Chapter 1: The Drowning Dark
The darkness had teeth.
That was my first thought when awareness returned—not gently, not like waking from sleep, but like a door slamming open in a house I thought was empty. The darkness pressed against my skin, my lungs, my mind, and it had been pressing for...
How long?
Pain bloomed in my chest. Not the sharp, clean pain of a fresh wound, but the ancient, settled agony of something that had been burning for so long it had become part of me. Silver. I knew that burn. The dagger pinned through my sternum like a butterfly in a collection, holding me in place, holding me in nothing.
Water. I was underwater. The pressure was wrong—too much, too deep, the kind of depth that should have crushed my skull like an eggshell. Wood groaned around me. A coffin. I was in a coffin at the bottom of the ocean, and I'd been here for—
You've been awake.
The thought hit like a fist to the gut. Not unconscious. Not sleeping. Awake. Every second. Every minute. Every—
No. No, that's not possible. Nobody could survive that and stay sane.
Except I had. And I wasn't sure about the sane part.
Memories flickered like a broken TV. Two faces, blurred but familiar in the worst way. Esther. Mikael. Their names tasted like copper and ash. The woman with her clinical smile, blood-slick hands drawing patterns on my skin. The man with his dead eyes, draining me like I was a wineskin and he was thirsty.
"Such power," her voice echoed. "You'll be the foundation. The source. You won't remember this part, I promise."
She'd lied. I remembered everything.
I tried to move. My fingers twitched—barely, just a spasm—but even that sent lightning up my arm. The silver dagger wasn't just in me; it was part of me now, its magic woven through my paralyzed muscles like roots through stone. I wanted to scream. My jaw wouldn't open. I wanted to rip myself apart just to feel something other than this drowning, burning, nothing.
Another memory, sharper: dying. Not here. Somewhere else. Somewhere with cars that didn't look like museum pieces and phones that fit in your pocket. Nineteen years old, walking home from a party, truck running a red light, the world tilting sideways, asphalt rushing up to meet my face. The wish. I'd made a wish.
I want to live forever. I want to be powerful. I want to be Original before the Originals.
Careful what you wish for, Roy.
That was my name now. Roy Stark. Not the name I was born with—that one was gone, lost in another world—but the name of the body I'd woken up in centuries ago. A body that Esther and Mikael had found, drained, experimented on, and used to create their precious Original vampires. My blood became their spell. My suffering became their immortality.
And when they were done? Silver dagger through the heart. Sealed in a coffin. Dropped in the ocean. Left to experience eternity as a drowning man who couldn't drown.
I was going to make them scream.
The thought was clear. Pure. It cut through the darkness like a blade, and for the first time in—days? years? centuries?—I felt something other than despair.
Rage.
Then the world lurched.
It wasn't physical. It was deeper than that, like someone had reached into my chest and plucked a guitar string connected to my spine. Power surged through me—not mine, but from me, the bloodline connection I'd never understood suddenly flaring to life. Vampires. Dozens of them. Hundreds. All linked back to me through Esther's spell, through the blood she'd stolen to make the Originals, through—
Klaus.
I didn't know how I knew, but I did. Klaus Mikaelson, the hybrid, had just broken his curse. Werewolf and vampire merged, and the shockwave of it rippled backward through every vampire in existence because they were all, ultimately, mine. Children of my blood, even if they didn't know it.
The silver dagger's grip loosened.
Not much. Not enough. But the absolute, crushing paralysis pulled back from "can't twitch" to "can barely move," and that was enough. It was everything.
I focused on my right hand. Fingers first. The index finger moved a quarter-inch, scraping against the wood above my head. The pain was exquisite—nerve endings that hadn't fired in a millennium screaming back to life—but I welcomed it. Pain meant I was alive. Pain meant I could act.
Twenty minutes to move my whole hand. My palm pressed flat against the coffin lid, and I could feel it now: the wood was old. Waterlogged. Weak. The seal was magic, yes, but magic was just another material. It could break.
I pushed.
The wood groaned. My hand trembled. The silver dagger shifted in my chest, and I tasted blood in my mouth—my own, fresh, the first real sensation in a thousand years beyond drowning. I pushed harder. My shoulder socket popped, grinding bone against bone, but I didn't stop.
Crack.
The sound was beautiful.
Water sprayed through the fracture, pressurized and freezing, slamming into my face like a hammer. I didn't care. I kept pushing. My other hand joined the first, clawing at the widening split, and the coffin lid splintered like rotted driftwood. Ocean water flooded in, and the pressure—the crushing, brutal pressure that should have killed me instantly—felt like a relief.
The silver dagger burned brighter as I moved, as if sensing its prisoner was escaping. Esther's magic pulsed through it, trying to reassert control, but Klaus's curse-breaking had weakened it just enough. I grabbed the hilt with both hands, felt the metal sear through my palms, and pulled.
I screamed underwater.
No sound came out. Just bubbles, rising toward a surface I couldn't see. But the dagger moved. Inch by agonizing inch, it slid free of my sternum, my ribs, my heart, and the moment the tip cleared my skin, my body exploded with sensation.
Hunger. Not vampire hunger, though that was there too, gnawing at my insides like a living thing. This was the hunger of a body that had been used. Drained. Starved. Every cell screaming for blood, for energy, for anything to fill the void Esther and Mikael had carved out of me.
But also: freedom.
I could move. My arms worked. My legs kicked. The coffin shattered around me, and I pushed through the debris, through the dark water, through the pressure that still felt wrong but no longer crushing. My healing factor kicked in—weak, sluggish, barely 10% of what it should be—but it was there. The dagger wound in my chest closed at a crawl, skin knitting itself back together over exposed bone.
Which way was up?
I looked around. The ocean floor stretched out in every direction, black and empty. No light. No landmarks. Just... nothing. For a second, panic clawed its way back up my throat. I'd survived the coffin only to drown for real, lost in the depths, unable to even orient myself toward—
No. Wait. Bubbles. The air escaping my mouth was rising. I followed them.
Swimming felt like dragging myself through concrete. My muscles were atrophied, weak from disuse and blood loss and time. Every stroke sent pain lancing through my shoulders. My lungs burned—not from lack of air, because vampires didn't need air, but from the memory of drowning, a phantom sensation so ingrained after a millennium that my body couldn't tell the difference between real and remembered.
I swam anyway.
The darkness above me lightened by degrees. Black to deep blue to lighter blue, the water warming as I rose, and then—
Moonlight.
I broke the surface gasping, even though I didn't need to breathe, and for a moment I just floated there, staring up at the sky. The moon looked exactly the same. That shouldn't have surprised me—moons don't change—but it did. A thousand years, and the moon was still the moon, still bright and distant and utterly indifferent to the horror show playing out below it.
Time had passed. The world had moved on. And I'd been down there the entire time, conscious and drowning and screaming into the void where no one could hear me.
I started laughing. It came out as a broken, rattling sound, half-drowned and manic, and I couldn't stop. I laughed until my chest ached, until the sound twisted into something that might have been sobs, and then I forced myself to stop because if I kept going I might never start again.
Land. I needed land. And blood.
I looked around, treading water on instinct even though I couldn't sink. The ocean stretched in every direction, vast and empty, but there—far to the north, maybe ten miles—was a dark smudge against the horizon. Coast.
I swam.
It took hours. My body protested every movement, muscles tearing and healing and tearing again in a cycle that would have killed a human. But I wasn't human. I was something older, something Esther had tried to bury at the bottom of the ocean because she was terrified of what I could become.
She should have been.
The water grew shallower. Rocks scraped my palms. I crawled forward, not swimming anymore but dragging myself like a wounded animal, until my head broke through the surf and I collapsed on sand.
I'd made it.
The beach was dark and silent. No houses. No people. Just rocks and sand and the quiet rush of waves. I lay there for thirty minutes—I counted every second—while my body tried to remember how to function. The silver dagger wound in my chest was mostly closed, a puckered scar where there should have been a hole, but it still pulled every time I breathed. Not that I needed to breathe. But old habits died hard.
You're free, I thought. You're actually free.
And then: Now what?
The hunger answered that question. It rose up from my gut, sharp and vicious, drowning out every other thought. Blood. I needed blood. My body was running on fumes, barely holding itself together, and if I didn't feed soon I'd collapse back into torpor. Or worse.
I pushed myself to my hands and knees, then to my feet. The world spun. I steadied myself against a boulder, feeling the rough stone under my palm, and breathed in deep through my nose.
Deer.
I smelled them in the woods past the beach, their blood warm and animal and close. My vision sharpened, the edges going red, and I stumbled toward the trees.
Predator instinct overrode everything else. I wasn't Roy Stark, ancient vampire and victim of torture. I was just hunger on two legs, desperate and mindless, and when I found the first deer—a young doe, grazing near a stream—I didn't hesitate.
I was on her before she could run. My teeth sank into her throat, and the taste of blood, fresh blood, warm blood, nearly brought me to my knees. I drank. And drank. And drank until the animal collapsed, until there was nothing left, and even then I couldn't stop. I dropped her body and found another deer. Then another. By the fourth, my hands had stopped shaking.
By the fifth, I could think again.
I sat back on my heels, covered in blood, surrounded by drained carcasses, and took stock. My strength was returning. Not much—maybe 20% now instead of 15%—but enough to walk without stumbling. Enough to not feel like every movement might be my last. The healing factor had kicked into a higher gear; the dagger wound was a faint pink line now, almost invisible.
I was still weak. Dangerously weak. Any vampire with a few centuries under their belt could probably take me in a fight. But I was functional. And that was a start.
I stood, brushed the worst of the blood off my hands—no point, I was covered in it—and walked back toward the beach. There had to be a house nearby. Clothes. Maybe information.
I found it a quarter-mile down the coast: a small beach house, dark and silent, probably a summer home left vacant for the season. Perfect.
The door was locked. I ripped it off its hinges and stepped inside.
The smell hit me first: stale air and dust, the scent of a place that hadn't been lived in for months. I ignored it and moved through the house, searching. Bedroom. Closet. Clothes that were too big but better than being naked. I pulled on jeans and a shirt that hung loose on my frame—I'd lost weight, a lot of it, muscle eaten away during the millennium of starvation—and found a jacket to cover the worst of the bloodstains.
Then I saw it.
On the kitchen counter, plugged into the wall and glowing faintly: a smartphone.
I picked it up. The screen was smooth and black, reflecting my face back at me—gaunt, pale, eyes too bright with residual bloodlust. I looked like a corpse someone had forgotten to bury. I tapped the screen the way I'd seen people do in... when? The last time I'd been awake, phones were attached to walls and the size of bricks.
The screen lit up. Icons. Colors. A date at the top: October 15, 2011.
I'd been sealed in that coffin in 1011. Exactly one thousand years. Esther and Mikael had imprisoned me, used me, and left me to rot for a millennium.
The phone made a sound—a cheerful chime—and a woman's voice spoke: "How can I help you?"
I dropped it.
The phone clattered on the counter, still talking in that calm, artificial tone, and I stared at it like it had sprouted teeth. What the hell was that? Was someone inside the phone? Was it magic? Did humans have magic now?
"Hello?" the voice said again. "Are you still there?"
I grabbed the phone and threw it across the room. It hit the wall and went silent.
My hands were shaking again. Not from hunger this time, but from something worse: the realization of just how much the world had changed. A thousand years. I'd missed a thousand years. Everything I knew was gone. Everyone I might have known was dust. The Mikaelsons were probably ancient legends by now, if they were even still alive.
And I was alone.
I sank into a chair, still holding the stolen jacket, and stared at the shattered phone on the floor. My body was weak. I had no allies, no resources, no plan. Just rage and a promise I'd made to myself in the darkness:
I was going to find Esther and Mikael.
And I was going to make them scream.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1