Sam Olley speaks to residents and locals to piece together what happened in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
The neighbours first noticed smoke seeping out of Loafers Lodge just after midnight.
Students were up late watching movies in flats and friends chatted in apartments, after long days at work.
They had been about to go to bed when people in pyjamas started gathering on Adelaide Street.
Then the fire crews arrived, but by now flames licked out of windows onto the building's beige facade.
Windows exploded, and debris fell onto the sidewalk.
Still, it wasn't until student Jack Bushell saw body recovery teams that he realised lives had been lost in the rooms just 20 metres across the road.
"We had no clue. We saw so many people on the road, we just couldn't think there was possibly people hurt or dead even."
Bushell's housemate Corey Matthewson noticed the nearby blaze was so intense it made the windows on their flat hard to touch.
"You could feel the heat coming in. It was pretty scary."
On the other side of Loafers Lodge, in a separate apartment building on Hanson St, a resident could hear windows exploding.
Then she saw those who were escaping.
"People were panicking and screaming out of the doors from the lodge."
The sight was "traumatising".
It was a sleepless night for witnesses like her, who say the flames continued to burn for hours despite firefighters attacking it at all angles and levels.
'Like a campfire'
It was about 4am when gymgoers started driving in to the F45 gym about 200m down the street from Loafers Lodge - unaware of the seriousness of the sight.
Coach Kate Roberts worried if it was safe to open the gym - despite the distance.
"When I got out of my car, it was like you were in a campfire, there was so much smoke, and it came into the building down to the ground floor where the gym is. And even inside the building it was really, really smoky, the air felt heavy and gritty."
Then as classes began, news of the deaths and injuries came in.
"Someone arrived in tears, because she'd gone past and just heard it on the radio as she was driving."
As the sun came up, Adelaide Street was quiet - cordons blocked traffic, but some pedestrians could walk to businesses still open.
Water ran downhill towards the CBD in gutters - the leftovers of fire crews' attempts to dampen the lodge.
The charred remains of the building, and the empty windows, left onlookers stunned.
The Countdown across the road opened to distracted pedestrians, orange flowers were placed at the entrance, and nearby media formed a scrum awaiting stand-ups.
At the last media conference of the day, six were confirmed dead, 11 unaccounted for, and emergency services confirmed details that left neighbours stunned - there were no sprinklers in the building and first responders could not confirm if alarms went off.
Fire and Emergency NZ District Manager Nick Pyatt called it "a worst nightmare".
"It doesn't get worse than this for our people."
And as firefighters spent their second night at the scene, the remains of the dead stayed in the gutted building, ahead of post-mortem examinations.
Chief Coroner Anna Tutton said it could be a "painstaking" and "slow" process to identify them.
"The last thing we want is to have a family further traumatised by having someone other than the person they love returned to them, as we know has happened numerous times in relation to similar tragedies overseas."
Bodies yet to be reunited with loved ones. Residents taken from a community left shocked by the tragedy just the night before - in a building of 94 rooms once filled with people, now silent.
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