From the Private Papers of Vlad Dracula
Sealed Addendum — Predictive Liability Archive
Ilyas does not seek power.
This alone makes him dangerous.
He moves through the world as one already condemned, and therefore unburdened by the need to justify himself. His manner is soft, apologetic, almost fragile. Those who mistake this for weakness rarely survive the correction. When Ilyas acts, he does so without hesitation, spectacle, or satisfaction. He resolves problems the way surgeons remove rot—quickly, cleanly, and without ceremony.
His gift is not prophecy. It is comprehension.
Ilyas understands systems the way others understand language. He sees where incentives collapse, where authority overextends, where mercy becomes delay. This Burdened Foresight makes him appear cold, even cruel, because he acts before suffering becomes visible. Most beings only recognize catastrophe once it arrives. Ilyas recognizes it while it is still avoidable.
The eradication of his own bloodline was not fanaticism. It was mathematics.
The Ascendancy would have made an example of them. Public, slow, instructional. Ilyas chose silence instead. He absorbed the sin personally and allowed the world to misname him. Being hated is cheaper than letting violence multiply. This is a calculus few can stomach.
He loves without possession. This is not virtue. It is survival. Attachment is leverage, and leverage invites exploitation. Ilyas accepts loneliness as a structural necessity, not a tragedy. He does not ask forgiveness because forgiveness implies absolution. He does not believe absolution exists.
I allow him to operate because he delays collapse.
Where others oppose the Forever Night directly, Ilyas trims its excesses. Where rebellions ignite prematurely, he extinguishes them. Where courts would overreact, he intervenes quietly. He does not preserve my empire out of loyalty. He preserves stability, and my rule happens to require it.
This makes him intolerable to idealists and indispensable to reality.
Should Ilyas ever decide that my existence is the greater catastrophe, he will not announce it. He will not rally opposition. He will simply act at the precise moment intervention can no longer be reversed.
I respect this possibility.
Men like Ilyas do not ask whether an act is evil. They ask whether it reduces the total.
That question will outlast every throne.