No one would have noticed the cave if it weren't for the horse tied at its entrance. Inside, a small pool of blood surrounded a boy in his late teens, lying with a dagger embedded in his abdomen. A silver sword lay on the cave floor, and clothes were neatly placed on a stone. Various other items were scattered around him.
The boy, fair and handsome despite his tattered clothes, bore numerous half-healed wounds visible through the holes in his garments. It was astonishing that he wasn't dead, given the stab wound and the blood around him. His breathing was gentle and slow, and his heartbeat was faint. Any physician examining him would be baffled, as he should have been dead but wasn't.
After a while, he slowly opened his eyes and sat up, seemingly unaffected by the pain or the dagger in his abdomen. His eyes were filled with shock. He remembered fighting alongside his fellow Hunters against Vampires who had attacked a village under their protection. They had lost the battle, and he had watched his friends die one by one. The last thing he remembered was being stabbed in the abdomen and feeling his life ebb away as his consciousness faded. He couldn't even recall who had stabbed him.
Feeling a sharp pain, he looked down to see the dagger still in his flesh. Before he could entertain thoughts of rebirth, he realised he wasn't reborn; he was still alive. He began to remove the dagger, and to his surprise, it was covered in blood that was a different colour from human blood. Disgusted by the sight, he yanked the sword out with one pull, ignoring the pain, and threw it away with all his might.
He knew exactly what that blood meant. It was the most shameful thing that could happen to any Hunter. The blood was that of a Vampire—red, but darker than human blood, almost black. He had been turned; he was now a Vampire, the creature he despised. In a fit of anger, he searched for any weapon made of silver. Grabbing the silver sword, he stabbed himself through the heart, expecting to die. But after a while, he felt only pain and no sensation of dying. This was something new: a vampire not dying from a silver weapon. Usually, if vampires get wounded by silver, they will either be severely injured or die. A stab through the heart would kill a vampire instantly, turning them into dust.
He was stunned by the turn of events. Slowly, his anger subsided, and grief started taking over him. His memories of the past began to come to him, the cruelty of vampires. The most hurtful of all memories was the death of his parents. When his village was attacked, Lucas Stone was around ten years old, his sister Ivy Stone was seven, and their parents, Ethan and Clara Stone, were in their thirties—living peacefully in Riverton, a village on river Silverstream's banks.