Her father was not in his bed, leaving his royal wife all alone. Laurel hovered above her, mere inches from her skin. Her thoughts were a foul mix of hatred and hunger. She imagined taking that first bite, startling her awake. The fear would taste so good. Then, she imagined sucking hard, draining every last drop of blood. She pulled herself away only at the last second, fleeing to the darkest corner of the room and peering out at her. Liana's words rang through her mind. She'd already hurt so many innocent people, why should she hesitate to kill her step-mother? Laurel found herself crying and didn't know why. She prayed for an interruption or an excuse, and one came.
A crashing sound from outside the room caused the Queen to bolt up. In an instant, Laurel had closed her eyes to hide her presence. Remaining still and silent was easy but exhilarating all the same, as she watched her step-mother fumble for a match to light her candle before exiting the room. She followed close behind and saw scenes of bloody chaos, as guards ran here and there. It reminded her of the night Nathan had died and her step-mother ran right to her remaining son's room. She found the door ajar and must've feared the worst. Laurel drank in the fear but remained alert. Inside the room, Callum was still sleeping but there were shades all around him and a devil. The monster, with thorny blackened red skin, simply turned to the Queen and shushed her, as if to say that she might wake her son.
Frozen with fear, Charlotte complied, watching in horror as shadows poured from the young prince's eyes. Each shade that was born wrestled its way into the feast they were making of a palace guard. Laurel debated what to do, internally, as she observed her brother give birth to nightmare after nightmare. When worse things than shades started to emerge, she made her move, charging into the room in a frenzy of tooth and claw, eviscerating the devil before he even realised what was happening. She felt weak but couldn't afford to sate herself with his blood, instead having to fend of attacks from dozens of shades. Once she was finished with the bloody business, she looked over at her brother's bed to find her terrified step-mother cradling him. 'You,' she said.
'How long have you known he was an active dreamer?'
Hundreds of thoughts seemed to cross over her step-mother's eyes, and she seemed to be deciding whether or not to tell the truth. 'Many years,' she eventually croaked.
'So, it was him, the night Nathan died. You blamed me but you knew it was him.'
Charlotte clutched her frightened son close. 'You frightened him. That stupid game you played, it upset him.'
'That stupid game was Nathan's idea, not mine.'
Her step-mother was silent for a while, long enough for more guards to show up. None of them knew what to do and the Queen gave them no instruction. Eventually, she spoke, 'I don't know why you came here tonight but,' her tone seemed sincere, 'please, just leave us.'
She wanted to object, even lash out, but her brother's tear-filled eyes stayed her hand. She let out a shaky breath before replying, 'okay.' With that, she fled the palace, and then the city. She didn't know where she was going but she knew that she needed to get away. She flew and flew and flew until the land vanished and the sea appeared. Still, she flew on, across hundreds of miles. Eventually, the seawater turned from dark blue to deepest black. She could see red eyes beneath the surface, some as big as dinner plates, and still she flew on. The further she went, the darker the water became and the more malevolent the nightmares grew. Then, all of a sudden, a tentacle emerged from the ocean.
It was too gigantic to manoeuvre around and it snatched her out of the air, dragging her down to the depths with a swiftness and suddenness that seemed impossible for such a monstrosity. She didn't need to breathe, she remembered, as the moonlight above the surface started to fade and the water pressure began to build. Once she got her bearings, she slipped out of its grasp with relative ease. Upon sensing her escape, the kraken turned its head and she got to see one of its eyes. It dwarfed her whole body and its red light bathed her, almost threatening to burn her, and the sea life all around them, most of it nightmarish in its own right. Fearlessly, she dove towards it. It positioned its enormous beak to receive her, opening into a maw that managed to be blacker still, even in the depths of the shadow-choked ocean.
One wrong move, and she was dead. Still, she did not hesitate and did not fear. She bit down hard on its slimy gnarled flesh. Seconds later, it crushed her, slamming one of its own tentacles into its own head in order to get her. She let it happen, letting her flesh and bones smash apart. She was the blood, only and always the blood, and she remained even as it feasted on the chunks of her that it could pluck from the water. Intuiting her powers better than she perhaps ever had, she entered its body, through one of the tiny wounds she made with her teeth. It seemed to realise what she was doing before long and it tried to pry her out but it had no appendage small enough.
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She gorged herself on its panic and rage and drained its vile blood. Within an hour, its gigantic body had been reduced to a shell and she exploded out of it. 'I am the blood,' she raged, her voice a psychic echo across the water, as she arose. Her blood was now over a hundred times its original volume and she used it to fashion herself a new body. At its core, it remained familiar, with her old face and body but she added massive leathery wings and long retractable barbed whips within her arms. She began to use them, immediately, snatching up nightmares, pulling them towards her and draining them dry, as soon as she made landfall. The nightmarish jungle she found herself in, where even the trees and the earthworms were twisted monstrosities, told her that she was somewhere beyond the wall.
In a sense, she was where she'd always wanted to be. She could be a hunter or a nightmare, or both. She could be a weapon or a person. In her wake, she cut down trees and carved up the earth in search of every last nightmarish morsel. It was not long before she encountered a group of elves and had a real fight on her hands. Well-armed and well-armoured, fearless before her and organised into a strict hierarchy, they misidentified her as a vampire and wasted crucial time trying to burn her with silver. As soon as they realised it wasn't working, however, they resorted to more traditional methods.
The swordsmen slashed at her as she dove at them and the archers peppered her with arrow fire. They kept up the pressure, even as they noticed that it wasn't working, in order to facilitate a delaying action. They sent off a messenger on horseback to retrieve reinforcements and she let them think he'd got away but sent out a droplet of blood to follow him. Once he was out of sight, it crawled up his nose and into his bloodstream. Within seconds, he was a corpse, eventually falling from his horse and the blood snaked its way back to her as she fought the others. It took her a while, as she insisted on fully exsanguinating each of them in turn, and she genuinely admired their combat prowess, but they were all eventually slain and she stole bits and pieces of their leather armour that she liked. With a small space carved out, free of nightmares, she spent the rest of the night in restful contemplation.
She was a little curious as to where Liana had ended up but in no great rush to be reunited with her. Most of her time was spent dwelling on her brother and the life he would lead. She wondered whether he'd be permitted to be king when his time came or if he'd even make it to such an age. His rank, she suspected, would keep him safer than most but it was hard not to imagine John's hunters, or a like-minded group, tracking him down and killing him, prince or not. She didn't know whether she wanted to save him. She'd never transferred any of her resentments onto him, growing up, but he still represented a life she could never have. Her step-mother had forced her out, for better and for worse. He was just a child, however, and she still felt very strongly that children shouldn't be harmed. A dark thought suggested that she wouldn't feel so strongly, had her master compelled her to cross that line, but she shook it away.
Looking out into the darkness, she saw hundreds of pairs of red eyes all keeping a respectable distance. She was no longer in the land of the trueborn, she realised. The nightmares here more often came with a long pedigree. Just before dawn, she went back on the hunt, and the eyes scattered. Most of her prey were shades, spawned from the great whirling mass of shadow all around. Others were tastier, however, including a vampire. She was clad in the armour of a soldier, wielded a sword and spoke of herself as a veteran of the Nightmare War. When she landed a solid slash across Laurel's new flesh and got her skin burned by the spray of blood, she wailed. 'Dhampir filth!'
Laurel nodded and the duel resumed. The vampire did a decent job of fending off her whip attacks and shielding herself from any more splatters of blood but, in the end, she had no real way to counter her powers. All it took was a single droplet to get through and it burned her heart away. Laurel got a lot of satisfaction from draining her dry and leaving her remains for the rising sun. Other nightmares she faced were just as powerful, but generally less intelligent, such as ogres and trolls. Several days and nights passed before she found any other signs of civilisation.
When she finally stumbled across it, it was like nothing she'd ever seen. A city, made of shadow, in the heart of the jungle. Its towers and walls were made of oily black stone and its streets shimmered like watery ink. It was home to shades and ghosts, spectres and other things clinging to existence by a thread. But its true citizens, the builders and maintainers of it, were dreamlings. She'd heard so many tales of the dreamling tribes but this was like none she'd ever encountered. The dreamlings here were pale skinned, white as chalk, and even their eyes were palest pink. They wore thin shawls and gowns and commanded even the mightiest shades to part wherever they walked, coming and going from their jet black homes. She kept herself out of sight as she explored the strange place and learned their habits.
They seemed to revere spirits, especially ghosts, whilst tolerating shades as a rough approximation, and subsisted on fleshier nightmares such as gremlins. Laurel could not understand what the rulers of the city spoke of, most of the time, as they seemed to allude to manoeuvres in the Nightmare War and their own uneasy neutrality. The common folk, on the other hand, seemed very human. They were born in the city and vast majority of them knew no other kind of life. To them, it seemed like a glorious thing for a son of theirs to become a soldier and fight in the name of some half-mad ghost and none of them saw any harm in their young children playing with shades as though they were puppies.
Laurel did not know whether she should be a friend or foe of the city of shadows until the war drums started up and dreamling scouts reported the massing of an elf army on their borders. Fear swept through the leadership as they faced the prospect of a siege. She drank it all in but, nevertheless, decided to be the difference-maker the city desperately needed.
