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.
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 and 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. I remember the way the trees blurred, then shattered, and the windshield exploded like a wall of falling ice. For a second, it felt like 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 weight, sound bled into silence. It was as if my mind hovered over the wreckage, watching—unmoored from my body. I did not dream, I did not drift — I waited, though I could not have said for what. The sensation was not peaceful, it was sterile. Like floating in a white room with no doors.
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 some small creature moving through the underbrush.
But my chest no longer rose and fell with breath, my heart did not beat. My skin bore no marks from the crash—no bruises or broken bones. I was intact in a way that no human could be, my hands felt alien. My mouth ached—not with pain, but with need, deep and echoing, as if some part of me had been hollowed out.
I stumbled from the wreckage. I walked barefoot through the vineyard, earth cold beneath my feet. The rows stretched on and on, gnarled and silent, shivering in the wind. The car was still burning behind me, 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 the 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 stood waiting in the shadows to offer answers. I heard no calling, no divine whisper, no purpose. There were no fangs in my mouth when I looked for them. There was no heartbeat in my chest when I placed my hand there. And when I found a mirror inside an abandoned farmhouse on the edge of the valley, I saw nothing at all.
Not a shadow
Not even a ghost
I wandered for days, or weeks, or months. I cannot say for certain, because time had begun to warp. The sun no longer dictated my rhythm. I slept only when the weight of thought became too much. I fed, eventually—driven by a hunger so primal it made language feel irrelevant. I do not remember the face of my first victim. I only remember the stillness that came after.
And the shame.
Not because I had killed, but because part of me had wanted to.
It took me a long time to realize I wasn't alone.
At first, it was just a feeling—that prickling sensation at the nape of the neck. The awareness of something just outside my line of sight. I thought I was hallucinating. Trauma, after all, leaves ghosts. But this wasn't memory. It wasn't grief, it was presence. Something was 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 would convince myself it was a delusion.
I would tell myself that isolation, thirst, and guilt had twisted my mind. That the thing in the periphery wasn't real. That no one was tracking me. 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 of silence 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 endured.
And that endurance would become something monstrous.
The world moved on. Seasons changed. The vineyard withered, then bloomed again. But I remained the same—unchanging, unaging, unnamed by any lineage or creed.
And somewhere, across oceans and years, the echoes began.
A name whispered in the dark,
A presence stepping 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 certainty that I should not have survived—but did