From the Journal of Elion Karsis
On What It Means When Dracula Keeps His Word
He kept his promise.
Not with fury.
Not with spectacle.
Not even with precision, as I had expected.
He kept it with structure.
I did not wake to alarms or fire. There was no singular catastrophe to point at, no moment to frame as attack. What came instead was absence—layered, coordinated, impossible to grieve properly because it refused to localize itself.
Routes failed.
Contacts vanished.
Caches reported intact but unreachable.
Signals arrived on time and meant nothing.
This is how Dracula inflicts loss: not by destroying what you love, but by making it impossible to prove it ever functioned the way you remember.
The Lamplight Collective lost three couriers in different cities on the same night, none connected on paper. An archive in Thessalonica collapsed inward without a single explosive signature, its contents pulped by pressure miscalculations no one could have predicted and no one could replicate. A silver forge we had never named simply stopped producing—not raided, not burned, just… quiet.
People did not die loudly.
They were unthreaded.
This is what I failed to account for.
I am accustomed to loss that announces itself. To endings that scream, that leave scars large enough to organize around. Dracula does not grant you that mercy. He removes load-bearing elements and waits for gravity to finish the conversation.
Entire efforts dissolved without identifiable cause. People began blaming themselves. Commanders re-ran decisions that had been correct. Hunters doubted instincts that had saved them for years. I watched confidence rot into hesitation, and hesitation metastasize into paralysis.
This is systemic grief.
There is no body to mourn.
No site to memorialize.
Only the creeping understanding that the system you trusted was never sovereign.
He did not come for Soraya.
He did not come for me.
He came for everything we built to survive without him.
I understand now why his patience terrifies even those who love him. Rage would have made him legible. Violence would have clarified his intent. This—this erasure of reliability itself—leaves nothing to resist directly.
I have engineered catastrophes. I have collapsed regimes. I have forced endings into existence.
What Dracula does is worse.
He makes you question whether your work ever mattered at all.
And yet—this is the part I will not write lightly—I do not feel defeated.
I feel seen.
This was not punishment. It was instruction. He is teaching me the difference between ending a system and understanding the one that replaces it. He is showing me that destruction without continuity only creates vacuum—and that vacuum is easily claimed by older, quieter powers.
Loss on this scale does not invite revenge.
It invites recalibration.
If I am to oppose him, I cannot behave like a weapon.
I must become an ecosystem.
He kept his promise.
And now I know what kind of war I am actually in.