In his cell, Gabriel falls silent until Jean-François urges him to begin with Daysdeath, the event when the sun was veiled. Gabriel recalls being eight when the sky darkened like molasses and the air turned cold. Weeks stretched into months and years, the sun reduced to a smudge, snow fell grey, and famine ravaged their village of Lorson despite Père Louis’s sermons that faith would see them through.

At thirteen, Gabriel encountered his first vampires. He describes life under the dim sun, mounting hunger, and the deaths that had become common. He introduces his sisters, Amélie and Celene, and neighbor Julieta, recalling a shy first kiss with Julieta. Late that summer, Amélie and Julieta disappeared while foraging; the village searched for days without success, and grief consumed Gabriel’s parents.

Ten days later, Amélie and Julieta returned as vampires, filthy from a bog and holding hands. Julieta’s mother, overjoyed, embraced her daughter, and Julieta tore out her mother’s throat. Amélie joined the feeding with inhuman hissing. Gabriel admits he stood his ground not from courage but from hate—hate for what the girls had become and for the memory it threatened to overwrite.

Gabriel attacked Julieta with a wood axe but, being only thirteen, failed to decapitate her. Amélie struck Gabriel and pinned him, fangs at his throat. As he faced death, something awakened within him “like a bear,” and when he grasped Amélie’s throat, a searing power flowed through his arm. Amélie’s flesh boiled and bled red steam, and she reeled back screaming as villagers, alerted by Celene’s cries, arrived.

The villagers dragged Amélie off Gabriel and set her dress ablaze; she burned like a bonfire. They also burned Julieta, still crawling with the axe embedded in her head, their screams unholy. Gabriel and Celene watched Amélie’s final “dance” in flames while Papa restrained Auriél from throwing herself onto the pyre. Gabriel was unbitten, and Père Louis proclaimed his survival a miracle, though the priest denied burial to the girls, declaring them damned and ordering their ashes scattered at the crossroads.

Gabriel was haunted by the smell of Amélie’s ashes and dreams of both girls. He reflects that country folk already believed in monsters, but the true revelation was that the veiled sun allowed vampires to walk at noon, nullifying the greatest bane of sunlight. He recounts theories he later heard at San Michon—an eastern star’s smoke, or debris from angels thrown down—but stresses that no one knew the cause. Standing at the crossroads as ashes scattered and his mother screamed, Gabriel knew this was the beginning of the end.

Jean-François offers that all things end; Gabriel agrees, his red eyes glittering, underscoring the fatalism born that day.