When the bedroom lights go out, Sibble begins getting his brushes ready. Each is a tiny thing – eyelashes and sealing wax – gathered from cheeks and writing desks in the small hours. By the time your eyes are closed, he has strapped on his tiny paint pots and scampered onto the light fixture. From there it is tiny, precise brush-strokes of glittering phosphor spreading swathes of stars across the ceiling. Here and there he adds small flourishes – galaxies and nebulae that would seem to spin and swirl were your eyes open to see them. By the time the rays of dawn seep into the room the glitter has all but faded, and Sibble has replenished his supplies and retired to his snuggery.

The cobbled streets leading away from the harbour twisted and coiled like brambles. A left turn, then another, and another, and another, and rather than being back where they started, they would find themselves in an alcove off a passageway off an alley off a lane. “In here,” she would say, or “What’s down this way?” he would say, and they would find themselves in stores selling sugared candies in the perfect hand-crafted shapes of flowers, or delis stocking olives of every varied shade and hue. Soon their only sense of direction came from the smell of salt air or the excited murmur of people from the direction of the harbour, though that could have been the anchovies drying in parade formation on a balcony, or the pet store with parrots in cages covered with dark velvet hanging from every beam.

Hidden amongst the undulations of rock, the river splits in two. One of the branches winds out of the barren hills, and on to the sea. The other cascades down a cleft into the earth. Along its course a spray of plants has sprouted, starting with small grasses and flowers in tiny crevices. Just visible below, standing at the entrance, are the heads of small trees. Further down, in the deep, where the sediment of countless centuries has accreted, grows a vast subterranean forest. When night falls, the soft luminous glow of lichen lights the underside of spanning branches and thick vines. Through the caverns, birdsong burbles along below the splashing of water, and a soft, occasional snuffle permeates the undergrowth. No matter how still you are, no matter how long you wait, the only visible sign of life will be the twitching of leaves, and the sporadic staccato drip of water from the rock above makes even that suspect.

Inch by inch, hour by hour, his hammer and chisel turned the rock into tiny splinters that stung at his hands and face. What had once been a simple overhang was now a network of tunnels and chambers burrowed into the cliff face. Some rooms were small as closets – no more than alcoves in the tunnel walls – others were echoing halls, sumptuous bedchambers, or bathrooms atinkle with the sound of natural running water. Every time he finished carving out a room, he would rest for a day and wander through the other chambers, looking for signs of life. Every time, no matter how magnificent his workmanship, no matter how many times he checked, there were no people to be found.

After many moons aback his horse, the veil of distance lifted, and Ænor first beheld Yggdrasil, the World Tree. From eastern horizon to western horizon, its trunk cleaved to the Firmament with great gnarled knots unfurling into filament-thin roots drinking in life-giving draughts of æther. Far, far above, its vast leaves of cerulean blue whispered the soft murmurs of time. Under the shade of the boughs the luminous fruit could be seen to sparkle and shimmer. Somewhere on one of those worlds, along one and only one path of trunk and branch and twig and stem, she was waiting for him. He shouldered his pack and began to climb.

By the time my sight had returned, several things had become clear to me. Firstly, my daughter’s safety was paramount to me, and that safety was best served by keeping her away from both the pit master and myself. Secondly, the pit master would be on our trail by dusk, if not sooner. Clearly he would be as impaired as I in the light of day, but I knew well enough from months in his employ that his other senses more than made up the lack. He was a man — a thing — of power and influence, the best course was to get out of the city and out of the empire as quickly as possible. Aside from two rats and some numerous insects, I had heard not a sound from the house above in all the minutes it had taken me to plan our immediate action. The first thing, then, was to avail ourselves of my absent friend’s hospitality to clean the blood from our bodies, swaddle my daughter, and wrap my eyes against the light. This done, we stepped once more into the blinding day.

It was dark when I awoke. The side of my face that was pressed into the ground felt wet, though with the ferrous smell of a recent detonation heavy in the air it was hard to tell whether that wetness was water or blood. The relatively small exertion of pushing myself into a sitting position sent a shooting pain through my arm that almost caused me to black out again. My face burned as it moved through the air. Blood, then.

The darkness was absolute. There were no dim silhouettes to be picked out, just the constant kaleidoscopic flicker of randomly firing neurons behind my eyelids. I stood slowly, pawing the air over my head defensively in deference to the oppressive feeing of weight in the darkness above me. My legs held my weight without complaint, though I still patted them gingerly through what felt like jeans to be sure they were up to the task. There was a lump in each hip pocket. The right, a leather rectangle. Wallet maybe. The left, hard plastic. A phone? I fumbled the catch open and it spilled insipid blue light into the surrounding air. The floor was hard-packed dirt, the walls and ceiling rock, bolted and reinforced. From where I stood, three tunnels ran in a tee out of the circle of light. The phone beeped three times, feebly, then died, leaving me in the dark once more.

Had I been sired millennia later, I might have checked my headlong flight into the supposed oblivion of sunlight, but all I had heard of vampires were those ghost stories of things that fed on men in the dark that have followed us from plain to cave to hut to house to skyscraper. At that point I had not even a name for myself. Even in my flight I realised this lack, realised that I was fleeing from the one creature that knew what I now was. But I fled still, in my fury preferring ignorance to any enlightenment garnered from that fiend. In time these delusions of morality and distinction left me; such things are hard to keep in the knowledge that one is as fiendish as any other.

In the bald light of day, wild in my fury, chin caked with dried blood, bleeding baby girl under my arm, I must have looked a horror loosed from Hades. Certainly there were screams. Footsteps fled from my passage. I saw none of it. I was blind from the moment the sun hit my eyes. Not the blindness of midnight, soft and almost comforting, but the blindness of cold steel thrust through the eyesocket, grating on bone with its passage. I ran regardless, bouncing off beggars, fruit stalls and walls of stone. With ears and nose and hands I found my way to a back alley and an empty cellar. The cellar of an old colleague, gone for months on the trade routes at this time of year. There, still blind, I sat in the dirt to take stock. My daughter began to cry.

Down at the base of the sea-cliffs, more than half submerged at high tide, was the dark mouth of a cave. It was hidden around a kick in the rock, so that sunlight never penetrated more than a few scant meters, and impossible to see unless you were standing right in front of it. A strange heat and the smell of decay emanated from the opening, dissipating quickly in the sea air. It was the kind of place the locals of a town with a less intelligent populous might have called haunted. None living in the town had been into that darkness beyond an arm’s reach of the sunlight, but they all felt with an unspoken concert that it was the kind of place they would not like their children going on a dare. So it was not called haunted. It was not much spoken of at all, and were the things that crawled and dripped deep in the darkness capable of knowing or understanding this, it would have pleased them.

“Marcus Avitus,” the pit master bared his teeth. “You are reborn!”
“I am destroyed. By your hand.”
“And so? Your debt brought you to me, and in turn I have handed you the most marvelous destruction ever to befall a man. Show some gratitude!”
“And what of my wife? My daughter? Do you bring her to me as a gesture of good faith, or as a meal?”
“She is… insurance. I have invested much in your training and transformation. You young are so full of vitriol and folly and unrestrained emotion. It would be foolish to risk everything on the whim of your impotent fury.”
All through this talk I had been sizing up the monster that stood before me. My gladiator’s eye saw more than ever it had on the floor of the arena. His strength I gauged from the way he held my daughter, his speed from the fractions of a second it took his eyes to register emotion at my words and his hands to adjust to the squirming of my baby girl. I saw an opportunity presenting itself and, calmly and thoroughly, ran through the options and implications in the time it took him to speak.
“My mortal eyes had not seen how complacent power has made you,” I snarled, “for my fury is anything but impotent!”
Bald surprise showed on his face for only an instant, but in that time I had torn my daughter from his grip. Too roughly, and leaving chunks of skin under his fingernails, but alive and safer perhaps with me than with him. I was out the door before her heart beat next, and halfway down the corridor before the next. The pit master gave chase, but he had invested much in the illusion of his mortality, and I had little left to lose. I knocked aside servants and gladiators alike, finding my bearings quickly as I ran, and soon enough was shouldering aside a heavy oaken door to burst onto the busy sunlit street beyond.