Xander could sense Claire's fear. Even though she had been brutally murdered in the real world, inside this nightmare her Last Memory believed she was still alive.
The scratch marks that Xander had seen on the arms of her corpse now started making sense to him. There was a chain tattooed on her left arm while her right had a lock and key chiseled onto it.
"They wanted to trap your Last Memory inside a cage, so this nightmare would never end. It was all planned from the start to the finish," Xander remarked as he connected the dots. He could now see the bigger picture.
The cultists had deliberately tampered with Claire's corpse to conjure a colony of Ankarogs into her Death Nightmare and imprison her Last Memory in a far-off wasteland.
It was almost as if they knew a Dreamwalker would be coming after them, and so they had carefully formulated a plan to make things as complicated for him as possible.
