Chapter 14-Draugr
My chest heaved the moment Professor Kenna cast me out.
The wards slammed shut behind me, rune-light flaring along the corridor like a warning carved into stone.
Containment.
Not for my protection.
For theirs.
My DeathFace surged up without permission.
It always did when control fractured.
My skin tightened, darkened, pulling too close over bone that no longer belonged to the living. The runes etched into me burned faintly beneath the surface—alive, restless, eager.
Then came the fangs.
They forced their way through my gums, slow and relentless, splitting flesh with a dull, grinding ache that never lessened, no matter how many times it happened. Blood filled my mouth—thick, metallic, wrong.
I swallowed it.
Let it ground me.
Let it remind me.
This was the curse.
Not some poetic tragedy.
Not some misunderstood burden.
Darkness.
Ancient. Patient. Devouring.
It did not sleep.
It did not weaken.
It waited.
And when it rose—it consumed everything in its path.
Including me.
The hunger followed, as it always did.
But this time it wasn’t alone.
That was what unsettled me.
What fractured the careful control I had carved for myself over years of discipline and blood.
Because beneath the hunger?
There was something else.
Something new.
Something unbound.
Hope.
The word felt wrong in my mind.
Foreign.
Dangerous.
The curse did not allow for such things.
It thrived on absence. On emptiness. On the slow erosion of anything that resembled light.
And yet, she had carved something into me simply by existing.
A presence that did not bow to the darkness.
A thread that did not obey the curse.
Unfettered.
That was the only way to describe it.
Not controlled.
Not contained.
Not shaped by fate or the Norns’ cruel design.
It simply was.
And that made it more dangerous than anything I had ever faced.
Because I did not know how to fight it.
My hand dragged down my face, claws scraping my own skin as I forced myself still, forcing the instinct to turn back—to break through the wards, to return to her—to take what the hunger demanded.
The Witch, Professor Kenna, was powerful.
Within these walls, she was law.
I could feel her magic threaded through the stone, pressing against me, holding me at bay.
I could break it.
Gods, I could feel it—coiled in my limbs, in the hunger itself, urging me to tear through the barrier and claim what had already been marked.
But I did not move.
Not yet.
I was still a guest here.
Still bound by covenant.
And I was not ready to bring ruin to the Institute.
Not ready to lay death at the feet of my Unnasta.
So I held.
Barely.
Clinging to control like a fraying rope.
Better to wait.
Better to endure.
Better to deny.
My breath slowed, though my body still trembled with restraint. The hunger pressed closer, whispering, promising release if I would only surrender.
And beneath it—
That other thing pulsed.
Steady.
Unyielding.
Untethered to the curse that ruled me.
Don’t stay away.
I froze.
The words were not sound.
Not memory.
They slid into my mind like they belonged there.
Her.
The one thing I should not touch.
The one thing I could not stop wanting.
The hollow inside me—carved by centuries of hunger and absence—tightened sharply, reshaping itself around her presence.
Not emptiness anymore.
Not entirely.
Something else.
Something that threatened to unravel everything I had fought to maintain.
My claws bit into the stone beside me, cracking it under the surge of instinct that demanded I move.
Return.
Take.
Claim.
I stilled through sheer force of will.
Because if I gave in—if I let the darkness and this new, untethered thing collide—there would be no control left to salvage.
No restraint.
No mercy.
I closed my eyes, jaw tightening as I forced the hunger down, forced the instinct back, forced myself to answer without moving.
I won’t.
The words left me the same way hers had come.
Silent.
Certain.
A lie.
Because even as I said it—even as I tried to anchor myself in discipline and duty—I knew the truth.
Hope did not belong to me.
It was not shaped by the curse.
Not bound by it.
And that made it dangerous.
Unpredictable.
Uncontainable.
Untethered.
And I?
I was not strong enough to destroy it.
Not when it wore her voice.
Not when it lived inside me now.
The darkness coiled tighter in response, threatened, angered, aware of something it could not control.
For the first time since I became the Monster, the curse was not alone in ruling me.
And that? That was how everything would fall apart.