Chapter 3-Draugr
“It always rains when new students arrive,” I muttered, watching the skies split open above the obsidian towers of the Asgarheim Runevald Institute.
The auroras had dulled to bruised streaks of violet and sickly green as storm clouds rolled in from the black sea below.
Wind clawed at the spires carved with runes older than most gods.
The Institute stood unmoved, as it always did—unyielding stone, ancient magic, older than kingdoms.
I flexed my wings against the gale, stretching until bone creaked and sinew pulled tight beneath pitch-dark skin.
Rain struck like thrown pebbles.
“Oy, Draugr! Buckie’s?” Bench McCree called from the rune-lit path below.
He was just another Monster attending the Institute.
A friend? Not really. But he spoke to me when others denied I even existed.. so there was that.
Bench’s tentacles writhed lazily around his jawline, water sliding down the slick skin of his face.
He was grinning, already half-drunk on anticipation of fermented sea-grain.
I stared at him a beat too long.
He shifted.
“Right then,” he muttered, lifting his hands in surrender. “Suit yourself.”
The others laughed and drifted toward the lower terrace that housed Buckie’s—an ancient tavern warded against implosion, hexing, and student duels.
Whatever.
Ale would not dull this.
Nothing dulled this.
My hunger was no longer a gnawing thing.
It was a living creature beneath my ribs—clawed, pacing, restless.
It scraped the inside of my spine. It licked the back of my throat.
It whispered.
Feed.
I clenched my jaw until my fangs cut into my lower lip.
Blood filled my mouth.
The taste only sharpened it.
Hangry.
That word had once amused me.
Now it mocked me.
The Asgarheim Runevald Institute was the most prestigious graduate-level magical institution across realms—where Witches refined rune craft, where ancient Monsters mastered restraint, where descendants of gods wrote doctoral theses on blood pacts and dimensional fractures.
And I stood above them all, a relic of something far older.
The Draugr.
The bony crown hovered just beyond my reach, but I felt its weight already pressing into my skull.
My father had told the tale countless times.
The avalanche.
The ice burial.
The six months beneath frozen stone.
The hunger that drove them to consume their own.
“How could they do that?” I had once asked him.
“How could they not?” he answered.
Buried alive in winter.
No fire. No light. No hope.
They began with flesh.
But flesh froze too quickly.
So they drank.
Blood kept warm in veins.
Blood kept them breathing.
Blood damned them.
The All Father saw.
And he judged.
They were dragged to the underworld for cannibalism. Their descendants cursed to always hunger for blood.
Yet one rose and made the pact.
One volunteered.
Free us. Let one bear it.
Let one thirst so the rest may live.
Let penance stretch across generations.
And so the Draugr was born.
Three thousand years of inheritance.
Three thousand years of one son after another cursed above all.
Three thousand years of unbearable hunger.
The Norns—those Nordic weavers of fate Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—weave.
The Norns cut.
The Norns do not pity.
My line is small.
We were once conquerors.
But we were not tyrants.
We were survivors.
And that survival came with a cost.
Flashes of memories. Of myth and lore. Of pain flitted through my mind as I stood on the precipice of the castle amid the raging storm.
My wings twitched violently as lightning cracked across the sea.
The hunger surged.
It had changed recently.
It was no longer predictable.
It no longer came in tides.
It came like an omen.
Like something approaching.
Something calling.
I pressed my palm against the stone parapet and inhaled deeply.
Salt.
Rain.
Rune smoke.
And beneath it—something else.
Something new.
Warm.
Alive.
Something I’d been ignoring since I first scented it through the portal.
My stomach clenched violently.
No. Not again.
The first time it happened I nearly tore through two donors before the restraint sigils activated.
Professor Kenna had watched without flinching as chains of runic light wrapped around my wrists and throat.
“Control,” she’d said calmly. “You are here to master it.”
Master it.
As if my curse were a thesis topic.
As if Bloodlust were a research variable.
The Runevald Institute did not fear me.
It studied me.
That was worse.
I pushed off the parapet and paced along the upper battlements, claws scraping stone.
My father’s reign was ending.
Five hundred years.
Each Draugr bears it for five centuries before surrendering the curse.
He had grown thin. Hollow-eyed.
Not from lack of feeding.
From exhaustion.
From resisting.
From carrying it.
Soon he would relinquish it to me fully.
Soon it would not be partial inheritance.
It would be total.
Absolute.
And I did not know if I was strong enough.
That truth haunted me more than the hunger itself.
What if I fail?
What if I drain someone dry before restraint magic binds me?
What if the Clan suffers because I am weak?
My siblings would never say it aloud, but I have seen it in their eyes.
Relief.
They are grateful it is not them.
As the eldest, it falls to me.
As the strongest, it must be me.
But strength is a myth when your own veins burn like acid.
I roared into the wind, spreading my wings fully as rain lashed against them.
The storm answered.
Lightning struck somewhere below, illuminating the cliffs in white.
Students scattered across the courtyard below like insects seeking shelter.
I did not join them.
I did not belong among them.
They were here for degrees.
For advancement.
For magical prestige.
I was here to prevent catastrophe.
To prevent myself from becoming the catastrophe.
And yet—something was brewing.
The hunger was not simply growing. It was sharpening.
Like it had caught it—that strange, alluring scent—and it lusted for it with a singular focus.
I froze.
The wind howled across the battlements, carrying with it the cold breath of the fjords and the sharp sting of rain—but beneath it, threading through storm and stone and ancient magic—I caught it.
I dragged in a breath.
And a monstrous hiss tore from my lips.
There it was again.
Warm.
Alive.
Impossibly… sweet.
My nostrils flared, instinct sharpening to a razor’s edge. I closed my eyes, forcing the world away, and listened—not with ears alone, but with the thing I had become.
The Institute was never silent.
It breathed.
The Runevald grounds pulsed with layered magic—old wards carved into obsidian towers, runes humming beneath the stone pathways, the veil between realms stretched thin as silk across the sprawling campus.
Power lived here. Coiled in lecture halls.
Buried beneath the catacombs.
Whispering through the libraries where knowledge older than empires gathered dust.
Students arrived from across the multiverse—Witches, shifters, creatures that defied mortal language—and the Institute adapted to them, contained them, shaped them.
With all the new arrivals, shifts were bound to happen.
But this was different.
Beneath the regular upheaval of it was something else. Someone new.
And I heard her.
A heartbeat I had never known.
Faint.
But distinct.
It pulsed like a drum through fog—steady, unafraid, cutting through the storm as though it belonged to it.
Not prey.
Not fear.
Something extraordinary.
Something that did not run from the dark… but answered it.
Recognition flickered through me—violent and unwanted.
No.
Not recognition.
Something worse.
Something older.
Destiny.
The sensation slammed into me so hard my body staggered, claws scraping against the stone of the watchtower as lightning split the sky above Asgarheim.
The auroras twisted, colors warping as if even the heavens reacted to the shift.
Rain lashed harder, turning the black stone slick beneath my grip.
My claws carved grooves into it anyway.
The hunger rose—but it was wrong.
Different.
I heard it then.
Not a sound.
Not truly.
A voice.
Inside of me. In my head.
Low.
Ancient.
Awake.
It spoke.
I flinched, a rare fracture in my control.
Impossible.
The Norns do not grant mercy.
The Draugr does not receive gifts.
Love does not live here.
My father’s voice echoed through memory like a curse of its own.
And yet—the hunger twisted again.
Not ravenous.
Not mindless.
Focused.
Claiming.
I snarled and slammed my fist into the tower wall. Stone cracked beneath the force, fractures spiderwebbing through the ancient structure.
“This is a trick,” I hissed into the storm, my voice nearly swallowed by thunder.
The All-Father had always delighted in cruelty.
Grant the cursed a glimpse of something unattainable—only to tear it away.
I would not be made a fool.
I would not become like those who came before me—males driven to madness by longing, by the impossible hope that something pure could survive proximity to a creature like me.
Mate.
The word slid through my thoughts like a blade.
Foreign.
Absurd.
Dangerous.
What female would willingly bind herself to this?
To a Monster who must be chained to feed?
To a creature whose very bloodline carried damnation like inheritance?
To a male who had already sworn—no!
I would not procreate.
“The curse ends with me,” I growled low and deep.
My father had called it stubbornness.
Professor Kenna had called it arrogance.
I called it mercy.
Better extinction than an eternity of suffering passed from father to son.
Thunder cracked again—louder now, closer—as if the sky itself sought to challenge that declaration.
Below, the great iron gates of the Institute groaned open.
They stood at the edge of the courtyard like the jaws of some ancient beast, carved with runes that glowed faintly beneath the storm. Beyond them stretched the bridge between worlds—the shifting threshold where reality bent and bled, where Earth touched Asgarheim in fleeting, unstable moments.
Tonight, it burned brighter.
Students crossed through in staggered waves—figures cloaked in uncertainty, power clinging to them in different forms.
Some walked with confidence.
Others hesitated, already sensing they had stepped into something far beyond comprehension.
Fresh blood.
The scent hit me like a blow.
The hunger surged so violently I dropped to one knee, breath tearing from my lungs in a ragged snarl.
Focus.
Control.
I forced it down—but then the scent sharpened.
Refined.
Singular.
Her.
Oh yes.
There was no mistaking it now.
I did not know how I knew.
But I knew.
The pulse was steady.
Strong.
Threaded with something ancient that did not belong to the living alone.
Death.
Grave soil.
Ghost-light.
My head snapped toward the courtyard.
Through the sheets of rain, I saw her.
Small against the vast expanse of rune-carved stone. Dragging a suitcase across the slick ground, her movements deliberate, unaware—or perhaps unwilling to show she understood exactly where she had arrived.
Lightning flashed.
For a brief, searing moment, the world stood still.
She paused.
Lifted her head.
Looked directly toward the tower.
Toward me.
As if she felt it too.
My chest tightened—sharp, painful, unfamiliar.
The hunger did not roar.
It purred.
Low.
Possessive.
Certain.
No.
NO.
I staggered back a step, retreating instinctively into the deeper shadows where even the storm struggled to reach.
“This is not salvation,” I growled under my breath. “This is destruction.”
Because if she was what my body insisted—then the Norns had woven something far more cruel than I had ever imagined.
A Witch.
No.
More than that.
A Death-walker.
One who stood with one foot in the grave and the other in the living world. One who could see beyond the veil, speak to what lay beneath it.
And I—I was the hunger that consumed it.
This was not balance.
This was catastrophe.
Because if she bound herself to me—she would inherit the curse.
Or worse… she would not survive it.
The storm intensified, wind tearing across the battlements, ripping at my cloak as though trying to drag me back toward the edge.
Toward her.
I stepped deeper into shadow.
I would not approach.
I would not allow this illusion to take root.
The Draugr does not get a happy ending.
The Draugr endures.
That is all.
Below, she crossed the courtyard and disappeared beneath the towering doors of the Institute—carved obsidian etched with runes that flared as they admitted her.
The moment she passed through—the hunger snapped back.
Violent.
Unrelenting.
Pain lanced through my spine, arching my body as I gripped the stone hard enough to crack it, black ichor seeping from where my claws split against ancient rock.
“This is no coincidence,” I rasped.
The air had shifted—charged, aware.
Watching.
The storm wasn’t for the students.
It wasn’t for the term.
It was for this.
For her.
For me.
For what had just begun.
Pressure built at the base of my skull. The inheritance stirring. The curse tightening, inch by deliberate inch.
Advancing.
Accelerating.
The unseen crown lowering.
Too soon.
Too precise.
This was design.
I threw my head back and roared. Lightning answered. Thunder split the sky. Rain swallowed the sound.
But the hunger?
It didn’t fade.
It sharpened.
Changed.
No longer blind.
It reached.
For her.
Her presence sank into me—deeper than instinct, deeper than need.
A claim I had never allowed.
I stilled.
And for the first time since the curse took me—I was afraid.
Not of blood.
Not of losing control.
But of wanting what could destroy me.
The Draugr does not love.
The Draugr does not hope.
The Draugr does not choose joy.
And yet, somewhere inside the rune-lit halls, she walked—carrying death and something far worse.
Temptation.
And here—inside me—the storm didn’t break.
It gathered.
Because this would not end in control.
It would end in ruin.