From the Journal of Elion Karsis
Undated. Written after the interrogation reports began circulating.
Dracula does not hunt me.
That is how I know he understands what I am.
A lesser tyrant would have sent assassins already. A god-pretender would have declared prophecy. Dracula does neither. He watches. He allows me to continue, and in doing so he commits the only sin he still believes unforgivable: delay.
He thinks this is wisdom.
He believes endurance is virtue. He believes a system that survives contradiction deserves to persist. This is the core of his philosophy, and it is why the Night has lasted so long. He mistakes longevity for legitimacy and calls it restraint.
I will give him this much—he is not stupid.
He knows I am not driven by rage. He knows I am not a revolutionary, not truly. Revolutionaries want replacement. I want termination. He sees this and understands that killing me would grant me the narrative closure I deny the world.
So he refuses me that dignity.
He calls me a fetishist of endings. He is correct. Endings are honest. They do not require maintenance. They do not rot into ritual. They do not excuse themselves by calling suffering “load-bearing.”
Dracula believes history is something to be curated. I believe it is something to be resolved.
He hides behind complexity. He allows anomalies, fractures, quiet heresies, and calls this intelligence. He mistakes leakage for health. What he has built is not resilient—it is addicted to postponement. Every life spared is another variable he will someday be forced to account for.
He believes I am small because I am willing to burn futures.
He does not understand that futures built under his Night are already corpses—preserved, cataloged, and animated by habit. I do not destroy possibility. I destroy pretense.
He thinks killing his son wounded him.
It did not.
What wounded him was realizing that something he allowed—something unfinished, something contradictory—could be removed without ceremony. That the world does not require his patience to continue. That even his most careful tolerances can be erased by a single decisive act.
This is why he hates me.
Not because I am cruel.
But because I am final.
He calls himself a philosopher king because he believes thinking longer excuses him from choosing. He believes delay is governance. He believes survival justifies structure.
I reject this.
If a system requires eternal management to prevent collapse, it deserves collapse. If peace exists only through containment, it is already war. If endurance is the highest value, then nothing ever ends—and nothing ever matters.
Dracula will wait. He always does.
That is his mistake.
I do not need to defeat him.
I only need to force him to choose.
And when he finally does—
when he is compelled to end something rather than manage it—
the Night will fracture in ways his patience cannot repair.
I will not outlive him.
That is irrelevant.
I will out-end him.
And that will be enough.