The village should have become a memory — a ghost among the pines like all things mortal — but humans, Aleksandr mused, were never content to let monsters lie. Rumors bled through the forests like spilled wine: tales of the immortals in the old fort by the fjord, the pale devils who drank blood and howled like wolves. Some came with gifts and prayers. Others came with fire.
Aleksandr watched them from the old longhouse roof, the thatch still blackened from the first raid. His siblings gathered below, each a mirror of their own madness: Mikael pacing like a caged bear, Kol playing with a severed hand as if it were a toy, Finn perched on the fence with his eyes hollow and lost. Niklaus stood apart — brooding, jittery, a secret boiling under his skin that not even he fully understood yet.
Rebekah sat beside Aleksandr, legs swinging over the roof's edge. She hummed under her breath, plaiting her hair with a strand of blood-stained ribbon — one of the village girls who'd come with a knife and found herself a meal instead.
"They'll never stop, will they?" she murmured.
"Not until we make them," Aleksandr said. He watched the snow swirl around the torches gathering at the tree line. There were dozens tonight — hunters, fathers, boys too young to swing a sword but brave enough to stand beside one. Brave enough to die.
Mikael's voice thundered through the courtyard. "We will break them! Leave none alive to whisper our name!"
Aleksandr's eyes flicked down to him, studying the man he once called father. In another life, Mikael's iron will had forged a terror that drove the siblings apart — the unrelenting cruelty that chained Klaus, crushed Rebekah, and buried them in coffins for centuries.
This time, Aleksandr would forge a different legacy.
He slipped down from the roof, Rebekah landing beside him with a thud. She flashed him a grin — her fangs still sharp with the taste of the last intruder.
Mikael rounded on them, spear gleaming in his fist. "You'll stand with us tonight, eldest. No lurking in the shadows."
Aleksandr tilted his head, smile thin. "Of course, Father. But the shadows are where this battle will truly be won."
They met the villagers at the edge of the clearing. It was a massacre — it always was. Aleksandr moved like a phantom, stepping through blades as if they were nothing but reeds. Where his siblings tore and ripped, he was precise: veins frozen with a touch, hearts stopped with a flick of magic woven into his palm. The Alpha Stigma glowed faintly when he let it, the ancient power unraveling bone and sinew with surgical grace.
Rebekah fought at his back, her laughter ringing like bells in the snow. Sometimes she was all child, skipping through the blood. Sometimes she was death itself.
"Spare that one," Aleksandr said once, catching her wrist before she tore out a boy's throat. "We need a message delivered."
She pouted but obeyed, licking her fangs clean. "Always the tactician."
Afterward, when the snow was red and the survivors fled howling into the night, Aleksandr gathered his siblings around the old hearth. Mikael's rage burned bright — furious that any dared to stand against them at all.
"They will never learn until the fjord itself runs dry with their blood!" Mikael snarled, pacing, spear tip gouging lines into the dirt floor.
Aleksandr leaned against a beam, arms folded, eyes half-lidded as he read the threads of magic in the room. Esther's old wards still clung to the walls like cobwebs. He'd long since bent them to his will — the Alpha Stigma's script etched beneath the wood, invisible to any witch but him.
"Fear is useful," Aleksandr said evenly. "But terror is sloppy. It leaves too many witnesses."
"You would have us hide like rats?" Mikael barked.
"Not hide — endure. Survive. Build." Aleksandr's gaze swept the family. "We are not hunters anymore. We are kings. Gods. And even gods need worshippers — or at least subjects who fear them more than they hate them."
Kol snorted. "I rather like being hated."
"Of course you do," Aleksandr murmured, dismissing him with a flick of his eyes. "But you don't think beyond the hunt. I do."
Niklaus stiffened in the corner, fingers tapping against the wall as if trying to drown out the pulsing in his veins — the dormant wolf side that would soon awaken. Aleksandr watched him carefully. His brother's eyes darted to him, wary, pleading.
Soon, Aleksandr thought. I'll set you free of Father's leash. In my own time.
That night, as the family slept — or lay entombed in coffins, some by choice, some by force — Aleksandr walked the village alone. His cloak trailed through the snow, black on white. The Alpha Stigma glowed beneath his skin, every rune alive with the pulse of Esther's old magics waiting to be remade.
He found the boy he'd spared — half-frozen, half-mad — and touched two fingers to his brow. Words poured through the boy's mind like molten silver: a story Aleksandr planted there, a tale of monsters worse than the Mikaelsons who lurked beyond the forests. He let the boy see glimpses of the Ættar — Aleksandr's hidden Order — shadows with fangs and runes etched into their skin.
When the boy stumbled into another village days later, babbling of the devils who walked as men, the seeds would spread. Fear would drive humanity inward — uniting the clans against shadows they could not hunt.
All the while, Aleksandr's true family — the Order — would slip into their ranks, invisible and watching.
Years bled into decades. The fjord thawed and froze and thawed again. Villages burned and were rebuilt, only to crumble again under the weight of winter and whispered nightmares.
The Mikaelsons moved like ghosts through the continent — crossing frozen rivers into the heart of Europe as the old Norse ways fractured under the rising dawn of new kingdoms. Mikael's hand grew heavier with each passing year — his fury turned inward, battering Niklaus with blows that left even an immortal bruised. Finn sank deeper into his despair, while Kol reveled in chaos until Aleksandr's iron hand reined him in.
Only Rebekah remained Aleksandr's constant. She learned to wield her hunger like a blade. She charmed and fed, ruled and destroyed, but always returned to her brother's side when the centuries grew too heavy.
In the shadows behind them, Aleksandr's Order flourished. His first Ættar took new names as centuries shifted: priesthoods in the age of cathedrals, knights when armor was worth more than coin, merchants when trade bound cities together like veins in a body. Each carried his mark — the rune hidden beneath flesh that thrummed with the Alpha Stigma's will.
When witches caught wind of him — of the strange immortal warlocks who could bend spells that should not bend — Aleksandr sought them out. Some he killed. Some he broke. The clever ones he brought into his fold, offering them sanctuary from the persecution that burned so many at the stake. In return, they bound their magic to him — feeding the ever-growing script woven through his body.
With each generation, his control deepened. He learned to siphon power from ley lines, to anchor entire bloodlines of witches to his will. Some said the Devil walked among them — a monster who stole the gift of magic and made it his own.
Aleksandr let them whisper. Fear was useful. Fear was currency.
On a winter's night outside the rising walls of what would one day be Paris, Rebekah found Aleksandr sitting alone in the ruins of a burned village. She wrapped herself around him like a child — though she'd left childhood behind centuries ago.
"Will we ever stop running?" she asked, voice muffled against his cloak.
"Not running. Adapting." Aleksandr brushed a curl from her cheek, tracing the edge of her jaw with a tenderness he gave to no one else. "We survive because we change. Father hunts the world like it's still the forest, but we build the world in our image."
She looked up at him, lips curving. "We're already monsters. What more could we become?"
Aleksandr's eyes gleamed in the moonlight — the Alpha Stigma blazing like a fallen star. "Kings. Queens. And more than that — the hand that shapes the night itself."
Rebekah shivered, but not from the cold. She kissed his cheek — a promise, a prayer, a tether to the only thing that still felt true after centuries of blood.
"Always, brother?"
"Always," Aleksandr whispered back.
And far away, under the flicker of a thousand candles, the Ættar knelt in hidden chambers. Their voices rose in unison — a single chant that threaded through the world's magic, binding kingdoms and shadows alike to the will of the eldest Mikaelson.
The world would break before he did.
ADVANCED CHAPTERS:
patreon.com/CozyKy