3rd pov
———
The ruins should have resisted them.
They always had before.
Even after decades—after abandonment, after the slow suffocation of vines and rot—the place had clung to its curse with a kind of stubborn pride. The magic woven into the stone had not been delicate. It had been brutal, sustained by blood and repetition, fed by belief long after belief itself had thinned.
Elijah Mikaelson remembered it well.
He remembered the way the air had pressed inward, the way sound had dulled as though swallowed. He remembered standing at the edge of the clearing years ago and knowing, with quiet certainty, that the land itself did not wish to be witnessed.
Now, as he stepped across the threshold once more, there was nothing.
No resistance. No pressure. No echo of power stirring uneasily at his approach.
Just stone.
Just jungle.
Just the night, breathing as it always had.
Elijah slowed, his brow furrowing almost imperceptibly as he let his senses unfurl. He searched for the familiar—old sigils etched deep into the bones of the place, the faint aftertaste of sacrifice—but found only absence.
Not emptiness.
Resolution.
Behind him, Klaus entered the clearing with far less patience. His boots crushed brittle leaves and fragments of stone, his posture already coiled with irritation from the journey.
He stopped short.
The change in him was immediate.
Klaus's head lifted, eyes narrowing, the wolfish edge of his attention sharpening as his instincts reached outward and found nothing to bite into.
"…That's wrong," he muttered.
Elijah did not respond. He crouched instead, pressing his palm flat against the stone floor where an altar had once stood. The rock was cool beneath his skin. Clean.
Too clean.
"There should be residue," Klaus continued, prowling a few paces into the clearing. "This place reeked. You said so yourself."
"It did," Elijah replied quietly.
Klaus turned on him sharply. "Did?"
Elijah rose slowly. "The curse is gone."
Klaus laughed, a sharp, disbelieving sound. "Gone? You're telling me a spell that survived conquest and conversion simply… evaporated?"
"No," Elijah said. "It was undone."
Klaus's expression darkened. "By what?"
Elijah did not answer immediately. He moved deeper into the ruins, passing stones that once bore layered sigils now worn smooth, as if centuries of corruption had been gently—meticulously—peeled away.
No backlash.
No scarring.
The jungle itself felt different here. Less wary. As though something it had tolerated out of necessity had finally been allowed to leave.
Klaus followed, his irritation sharpening into something closer to unease.
"You brought me halfway across the world for a ghost story," Klaus snapped. "If this is another one of your—"
He stopped.
They both did.
The wall loomed before them—what remained of the central structure, once an altar backdrop, now standing alone amid the clearing. Moonlight spilled across its surface, revealing stone that looked younger than it should have been, its fractures sealed, its surface restored to something approaching wholeness.
And carved into it, deep and deliberate, were two words.
NEW WORLD
Klaus stared at the inscription in silence.
Then he laughed.
Not amused.
Not impressed.
"I don't like that," he said flatly.
Elijah stepped closer, eyes tracing the grooves of the carving. The strokes were precise. Unhurried. No magic clung to them—no glamour, no compulsion.
Just intent.
"He wanted this found," Klaus said.
"Yes," Elijah replied.
Klaus turned to him. "You said this thing wasn't reckless."
"It isn't."
"This is a challenge."
Elijah shook his head. "No. It's a declaration."
Klaus scoffed. "That's worse."
They stood there, the silence stretching. Klaus paced once, then again, senses flaring uselessly as he searched for something—anything—to react to.
"There's nothing left," Klaus said finally, voice tight. "No signature. No trail. It's like he never existed."
Elijah's gaze remained fixed on the wall. "On the contrary."
He reached out and brushed his fingers lightly across the carved words. The stone was warm, as though it remembered the hands that had shaped it.
"He existed here," Elijah said softly. "And then he chose not to."
Klaus stopped pacing. "You speak as though you expected this."
Elijah exhaled slowly. "I feared it.
Klaus stared at him. "You feared he'd leave?"
"No," Elijah said. "I feared what it would mean if he stayed."
Klaus folded his arms. "You never answered me," he said. "Back then. When you met him. You never told me what he was."
Elijah finally turned to face his brother.
"I still don't know," he said.
Klaus blinked.
In a thousand years, he could count on one hand the number of times he'd heard his brother say that phrase.
You don't know?" Klaus repeated.
Elijah nodded once. "I know what he appears to be. A vampire who retained magic that should have been extinguished. A singular anomaly. An impossibility."
"And you didn't kill him," Klaus said sharply.l
"No."
Klaus's jaw tightened. "You should have."
Elijah held his gaze. "I don't believe I could have."
The words landed heavier than any threat.
Klaus stared at him. "What?"
"When I stood before him," Elijah continued evenly, "I sensed restraint. Control. A system of power that fed itself without excess."
"So?" Klaus snapped. "Everything bleeds eventually."
Elijah shook his head. "I have ended many things that should not exist. I am telling you, honestly, that I do not believe he was one of them."
Klaus searched his face for deception. Found none.
"You're saying he could have killed you," Klaus said quietly.
Elijah considered. "No."
Klaus's lip curled. "Then what are you saying?"
"I am saying," Elijah replied, "that had I tried to destroy him, I do not believe the outcome would have been as certain as you assume.
Silence stretched between them, thick and unsettled.
Klaus looked back at the inscription. "Then show me," he said.
Elijah hesitated, then he nodded. "Very well."
Elijah stepped closer and placed his hand on Klaus's shoulder. The jungle vanished.
———————
Firelight. Low, controlled. A man seated beside it, posture relaxed, eyes steady as Elijah stepped into the clearing years earlier.
Klaus felt the sensation of containment immediately—the magic cycling inward, feeding on something vast and unseen. He felt Elijah's curiosity. His caution. His unexpected ease.
"You carry magic," Elijah's voice echoed in memory.
"I was born with it."
Klaus felt the subtle recalibration of reality as Elijah examined the structure of that magic—how it did not draw from the land, nor from spirits, but from the animating curse itself.
"How?" Klaus demanded within the memory.
Elijah had not known.
Klaus felt the moment Elijah realized something else, something far more unsettling:
The absence of hunger. Not physical—existential.This creature did not strain against the world. Did not claw for dominance or validation.
He endured.
The memory shifted—years later.
The same ruins. The curse weakening. Jasper moving through ancient sigils with precision, siphoning without violence, untangling centuries-old corruption strand by strand.No chants. No blood. Just patience.
And beneath it all, a sense of inevitability—as though this outcome had always been possible, waiting only for the right hand to guide it.
Klaus recoiled as the memory ended.Elijah released him. The jungle rushed back in.
—————
"…He wasn't taking," Klaus said slowly. "He was correcting."
"Yes," Elijah replied.
Klaus ran a hand through his hair, unsettled. "That kind of control doesn't come from strength alone."
"No," Elijah agreed. "It comes from understanding limits."
Klaus scoffed weakly. "You sound impressed."
Elijah did not deny it.
"He didn't challenge us," Klaus said. "He didn't hide, either."
"No."
"He chose to leave," Klaus finished.
"Yes."
Klaus looked again at the inscription. "New World."
Elijah nodded. "He is going where definitions have not yet hardened. Where he can exist without immediately being named—or hunted."
Klaus's expression darkened. "If he builds something—"
"He will do so quietly," Elijah said. "He always has."
"And if he becomes a problem?"
Elijah's gaze drifted to the ruins, now nothing more than stone and moonlight.
"Then he will announce himself," he said softly. "Not with blood. But with consequence."
Klaus exhaled sharply. "I hate enigmas."
Elijah smiled faintly. "You are one."
They turned to leave, the jungle parting reluctantly before them. As they crossed the threshold, Elijah felt it—the finality. Whatever had been bound here was truly gone.
Not destroyed.
Released.
"Brother," Klaus said as they walked, "if we meet him again—"
"We will," Elijah replied without hesitation.
Klaus's eyes gleamed. "Next time, I won't be so patient."
Elijah glanced back once more at the ruins.
"I suspect," he said quietly, "that next time, patience will be the only reason any of us survive."
Far across the ocean, beneath a sky not yet scarred by empire, the New World waited. And somewhere within it, something ancient and unnamed was already beginning again.
——
Jasper pov
The crossing ended without ceremony.
No storm rose to challenge him. No omen split the sky. The ship simply slowed, groaning as it yielded to unfamiliar waters, and the New World appeared as land always did—solid, indifferent, unconcerned with who stepped upon it.
Jasper Fontaine stood at the rail long after the others disembarked.
He listened.
The Old World had always spoken first.
Europe murmured with the weight of history, magic layered upon magic until the land itself had learned expectation. Every step there had been measured against what had come before. Every spell remembered its ancestors.
Here—
Here, the land was quiet.
Not empty.
Unclaimed.
Jasper closed his eyes and opened himself fully.
Magic did not recoil from him.
It did not strain or buckle or scream the way it had once done across oceans heavy with blood and doctrine. Instead, it flowed—wide, untethered, unstructured. Power bled into the soil and lingered there, waiting for meaning rather than demanding it.
The land noticed him.
He felt that much.
But it did not judge.
Jasper stepped down onto unfamiliar ground and felt something settle into place behind his ribs. Not relief. Not triumph.
Permission.
He did not announce himself.
He moved inland slowly, following no road for long, crossing rivers where they narrowed and forests where they thickened. He fed discreetly, never twice in the same place, never leaving marks that would invite pattern or pursuit.
He learned quickly what the New World tolerated.
Magic here was abundant but unrefined. It surged in some places and thinned in others without apparent logic. Spells were less precise, but more resilient. Belief shaped power faster than tradition ever could.
Jasper siphoned carefully.
Always carefully.
He had learned, long ago, that excess invited consequence.
Where he walked, magic changed.
Not immediately.
Not violently.
But consistently.
A charm meant to protect a homestead dulled instead of breaking. A curse woven too tightly unraveled without backlash. An enchanted blade lost its edge but did not shatter.
Jasper noticed the pattern before anyone else did.
Others followed soon after.
Witches sensed him as absence before they sensed him as presence.
That was new.
In Europe, magic had screamed when it was disrupted. Here, it simply… quieted. The first coven to notice him did so only because their wards failed to react at all.
Jasper felt their attention brush against him like mist.
They did not approach.
They tested.
Carefully shaped probes of magic reached for him—diagnostic, cautious, meant to reveal structure without confrontation.
They slid through him and vanished.
Not absorbed.
Not resisted.
Gone.
Jasper paused beside a riverbank and waited.
He did not hide.
If they wished to understand, they would have to look directly.
They withdrew instead.
The second group was bolder.
They attempted to bind him from a distance, weaving sympathetic threads meant to restrict and analyze simultaneously. Jasper felt the spell collapse before it reached his skin, its magic dispersing harmlessly into him and being siphoned into his vampiric nature. The witches staggered, shocked by the lack of backlash. Jasper almost smiled.
By the third attempt, he understood what frightened them most. It was not that he could not be controlled.
It was that he did not react.
Rumors began to spread faster than he could outrun them. Not stories—patterns. Magic behaving strangely in places he had passed through. Old workings loosening. Enchantments losing aggression without losing purpose.
He heard the theories secondhand.
"He's draining us."
"No, he's stabilizing something."
"He's a witch who survived the turning."
"That's impossible."
"So is everything until it isn't." Jasper listened without interfering. Definition was a trap.
Once named, something could be bounded. Studied. Repeated.
He had no intention of allowing that. When they finally confronted him directly, he had already chosen the place. A wide riverbank at dusk. Open ground. No cover. No leverage.
Five witches emerged from the treeline, their magic coiled tight with discipline and fear. They were careful, which Jasper respected.
"You're disrupting the local flow," one of them said.
"Yes," Jasper replied. "That was not my intention."
"You drain spells."
"I siphon," he corrected gently.
The word landed wrong. Too early.
"From where?" another demanded.
Jasper considered the question honestly. "From wherever magic is being wasted."They cast anyway.
The spell was elegant—meant to bind and reveal simultaneously. Jasper felt it brush against him and he siphoned it before it could affect him, its energy slipping away without protest.
The witches staggered, breath leaving them in sharp gasps.
"Please stop," Jasper said quietly. "You're exhausting yourselves."
One of them laughed, sharp and hysterical. "We can't see you."
"You can," Jasper replied. "You just don't have the language yet. Fear took hold then. They backed away, murmuring to one another, eyes never leaving him.Jasper let them go. By morning, the story had changed beyond recognition.
———
He moved south. Not because he was chased. Because the land pulled. He felt it before the river widened. Before the air thickened with rot and salt and old water.
Jasper slowed at the edge of the delta, senses opening fully, and for the first time since setting foot on back the continen of his birth, he stopped because something else had already claimed the space. Something strong.
This magic was not unsettled. It was wounded.
The land here carried a pressure he recognized immediately—not age, but memory forced into shape. Power that had been driven inward instead of allowed to disperse. It did not flow; it coiled. It did not answer; it waited.
Jasper stood very still. This was not the layered chaos he had expected. This was concentration. Something ancient had sunk its roots deep into this place and refused to die properly.
Not bound. Not free. Contained. Badly.
The river carried it like a scar, wide and patient, bearing the echo of ritual too violent to ever be fully forgotten. Jasper could feel where belief had turned feral, where pain had been mistaken for power and fed until it learned hunger.
He did not need a name to understand the shape of it. This was not witchcraft as practice.This was witchcraft as vengeance. Jasper exhaled slowly, careful not to draw on the magic around him.
Whatever slept here did not respond well to interference. He understood then why the city above it felt inevitable. Why so many paths bent toward this place.
This was not merely fertile ground. It was a wound that refused to close. New Orleans was not unfinished. It was waiting. Jasper took a step back from the riverbank. "Not yet," he murmured—not as a warning, but as a promise. Some evils did not require confrontation.
Some only required time. He turned away, leaving the delta undisturbed, and felt the coiled presence beneath the water remain exactly as it was—watchful, patient, and far older than the city that would one day rise screaming above it.
———
Interlude Salem, 1692
History remembers Salem as hysteria.
Fire. Rope. Accusation masquerading as faith. History is wrong.
The first scream reached Jasper Fontaine at dawn—not because it was loud, but because it echoed. Fear had become ritual. Belief had crossed into structure. Magic was being dragged into the open by hands too ignorant to understand what they were tearing apart.
Salem was not hunting witches. It was creating them. Jasper arrived before the second pyre was lit.
The town stank of smoke and sanctimony. Iron bells rang too often, their sound warped by repetition and certainty. Scripture was shouted like incantation—every word fed by belief rather than truth.
He stood at the edge of the square and watched a girl no older than sixteen beg for mercy from men who no longer required it. The covens had already gone to ground.
They always did.
But not all bloodlines hid the same way. Jasper felt them—deep, quiet, anchored to something older than the land itself. Bennett magic pulsed beneath the town like a buried root, disciplined and watchful. They had learned, generations earlier, that survival meant silence.
Still, silence would not be enough. The town itself had become a spell. Enough. Jasper stepped into the square.
No one noticed him at first. Then someone did. Then everyone did. His eyes met the magistrate's. And the man stopped breathing.
Not permanently. Just long enough to listen. Jasper's compulsion did not descend like force. It settled. It rewrote. "You are afraid," Jasper said softly. "You are tired." "And you are wrong."
Belief cracked. He moved through the crowd with impossible precision, removing certainty, unraveling accusation, collapsing momentum. By nightfall, Salem was quiet. History would call it madness.
Only the Bennett witches remembered him. And they chose to bury his name. Jasper left before dawn. Another catastrophe unmade. Another story misremembered.
———
Authors note: there it is. Thought I'd just do a mix of 3rd and first pov. Usually use 3rd when I have a lot of main characters in the same scene together and 1st when they're alone. Have a good weekend guys!