Chapter Text
The story of Shadyside and Sunnyside wasn't told in textbooks or in the songs that enlivened our camps. It was whispered in the night breezes that stirred the veils of our vampires, and resonated in the scorching heat that tempered the skin of the Daywalkers at dawn. It was a story of fear and anger, woven from the threads of a conflict so ancient that no one remembered its origin. We only knew that light and darkness—what we were—could never coexist.
In Shadyside, my ancestors, the Vampires, had always ruled the night. Our homes were built beneath a perpetually starry sky, where the wind and clouds were our allies. We prided ourselves on our grace, on our connection to the ethereal essence of the air. From childhood, we were taught that the Daywalkers of Sunnyside were aberrant creatures, a perversion of what a true nocturnal being should be, with their grotesque sun-absorbing abilities. They were a stain on the canvas of our eternal darkness, a threat to our very existence.
Across the dimensional veil, in Sunnyside, the Daywalkers grew up bathed in a light that we Vampires only knew as a lethal weakness. They saw our power over the wind as a mere gust without substance, and our preference for the night as an inherent cowardice. They believed that strength lay in absorbing the power of the sun, in the vitality of the day. To them, we were shadows, ghosts of the past that must be eradicated so that their final "dawn" could shine uninterrupted.
Our legends, our lullabies, our most sacred oaths—all spoke of the impossibility of peace. It was said that a Vampire and a Daywalker could never cross the line without catastrophic consequences. And yet, despite centuries of hatred and the battles that had stained both heaven and earth with blood, the universe had a strange way of weaving destinies. A greater force loomed over both worlds, a threat so monumental that neither eternal night nor perpetual day could face it alone.
What my ancestors didn't know, what no one among our people understood, was that conflict wasn't a choice, but a chain. And that chain was about to break.
Camp Rayburn, supposedly a place of "integration," promised to be the scene of a different kind of battle. But what was really brewing there was a dawn. A different dawn for all of us. One that neither I nor she could have anticipated.