Laurel had hoped to sneak up on them but the elves could smell her blood.

  'Vampire!' the call rang out and they readied themselves to face her. Rather, they readied themselves to fight the lesser creature they believed her to be.

  She met the vanguard in a whirlwind of blood and death, her blood whips smashing their armour and bisecting them. Trusting her powers now more than ever, she let out a hundred tiny droplets of blood. Each one chose a corpse and seized its blood. Then, when she called her blood back with her mind, the blood of the elves came with it and she was able to exsanguinate an entire battalion in seconds. She didn't even have to taste it. The power of elvish blood coursed through her veins and she warped her body further, creating a carapace of needle-sized armour plates spread across her body. When the rest of the army caught up to her, she unleashed these needles. They found their marks and she began to drink. Within seconds, the army had been decimated.

  They fought back with all the tactics they'd developed for vampires. They blanketed her with silver-tipped arrows and she didn't even try to evade them. They shot her with flaming arrows and she extinguished them with her blood. Poison arrows she laughed off and, when their swordsmen closed in on her, she cut them to ribbons with her whips. As the battle progressed, she continued whittling them down with her needles, draining the blood of dozens of them at a time and growing ever stronger. When they began to throw down their weapons and surrender, she had to stop herself from carrying on. For a while, she didn't even know what to do.

  Eventually, she spoke. 'I am Laurel Blackheart, I am a dhampir, here to win the Nightmare War for the human race, and you are all my prisoners.'

  They were confounded by her words but acknowledged her nevertheless and assented to her terms. A woman, seemingly a noble or a general on account of her fancier armour, spoke for them. 'You are the King's daughter, then?'

  'Yes,' she replied, though the notion seemed strange to her now.

  'Where will you take us? Beneath the wall, to the Teardrop Island?' She realised, as soon as the woman asked, that she had no interest in going home.

  'You were about to attack that dreamling city, were you not? I'll take you there.'

  The woman scowled. 'Then have some mercy and kill us now.'

  'I don't understand.'

  A strange look of recognition passed through the elf woman's shiny red eyes. 'Those ghost worshippers eat elves.'

  She hadn't realised that at all and had just assumed they restricted their diet to animalistic nightmares, such as gremlins. 'Then, I shall take you to another dreamling tribe. I will not bring you south of the wall.'

  Relying on her own prisoners to tell her where to go was not ideal but she was confident that she could survive any ambush they might lead her into and, in such an event, she'd at least be free of them. She flew alongside them as they marched in a line, three men wide. Her prisoners numbered about two hundred, though some were wounded and died along the way. The marching took hours but her prisoners gave no complaint. She took the time to observe and examine them. Elves looked quite human but their features were all just slightly elongated, not enough to make them uncanny but enough to make it clear that they were not simply common dreamlings. Their skin tones were off as well, palest pink through to jet black in an almost greyscale. They stood a few inches taller than humans, on average, and tended towards slender builds, even among their elite warriors.

  'What's your name?' she asked the elf woman who led the group.

  'Aila,' she said, without looking up at her, 'I am King Alre's sixteenth daughter.' She'd heard of an elf named Alre, a leader of the nightmares during their initial attack. Elves were long-lived, so it was possibly the same one. Either way, it explained why she'd assumed some kind of leadership position. 'Laurel is a pretty name,' she continued, unprompted, 'but hardly fitting for a dhampir.'

  'Why not?'

  'You deserve a monstrous name, to fit your monstrous form, like the names the dragons have.'

  Laurel knew the names of the legendary dragons, of course, but dismissed the idea. 'I am a person,' her mother's words seemed hollow coming from the mouth of her new form, however. So, she shrunk herself down, and resumed her old appearance, letting the excess blood float as particulate matter in the air around her. It took minutes rather than hours and she knew that even that short delay was the result of psychical barriers that she would eventually push beyond. The lack of clothes and lack of hair spoiled the look somewhat, but she still resembled her old self in fine detail.

  'Now, that's a pretty girl who suits her pretty name,' Aila said, making her smile. 'You're young, I take it?'

  'I'll be nineteen soon,' she said. She could piece the date together from her eidetic memory but she hadn't really thought about her age or her birthday since her grandfather's funeral and her expulsion from her family.

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  'That's rough,' Aila said, apparently having read her mind, 'so, you're not here in the King's name?'

  Letting a prisoner of war read her mind seemed like a terrible idea but she gave no objection. 'I'm here on my own terms, to fight for the greater good.'

  'Sweet girl,' Aila said, adding nothing more. The phrase troubled her and she let her thoughts dwell on her time with her master. 'It seems like you've always been a pawn in someone else's game, from the moment you were conceived.'

  'You're going to try to convince me to switch sides aren't you?'

  'Not at all,' Aila insisted, 'my own side is not so different from yours. I have fought in my father's pointless war for eighty long years. I envy you, in truth, and the power you have. You don't have to fight, if you don't want to. Given time, I think you'll understand.'

  Aila looked great for her age, like a woman barely in her twenties.

  'I'm glad you think so,' Aila teased, 'now, here's where I reveal that I've been leading you deep into the middle of nowhere.' Laurel should've suspected as much, but she'd been distracted by her thoughts. 'Nowhere dangerous, certainly not by your standards, but also nowhere near any ghastly dreamling tribe. We can negotiate the terms of our release here.' Her tone was hoity and presumptuous but Laurel didn't fault her for it. The woman had read her mind and learned what she could get away with.

  'Why should I release you?'

  'You don't have the facilities to imprison us yourself, you're unwilling to return home and you don't have the slightest idea which dreamling tribes would keep to any agreement you want to make. You've involved yourself in a war you don't understand. And, look, that's your right. The rule of the jungle applies here. You're strong enough to kill whoever you want, and that's all that really matters. We're all quite grateful that you spared our lives but it's beyond time for you to bring this farce to a close.'

  Laurel knew she was right, and hated that fact. She'd killed large numbers of people on a whim. That was much more monstrous than the flesh she'd crafted herself. 'Alright,' she said, wanting to save face, 'on one condition.'

  'I accept,' Aila replied, having read her mind and understood that Laurel's condition was that she would remain prisoner and her subordinates would be free to go. A few thoughts went through her mind that she'd rather not have shared. 'Still trying to find another Sarah?'

  'Yes,' she admitted, since there was no use lying. Once the rest of the elves had gone, she began to give her prisoner orders. 'Alright, you'll teach me everything I need to know about this land and the Nightmare War. We can travel together until I'm satisfied, then I'll let you go.'

  'Fair enough,' Aila said, seeming bemused more than anything. 'Perhaps you'll come to regret massacring my men, when all the ins and outs are explained to you.'

  'I doubt it,' she replied, a little unsure. She had no real sympathy for nightmares, even though she'd lived as one and even thought of herself as one. If Aila thought much of that, she didn't say. 'First, I want to see the dreamling tribes.'

  'You think they'll accept you,' Aila said, with a wry smile, 'but they won't.'

  'I don't care,' Laurel lied, 'just take me to them.'

  Aila rolled eyes at that, 'most of them are nomadic. I can take you to the settled ones but you'd have more luck searching for the others on your own.' The elf seemed to scheme for a while, 'I'll take you to the northern tribe, first. They're led by a dhampir.'

  Laurel's eyes lit up.

  Aila chuckled at that, 'don't get your hopes up.'

  With that, they set off. Laurel eventually scavenged some clothes and they travelled on foot. It would've been much quicker to fly but she wanted to get a proper lay of the land. Plus, walking made her feel a little more human, even with her blood swirling in the air around her. It was impossible to distinguish between the unnatural darkness and the real shadows in the jungle landscape. Every root and vine was alive with nightmarish hatred, every last thing was designed to startle and terrify any human being that might happen to be travelling through.

  'This is the real Nightmare War, Laurel. It's why humanity can never win. This place, every bit of it, is hostile to human life. The soil can't be cultivated, the dream creatures can't be farmed or hunted for meat. Even the gremlins here are so much harder to eat than the ones back home. Any human civilisation that tried to exist here would fall in short order or be forced to become nightmares themselves.'

  'We could cleanse the land,' she said, not really believing it, 'and banish the darkness.'

  'It would take stronger magic then any this world has ever known. I am not speaking as a partisan, you know? I don't think my own race will win. The dreamlings are too prone to infighting. The vampires can't win and don't even really want to. It's the land. The very ground beneath of our feet, you can feel it writhe with nightmarish power. One day, it will swallow us all and the the planet will be transformed, once and for all, into an inky black orb. Things like you might survive for a while, orbiting it and drinking in any lingering residue of emotion but then you'd starve and its victory would be complete.'

  Laurel struggled with the notion and tried to find a way to counter it. 'Moon beasts,' she said, 'someone could dream up a solution. Angels could come and purge the land with holy fire.'

  Aila laughed at that, 'very funny.' As they trudged on, night to night, the weather started to change. The winds grew cold, snow and freezing rain became more common. Laurel knew that she shouldn't really feel it but she chose to. 'Remarkable,' Aila said to her, one day, when the rains were especially harsh, 'you're really committed to this delusion.'

  'I'm half-human,' she said, more to herself than to the elf.

  'A long time ago, maybe.' Eventually, the tangles of vines and thick canopy of living trees gave way to open air and rocky snow-capped terrain. As they began their ascent up the mountain Aila had directed them to, a wondrous sight came into view. 'That's their dhampir master,' Aila said, as they stared at the gigantic creature hovering above a fortress built into the mountain. Its wingspan must've been forty feet and its flesh was armoured in dark red scales. The shape of its body was only vaguely human and its head was that of a monstrous bat. 'Last chance to turn back,' the elf said, obviously knowing that it wouldn't change her mind.

  Laurel had always imagined other dhampirs as the half-humans she liked to think of herself as. Even after she'd crafted herself that monstrous body, she'd continued to assume they would live among the dreamlings as equals, not looking too dissimilar. Still, this was an opportunity to find real kinship and she would not pass it up.