The next day dawned with a bright sun cutting across the Mystic Falls sky, pleasantly warming the morning air. But the one shining brighter than the weather itself was Ethan.
He bounced out of bed like a kid on a holiday, and on that particular morning, he seemed to carry a completely different kind of energy. A stubborn, unerasable smirk kept planting itself on his face every time his mind wandered back, against his will, to what had happened in the cafeteria the afternoon before. The memory of the kiss, the way she had reacted, and her desperate escape right after made him let out a short laugh as he slipped into a simple t-shirt.
Since there were no classes at the Salvatore School that day—a rare moment of truce after the chaos of slime molds and monsters—Ethan decided to take a walk around town. He knew he needed to start fending for himself, and the first step was very practical: making some money.
Walking through the quiet streets, he scanned the signs and local businesses until his eyes landed on a slightly old auto repair shop where the owner was taping a "Help Wanted" sign onto the dusty facade.
Ethan adjusted his t-shirt sleeves and walked straight in, with the confidence of someone who didn't fear the world very much.
"Hey, mister! Need an extra hand around here?" he called out, catching the attention of the chubby, grease-stained mechanic whose head was buried under the hood of an old car.
The man straightened up, wiping his hands on an old rag, and looked Ethan up and down with a scowl. Seeing that the kid was way too young and had too clean a face for heavy labor, he let out a skeptical chuckle.
"Kid, you're kind of young for this kind of work... Do you know your way around cars, or are you just looking for a place to waste time?"
Ethan shrugged, keeping his easygoing smile.
"I know the basics, but I want to learn how to do everything," he replied without stuttering.
The mechanic stared at him for a few more seconds, evaluating his posture, and let out a huff.
"Hm... Fine. Give me a hand here, help me lift this part." He pointed to a rusted driveshaft on the floor. "Let's see if you can handle the weight."
What old Marcos didn't know was that Ethan was far from being an ordinary teenager. Being a powerful ancestral werewolf, his physical strength was on a completely different level from any mortal's. However, to avoid raising suspicions or awkward questions, Ethan dialed back his energy and acted like an absurdly strong, above-average human kid—the kind who looked like they'd just come out of a heavy gym session.
Marcos raised his eyebrows upon seeing the boy handle the heavy iron with ease.
"Hnm... You've got strength, kid." He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm. "Start by helping me pull out this cylinder here."
Ethan didn't even ask about salary or paperwork at that moment. He just nodded and dove right into the work, helping the mechanic with enthusiasm.
A few hours later, around noon, the shop was already cleaner and more organized. Marcos leaned against the workbench, crossed his arms, and looked at his new helper with approval.
"Look, Ethan, starting tomorrow you can come in every day at 1 PM. The pay is 18 dollars an hour, paid every weekend. We've got a lot of backlog, so I'm going to teach you everything I know... But I need you to actually want to learn for this to work."
Ethan agreed on the spot with a confident smile. The rate wasn't bad at all for someone who needed to stack cash fast. After chatting a bit more and devouring a takeout lunch that Marcos had ordered through an app, Ethan said goodbye and started his walk back to the boarding school.
Phew...
As he walked, feeling his body slightly sore, he thought that even a supernatural being could feel the fatigue of hard work. But the experience hadn't been bad at all. He needed to save money as fast as possible to buy a motorcycle. And since he had no way of talking to his mom—having forgotten her contact number and, either way, she would probably call him an impostor or a lunatic if she heard him—he had to fight for himself and build a life from scratch in this world.
When he reached the school gates in the early afternoon, a little sweaty and with traces of grease on his hands, he didn't even have time to breathe.
As soon as he stepped into the inner courtyard, he ran right into MG, who was chatting animatedly with a group of students, all vampires, near the fountain.
"Hey, newbie!" MG called out, waving. "You missed the morning action. Alaric left early with a bunch of people to go after the Malivore urn. The school is kind of empty today."
Ethan frowned.
"Who went with him?"
"The teachers, the twins, Kaleb... Hope." MG shrugged. "The crew that knows how to fight."
Hope.
Ethan nodded, trying not to show anything, and headed toward the dorms.
Earlier that same morning, Hope had stared at her bedroom ceiling for hours.
She hadn't been able to sleep properly all night. Every time she closed her eyes, the scenes from the previous day came back to haunt her in an endless and incredibly detailed loop.
The warmth of his hand on her back. His ragged breathing. And, above all, the surreal, out-of-control moment when she had simply lost her mind in the middle of the cafeteria and kissed him as if the world were ending right then and there.
How was I capable of throwing myself at him like that? she asked herself every ten minutes, running her hands over her face. She had never done anything like that before. She was Hope Mikaelson: controlled, focused, strong. But around Ethan, all her defenses turned to dust in seconds. And the memory of how she'd bolted right after, unable to look at him, made her cheeks burn with shame just thinking about it.
She needed to clear her head. She needed clean air and a very good reason to stay as far away from the cafeteria and, preferably, from Ethan himself as possible.
And the universe seemed to grant her wish, albeit in the most chaotic way possible.
The day before, amidst the confusion of parasites and chases, Mr. Saltzman had made a radical decision: try to get rid of the infamous mystic urn of Malivore by throwing it into the waters of the local river.
As soon as Hope went down to the main lobby, she found Alaric and the rest of the crew on high alert. The urgency of the situation fit her needs like a glove.
Shortly after, the school's classic van was driving down the road toward the countryside, where the clues about the urn were located. Inside the vehicle were Alaric at the wheel, Dorian, Emma Tig, Kaleb, Josie, Lizzie, and Hope.
Hope leaned against the window, trying to pretend she was just resting, and ended up falling asleep from sheer exhaustion. In the middle of her troubled nap, a vision invaded her dreams: a massive, dark, and imposing wolf whose eyes, which used to glow a clear blue, slowly began to shift until they became entirely green and piercing.
Hope woke up with a start, gasping and blinking rapidly to return to reality.
"Hnm..." Lizzie grumbled beside her, noticing the sudden movement. She turned her head with her usual snobby expression. "Why did you have to insert yourself into our family trip, anyway?"
Hope adjusted her posture, masking the cold sweat on her forehead, and shot back:
"As if I was going to let you guys go monster-hunting without me."
Lizzie gave an ironic smile.
"Right... I thought you'd prefer to spend the holiday glued to your hobbit boyfriend or whatever doing something else."
"Sorry if I want to help protect the world from my mistakes," Hope retorted firmly. "There's an urn crossing a river and spreading plagues across America, all because I found a stupid cute unicorn! That's called responsibility, Lizzie. Maybe one day you'll have some too."
In the front passenger seat, Kaleb, who had been listening to everything next to Alaric, let out a muffled chuckle.
"Oof... That one hurt."
Lizzie rolled her eyes, unfazed.
"Or maybe you just want to ruin another Saltzman holiday, like you always do."
"When have I ever ruined a holiday of yours?" Hope challenged, glaring at her.
"Ha! I'd give a thousand times more for Ethan to be here in your place than this annoying pest!" Lizzie blurted out, huffing.
The exact second she heard Ethan's name, Hope closed her eyes tight, and her entire body gave an involuntary shudder. The memory of the cafeteria, of his mouth on hers, overwhelmed her mind with staggering force.
Lizzie, who never let anything slip by, frowned.
"Huh... Why did you do that with your eyes?"
"It was nothing!" Hope snapped quickly, trying to keep her tone neutral, even though her heart was racing. "Shut up, Lizzie."
Alaric, his hands steady on the wheel, looked in the rearview mirror and called the two of them out:
"Girls, please! We're going to be stuck inside this van for the next six hours, so no fighting."
"It would help if it wasn't about fifty degrees in here," Hope complained, fanning her own neck with her hand. "I'm burning up."
Lizzie raised her eyebrows, giving a suspicious, mischievous look.
"You, burning up? How ironic, isn't it?"
"What is that supposed to mean?" Hope asked, frowning and trying not to show her growing nervousness.
Lizzie leaned closer and said in a low voice, just for her to hear:
"I see the way you look at Ethan, Hope. And I'm not going to let anything happen... not now, when someone like him finally arrived at that school."
"Listen here, Lizzie," Hope replied, staring her straight in the eye through gritted teeth. "I don't know what nonsense you're making up in your head, so stop talking rubbish."
"I know very well, Hope Burning Up Mikaelson," the blonde taunted with a winning smile. "Yesterday you were dying of jealousy just because I was talking to Ethan in the morning, weren't you? I wonder what your little hobbit boyfriend would do if he knew about this..."
"You only tell lies, Lizzie!" Hope retorted, feeling her cheeks burn with anger and shame.
"Lies? Right..." Lizzie mocked, crossing her arms and resting her head back against the seat with a smug smile.
Josie, who until then had been isolated in her own world listening to music through headphones, took one earbud out upon noticing the heated argument. She glanced sideways at her twin and let out a tired sigh.
"Lizzie, leave Hope alone, please..."
Lizzie turned her head instantly, outraged by her twin's lack of support.
"Hmph! You're my sister, Josie! You should be on my side, not hers!"
Since she was sitting in the middle seat between the two of them, Lizzie started using her elbow to push Hope, staking her territory in a childish way. Hope, whose nerves were already frayed and whose head was boiling from the heat and the memories, didn't let it slide. She shoved her back hard.
"Cut it out, Lizzie!" she warned through gritted teeth.
"Come and make me!" the blonde provoked, shoving her again, this time harder.
Within seconds, the cramped space of the seat turned into a war zone. The two of them were shoving each other brutally, faces inches apart, muttering curses under their breaths while almost invisible sparks of magic crackled at both of their fingertips. They were a second away from actually attacking each other right there.
"Girls, stop fighting!" Alaric yelled, raising his voice, and the van gave a slight shudder on the road. "Stop it right now! What is all this tension for? We have a job to do, a dangerous urn to find, and we're going to get through this together... and hopefully, alive!"
At the scolding, Hope gave Lizzie's shoulder one last shove, adjusted her jacket, and leaned back against the window, huffing and looking outside. Lizzie did the same, crossing her arms with a giant pout and settling back into her seat with a sour face.
The trip continued in a tense, heavy silence as the van ate up the kilometers toward the river.
Hours later, now at night in an isolated area of the countryside where the group had stopped, Hope and Alaric were talking to a guy in his mid-twenties.
"I work for an organization that hides the monsters and horrors that emerge at night from the public sphere," the guy explained. "I thought you already knew. You and your daughter, right?"
"Actually, it's Hope," she corrected with a frown, remembering perfectly where she knew him from. She had seen that guy in Kansas at Seyla's house during a fake gas leak.
"I didn't know if it was a coincidence running into you guys out here, so we checked out the van," he continued, keeping his calm. "You're Alaric Saltzman, headmaster of the Salvatore School. We know all about it. You have an incredible reputation."
"Leave the school out of this," Alaric retorted, his voice hard and protective.
"I applaud the school's mission. If you do your job right, mine gets a whole lot easier."
"And why are we still here?" Alaric asked impatiently.
"I have a whole town that needs to forget what it saw today," the agent explained. "Usually we convince a Nebraska farmer that he didn't see a chimera, or some Minnesota fishermen that a yeti didn't eat their best friend. Here it's different because it involves an entire town. We could use the help of a vampire, and I noticed the daylight ring on one of your daughters' boyfriends."
"He's not... It doesn't matter," Alaric cut in, irritated.
"Why don't you just say it was a weird swarm of insects? Why wipe their memory?" Hope intervened, crossing her arms.
"Because someone might recognize what they are: heralds."
"Heralds of what?" Hope asked, surprised.
"Seriously? This is obviously the work of a mummy," Alaric said with conviction.
He made a subtle gesture of victory, glanced sideways at Hope, and blurted out:
"I told you so."
"One of our drivers survived an attack at the river and has been tracking the mummy ever since," the Triad agent continued. "We're a cleanup organization and we aren't equipped to fight a mummy. So? Are you going to help hunt it down and save these people?"
"They're kids," Alaric replied defensively.
"Kids with magic. And there's a town full of innocents without it," the guy countered sharply.
"We'll be happy to help," Hope decided.
"I'm going to need my weapons," Alaric added, accepting the terms.
"Sure. Grab whatever you need and gather your friends. We'll help however we can."
As soon as the guy walked away, Hope turned abruptly to Alaric with an analytical, serious gleam in her eyes.
"Look, I know you don't really remember our trip to Kansas, but the field we woke up in, in Georgia, is where the portal to Malivore is located—hidden in plain sight by a company called Triad." She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket, pulled out a small business card, and held it out to him. "Ryan Clarke. Sound familiar?"
Meanwhile, back at the Salvatore School, Ethan was alone in one of the boarding school's common areas, sitting cross-legged on a worn wooden chair.
Being a practically immortal being with a supernatural biology forged in the darkest depths of Malivore, he didn't hold himself to human conventions. In an automatic gesture of boredom and curiosity, he picked up a sharp stone he found on the floor to see what his body would do. The sharp stone left a thin red line on his skin, which closed up and vanished before a single drop could fall, as if it had never even existed.
He knew he needed money, but the only real reason he'd gotten a job at Marcos's shop was to create a front—an acceptable excuse for the income that would pay for his much-desired motorcycle.
As he tossed the stone up and caught it with his hands, however, a darker train of thought crossed his mind: Why the hell did he need to work? What was stopping him from just taking whatever he wanted? In that cold, predatory logic, if he wanted something, he just had to take it. It was the basic law of survival, so he squeezed the stone in his hands and it turned to dust.
Yet the very next second, Ethan violently shook his head, expelling the thought.
No. He wouldn't do that.
Even though he had lived like a ferocious animal for over twenty years—hunting, killing, and devouring monsters in that dark, forgotten hell—he refused to yield to that again. He wasn't in that abyss anymore. This was the world of the living, his world now.
Still, the loneliness and the weight of the past took their toll. Sometimes, in the silence of the night, he caught himself asking the most painful question of all: Was it worth it?
Was it worth sacrificing two decades of his life in a purgatory so that Hope could grow up safe, alongside her parents, with a real chance at being happy? And worst of all: seeing that, in the end, she had completely forgotten him and moved on with another boy. He couldn't deny that it hurt, burning in his chest like acid. But he tried to rationalize: it wasn't her fault, and technically, it wasn't his either. It was that cursed place, which had erased his existence from everyone's memory.
With a heavy sigh, he shoved those sad thoughts to the back of his mind. He didn't have time for self-pity. He needed to train, to test the limits of this body, since he had been trapped in his werewolf form for so long that he had even forgotten some things.
Yet one more thing still hammered in his head the whole time:
If you want her that bad... why don't you just kill Landon? That way the path is clear, and Hope is yours.
Ethan jolted in his chair, shaking his head again almost with disgust. Where were those thoughts coming from? What the fuck?
Had living for so long as a wild beast, guided only by the instinct to slaughter, corrupted something deep in his soul, turning him into a monster forever?
With a tight chest and an unwanted electrical energy buzzing beneath his skin, he stood up abruptly. He needed to clear his head. He needed to vent.
He walked with firm steps out of the main buildings toward the more isolated parts of the property, right at the border with the dense Mystic Falls forest. It was the perfect place to test his powers without drawing anyone's attention.
He closed his eyes, breathed in the damp forest air, and let his mind return to the memory of how he had discovered his most destructive ability.
It wasn't just the brute strength of an ancestral werewolf. It was something more. The electricity he had unleashed against Josie the day before, and which was now snapping in tiny blue sparks at his fingertips, had been born in a make-or-break moment years ago in Malivore.
He vaguely remembered that day in the mud hell: the instant he was almost decapitated by one of those biomechanical horrors—humanoid monsters with sword-sharp blades for hands. Cornered, taken by a blind fury of survival, he had ducked by a hair's breadth. And when the rage exploded in his veins, a discharge of raw electricity erupted from his hands, hit the monster square on, and scorched it to ashes.
He opened his eyes and raised his right hand toward an old, thick tree trunk a few meters away. He focused on the pressure of his own blood and the latent electricity inside him, and released the impulse.
ZAP!
A bolt of pure energy leaped from his palm with a deafening crack and struck the tree bark in an explosion of sparks and smoking splinters. No matter how much he tried to hide as a simple human boy, the power of a true nightmare still coursed through his veins.
As for the wolf form, the answer was uncertain; he would need to test it again. He needed to test if he could still transform and needed, more than ever, to feel the weight of that wild fur to clear his head.
Venturing deeper into the forest to ensure he was completely isolated from any students or onlookers, he stopped in a silent clearing. Without hesitating, he stripped and left his clothes neatly folded beside the trunk of an ancient tree. He felt the cool afternoon breeze on his skin before closing his eyes and searching for the primal instinct sleeping in his blood.
He breathed deeply, focusing on the pressure of his pulse, the racing heartbeat, and the energy rushing through his veins. With an explosive leap toward the sky, his body shuddered and reconfigured in mid-air.
When the transformation was complete, he was no longer the ordinary wolf of decades past. His coat was now jet-black, deep as night, slashed with patches of earthy brown that camouflaged him among the shadows of the woods. The size was impressive: massive, imposing, only slightly smaller than an adult horse, exuding an aura of strength that no other werewolf in that world could match.
As soon as his paws hit the ground, Ethan took off.
He ran like never before in his life. The speed was absurd, the wind slicing through his fur, the sound of his own breathing merging with the beating of his paws against the dirt trail. He felt free—free from chains, from guilt, from everything that kept him from being happy and truly breathing.
He ran for hours, losing track of time, devouring leagues and leagues of forests and dirt roads until he reached the edge of an abandoned quarry. He stopped at the cliff's edge and looked down into the deep abyss, where dark, crystal-clear waters reflected the twilight.
He realized he had gone too far: he was miles and miles away from Mystic Falls, with no memory of the exact way back. At that moment, though, he didn't give a damn. He just wanted to soak in the adrenaline of that instant of pure freedom.
As he contemplated the immensity of the landscape, the image of Hope invaded his wolf mind. He remembered seeing her transform into a wolf for the first time: even in her lupine form, she remained stunning—a fierce, magnetic vision that had left a mark on him. An audacious, definitive thought crossed his head: I'm going to ask her to run with me one of these days.
Screw it if she was still romancing Landon. She felt something for him—something raw and overwhelming that far surpassed a fleeting teenage crush. And if Landon stood in the way... if that kid had to suffer, Ethan wouldn't give a damn. Hope would be his, one way or another.
He turned back and began the return trip. In his wolf form, his speed was terrifying: propelled by his ancestral nature, he crossed distances at something close to Mach 1, tearing through the air with a muffled sonic boom, a black blur invisible to human eyes.
As he galloped back through the falling night, an annoying, technical doubt sprouted in his racing mind:
Wait... Did only people's memories get erased when I fell into Malivore? Or did the photos, videos, and records my mom had of me disappear too? Is that even possible?
The idea was terrifying. Because if Malivore had the power not only to erase what people remembered, but also to rewrite or make physical evidence of the real world vanish—like family albums, portraits on the wall, and digital files—that mud abyss wasn't just an ordinary prison. It was an entity with the bizarre, absolute power to alter reality itself, erasing someone's existence as if they had never set foot on Earth.
And if his mother didn't have a single photo left... who guaranteed she even remembered she ever had a son?
The weight of the thought almost made him brake hard in the dark woods. He would leave this investigation for later, but the urgency to discover the truth burned stronger than ever in his chest.
Sometime after that mind-blowing run, Ethan was back in the clearing, dressing in his clothes next to the ancient tree, lifting his face to the darkened sky as he thought about his own life. The silent immensity of loneliness weighed on his shoulders. Sometimes it felt like all those moments of reflection were pushing him, slowly, into the depths of a silent depression—a void that not even the strength of an ancestral werewolf could fill.
It was late in the night when Ethan returned to the school grounds, walking with a calm pace.
"Look who's back at this hour..." said a familiar female voice, cutting through the silence. "Where have you been all day? Cooking up some evil plan for Malivore?"
Ethan frowned, stopped, and turned around. To his surprise, standing in the dim light of the entrance, was his "friend" from the past: Penelope Park.
"You're the girl who got tossed yesterday by Hope while you had bugs in your brain?" he asked, raising his eyebrows with sharp irony.
Penelope cringed, feeling a chill of disgust as she remembered the humiliation, but she held her ground.
"Yeah, that's me. But I asked a question first: who are you? Because I feel like I know you from somewhere..."
Ethan raised an eyebrow, masking his start.
"You know me from somewhere?" he asked cautiously.
"Exactly," Penelope replied, taking a step forward and narrowing her eyes. "Ever since I saw you yesterday, I feel like I know you, I just can't remember from where. It's like those dreams you have and forget after a while..."
In Ethan's mind, alarms went off. Could there be a crack in Penelope's mind that had escaped Malivore's spell and remembered him?
"Listen... it's more complicated than you think, Penelope," he tried to deflect.
"Wait a second..." she interrupted, her eyes suddenly widening as the gears of her sharp mind began to turn. "You even know my name, and I don't remember anyone telling it to you yesterday. You know who I am, don't you?"
She was putting the pieces together with frightening speed.
"Tell me, newbie... by any chance, weren't you in Malivore?"
Ethan's blood ran cold for a second. Damn it... has this girl always been this smart?
Every survival instinct screamed at him to deny it, invent a lame excuse, and vanish. But something much stronger pulled him in the opposite direction. He wanted to open up to Penelope. Before everything fell apart, before he was sucked into the abyss and saw his entire life erased from everyone's memory, she had been his confidante, the closest friend he talked to about everything.
A part of him still hesitated, weighing the risks of trusting someone in a world that had betrayed him so much already. But, in a burst of emotional exhaustion, he thought: Screw it. I need to tell someone all this crap. Maybe she can help me figure out this hell.
"Come with me," he said seriously, gesturing for her to follow him.
He led her away from the main buildings, skirting the edges of the campus until they reached the old, isolated tree at the edge of the forest—the same silent refuge where he used to think and test his own limits.
As soon as they arrived, Ethan stayed silent for a long time, staring into space, assembling the pieces of a twenty-year puzzle he never thought he'd be able to put into words.
Penelope crossed her arms and leaned against the trunk, watching him with her usual sharp perspicacity until she lost patience:
"Come on, spit it out. The suspense is terrible."
Ethan let out a dry laugh, loaded with ironic bitterness, mixing the disbelief of being there with the crushing weight of everything he was holding in.
"Why don't you sit down here next to me?" he asked, tapping the grass beside him.
Penelope narrowed her eyes, suspicious of that sudden calm, but ended up nodding and sitting on the grass in front of him, keeping her arms crossed like armor.
Ethan gave a crooked smile, observing her facial features with a hint of genuine nostalgia.
"You know... you got a lot prettier during the time I was gone," he said naturally.
Penelope's eyes widened.
"!!! So you really do know me!" She caught him in the act by analyzing his words. For some inexplicable reason, a warm blush crept up her neck and heated her cheeks. She frowned, annoyed with herself. "Huh? What...? Why is my face hot?" she muttered under her breath, hating to lose control of the situation.
Ethan looked away toward the night sky, his hands resting on his knees.
"I studied at this school about two and a half years ago," he revealed, his voice low and calm.
Penelope nodded slowly, biting her lower lip as the pieces clicked into place. She had already suspected it, but hearing the confirmation changed everything.
"So you really fell into Malivore... and everybody forgot you," she concluded, staring intently at him, fascinated and intrigued. "But that's really weird. Why would someone like you attract Malivore's attention? Legend says it only sucks up ancestral monsters, creatures of myth and legend. What does some random kid, or whatever you are, have to do with a primordial mud pit?"
"I think what happened wasn't because of what I am, but because of what I did," Ethan replied, his voice low and distant.
Penelope frowned, her sharp eyes locked on him.
"Because of what you did?" she asked, leaning forward. "And what exactly did you do to attract Malivore's attention?"
Ethan let out a heavy sigh, looked down at his own calloused hands, and then raised his eyes to the immensity of the night.
"To start with, I only have a few clues. But in over twenty years trapped in that hell, surrounded by monsters trying to kill me every second, I had a lot of time to think and I came to some conclusions," he replied with chilling naturalness.
"!!! T-twenty... Twenty years?!" Penelope stumbled over her words, her eyes wide with panic and disbelief. "You were trapped twenty years in Malivore?! But how... how did you survive so long in there, if everyone who enters gets digested and erased?!"
Ethan shrugged, a cold gesture that hid invisible, deeply rooted scars.
"Time in Malivore is completely different from out here. From what it looks like, for every year that passes in the real world, ten years pass in that abyss," he explained calmly.
Penelope brought a hand to her mouth, feeling a freezing shiver run down her spine.
"That's terrifying, Ethan... I can't even imagine what you went through in there. But tell me... what did you do that led you to a place like that?" she insisted, curiosity and shock mixed in her tone.
Ethan broke into a sad, melancholic smile and looked back up at the starry sky, where the full moon was shining.
"Love..." he murmured, his voice loaded with unbearable weight. "It was love that made me do it."
"Love?" Penelope frowned in pure perplexity, crossing and uncrossing her arms. "What do you mean, love? Who in their right mind throws themselves into a primordial mud pit for love, Ethan?"
Ethan let out a short, humorless laugh, ran a hand through his hair, and stared into Penelope's dark eyes.
"To start telling my story, the sequence of everything, I need to go back to my father," he began, his voice dropping an octave, turning graver. "He wasn't an ordinary werewolf. In his lineage, there was an extremely rare biological and magical bond. A thing called an imprint."
Penelope tilted her head, intrigued.
"An imprint? Like an obsession?"
"No. It's much deeper and more inevitable than that." Ethan stared into the darkness of the forest. "An imprint is an anchor of the soul. When a wolf of my lineage finds their destined person, the whole world loses its gravity, and the axis of rotation shifts to that person. They become your air, your center, your only priority on earth. It's not a rational choice, Penelope. You don't choose to love. Your own biology and magic tie you to them—to protect, to care for, and to give your life if necessary."
Penelope blinked slowly, shocked by the weight of those words and the intensity of his gaze.
"And this imprint... made you find someone here?" she deduced in a whisper.
"It did," Ethan agreed, and his chest tightened. "I found my destined person right here in this school, two and a half years ago. And a series of absurd events and desperate decisions led me to take her place. She was carrying a burden too heavy, a destiny that was going to destroy her life and everyone else's around her. I couldn't let that happen. When the time came, I took her pain upon myself. I carried the weight that was hers. And that's exactly what threw me inside Malivore."
Penelope stayed silent for long seconds. The sarcastic, provocative girl had vanished. In her place was just a friend absorbing the magnitude of the sacrifice Ethan had made.
"And who was she, Ethan?" she asked, her gaze attentive and fixed on him. "Who is the girl you sacrificed twenty years of your life for in that hell?"
Ethan kept looking at the starry sky as he vented, his chest rising and falling slowly. He took a deep breath, let the air out in a cold puff, and finally let the name slip:
"It's Hope."
Penelope froze for an instant, and her sharp expression completely unraveled. Shock was stamped on her face. She blinked slowly, putting every piece of the puzzle together: the inexplicable sparks between the two of them, his silent obsession with every move of the tribrid.
"So... it's her," she said in a nearly inaudible tone, surprised by the dimension of the revelation.
Ethan nodded, not looking away from the sky above.
"I spent twenty years trapped in that place, fighting for survival every second," he murmured, his voice thick. "And the only thing keeping me sane was her image. I still catch myself thinking about her all the time. This cursed feeling is still alive right here, as firm as the first day."
He brought both hands to his face, rubbing his eyes and covering his face for a few seconds, then let out a dry, muffled laugh.
"What the fuck... This whole thing is crazy."
Penelope kept staring at him, digesting the weight of what she had just heard: a boy who had crossed a twenty-year temporal hell for the love of Hope Mikaelson, only to return and find the world upside down—and her in the arms of another guy.
"Must be hell for you, then... seeing that she moved on with another guy, huh?" she asked, with unexpected empathy in her voice, evaluating his expression.
Ethan pulled his hands away from his face and let out the air with a crooked, almost amused smile that seemed to defy the pain itself.
"Nah. Not everything is lost yet," he replied, while a flash of heat hit his mind remembering the day before.
Penelope frowned, confused.
"Why are you making that face? Don't you want to be with her? If she's with someone else, shouldn't you be furious, wanting to rip his head off?"
"To tell you the truth, I'm even glad that Hope 'seems' to have forgotten me for a while, because conquering her is going to be a blast," Ethan retorted, with undue confidence shining in his eyes. "To tell you the truth, I've already taken a giant step toward that."
Penelope raised an eyebrow, the curiosity of a gossip and a sharp witch screaming inside her.
"You've already taken a giant step? What exactly did you do, prodigy boy?"
Ethan leaned back a bit more on the grass, crossing his hands behind his head with a smirk that was irritating and fascinating at the same time.
"Well, from what I could gather since that Landon guy arrived at this school, Hope at least seemed to be getting on with her life. Before he showed up, she seemed to have lost her axis completely—she was closed off, a defensive pain in the ass. Today she at least has more courage to face the world. But want to know the best part?"
Penelope stared at him, static.
"If she's so happy with her precious little boyfriend, why did she kiss me yesterday afternoon in the cafeteria?" Ethan dropped playfully, knowing exactly the size of the bomb he was launching.
"!!! She kissed you?!"
Penelope's eyes widened, and her jaw dropped as her brain processed the information.
"Wow..." she whispered, stunned, with a mix of shock and pure venomous amusement. "What on earth happened to make her do something that crazy? Damn... you managed to destabilize the tribrid that easily?"
"Her thoughts might have forgotten me because of that cursed place... but her feelings? I highly doubt they vanished just like that," Ethan replied, his voice low and loaded with unshakable certainty, fixing his gaze on the darkness of the forest with an intense glint in his eyes.
Penelope crossed her arms and bit the corner of her lower lip, processing. She knew Hope's reputation: strong-willed, loyal to a fault, the weight of the world on her shoulders. Cheating on her boyfriend out of the blue didn't sound like her usual style.
"She doesn't look like the type to cheat on Landon just like that, out of nowhere," she argued, narrowing her eyes at Ethan. "Are you sure you didn't push a little? I mean... you really didn't do anything to make her yield like that?"
Ethan shrugged with a nasal, carefree laugh.
"Well... she was coming after me, wanting answers about who I am, where I came from, that marathon of questions," he recounted, remembering the scene clearly. "So I decided to charge a price for the answers. I asked for a kiss... and zero surprise to me, she agreed."
Penelope broke into a wide smile, mixing amusement and pure malice.
"Wow..." she shook her head, still fascinated. "I swear I'd give anything to see that scene. Hope has this untouchable-girl persona, the all-powerful who never steps out of line. If she did that to you, then damn, you might actually be right about her still feeling something. And you know what? This is going to crush Landon when he finds out."
At the mention of his rival, Ethan's relaxed expression evaporated. His face closed into a cold, merciless scowl.
"I don't give a damn what Landon feels or doesn't feel," he growled, his voice dropping to a dangerously low register. "If he gets in my way..."
Suddenly, his eyes underwent a frightening metamorphosis: their normal green vanished, giving way to a brilliant, predatory green that radiated an ancestral, violent energy, making the air around them feel electrified.
"...I'll rip his head off," he finished, his tone dripping with venom. Then he closed his eyes for an instant, took a deep breath, and the fierce green receded, returning to normal while he flashed a crooked, calculating smile. "Although... killing him that fast wouldn't be any fun at all. He's going to pay another way. He'll learn the hard way never to lay hands on what was never his."
Penelope's heart skipped a beat. A chill, both frightening and fascinating, ran down her spine at that glimpse of the beast that had survived twenty years in Malivore. She stared at him with a mix of respect and surprise.
"Damn..." she murmured, swallowing hard, but letting a sideways smile slip out. "You're pretty evil, aren't you? I like that."
"So, what are your plans from here on out?" she asked, leaning forward, her eyes shining with curiosity. "Because if you really intend to get Hope back and destroy Landon's perfect little world, you're going to need more than scowls and evil werewolf glares."
Ethan slowly turned his head and stared at her with surgical intensity. The smile vanished, replaced by a cutting seriousness that cooled the air around them.
"First of all, Penelope: if you open your mouth to talk to anyone about what we discussed here today, I promise I won't be friendly at all with you," he warned, his voice low, cold, and magnetic.
Penelope bit the corner of her lip. The truth was, she found it fascinating: seeing that dominant, dangerous, and unfiltered side of Ethan awakened her old attraction to good chaos.
She flashed a sly smile and replied in a drawn-out, teasing tone:
"Don't worry, big guy... I won't tell a living soul. It'll be our little... se-cret."
Ethan looked down for a second, weighing it, and then raised his face, letting a smirk slip that acknowledged her complicity.
"To attack someone, you can't go straight at them," he continued, plotting the plan again. "You can't be direct and hasty. You have to go around the sides, undermining the terrain slowly, sneaking up, pretending to be harmless, just to deliver the final blow later."
Penelope connected the dots with the ease of someone who understood psychological manipulation. Her eyes narrowed, understanding where he was getting at.
"Wait a minute..." she said, her smile widening with a gleam of perverse approval. "I'm starting to understand your plan. You're not going to hit him head-on. You're going to attack Landon through his heart."
"Of course. Hitting head-on would be way too easy, and where's the fun in that?" Ethan joked with a dry laugh devoid of an ounce of compassion. "Hope is all that guy has, right? His world revolves around her. So this will be like hitting two targets at once."
He leaned a bit closer to Penelope, his voice dropping to an almost whispered, yet lead-heavy tone:
"I'll take Hope back from him while he watches everything and suffers for every second. He'll learn the hard way that never, under any circumstances, do you mess with a werewolf's woman."
Before Penelope could reply, Ethan's expression closed back into a mortal coldness. He looked deep into her eyes, letting a predatory aura flow unchecked:
"As for you, Penelope... I repeat, it's best this conversation doesn't leave here for anything in this world. I know exactly how you operate and I know you love spreading good gossip around school. Consider this a warning: if you ruin my plan or let any detail slip to the wrong person, I will destroy your life. I don't care if, in the past, we were friends. My patience for anyone getting in my way ran out a long time ago."
Penelope swallowed hard, feeling a freezing shiver run up her spine. But far from being truly intimidated, her gaze sparked with a mix of danger, fascination, and pure complicity.
She rested her head against the trunk, let out a heavy sigh, and kept her provocative smile:
"Aggressive... I like when you talk like that. Relax, big guy. Your story and your secret are more than safe with me. In fact, I can't wait to see this show start."