The moonlight covered the tombstones with an ethereal glow, and the statues
above the tombs stood like silent guards waiting for something to happen.

Longche willed himself to change into his true vampire form. As the helpless vampire watched the transformation, it started screaming. It was still screaming when Longche's rows of razor-sharp teeth sank into its throat. It had been thousands of years since he had drunk the blood of vampires. With each creature he consumed, he could feel himself growing stronger.
Growing stronger - and growing closer to the Dark Mother, who was waiting to exact a terrible revenge upon him.

The desert became grim, dark and foreboding. A silence of death lay over the land, and it seemed as though the very stars held their breath and twinkled no more.

Not so many moons ago, he had been able to run to the summit of the temple without losing a single breath; however, now he felt like an old camel that laboured under a load of corn. Years pass so quickly, and the dreams of youth are lost forever.

His mind drifted back to times past. He missed the companionship of his old pack. He had grown up in the pack and knew each wolf by sight and smell. They had played and hunted, bred and cared for the young, and fought and died together. His bonds to the other wolves had been very close – particularly his mate. She had been the strongest and the swiftest female. She had reared their young well and had always yelped and whined with affection after he returned from the hunt. He remembered the comfort he had felt on so many starry nights, lying beside her with his head resting upon her neck in a sign of affection. However, she was gone now, and he could not bring her back. The two-legged ones had seen to that.

When Harper was in among the stones she could see brass plaques screwed into the towering pillars of granite. One listed the names of seventeen boys who had died in the mud of eastern France during the First World War. Another listed the names of thirty-four boys who had died on the beaches of western France during the Second. Harper thought all tombstones should be this size, that the small blocks to be found in most graveyards did not even begin to express the sickening enormity of losing a virgin son, thousands of miles away, in the muck and cold. You needed something so big you felt it might topple over and crush you.