From the Private Papers of Vlad Dracula
Sealed Addendum — Geographic Reflections & Volitional Release Archive
I have always found the Sea of Marmara resistant to dominion.
It does not submit to the Night the way cities do. It reflects it, absorbs it, fractures it into motion. Even under the Forever Night, the Propontis moves as it always has—tides indifferent to empire, currents uninterested in authorship. I allow this. Total control that leaves no remainder becomes brittle.
I walk its shores rarely. When I do, it is never with ceremony.
Zoriana despises this place. She calls it inefficient—too vast, too fluid, too resistant to refinement. She prefers spaces that can be perfected, where authority leaves visible marks. The sea leaves none. It takes what is given and returns nothing recognizable. This unsettles her.
Lyra understands it better. She stands quietly when we come here, watching the horizon as if it might confess something. She says little. The sea does not reward interrogation. It rewards patience. Lyra has always been patient.
Soraya lingers.
She listens to the water the way she listens to dying things—not to intervene, but to absorb. The Propontis agitates her blood anomaly. Echoes rise and fall unpredictably here. I once thought this might frighten her. It does not. She seems… steadied by it. Perhaps because the sea does not ask her to be coherent.
My son loved this place.
Before the Night, before doctrine, before he learned restraint as survival, he would come here to think. He believed the sea represented a future that could not be finished—only navigated. I indulged this sentiment. Contradictions should be allowed room to breathe.
I have not returned since his death until now.
Letting go is not forgiveness. It is not absolution. It is not forgetting. It is the deliberate refusal to freeze pain into monument. Empires that calcify their grief become museums. I did not build the Forever Night to become a relic.
The Sea of Marmara reminds me that some losses cannot be integrated. They must be released—not erased, but allowed to move beyond reach.
Tonight, I stood at the water’s edge and did not command it to still.
That is enough.
The sea does not remember my name,
yet it carries what I give it.
I cast grief into motion,
and it does not return as guilt.
Cities demand meaning.
The sea accepts weight.
What I cannot finish,
I let go—and it continues.