The Dark Times

The Dark Times is the remembered historical disaster in which the vampire race decimated the human population almost to extinction. Although the period belongs to the past, its legacy governs the moral tension between restraint and predation in the present: it is preserved as a warning within a family that values civilization, then echoed by laws that restore humans to the status of livestock and by a market that openly sells them as pets.

Definition and Historical Memory

The Dark Times refers to the period when uncontrolled vampire consumption reduced the human population to the edge of disappearance. The scale of the catastrophe is conveyed through the memory that humans were “almost to extinction,” making the period more than an unpleasant chapter in vampire history. It represents the point at which predatory power threatened the survival of the species on which vampire society depended.

That remembered near-extinction gives The Dark Times an implicit political lesson: a society that treats humans solely as prey risks destroying its own blood supply and destabilizing its own future. The danger is therefore both humanitarian and material. The humans’ former abundance, later contrasted with their disappearance from the streets, suggests how completely the old pattern of consumption could alter the kingdom’s social landscape.

Family Ethics and the Rejection of the Past

Within Aleksander Dumoulin’s family, The Dark Times is invoked by his mother as evidence of the errors committed by earlier generations. His family preferred Blood Wine and regarded that preference as proof that vampires had become civilized. She repeatedly reminded him that vampire society had come a long way from its ancestors and warned him not to repeat their mistake.

Her warning establishes a direct contrast between inherited restraint and Aleksander Dumoulin’s emerging appetite. He tries to respect the way his mother raised him, but the memory does not prevent his thirst from becoming an obsession after he encounters a fresh human blood source. The historical lesson remains present, yet it loses authority when confronted by the sensory and predatory impulses that the reformed social order permits him to indulge.

Political Reversal and Social Consequences

The restoration of the Old Vampire Laws creates a modern return to the logic associated with The Dark Times. After the Queen reinstates the laws, the city changes rapidly: humans who had previously been visible in the streets, especially through their work in blood banks, are no longer part of ordinary public life, and Human Breeding Farms open on the same day. The speed of this institutional transformation makes the past feel less like a closed era than a precedent being deliberately reactivated.

The new order also tears hybrid families apart. Vampires who protest are met with violence or death, and opposition to the Queen’s regime is suppressed before it can become a revolution. The political response matters because it removes the possibility of a public reckoning with the historical danger. Instead of debating how The Dark Times came about, the regime turns predation into law and punishes anyone who challenges the official restoration.

From Historical Warning to Commercial Practice

The human pet store makes the return especially concrete. Its cages contain adult humans supplied through capture in the city, while the humans produced on the farms are still babies. This distinction links industrial reproduction with direct seizure and shows that the revived system is not merely an abstract legal doctrine: it has a supply chain, commercial premises, categories of inventory, and customers.

The store’s conditions also expose the degradation hidden by official claims of order. Humans are confined in cages with straw, water, and food scraps, while the smell of urine marks the space as one of bodily neglect. The former human-goods shop now sells humans themselves, an irony that reveals how thoroughly social status has been converted into merchandise. In this setting, The Dark Times survives not only as remembered history but as an institutional pattern reproduced through law, breeding, capture, and ownership.

Racial Boundaries and the Possibility of Repetition

The period’s legacy also illuminates the strict boundaries between vampires, Humans, and Werewolf Witches. Esmeralda’s unfamiliarity with vampire customs is explained by her upbringing in a remote pack, while the mutual distrust between vampires and werewolves keeps the groups socially separate. Yet the fated-mate bond between Aleksander Dumoulin and Esmeralda is presented as a force that ignores those racial divisions: Alyson insists that the Moon Goddess does not limit mating according to race.

This contrast gives The Dark Times a broader significance. The old catastrophe is built on absolute classification, in which Humans are reduced to prey and other groups are kept outside the dominant order. The fated-mate bond challenges that logic by making intimacy cross the boundary the political system treats as natural. The historical memory therefore stands behind the story’s central question: whether inherited categories will continue to authorize domination, or whether relationships can expose them as constructed and unstable.