A thousand tendrils of blood crossed the threshold of the wall. They writhed through the earth, killing without hesitation. It was a slow, grinding, process that took months but it was irreversible. Mile by mile, the world was cleansed. In the final stretch, the Nightmare War was won. The elves made peace but every other trace of nightmarish pseudo-civilisation was brought low. Laurel's father got to be the first reigning King in a hundred years to walk upon the ground beyond the wall. The honour of planting the first real tree, however, was hers. As she walked out before the gathered crowd, mostly lords and soldiers, and dropped the seed into its bed, she read their minds. Some of them knew, or believed they knew, that she was responsible for what had happened, whereas others only vaguely suspected it was the case.

  Still, a small number believed that it was the work of a divine blessing that had finally saw fit to the cleanse the land. All of them, in their own way, were grateful. Part of her was happy with the pretence and loved playing the part of the King's formerly wayward daughter now brought into line, but her darker side wanted recognition. Humanity should bow to her, pray to her, love and fear her. Instead, they merely applauded her as she stepped back in line by her father's side. Many things were said that she paid very little attention to but the general thrust of it was that the King intended to claim as much of the land as he could and would not be respecting any of the borders that had existed prior to the war. It seemed reasonable to her and, of course, to all the King's supporters, but she imagined that it would cause a stir back home, with many prominent nobles expecting to return their ancient bloodlines to their ancestral thrones.

  Laurel did not really see much of the colonisation over the coming months and years but she did feel it, spread as she was across the entire planet. The last challenge to her new order arose over a year later, when the legendary dragons came down from their mountain peaks to scorch the earth and destroy what little had been built. They were tremendously powerful and succeeded in burning many of her tendrils to ash, cutting off about a tenth of her mass by the time she could mount a counterattack. Once she did, however, she simply snaked particulates of blood into their veins and exsanguinated them. In the end, more people died from their massive carcasses crashing to the ground than to their initial onslaught. Absorbing their power was worth it, she reasoned, because it made her invincible.

  The thought struck her, one day, as she gazed idly through a window, that she could barely even be said to be in the room. The millionth of her that was in the parlour, listening to her friends witter on about something or other, was insignificant compared to the vast network of tendrils beneath the earth and the particulates of blood that floated through the air. 'Are you alright?' Jenny said.

  'Yes, I'm fine,' she replied, getting down from the sill. Jenny was tall and skinny and wore spectacles. She fit in quite poorly and struggled to know what to say or what to wear but made up for it, in Laurel's eyes, by being less fearful. 'I was just lost in thought.'

  'I often get lost in thoughts,' the girl said. Her thoughts primarily revolved around her studies, however, especially mathematics. She was one of the rare girls with an indulgent enough father to be allowed a higher education. 'What were you thinking about?'

  'Life outside these walls, the world turning all around us.' If she focused hard enough, she could actually feel the planet spinning but it made her dizzy. 'Nothing important.'

  'Well, I think it's quite important for the world to keep on turning,' Jenny said, with a smile, and they joined the other girls for charades. Once she'd sufficiently entertained her coterie, she spent her late evening, as always, with Tamsin.

  'Apart from the elves, and the various creatures under their protection,' Laurel said, after wiping some blood from her mouth, 'you might be the only nightmare left in the whole world.'

  The vampire smirked at that, 'you still like to think you're not, like, a nightmare yourself?' She drank greedily from the prisoner Laurel's father had sent them, some murderer set to be executed.

  'I like to think that I'm something else.'

  'Yeah?'

  'An angel.'

  Tamsin giggled at that, and hiccoughed from drinking too quickly, 'maybe,' she said, 'maybe.'

  Unsure where the feelings were coming from, she announced, 'I'm glad I have you, though, to ground me.'

  The vampire simply entered another giggling fit and she had to shut her up with a kiss. Their relationship was awkward and strained but it never seemed like it was in danger of falling apart. False friends came and went, her father grew older and older, she felt herself becoming more alien and eldritch but Tamsin remained an unchanging fixture of her immortal life. Years passed by and that held true. Eventually, the King forbid her from being seen in public altogether, when she could no longer get away with simply being said to have youthful features. She could, of course, have made herself look like whatever she wanted but, in the grand scheme of things, she saw little point.

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  Either she withdrew from public life at the age of forty, on account of the fact that she barely looked twenty, or she did so once she reached her hundred-and-tens without dying. When she was in her sixties, he died and a son from his second marriage became King. She didn't seek her half-brother's permission to be seen, however. She simply attended her father's funeral and wept. She wore a veil but her youthful beauty still astonished onlookers. After that, Laurel and Tamsin spent most of their time travelling, generally through the woods and always at night. She was one hundred and forty by the time all of her siblings had passed away and, though the crown remained in her family, she felt less and less of a personal connection and loyalty to the kingdom she protected.

  At the age of two hundred, she seemed to intuit exactly what the other dhampirs had felt, a sense that they were owed recognition and deference for keeping their people safe. Still, for a hundred more years, she continued her life as a simple traveller. Always present but never seen. Centuries passed by like seasons. She reached the age of one thousand and one hundred before she decided to rule. At first, she merely expected deference wherever she went but, soon enough, she was demanding homage from kings and queens. The world turned from one millennium to the next and she eventually found herself drawn to obey the primordial part of her brain that demanded she present herself to her subjects. She hovered above the world in myriad forms, in something that almost felt like sleep.

  She continued to live in her true form with Tamsin but she found that it took less and less concentration to maintain such a presence. 'I am the blood,' she said, a psychic call sent through the minds of her subjects. They feared her and loved her, worshipped her and prayed to her. She granted their wishes if she felt they were worthy, wrote their laws and attended their great festivals. Five thousand years passed by and her influence reached its apex. From then on, she withdrew. Fewer prayers were answered, fewer appearances were made, except for the forms that hovered far above, unmoving and unchanging. Ten thousand years passed by and, at some indiscernible point, she lost track of Tamsin. It panicked her at first but the feeling faded. By fifty thousand years, the world was unrecognisable. Whether out of apathy or disgust she let her forms dissolve.

  A few millennia later, they'd stopped fearing her. There were so many of them by then, however, that she didn't notice, since they all still feared many other things. A hundred thousand years passed by and she let the nightmares return. Where fervent belief in her lingered, she gave protection, but such places were few and far between. For the first time in her immortal life, she slept. A million years passed by before she woke up. The nightmares had grown fat by then and she ate them. She parted the land and swallowed them, boiled the oceans and lashed across the sky with a billion tendrils. Once the world was purged, she began to starve. She cried out in pain and true fear, a psychic screech across reality. Then, in pure agony, she collapsed into herself and finally died.

  Laurel gasped, waking up in a cold sweat. She reached out to find Jenny by her side. 'I dreamed,' she cried, 'I was dreaming.'

  'People do tend to,' Jenny said, without even stirring.

  'How much was a dream?' she asked no one, as she slipped out of bed. Her mother's portrait was still there and her own eyes still glowed red in the vanity mirror. Her sense of time flooded back and realised when and where she was. She massaged her forehead to vanish the headache before remembering that she didn't need to feel anything. 'I am the blood,' she repeated to herself, but those words seemed treacherous now. She glanced up at her mother and remembered her words. 'You're a person,' she said to herself. 'I need to feel like a person.'

  Jenny sat up at that. 'Isn't dreaming what people do?'

  'Yes,' she replied, uncertainly, before slipping back into her bed. For the first time in her life, she fought the urge to close her eyes. 'Hold me,' she said, true vulnerability clear in her voice and her friend complied. In the end, however, no dreams came. Her sleep, once again, was pretended sleep. The morning after, she thrust herself into her fake life, choosing to take joy in the company of her friends, trying to care about the petty things that troubled them. She went horse riding and played crochet and ate real food. Fruits were the only thing she could keep down, but she gave tea a decent try. She let Tamsin eat but did not partake herself and passed the time with her in a romantic entanglement.

  She supervised the staff and tried to be gentle with them. When she retrieved one of her books, she read it one word at a time. Her father noticed the effort she put in and encouraged her, himself daring to believe that she could be human. She knew that there would still be challenges, when her family passed away, but she tried to forestall them, getting to know her younger siblings and paying closer attention to the lives of her cousins, nephews and nieces when they arrived. Eventually, it seemed to start working, and she felt less like the tendrils beneath the earth and more like the young lady in the palace parlour. The distant future remained uncertain, of course, and her eidetic memory didn't let her ever truly forget the horrible life she'd lived in her dreams, but she chose to focus on the here and now.

  Months passed until the here and now was a wedding freshly hosted by the palace. That was when she saw her, after all this time, in the flesh. Sarah stood by her husband and her four children and smiled. 'You look well,' was all Laurel could say before moving along. Reading Sarah's mind was painful, as she discovered how much the girl had been tempted to run away with her all those years ago and how devoted she now was to her children. She cried that night, hot tears falling down her cheeks, and found comfort in one of her new fake friends, who stifled her own fear in order to hold her and shush her.

  Laurel knew that she could switch off the pain at any time but she chose not to. She was a person, she reminded herself.