Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussions of flashbacks of rape, emotional abuse, slavery, and references to sexual abuse.

In a flashback two decades prior to the official start of the story, a war wages between the two Nightborn vampire clans of the House of Night. The two enemy clans—the Rishan and the Hiaj—battle over territory. A three-year-old child named Oraya lies in the ruins of the human city of Salinae, which has been ravaged by the Rishan. Vincent, the Hiaj Nightborn King and ruler over the House of Night, approaches the child. Seeing himself in her stare, “the stare of a creature who understood she was confronting death itself, and still chose to spit in its face” (3), Vincent decides to adopt her as his human daughter. He regards this hint of compassion as “something more dangerous as hunger” (4). The Prologue ends with an ominous declaration that this decision will be his downfall.

Oraya hunts vampires in the human districts of the House of Night. She tracks a Hiaj vampire—one of the two Nightborn races, identified by their leathery, bat-like wings—and kills him just before he attacks a human boy.