Nathaniel Ward died on a gray Tuesday in March.
It wasn't romantic. It wasn't cinematic. He collapsed on the kitchen floor while waiting for the kettle to boil. No flashes of light, no tearful confessions, no heroic last words. Just the soft click of bone on tile, and then — nothing.
He thought, if anything, he might feel regret. But all he felt was cold.
Not long after, his eyes opened again.
But not in the apartment.
Not in the city.
Not in any place he recognized.
He woke in a forest, naked and shivering.
The first sensation was pain. A slow, dull pulse under the ribs, as if something had been planted deep inside him and was beginning to root. His breath caught on every inhale, and his limbs ached with a low fever that never broke.
Birdsong filtered through the trees — not the high, sparrow-chatter of his childhood, but deeper calls. Echoing. Predatory. Sunlight speckled the ground in shifting gold. The air smelled clean in a way he didn't recognize. Alive. Ancient.
It took days before he could stand.
The hunger started on the second.
He walked for miles. Drank from cold creeks. Ate berries that made his stomach twist. At night, the forest spoke in sounds that made his skin crawl. He slept curled beneath roots, pressed close to the earth like a frightened animal.
He didn't know how he'd gotten here — wherever here was. But he knew it wasn't home.
Not his time.
The stars were wrong. The sky too dark. No contrails, no satellites, no hum of power lines in the wind. The world had been stripped bare of history, like a book scrubbed clean of ink.
And yet, he still felt human.
Barely.
The first animal he killed was a rabbit.
It came too close to the fire he'd scraped together. He didn't plan it. One moment it was sniffing at his food — and the next, he was on top of it, hands red, mouth full of fur and blood.
He didn't cook it. Couldn't. Fire made him sick. Smoke burned his eyes.
But the blood — the rawness — filled something inside him he hadn't known was empty.
He didn't sleep that night. He sat by the fading embers, staring into the dark, heart thudding, hands shaking with something more than adrenaline.
Shame.
He wasn't just surviving.
He was changing.
By the third week, he heard voices.
Not in his head. Real ones. Human.
Laughter. Crackling fire. A woman humming.
He stayed at the edge of the village for days, hiding in the undergrowth. Watching. The people spoke in a language he didn't recognize, but something in their body language — their rhythm, their rituals — felt familiar. They braided each other's hair. Told stories by firelight. Passed food with soft hands.
It hurt to watch.
He thought of going to them. Thought of asking for help. But the fever inside him had grown worse. His skin blistered in sunlight. His nails darkened. His reflection, when he caught it in water, was stretched — the eyes too wide, too pale.
And the hunger was back.
Worse than ever.
The girl found him.
She was perhaps seventeen. Her hair was tangled with wildflowers. She carried a basket of roots and bark. He saw her coming before she saw him — but he didn't move.
Couldn't.
She stepped closer. Her eyes narrowed, and he could tell she didn't see a man.
She saw something broken.
She crouched a few feet from him, murmured something low and kind. He didn't understand the words, but he understood the tone.
Compassion.
When she reached for his face, he didn't stop her.
Her hand touched his cheek. Warm. Gentle.
And in that moment, he wanted to be human more than anything in the world.
But it was too late.
She recoiled. Her pupils widened. Her mouth opened—but no scream came. Her body seized, collapsing inward. Her skin grayed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. She choked, eyes darting as if trying to understand what was happening.
And then she stopped breathing.
He buried her with his bare hands.
The villagers found the grave the next morning.
By nightfall, she had risen.
He watched from the treeline as chaos erupted. The girl wandered into the village as if sleepwalking. She didn't speak. Her eyes glowed in the dark. When her mother embraced her, she bit deep into the woman's neck, not out of violence — but instinct.
There was no malice.
Just need.
She was dead again before sunrise. Staked through the heart. Her body burned.
But the fire didn't stop it.
Her brother had already been bitten.
He changed differently.
Where the girl had grown colder, slower, the boy split. His body contorted under the moon. Bones snapped into new shapes. He screamed until his voice was no longer human.
He vanished into the forest the next night.
By the end of the month, six more had turned.
Nathaniel ran.
Not to escape.
To distance them from him.
Because he felt it now. A tether. Something invisible that stretched from his chest to each one of them. He didn't command them, but he sensed them — their hunger, their pain. Their fear.
They were bound by something deeper than flesh.
And he was the source.
Years passed.
Not centuries — not yet — but time began to slow. He stopped aging. His skin, once pale with fever, now glowed faintly in moonlight. The sun no longer burned him, but he avoided it all the same. Crowds made him anxious. Villages began to fear him on sight.
He changed his name, then abandoned it altogether.
He lived in the woods. In caves. In ruins that hadn't yet become ruins.
Every few years, someone would find him.
Another turned one. Another vampire. Another beast.
They always found him. Drawn by the same pull.
Some begged for help.
Some attacked him.
One girl — her name was Mira — traveled weeks to reach him. Her hair was shaved short, her face scarred. She had been bitten, but hadn't yet turned. She hoped he could stop it.
"I don't want to live like that," she whispered one night. "Please. If you can stop it…"
He tried.
He held her hand.
He gave her blood.
He wept when she screamed.
She changed anyway.
But she stayed. For a while. They lived together in the forest, hunting small animals, keeping to the shadows. She made him laugh — the first time in what felt like years. She taught him old songs. They sat by the fire and pretended, for a few precious nights, that the world wasn't broken.
And when she couldn't take the hunger anymore, she asked him to end it.
He did.
Gently.
He buried her beside a flowering tree.
That was the last time he touched another soul.
Decades later, he returned to the place where the girl had found him — the beginning.
The village was gone. Nothing remained but stone and moss.
But he still remembered.
He sat at the edge of the old clearing, staring at the sky.
And for the first time in years, he prayed.
Not to be forgiven.
Not to be healed.
But to be forgotten.
Because maybe that was the only mercy he had left