Provence, France – Autumn, 20xx
18:47 — Rainfall, no moon
The highway wound through the countryside like a question left unanswered.
Sylvain Noirel kept one hand steady on the wheel, the other curled loosely in his lap, his fingers twitching every so often with the ghost of some thought he couldn't quite hold. The rain was soft, steady — the kind that blurred the line between night and memory — and the windshield wipers moved in dull, mechanical rhythm, neither fast enough to keep up with the mist nor slow enough to ignore.
His eyes were dry. He hadn't cried, not since yesterday. Not even after the call
The folder lay unopened on the passenger seat, a pale manila thing bearing his own careful handwriting. A clinical case report, now closed.
Jeanne L. — 24. Dissociative fugue. Self-injury. Suicide ideation. Confirmed fatality.
The page had no room for doubt, and yet his mind refused to stop turning it over, as if repetition might soften the verdict. A single mistake, a delayed intervention, and a hesitation in the fifth session when he should have pressed harder. Or maybe it wasn't a mistake at all. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe—
He blinked. The fog thickened. The road ahead warped, just slightly, as though the world itself were shifting out of focus.
His temples throbbed. That familiar pressure — sharp, sudden, buried behind the eyes. Not quite a migraine. Not quite a memory, something else. Something he couldn't name.
Beside him, the folder slid a little on the seat. The edge of a paper peeked out.
He glanced at it.
And in that moment—
A shape surged out of the mist.
Pale legs, dark eyes—A deer, startled and spectral.
Instinct took the wheel before thought could. Sylvain swerved. The tires screamed across wet asphalt. The car spun. Metal crumpled. Glass exploded in flower-like patterns across the windshield.
Impact
The world came undone in silence.
---
He would not remember the crash. Not truly. Only impressions:
– The shriek of steel giving way
– The smell of ozone and rust
– Cold, sharp air rushing in from nowhere
– A moment of weightlessness
– Then gravity
– Then dark
No pain. Not yet. Just stillness.
Somewhere, distantly, a bell rang — once, twice — from a church he could no longer see.
---
But death, for Sylvain Noirel, was not the end.
---
Somewhere, France – Autumn, 1985
18:47 — Rainfall, no moon
He awoke on stone.
No sound of traffic, no paramedics , and no fluorescent lights. Only the quiet flicker of a single candle burning high above, its light painting trembling shapes on ancient walls.
The air was cold, damp, earthy, heavy with the scent of mold, dust, and iron.
He sat up slowly, his body unfamiliar. Too strong and too silent. His chest did not rise or fall. His skin felt tight, as if stretched over too-sharp bones.
His throat burned.
Not in the way sickness burned — not acid, not infection — but something deeper, older. A thirst so complete it was indistinguishable from need.
His hands reached for the damp floor, and he saw his fingers had changed. Longer. Thinner. Paler than bone. His fingernails gleamed faintly, translucent and hard like glass.
His mouth ached.
He touched his lips and flinched at the sharpness beneath them. Fangs, not teeth and not human.
A sound rose from his throat — raw, hoarse, and unformed — and echoed through the hollow space around him. The chamber was circular, built of old brick and silence. A wine cellar, perhaps, once. Now a crypt.
He did not remember how he'd come here.
Or if he had died.
He remembered the crash. The deer. The spin. The light dying.
But this?
This felt older than death.
It felt like something had claimed him.
Somewhere above him, the vineyard lay in silence, forgotten in the rain.
Below, something new had opened its eyes.
---
" Are we the sum of our memories, or the lies we tell to survive them?"