Chapter 8 Searching for HER
DAGNOTH DRACULIS
The seer kept saying the same thing, like a broken bell: She’s coming. She’ll save you. She’s the bond. I wanted to throw him into the nearest fire.
“Where the hell is she?” I snapped, standing over the old man until he looked like he might shrink into his robes. He trembled like a child and kept looking at me like I was the monster in his story. Maybe I was. Maybe I had always been.
“You told me she was coming months ago,” I said. “My wolf is dying, the borders are burning, and you keep telling me to wait.” The words tasted like rust.
He blinked. He smelled of dust and old incense. “I only tell what I see, my King,” he said. “She will come when the moon burns red...”
I laughed, one of those low, humorless laughs that makes everyone in the room uncomfortable. “The moon’s been red before, old man. It’s been red a thousand times. Waiting hasn’t fixed anything.” I wanted a fix. I wanted the wolf that used to roar in my head, not the small thing I barely heard anymore.
He shuffled away, muttering prayers. The doors closed behind him and the silence felt thick, like a blanket of ash. I dragged my hand through my hair and stared at the palace, the banners, the empty seats, the way the fires in the hearth seemed to sputter instead of blaze. Everything felt smaller, like someone had turned down the world’s volume.
My hand found the nearest pillar and I hit it. Stone cracked under my fist. It snapped something inside me too. For a second I felt less hollow. Then the echo faded and the ache stayed.
A knock. “Enter,” I said.
Simone walked in. He’s my Beta, the one man who didn’t walk away when the others did. He was calm, solid and always watching the angles before he acted. Tonight, he looked tired. There are things even a soldier can’t hide.
“You yelled,” he said. “What did the seer say this time?”
I poured something dark into a glass. It burned going down, which was at least honest. “She’s supposed to be the one who fixes this. Who wakes the wolf. Who stops my brother.” I set the glass down too hard. “But she isn’t here.”
Simone didn’t flinch. “We can stop waiting.” His voice was low and practical. “You said the seer said she’s unbonded, right? A maiden. Untied to any man.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Bring them to you,” he said. “Announce it. Have every household send their maidens. Let them come. The right one will react to you. Or she’ll stand out. Either way, there would be action. Not waiting.”
The idea should have felt ridiculous. It should have felt desperate. It did. But it was also a thing I could do. Waiting had been killing me. Doing something felt better than nothing.
“You want me to call a parade of girls while my brother chews at our borders?” I asked, picturing the court buzzing with whispers, spies, schemers.
“It shows you’re not broken,” Simone said. “It pulls the eyes. It makes them look at you again. It gives you a chance to take back the stage.”
I thought of my stepbrother, the one who smiled while he stabbed, the one who’d been feeding rumors and sowing doubt. He was clever. He played hands well. He’d twist a ceremony into a trap if I let him. But I had to do something. I had to start moving.
“Fine,” I said. The word felt like an order and a confession both. “Send the proclamations. Summon every maiden by the full moon. If this does nothing...”
“Then we burn the seer’s temple,” Simone finished for me, harder than I wanted to hear.
The thought of fire made something in me uncurl. If prophecy was a joke, I’d scorch the joke into nothing. If it was right, I’d be ready to fight for whatever came next. Either way, I wasn’t sitting like a goddamn corpse while everything I cared about bled out.
That night the palace moved. Messengers rode out in the dark, seals stamped, papers pinned to doors. Servants worked by torchlight. Kitchens cooked for crowds we might not even host. It felt like rallying an army, small, precise motions that helped me feel like a king again instead of a man with an echo for a soul.
I walked the ramparts later, watching smoke curl from the distance where villages burned in fits of chaos. People were scared. Men who used to stand tall bent the knee to his whisper. My stepbrother was patient in a way that made me sick. He waited for me to falter, and he kept pressing.
Back inside, the emptiness sat in my bones. I could feel the wolf like a memory. Once he would have screamed at the sky and demanded blood. Now he rustled like dry leaves. I press my head against cold glass and think about how little time a man has before people forget him.
Simone found me there, and for a moment we just stood in silence. He didn’t say “You’re done,” or “You’re finished.” He didn’t offer pity. He offered a plan. That’s what real leaders do when the world is burning, they make plans.
“Do you think she’ll come?” Simone asked finally.
I didn’t answer. If I said yes, I’d be a fool. If I said no, I’d be admitting defeat. Neither was an option.
There’s a kind of rage that’s quiet. It sits in your chest and waits. It doesn’t howl. It tightens. That was inside me. It wasn’t pretty, but it was useful.
Orders went out. We tightened the patrols. We moved supplies into the vaults. I sharpened my knife not because I planned to use it immediately, but because the act of sharpening felt like carving a promise into the night.
And I hated waiting still.
I thought of her, this girl the seer swore would save me. Maybe she was real. Maybe she was somewhere trembling at the thought of meeting a king whose shadow burned cities. Maybe she’d been sleeping and would wake, smelling smoke and know she had to come. Or maybe she was a story told to keep men like me from killing themselves.
Either way, I would not be found wanting.
If the prophecy was true and she came, then she’d be mine to test, to teach, to bend. If she was false, I’d bury the liar who birthed the rumor.
Either way, when she arrived I would not look grateful. I would look hungry. I’d make sure she understood she’d paid for my patience with something, her presence, her life, or her silence.
And if she had the audacity to make me wait, I’d make her pay for that too.