Adeline retired to her bedroom not long after Eli hesitantly departed, en route back to his wife, Rose, at their home in Chelsea.

Adeline was overtaxed, her mind a muddled mess of confusing and conflicting information, too disquieting to sort through in any meaningful fashion. The manner of things, that is to say, certain uncompromising truths which were held in high regard in Adeline's mind, had been so ungraciously challenged in the span of only one day, and she was left inundated and terribly unbalanced.

Perhaps it was the body's natural response to emotional unrest to make a person want to sleep and never wake. Adeline felt no fondness for the days that were sure come and such a feeling wrought with it an exhaustion for matters yet to be attended to. Once entirely disrobed of the day, Adeline climbed into bed and seamlessly faded out of the world and into herself.

It seemed only moments before she was mysteriously shook, provoked where she lay in her bed by some unusual and mysterious force. Her eyelids were dense and grainy, so difficult to keep open as she attempted to wake in what she would immediately discern was a displaced and unexpected atmosphere.

Gazing up at a dense, overcast and querulous sky, Adeline took particular notice of the tops of many ancient Silver Birch and Black Alder trees, all bare as they awaited a more temperate season. The scent of moist earth and decaying leaves brought Adeline a strange and instinctive calm with its sweet, pungent, and all too familiar musk, and the breeze, chilled and biting, whispered and rustled between naked, quiescent branches and nipped at Adeline's silky, flushed skin.

Before she could ponder the meaning of her vision, the curious sensation of movement that Adeline first woke to recurred and she shifted her gaze downward to see the crisp, starched sheets between her legs shift unnaturally with no movement of her own.

A shape emerged slowly, seemingly from a mysterious gateway within the mattress of which she lay upon. It was a hand, hot and slow and deliberate, as it materialized from the innermost depths of her very own bed and slid wantonly and unrestrained along the flesh of her knees up to her quaking thighs with a torrid heat that tickled up her spine. She let escape a labored breath, the sensation startling and exciting and unearthly all at once.

As Adeline watched on entranced, another hot, forceful hand emerged from the mysterious matter which birthed the first, this one mimicking its predecessor, crawling its way up Adeline's thigh in a most hedonic manner. The dense, spectral hands prowled upward over her night dress, past her belly button, over her breasts and to her shoulders where they then urged her to lay back. She acquiesced, closing her tired eyes. Hands materialized into arms and arms to a muscular torso, as the seemingly typical attributes of the mattress exudated the shape of a man, lean, naked and hot to the touch.

Slowly, deliberately, this spectral male materialized, first only as a masculine shape under Adeline's rumpled sheets, but as he crept upward, outward, strong, square shoulders and powerful arms emerged in glistening flesh as he worked his way abreast Adeline, his pelvis sitting hot and rigid between her spread legs. His scent was heady and arousing to Adeline and she likened it to ambergris musk or suede and vanilla. The mysterious figure swept, with the tips of his fingers, long, raven strands of hair away from Adeline's flushed cheeks as he leaned his body deeper still onto hers.

In defiance of this lucid and palpable dreamscape, Adeline could not distinguish the face of the otherworldly entity above her, and yet she felt a keen familiarity with this phantom man, his form and his scent. Either way, it was of no consequence in this place. Adeline felt intoxicated, her body heavy and sedated. It suddenly alarmed her, the intensity of this supernatural experience and this masculine creature atop her. She raised her arms with much difficulty and weakly attempted to push away the form above her.

Deep, intimidating breaths, like growls, reverberated in Adeline's ears as the bewitching man tore her hands away from his chest and grasped them firmly into his fists. With great ease, he pushed Adeline's arms firmly into the bed above her head. She could not help herself but to gasp, overcome with a perplexing fusion of fear and pleasure at this figure and his potent need of her. With her arms subdued, the hard, hot body of the man rested atop her own, slowly moving back and forth as he sought out the nape of her neck, breathing her scent into himself deeply. Adeline's breath caught as the unearthly form panted wantonly in her ear, kissing and nipping at her flesh in a fever of longing, meanwhile exerting his force against her body with his own.

Adeline's better judgement all but abandoned her in a sweet submission, and her hips began to stir beneath the stifling and unyielding specter mounted firmly, powerfully above her. She closed her eyes, giving into the divine sensations being offered to her and allowed her tense body to relax in surrender, a triumphant liberation from her own bonds.

The virile entity loosened his grip on Adeline's arms, sliding his freed hand down to her breast where he took an audacious handful, sighing coarsely in his own thrill. Adeline exhaled deeply, allowing her fingertips to explore the thick, strong shoulder and arm of her pursuer, her eyes closed still in heated satisfaction.

She sensed as the man's hand left her breast, gliding up her chest toward her neck slowly, where he then took hold of the jewelled locket that had been gifted to her from Thomas so many years ago. Adeline met his hand with her own, curious at the masculine being's interest in her trinket. Her mind roused from its sedation. She opened her eyes, shifting her focus downward to where the locket was being held. Just as she motioned to pull the imposing entity's grasp away from her personal ornament, a great gust of icy wind blasted its way through the forested dreamscape in the very same instant the man reared back and powerfully ripped the locket away from Adeline's breast, snapping the delicate gold chain that had been clasped around her neck. Adeline rose immediately from where she lay, reaching out desperately for the man's closed fist as he thrust himself unnaturally away from her.

In an instant Adeline was propelled back to the waking world, gasping for air where she sat in an icy sweat on her very own bed, in her very own room. She grasped at her chest in a panic for her treasured locket, horrified to discover it was no longer there.