From the Private Papers of Vlad Dracula — The Crimson Needle
Soraya has inked herself.
I learned this not through surveillance or confession, but through rumor—one of those harmless murmurs that drift upward from the lower wards, stripped of urgency by the time they reach the Opera. The Crimson Needle, they say. A little studio where adventurers dramatize their endurance by wounding themselves deliberately and calling it memory. How charmingly human. How perfectly unnecessary. And yet—she chose it.
Arabic verses, I am told. Classical. Somber. Earnest in that way youth mistakes for permanence. She wears them along the chest, the throat, the arms—places chosen not for vanity, but for declaration. That is what amuses me most. She believes she has marked herself with meaning. She believes this is refusal. I remember when refusal felt like a revelation.
I read the poems, of course. I always read. They are not incorrect. That would be disappointing. They speak of endurance, of identity discovered after erasure, of walking willingly inside a cage. Reasonable sentiments for someone who has begun to notice the shape of the walls. They are the sort of lines one clings to when one suspects—correctly—that the world will not explain itself gently. If anything, I am impressed she avoided slogans. That would have been tedious.
What she does not yet understand—and what I find endearing—is that these verses do not oppose me. They orbit me. They are not weapons; they are symptoms. Proof that the experiment continues to produce interiority under pressure. She has not rejected design. She has personalized it. A classic developmental phase. I have seen it in empires.
The Crimson Needle itself interests me only insofar as it persists. A place where people still believe commemoration matters more than survival. I allow such places to exist for the same reason I allow parks, debates, taverns, and lovers: they generate texture. Texture produces attachment. Attachment produces leverage. Besides, it is healthy for a city to believe it chooses its scars.
Soraya does not know I am amused. She would resent that. Good. Resentment is proof of separation, and separation is the point. I do not need her obedient. I need her coherent. If ink helps her feel authored for a time, I consider it a successful expense.
She will outgrow the poems, or reinterpret them, or forget they are there until pain or hunger draws her attention back to them. All outcomes are acceptable. Meaning that survives adolescence tends to be resilient. Meaning that does not was never useful.
For now, I watch with the patience of someone who has raised centuries.
Let her have her phase.
Ink fades slower than belief—but belief always fades first.