From the Journal of Elion Karsis
Recovered fragment. Ink burned thin in places.
I did not know who he was.
I must write this first, even if it changes nothing.
I did not know Soraya was his daughter. I did not know the boy who walked into her quarters carried a lineage instead of a function. To me, he was only another presence on the vessel—another variable too close to something I had not yet decided how to protect.
His name was Alexios Dracul.
I did not know that then.
At the time, Soraya and I were unfinished. New. Careless in the way people are when they believe the world has not yet noticed them. I was assigned to the submarine as staff—unimportant, unremarkable, a body that moved when told and disappeared when not needed. That invisibility is how I have always survived.
She did not treat me as staff.
That should have warned me.
We were together when he entered. No ceremony. No apology. He looked at us with surprise, not accusation. Curiosity, even. I remember thinking how young he seemed—not weak, just unguarded. He said her name like he had the right to.
I brushed him off.
Not cruelly. Casually. As one dismisses an interruption, not a threat. I told him to leave. He hesitated. She raised her voice then—sharp, irritated, indulgent in the way only the powerful can afford. She ordered him out so we could finish.
He left.
I remember thinking nothing of it.
That was my first mistake.
After that, he lingered. Too often. Asked questions that were framed as concern. Watched routes. Spoke to people who did not need speaking to. He smiled too easily. He moved like someone who believed himself untouchable.
I mistook proximity for surveillance.
I have learned to recognize the early signs of interference. Patterns tightening. Curiosity where there should be distance. And beneath it all, that pressure—the beast in me—that recognizes danger before proof arrives. It whispered insistently: He will compromise you. He will compromise the outcome.
I did not investigate him.
I decided him.
I killed him cleanly. Efficiently. Without spectacle. I told myself he was a spy—another of Dracula’s countless instruments testing the edges of my movement. I told myself his friendliness was camouflage. I told myself I was preventing something worse.
The beast agreed.
Only later did I understand.
Soraya did not scream. She did not collapse. She did not accuse me. She went quiet in a way I have come to fear more than rage. When the truth surfaced—fragment by fragment—I watched her assemble it without asking me for explanation.
She did not need one.
He had been curious because he trusted her.
He had lingered because he was trying to understand her world.
He had smiled because he did not yet know how dangerous affection was.
And I—because I cannot tolerate open futures—ended him.
I did not kill Dracula’s son as an act of war.
I killed him as a reflex.
This is the part I cannot forgive—not because of what it cost me, but because of what it revealed. The beast did not act to save me. It acted to simplify. To remove complexity. To collapse ambiguity into certainty.
This is what I am capable of when love and threat occupy the same space.
Soraya never framed it as betrayal. She never framed it as vengeance. She withdrew something instead—something I did not know she had given. I was a fling to her then. A moment. A deviation she had not yet named.
I understand this now.
What I cannot reconcile is that even knowing all this, even knowing who he was, even knowing what I took from her, the beast in me does not regret the act.
It only regrets the timing.
That truth disgusts me.
If Dracula hates me, it is not because I killed his son.
It is because I proved something he did not want proven:
That his Night can produce men like me—
and that love does not civilize us.
It only sharpens the moment
when we decide
something must end.