From the Private Papers of Vlad Dracula
Entry sealed beneath Black Salt and Iron Ink
I am told the Nautilus no longer answers.
The report is precise in its evasions.
Decommissioned.
Unaccounted for.
Presumed lost to silt and pressure.
They think these words soften the truth.
The Nautilus’s Rest has been taken.
I built that vessel to escape the surface—to move beneath borders, beneath doctrines, beneath the gaze of God and king alike. It was never meant to belong to the sea; it was meant to transcend it. A court that could not be besieged. A place where consequences arrived late, if at all.
I had considered letting it go.
There is a discipline to relinquishment. Empires rot when they cling to obsolete instruments. I have buried cities, erased lineages, allowed beloved structures to collapse because they no longer served endurance. Loss, when chosen, strengthens the hand.
For a moment—only a moment—I entertained the thought that this too could be surrendered. A vessel is only steel. A location is only memory. Power survives the shedding of skin.
Then I remembered where my son died.
Not as a prince.
Not as a martyr.
Not even as a rebel.
He died there as something smaller and more unbearable: a presence that was not taken seriously enough.
Alexios was killed in corridors meant for silence. In rooms designed to permit proximity without accountability. On a vessel built to make intimacy feel consequence-free. The Nautilus did not cause his death—but it allowed it.
That distinction matters.
Letting go is an act of sovereignty when the past has finished teaching you. But the Nautilus has not finished speaking. Its theft is not merely strategic—it is interpretive. Whoever commands it now does not only move unseen; they move inside a wound I have not permitted to close.
Elion Karsis understands endings. He understands how to weaponize finality. That he would choose this vessel is not coincidence. It is statement.
And Soraya—my daughter—operates from within it now. She did not ask permission. She did not apologize. She chose continuation over penitence.
I respect that.
I do not forgive it.
There are losses I allow because they instruct the system.
There are others I retain because they instruct me.
The Nautilus belongs to the latter.
I will not rage. Rage would cheapen Alexios’ death into spectacle, and I have spent centuries excising spectacle from my grief. I will not send fleets. I will not issue proclamations. I will not announce pursuit.
Instead, I will do what I have always done best.
I will remember.
I will allow the Brotherhood to believe they have escaped consequence. I will allow the vessel to move freely, to accrue stories, to become indispensable to their identity. I will let them invest themselves so deeply into its function that separating from it becomes unthinkable.
Then—when the Night requires it—I will decide whether to reclaim it, destroy it, or leave it drifting as a monument to miscalculation.
Letting go is virtuous only when it does not confuse mercy with amnesia.
I can endure many thefts.
But I do not relinquish
the places where my children died
without response.
The sea may keep its silence.
I will not.