From the Private Papers of Vlad Dracula
Sealed Addendum — Relational Anomalies & Psychological Fractures Archive
I did not engineer their union.
This matters.
Soraya was designed to absorb fracture, not to seek it. Elion was forged to end systems, not to inhabit them. That they found each other is not coincidence, but collision—two incompatible vectors briefly aligning through damage neither fully acknowledged.
Elion killed her brother without knowing. Soraya knows this now. She knew it before she chose to stay.
This is the detail the Court cannot reconcile, and therefore misnames as madness, weakness, or corruption. They are wrong in the simple way bureaucracies always are.
Soraya is not drawn to Elion because he is cruel. She is drawn to him because he is unfinished in the same direction she is. He does not seek forgiveness. He does not ask to be understood. He does not perform remorse or redemption. He moves forward as though consequence were already accounted for. This mirrors something primitive in her—an instinct older than ethics, older than ideology.
She grew up among systems that consumed people gently and politely. Elion consumes futures violently and without apology. To Soraya, this reads not as monstrosity, but honesty.
There is also hunger involved. Not the vampiric kind—something more basal. Trauma recognizes trauma before language does. Her blood anomaly responds to proximity, to intensity, to unresolved death. Around Elion, her senses sharpen. Her Echoes grow louder. He is a walking rupture, and ruptures feed what she has become.
This is not romance as mortals describe it.
It is alignment through damage.
Elion, for his part, does not see Soraya as absolution. That is why she remains. He does not beg forgiveness for what he did. He does not ask her to forgive him. He accepts her presence the way he accepts catastrophe—as inevitable once conditions are met. This lack of manipulation is, perversely, what makes him trustworthy to her.
She is not blind to what he is. She is choosing it.
That choice horrifies those who believe love must be corrective, civilizing, or redemptive. Soraya has no interest in being redeemed. She has survived too long for that lie to comfort her. She is drawn to Elion not despite his violence, but because it is uncurated, untheatrical, and terminally sincere.
This does not absolve him.
It condemns them both to proximity without resolution.
I do not intervene.
To sever them would grant Elion the martyrdom he craves and Soraya the narrative closure she resists. To bless them would aestheticize what should remain raw and unstable.
So I watch.
If their bond fractures, it will do so catastrophically.
If it endures, it will warp both of them beyond recognition.
Either outcome teaches me something the Court cannot learn on its own:
That love, like power, does not always civilize.
Sometimes it simply reveals what was already feral.
And sometimes, that is enough.