Provence, France — Autumn, 1965
The vineyards burned gold that evening.
Not with fire, but with the kind of light that arrives only at the end—when the sun drapes itself low over the hills and the world seems to hold its breath. The grapes had already been harvested. Dry leaves rattled across the soil like forgotten confessions. Even the wind moved gently, as if unwilling to disturb what remained. Somewhere beyond the olive groves, a church bell rang out over the valley, each note echoing like a slow heartbeat.
In the distance, something moved—briefly—in the vines. A flash of antlers, then stillness.
I remember thinking:
This is how endings should be.
Not loud, not cruel. Just still, just final.
At that moment, I was still a man. A doctor, a student of grief and silence. I listened for a living, made meaning out of sorrow, and believed I could unearth patterns from the fractured terrain of human memory. I had spent years in therapy rooms—offices painted in neutral tones—coaxing wounded minds into coherence. I thought I understood pain. I thought I knew how it moved, how it settled in the bones and made a home.
That was before the accident, before the vineyard. Before the thirst came and never left. Before I forgot how to die.
I remember the flash of a deer in my headlights, the sharp turn of the wheel. The scream of tires on wet asphalt. The way the trees blurred, then shattered. The windshield exploding like a wall of falling ice. For a second, it felt as though I had been caught mid-sentence—like something had interrupted me, not violently, but decisively.
And then there was nothing.
Not darkness, not unconsciousness. Just absence. A slow unthreading of everything I thought I was.
Time lost its shape, its weight. I hovered—aware, unmoored. Sound bled into silence. It was as though I were floating in a white room with no doors, no breath, no pain. Not dreaming and not drifting, just waiting, though I could not have said for what. The sensation wasn't peaceful, it was sterile.
When I woke again, the world was unfamiliar.
The night air no longer chilled me. The stars seemed too sharp, as if the sky had been etched in glass. My vision had turned impossibly clear—every detail drawn in fine relief: the veins on a vine leaf, the distant flicker of a moth's wings, the ripple of something small moving through the underbrush.
But my chest no longer rose and fell. My heart did not beat. My skin bore no bruises from the crash—no broken bones, no lacerations. I was intact in a way that no human could be. My hands felt foreign. My mouth ached—not with pain, but with need, deep and echoing, as though something inside me had been hollowed out.
I stumbled from the wreckage. I walked barefoot through the vineyard, the earth cold beneath my feet. The rows stretched on endlessly, gnarled and silent, shivering in the wind. The car behind me burned on the roadside, flames licking at the hood—but I didn't feel afraid.
I didn't feel anything at all.
Then the moonlight touched my skin.
It didn't just illuminate—it transformed. My arms shimmered, pale and prismatic, like marble kissed by fire. I stared at myself in horror and wonder. This was not natural, this was not human.
That was the first lie I encountered.
Because despite what it looked like, I had not been reborn. Rebirth suggests renewal—a beginning forged from an end. What happened to me bore no such grace. It was not a gift, it was not sacred.
It was a severing.
I had not inherited a second life, I had simply lost the first.
And in its place, I had been given only two things: hunger and silence.
No voice came to explain what I had become
No figure waited in the shadows, I heard no calling
No divine whisper
No purpose
There were no fangs in my mouth when I looked for them
No heartbeat when I pressed my hand to my chest. And when I found a mirror in the ruins of an old farmhouse at the edge of the valley, I saw nothing at all.
Not a shadow, not even a ghost.
I wandered through time that no longer ticked. Days, or weeks, or months—I cannot say. The sun no longer governed me, I slept only when the weight of thought became too heavy. I fed, eventually—driven by a hunger so primal it made language irrelevant. I do not remember the face of my first victim. Only the silence that followed.
And the shame.
Not because I had killed, but because some part of me had wanted to.
It took me a long time to realize I wasn't alone.
At first, it was a sensation. A flicker at the edge of thought. That prickling at the nape of the neck. I assumed it was trauma—hallucination, ghosts of memory. But this wasn't memory. It wasn't grief, it was presence. Something watching me from the margins of perception.
Not a person
Not yet
But a shape
A suggestion
A shadow lined with eyes
For years, I told myself it wasn't real.
That solitude and thirst had warped my mind. That the thing in the periphery was a symptom of isolation, not design. That no one was watching. That no one had marked my birth into this strange unlife.
I would come to understand how deeply wrong I was.
This is where my story begins.
Not with love—though that will come.
Not with war—though it lies ahead.
Not with prophecy, nor fate, nor legacy.
But with silence.
The kind that follows trauma, when every scream has already been spent and all that remains is breathless stillness. It begins with forgetting what it feels like to be human. With the vines curling around my ankles. With the gold light fading. With the knowledge that I did not survive—I remained.
And that remaining would become something monstrous.
The world moved on. The vineyard withered, bloomed again. Seasons passed, names were spoken and forgotten. But I did not change. I did not age, I belonged to no family, no faith, no legend yet written.
And somewhere, across oceans and years, the echoes began.
A name whispered in the dark.
A presence drawing closer.
And behind it all, the sound of my own mind, beginning to fracture under the weight of memory, illusion, and something else I dared not name.
So if you ask me where this begins,
I will not tell you it was the car crash
Or the thirst
Or even the illusion of moonlight on my skin
It began with stillness
With silence
And with the quiet knowing that I had not survived—
Only
Endured.