I awoke in darkness.
Not the metaphorical kind—though it felt like that too—but a true, full darkness, thick and grainy. The cold stone beneath me pulsed with dampness, as though it had been weeping long before I arrived. My body felt foreign—weighted. The silence around me was absolute, as if the world had been buried alive.
And I was the corpse.
I did not breathe,
It took too long to realize that.
When I opened my mouth, no air moved in or out. My chest did not rise. There was no tickle of warmth in my throat, no fog of breath in the icy air. Panic should have followed. Instead, there was only confusion—dull and treacly, like syrup clinging to glass.
I blinked, but the dark remained unchanged.
Then—somewhere above—a crack of sound: a creak of wood shifting, the groan of old hinges. It echoed down, fractured into a dozen pieces by stone. I felt it more than heard it.
Instinct pulled me upright. My limbs responded too quickly—faster than I intended. I slammed into the wall behind me. Stone, cold and flaked with dust. My fingers scraped against grooves and mortar.
Where was I?
A cellar
It smelled of earth and old barrels—tannins and mildew, cork, grapes. There was something deeply familiar about it—almost comforting, almost...
Home?
That couldn't be right.
I staggered to my feet, blinking until the dark relented. Shapes began to coalesce: outlines of wine racks, the glint of glass, a rusting iron stair.
There were bottles everywhere. Hundreds of them. Some stacked, others shattered on the ground. One had spilled dark liquid in a slow curve across the stone—congealed now, black as ink.
I reached for a nearby shelf, gripping the edge. My hands trembled.
And that's when I heard it—
A heartbeat.
Not mine.
It echoed from above, muffled by wood and stone, but impossibly loud. I could feel it in my bones, the hollows of my cheeks, my teeth. It was... delicious.
The realization sickened me.
I stumbled back, striking a bottle that crashed against the floor. The heartbeat quickened, then retreated. Footsteps—running.
I fell to my knees. My stomach twisted—not with nausea, but hunger. A kind of thirst that had no name. It clawed at me from within, sharper than memory, louder than reason. I clutched my abdomen, but it offered no relief. Nothing would.
---
Time passed, I do not know how long.
Eventually, I found a rusted lantern and a matchbox hidden behind a loose brick. My fingers moved too quickly, too precisely. When I lit the flame, it did not flicker. The stillness was unnatural.
In the lantern light, I finally saw myself.
A shard of a broken bottle acted as a mirror. I leaned forward—
And saw nothing.
The glass was empty.
I gasped, recoiling.
Then I blinked—and there I was.
My reflection, pale and still, stared back.
I touched my face, the glass mimicked me.
But something was wrong.
My eyes glowed faintly amber, like candlelight beneath water. My lips were colorless, my skin was no longer just pale—it was marble. Not a blemish, not a vein. And something else—something off about the way the light curved around me.
Like I didn't belong here.
The illusion held steady, but I felt it.
Felt the wrongness.
I didn't understand it then, couldn't. But I would, in time.
This—this reflection—was not real.
It was a memory I wanted to see, forced into shape.
Not yet a power, not yet control.
Just a frightened echo of a self clinging to familiarity.
I backed away, chest tightening. The thirst roared again. It dragged at me, begged for blood—not water, not wine.
Blood
I was not human.
That was the first truth I could accept.
But I was still me, wasn't I?
I didn't know.
---
From the far corner of the cellar, something stirred—scratched against the stones. A rat, perhaps. Its scent hit me before the sound did, warm and rank.
And I moved—without thinking, without hesitation.
One moment I stood by the lantern.
The next, I was crouched—hand buried in dust, claws where my fingernails had been.
The rat had already died.
I had crushed it.
I stared at it, horrified. Not because it was dead—but because I hadn't decided to do it. My body had moved faster than my thoughts.
My mouth watered.
I didn't eat it.
But I wanted to.
So I ran.
Up the stone stairs, shouldering through the old wooden door that groaned open to a gray dawn.
The vineyard stretched before me.
Spring,
But it wasn't my spring. The vines were younger. The trees I remembered taller were now thin and small. The tractor I'd left rusting was gone. The land was... off.
And then I saw the paper nailed to the doorframe.
A calendar.
April, 1965.
That couldn't be right.
I stared.
Something trembled in me—not just fear now. Recognition.
I wasn't in the world I had left.
I wasn't in the body I had known.
I wasn't in the time I belonged to.
And I wasn't sure if I had survived the crash—Or if this was something far worse.