Does being optimistic mean you're naive? If you believe so does that make you a pessimist or a realist? If you're a realist can you have dreams? If not, does that make you hopeless? Or if you can have dreams does that make you foolish? By being foolish are you as a child? As a child are you naive? If you're naive are you forever optimistic? - By asking all these questions.... what am I?

The whole room seemed to swelter in the heat from the bath's steamy breath, sweat dripping from the stone walls, sliding down in guttering movements to puddle on the slate floor. To the touch all was cold; glass of the window, stone of the walls, porcelain of the bath and metal of the taps. All cold and yet all sweating in a mad fever. Looking down at the clear water in which I bathe I sink deeper, letting my body submerge completely. The gentle lapping cracks loudly against the bath, I can hear it like someone knocking at a door as my ears hear through liquid. Like a lurking predator I peer over the waters skin, an odd filmy feeling against my face as bubbles run up from my nose to pop beside my eye. Eventually the water comes to rest, accepting my naked body as part of it as I linger, waiting. Though waiting for what? My throat burns for air but I ignore, still waiting. But waiting for what? Death? Some kind of last moment induced epiphany? Slowly I rise up to allow my nose to draw air deeply and watch the water run from my movement - fearful of the living. What would happen if I did die now? Would I enter limbo? Simply existing as the spirits janitor?

Without a soul where was one to go?

Not a sound as my slender snow-white hand reaches up out of the blue to grasp a silver blade from the bath's rim. It grazes the porcelain as I drag it to the depths, my ears twinging with the vibrations of the water molecules. The blade is cold. A harsh contrast to the heat embracing me. The pale sun of Autumn continues to quietly shine through the frosted glass beside me, igniting the knife with a dash of white light as though somehow heavenly. When pressed to my flesh goosebumps appear, the skin cringing at the concept of pain. I smile. Ever cell doesn't want it to happen but is also an understanding that it will. It is inevitable. I do it every time. With blade as a paintbrush I draw a dark line along my left forearm, watching the flesh pucker and tear like paper as the silver slides across as though only buttering bread.

Without a soul what was one to do?

Slow and heavy it coils out the wound and into the water in oily clouds of brown. No longer fresh as it beats through my veins, instead old and drying with damnations heat. This was my own conclusion, it may not be why my blood was now brown instead of a royal blue. Such dirty blood to run through the body of a young queen. How wrong it seemed. It had taken time to change, from royal blue to deep purple, from that to vulgar crimson and finally to this diminished shade of filth. The decaying of my purity over the years, or perhaps I was merely fading into time itself. Again and again the sludge was pushed from the wound, my heart shoving the polluted poison away, banishing it to the clear blue water where it would linger a few seconds before dissolving to nothing. The arm reached out of the pools embrace and hung in the cold air, allowing the wound to clot before slowly zipping up. Not a trace. Not one. Snow white perfection left behind as though never touched.

Without a soul who was one?

A turn of three centuries it had been. Three hundred long years. 109500 days since my family died out. With the final breath of that wrinkled mouth had come the sealing of my fate to linger alone. Our once glorious and proud name run into nothing more than dust that drifts upon the dead air. Death had enjoyed too much pleasure in our house - of which remained a ruin with only a few rooms kept to liveable standards by myself. If I was to dwindle upon this wretched earth I would at least have part of my castle, my birth right. However beyond those few rooms lie nothing more than piles of stones over which weeds tangle and moss nestles a new home. Such degradation upon a home of such wonder, how wrong it all seemed.

Without a soul who was one to blame but themselves?

The string of misery had begun with an icy laugh wafting through the front door upon a stormy evening two days before my fifteenth birthday. My family and I had all known what this laugh meant but didn't look up. Death was a figure to never make eye contact with, otherwise you were seen to challenge him, that was only something a fool would do. How I laugh at that now. On that fateful night Death had reached in his hand to take three children, watching the grief crush my parents and consume their joy with that damned grin plastered upon his pasty face. He returned in the morning - to bask in his own glory I presumed. When he entered I couldn't help myself but to look. I was the last child alive, the fourth child, for some reason he had left me alone through the night. Even now I do not know whether he noticed I had looked at him and decided to punish me for it, but he had stared at me for a long moment in the morning suns rays, seeming to study my very being as those bottomless chasms bored down upon me. As the oldest I felt no fear for this demon, he had been here before to claim my grandmother. Although knowing I shouldn't, I had stared into those eyes before and did so again. I felt no fear. Was I foolish? Or brave? I do not know. Perhaps my lack of fear was what sent him from me onto my mother. As though he couldn't take me if not fearful. Arm outstretched his bony fingers ready to clasp her rigid throat, my father dismaying at his feet, begging for his wife to be spared. As the wails grew and my fathers voice broke like glass I gave out a cry, loud and pure it cut into Death and he shuddered at the sincerity.

"Take my soul. Surely this is meal enough for your hunger?"

With curiosity he turned, head tilted at an angle of consideration. My parents stood agog though I daren't look at them. As though dust falling he slowly walked towards me, arm once more outstretched, grasping for substance. Even before his waxy hand had been laid upon my young flesh I felt the cold of his touch, it seemed to radiate from him. There was no pain, only the cold.

Through the water I pulled myself up, gasping for air, my lungs aching for the oxygen I'd starved them of whilst dwindling within my memories. The room was silently listening to my breathless whimpers as I clung to the side of the bath, the cold nipping my slender fingers. I had never understood why I hadn't died when his hand clasped my throat, I had only gone cold and when opening my eyes once more found myself still within my home except everything was black and white. Only Death stood before me in full colour. He was beautiful: the dark hood a rich purple and his skin a gentle ivory, no longer did the black of the hood conceal his face, I could see every fine feature and no longer dark pits for eyes, instead two bright beautiful orbs of snow white with the colour of fresh grass in spring. I found myself speechless. At first I did indeed believe myself dead and in the presence of an angel, though he quickly explained that I wasn't. I something entirely different. No longer a human, or even a royal, I was his servant, a creature that was his. Instead of killing me he had claimed me for his own - something he has thus far refused to explain to me. From that point till the present I lived a half life, only ageing every hundred years and only then by a singular year. In two days time I would turn eighteen. For the rest of my families domain - all eighty years of it - I saw the world in monochrome, remained my fifteen year old self and watched as my family dwindled into the dust. When that final breath had left the broken body of the last of my family the world had spun for me. Colour crashed into my eyes and I felt alive again. But I wasn't.

Nor was I put to work, each time I asked what it was Death wanted me to do he would reply, "nothing." it wasn't until my seventeenth birthday that he explained that everything would be told upon my eighteenth birthday. including my purpose. For all three hundred years of my prolonged life I had wondered about my Death-day, why had Death paused and then chosen my mother? Why had such hesitation been in his face before clasping my throat? Though whenever I asked him these questions his voice would go solemn, explaining all would be revealed upon my eighteenth birthday. Two days. Only two more days.

With a sigh I sank back down into the water and stared through the speckled glass, in life I had been stubborn, optimistic and naive. I had been a child. But what was I know? I was one who saw the glass half empty and always waited for the worst, I have watched my home fall to the ground stone by stone whilst I myself become a phantom of the land. A myth for tourists and the local village at the bottom of the hill. What am I? A young queen? A slave? A fool? A demon? Or simply me? Alice Gray.