Only When She Sleeps

ONLY WHEN SHE SLEEPS

Róisín hasn’t dreamed in nineteen years.

Not since the night her mother died, and something reached through the dark to take her.

Now she studies the sleeping minds of others, cataloguing what she can’t feel, until a patient screams her name, and the monitors start to hum like they know her secret.

That’s when the dreams begin.

Wet air. A voice in the mirror.

A man with galaxies in his eyes who says she’s the one who left him.

Phantasos.

The god who builds worlds out of sleep and the one who’s been waiting for her return.

Each night he pulls her deeper, unmaking the woman she thought she was. Each morning she wakes with less of herself left behind. Memory turns to hunger. Science turns to faith. And the only thing more dangerous than being loved by a god is remembering why he chose her in the first place.

Because this isn’t a love story.

It’s a haunting.