stranger said, his dagger at her throat.

She did not move. “Even you cannot ignore someone’s destiny. This is not when I will die.”

Curious now, the stranger lowered his blade. Around them were her traveling companions, slain and dead for their food and supplies. The stranger had crept among the four of them during the night, killed her brother who was on watch, and then the elderly couple they had been traveling with. She had awoken to the elderly woman dying, and stood up to face the stranger, fearless. “How do you know such a thing?” he asked of her now.

“I dreamed as a girl that I would not die until I was old and in love, with children grown and left,” she answered him.

“And how do you know that this dream was true?” he demanded, scornful. “It was just some little girl’s fancy.”

“No,” she replied. “I have dreamed when all those in my family would die.” She pointed to her brother, slumped over near the still-crackling fire. “I dreamed long ago that he would die tonight, and said good-bye to him before I lay down to sleep. I knew that my mother would die of sickness, and my father of bandits years before her.”

“Truly?” the stranger asked, intrigued now. She saw a flash of greed in his eyes then, and knew what he would ask. After all, the man who knew how he would die was forewarned, and mayhap could cheat his death when the time came. He raised his dagger once more. “Tell me, witch, how will I die?”

“I am no witch,” she replied, “only a simple maid, now traveling alone.”

“Tell me,” he said, ignoring the rest.

She shook her head. “I cannot. I can only dream the deaths of those who have a place in my heart. Why should I care when you, a stranger to me, will die?”

He considered this for a moment, and then sheathed his dagger. “Then, you shall come back home with me, and be my wife, and when you come to love me you will dream of my death.”

“Yes, I will,” she agreed.

And so the stranger took her home, and made her his wife. He gave up thievery to farm some small land now that he had a wife to care for. The two of them lived many years together, and she gave him two sons and two daughters, and they were very happy.

Still, once a year, on the anniversary of the day that they’d met, the stranger would ask her, “Have you dreamed of my death yet?”

“No,” she would reply. “I have dreamed the deaths of our children, but of yours I have seen nothing.”

And so the years passed, and eventually even their children grew up and moved out, to pursue their own lives and loves. She grew old, and the stranger older, and yet her answer never changed.

The stranger grew sad, for he had come to love his wife for bearing his children and filling his life with laughter and joy. After a few more years, though, the stranger’s sadness grew to anger. Another year passed, and still her answer was the same.

“Why will you not dream of my death?” he asked her, and in his fury that she would not love him back, the stranger grabbed his dagger and stabbed her through the heart.

She smiled at him, soft and sad. “I dreamed of your death years before we ever met, the same night that I dreamed of mine, old and in love and with children grown. This is when we both die.” And closing her eyes, she fell to the floor and died.

The stranger realized what he had done, that she had loved him always, and in his grief and sorrow he removed the blade from her breast, the same dagger that he had kept all these years, and stabbed himself through the heart. Closing his eyes, he fell to the floor and died.