Slumber
The woman moved through the manor like a whisper that had learned to take shape. Dust did not dare settle where she walked; shadows seemed to step aside.
Her eyes large and dark, set in a face as pale as moonlight. Beautiful, yes. Haunting, absolutely. The kind of presence that makes you question whether she’s a person or a spectre.
Her name, Kyia, though it hadn’t been her first name. The first one was buried under centuries of obedience, traded for power and a promise she still regretted making.
The manor—her prison, her master’s shell—sat at the edge of nowhere, surrounded by ash trees that refused to bloom. Inside its cold ribs and deep beneath the foundations, lay the Casket of Andreas, wrought of black glass and ancient sigils that flickered with a heartbeat far too slow to belong to the living.
Andreas had been asleep for centuries. His age before the slumber unknown to all but himself… perhaps thousands of years.
Kyia was the only one to whom he revealed his true name, the only one who carried his hunger in her blood. The others—the so-called vampire courts of the new age—believed he was myth. Conveniently forgotten. Even the oldest among them spoke of Andreas like a fable, a warning whispered over chalices of blood.
Every seventh night Kyia descended into the crypt. The air there was dense, flavoured with iron and memory. Candles refused to stay lit, so she worked by the glow of the runes etched into the casket’s surface. They pulsed faintly when she approached, recognizing the diluted spark of his essence in her veins.
She retrieved a small vial and poured its contents of blood into the grooves that fed the casket. The runes brightened, then dimmed again, sated for now.
She’d been doing this ritual for 200 years. Too long, even for something not quite human. Her skin hadn’t aged a day past the night she was chosen, but her soul carried the weight of every year she’d waited. Sometimes, when she caught her reflection, she didn’t recognize the thing staring back.
Above her, the world changed. Empires fell, cities glowed, humans turned their myths into entertainment. But here—beneath the stone and secrecy—time obeyed only him.
She visited the the mortal world only when necessary, to obtain small amounts of blood for her sleeping master and to satiate her own hunger, after all, she still had the remnants of human in her veins.
Andreas had given her only a fraction of his power, yet even that made her formidable beyond measure. The eldest vampires were insects compared to her. Her own kind—the familiars—barely registered as life. Occasionally, a witch or warlock would sense something strange, but curiosity rarely survived long. She was untraceable, untouchable… invincible.
It terrified her.
Andreas had forbidden her from revealing herself. He’d once said her blood was too valuable to risk falling into the wrong hands—and his, even more so.
In the past, during war and chaos, he could feed freely, his thirst hidden amid the carnage. The endless lives it took to sustain an ancient like him had become both unbearable and impossible to conceal. But the world had changed. Conflict still existed, yes, but not in the old way—not with battlefields ripe for the taking, not with thousands of nameless souls waiting to be drained.
So he chose to vanish into slumber, burying his hunger beneath centuries of sleep. In this state, he could survive for months on just a few droplets of blood.
Kyia suspected that there was something more to the reason he’d withdrawn. There was something else beneath the stillness of his sleep—something he had never confessed, but she had never dared to ask.
And now here she was on a warm summer’s night. The year 1984. 600 years after her mortal birth. 582 of those spent serving Andreas, although he had lay dormant for the last 200 years. She walked among humans, unseen, the night warm and full of energy. The faint smell of honey blossoms hung in the air. How different it all was compared to when she was a child. The gift of immortality had given her the opportunity to watch as the world morphed and changed into something unrecognisable from the simple days of old.
The clothes were bold, with much less fabric and many colours. The hair’s styles were Even bolder, untamed and sculpted with so much hair spray that a lighted match would prove dangerous. Kyia stepped backwards into the shadows and watched as a group of boisterous teenagers spilled down the street, voices tumbling over one another in bursts of laughter, their energy crackling through the dark like static waiting for a spark. She longed for the interaction, for at least a modicum of attention or acknowledgement, a conversation with someone other than herself. Instead, she roamed the earth like a ghost, a lonely existence, with only the faint pulse of her masters blood in her veins for company. No one ever remembered the pale slender woman with the haunted eyes that walked among the shadows like a figment of the imagination.. Even the unnatural beings who crossed her path could not see her through the mist of sorcery that cloaked her. Kyia had no one to blame but herself. It was her own choices that had led her to this lonely fate.
She continued through the shadows, watching people as they milled about her, oblivious to her existence.
And then she saw him.
A man standing across the street, 6ft tall or more, with clothes that didn’t quite fit the twentieth century, He shouldn’t have seen her. Her concealment was the kind that even gods would overlook. Yet across the road beneath the yellow pulse of dying lamps, he stood—a thing pretending to be beautiful. His face was almost perfect, almost human, and that was the horror of it. The symmetry went a breath too far, the skin too smooth, the smile stretched just beyond what bone should allow.
His eyes caught the light wrong. They reflected, not shone—flat, like polished stone over something shifting beneath. His hair moved as if underwater, each strand obeying some rhythm the wind didn’t know. Every gesture was graceful in theory but unsettling in practice, like a puppet trained too well.
The longer she looked, the more her instincts rebelled. He wasn’t beautiful; he was the idea of beauty copied by something that had only ever seen it from a distance, something that didn’t quite understand how human faces worked. When his gaze found her, the disguise around her trembled, the air warping like glass under heat.
His smiled widened, unnaturally so, sending a shiver down her spine, and for a moment, she glimpsed the thing beneath the imitation. Not ugliness, but evil: beauty stripped of its soul, a mask stretched over an abyss. She stepped back in fear, hearing his laughter as she did so. Then the lamplight blinked, and he was gone, leaving behind the sick certainty that she had just been studied.
Ice cold fear filled her veins. Would Andreas have sensed this? His current state of stasis didn’t mean he was unaware. On many occasions she had felt a push of energy, emotion or some kind of warning, but now she felt nothing from her master. No shift in thoughts, no nudge in her mind, no awareness of this encounter… only the slow, steady beat of his heart.
Kyia fled. Moving swiftly through the night, the forest swallowed her every step, branches whispering her name as if they too had seen what she should never have been seen by. Her heart—if that ancient thing still deserved the name—beat once, twice, then stuttered into silence again, terrified to draw attention.
The manor’s outline rose ahead, skeletal against the dying moonlight. Every window was blind, every door a mouth sealed in mourning. It had been her cage for two centuries, and yet, it was the only place that made the rest of the world seem worse.
She had thought herself beyond fear. After all, what could frighten a creature who had served a vampire older than most empires? But the memory clung to her like frost. That thing in the street—the shape that mimicked beauty but wore it wrong—had looked at her. Not as mortals looked at shadows or ghosts, but saw her through her glamour, through the years of perfecting the skill of invisibility. Its eyes had been deep and endless, like reflections of something burning behind glass.
Inside the manor, silence pressed in, heavy and deliberate. The air was thick with the scent of candle wax and old stone. Down the main corridor, her master slept beneath layers of marble and spellwork, the vampire’s slumber deep as death, patient as the grave. She felt him even now—an ache in her veins, a whisper at the edge of thought.
Kyia’s hands trembled when she touched the carved door to his resting chamber. She hated that. She hadn’t trembled in decades. Not when the hunters came. Not when she buried the last of her bloodline. But tonight she felt… exposed.
She could still hear the demon’s voice, though it had never spoken aloud. It had smiled at her—a wrong, too-perfect smile that promised recognition, ruin, maybe even kinship. That was what terrified her most: how familiar it had felt. The way its beauty mimicked what her master once was before eternity hollowed him out.
She descended into the crypt and the air grew colder, ancient. She hurried to the glass sarcophagus at the centre where her master lay within, still as a prayer unanswered. His name, Andreas, hung in her mind like a chain.
She knelt beside him, the cold biting through the thin fabric of her dress.
“I was seen,” she whispered. The words sounded blasphemous here. “Something else saw me.”
She expected nothing—he would not wake, not yet. His slumber had stretched nearly two centuries, and she had learned to survive the silence. But tonight, she thought she felt the faintest stir in the air, like a breath drawn in a dream.
