From the Journal of Faris Khan — On Women, Then and Now
Before the Night, women were owned in ways men pretended were gentle.
In Christian lands especially, ownership hid behind vows, lineage, and protection. A woman was passed from father to husband with ceremony and scripture, her worth measured by obedience, fertility, and silence. She was praised for endurance and punished for autonomy. Even mercy came with conditions. To step outside one’s place was sin before it was crime.
Islam, at its best moments, resisted this more honestly. The law named women as persons before God, granted them property, inheritance, testimony. Not equality as sentiment, but dignity as structure. Yet even there, culture often strangled law. Men mistook guardianship for possession. Fear wore the mask of piety.
Then the Forever Night arrived.
Dracula’s Court did not liberate women out of compassion. That would be a lie. It did something colder—and in some ways, more honest. It removed ownership by men and replaced it with ownership by the system. Marriage lost its absolute authority. Bloodlines weakened. Fathers stopped deciding futures. The Court decided instead.
Women became valuable not as extensions of men, but as independent vectors of usefulness.
This is not freedom. But it is not the old cage either.
In the Ebon Court, women command patrols, manage manufactoria, sit as Chroniclers, adjudicators, assassins, negotiators. Their bodies are no longer claimed as moral property. Desire exists, but it is not law. Pregnancy is regulated, not demanded. Survival replaces virtue as the primary expectation.
Dracula prefers it this way.
Not because he honors women—but because he despises the inefficiency of personal ownership. A man who believes he owns a woman becomes unpredictable. Jealous. Sentimental. Weak. The Night requires cleaner hierarchies.
Better that everyone belong to it.
There is something undeniably powerful about watching women move through the city without asking permission. They walk armed. They speak without lowering their gaze. They choose lovers and discard them without ceremony. No one pretends this makes them pure. Purity has been retired as a concept.
And yet—I remain uneasy.
Because while women are no longer owned by men, they are still extracted by the system. Their labor, loyalty, blood, and brilliance are consumed efficiently. The Court praises autonomy while monitoring outcomes. Choice exists, but only inside carefully engineered corridors.
The Qur’an says, “Do not inherit women against their will.”
The Court obeys this perfectly.
It simply inherits everyone instead.
I admire the clarity. I fear the cost.
Christian societies once clothed domination in love. The Night strips the disguise away. It tells women the truth: you are not cherished—you are necessary. Some thrive under that honesty. Others break quietly.
Perhaps this is progress of a kind. Perhaps it is merely a different cruelty, sharpened and well-lit.
I cannot deny that many women are stronger now than they were before. I also cannot deny that strength alone does not equal justice.
Dracula has solved one ancient injustice by dissolving its private form and reintroducing it as public policy. He has ended the lie of ownership by affection and replaced it with ownership by permanence.
Which is preferable?
I do not yet know.
But I know this: the Night has made women unclaimable by men.
And that single change has fractured the old world more deeply than any army ever did.