How to complete the opening without spending the month early
The Blood of Dawnwalker Prologue Walkthrough
The prologue is the one stretch of The Blood of Dawnwalker that behaves like a corridor. You are still Coen the villager. Your sister is sick. The plague decree and the vrakhiri blood tax have already shrunk Laslea to a handful of bad options. Brencis has not yet stolen the family into a coronation countdown — that theft is the door out of the prologue, not a side objective.
IGN First’s eight-minute Deep Down footage is the public reference for the cave investigation. It sits in the middle of this page because the quest is the gameplay tutorial wearing a missing-person story.
Laslea before the mine
The PlayStation Blog framing is the plot: Blood Mass night, every adult owes blood to Brencis’s clique, your mother’s neurological illness makes her a candidate for the cull of the weak. Walk, talk, and look. Do not treat early conversations as hourglasses to slam through. The time system is kinder in the opening, but the habit you want is already “read the prompt.”
Skender Dragosti’s history with Svartrau sits in the background; you do not need the full lore page to finish the prologue. You do need to know the vampires think they are turning Coen into a weapon against his own village. The turn fails. Dawnwalker is the failure mode.
Deep Down: Lazar, the mural, the Guardian
Deep Down sends a still-human Coen into underground ruins for Lazar, a local who vanished. The investigation layer is the point: inspect, not sprint. The mural is lore and a loot tell. Special items hide in the same visual language as story. If you skip inspect prompts you will fight the same rooms with a worse sword.
The Forgotten Guardian is the first named boss the public has seen. It is a directional fencing exam. Omniassist will carry a story-difficulty player. Manual directions teach the charge loop you need for hexes later. Do not empty every consumable; day Coen does not regen. Finish, loot, leave. The cave is not Vale Sangora yet.
The turn, the kidnapping, the thirty days
Brencis’s attempt to sire Coen as a cruel familiar does not stick the way the court expects. They believe he died. He wakes hungry and unburned. The family is taken for the investiture. From here the HUD becomes the game: thirty days, eight slices, day and night as classes. How to beat the prologue is easy. How to leave it with good habits is the walkthrough.
Do not run to the castle. Open how to play, pick a build sentence, find a shrine, feed or eat as the sky requires, and put one officer on your mental map. Ambrus stocks blood. Bakir stocks liquor and fear. Xanthe stocks Blood Guards. The characters page is the roster. The month is the match.
Frequently asked questions
Can I miss Lazar and still leave the prologue?
Deep Down is presented as a prologue quest, not as optional open-world clutter. Play it. The investigation tools it teaches show up for the rest of the valley.
Is the Forgotten Guardian optional?
In the IGN footage it closes the cave. Treat it as required for that route. Later bosses are the ones the sandbox lets you skip or predate.
When does the 30-day counter start?
After the prologue, once the family is taken and Coen is a Dawnwalker. Do not spend prologue hours as if they were already coronation segments.