Zander

It takes a monster to know one, after all — and Zander had made peace with what he'd become, because peace was cheaper than grief. He was not a gentle man. Arrogant, because he'd earned the right to be — there was no one on this border who could match him, and both allies and enemies knew it. Possessive of what little was his, because in a land this harsh, holding on to anything at all was a victory. Aggressive, because hesitation got men killed, and he'd buried enough of them already. He commanded the way winter commanded — absolute, unquestioned, and entirely without apology. And yet. Somewhere underneath all that ice, in the small, starved part of himself he no longer let anyone see, he had never quite stopped hoping for the one thing his bloodline promised but almost never delivered — a fated one. A single soul, out of all the souls in every world, tied to his by something older and stronger than the curse in his blood. The one person whose presence could reach the parts of him the ritual hadn't managed to burn away. He didn't speak of it. Hope, he'd learned, was a luxury the North rarely let a man keep. He had no way of knowing that soon, that luxury would walk directly into his hands. They called him the Bastion of the North — the last wall between the kingdom and everything that lived past it. He hadn't chosen the title so much as inherited it, the way he'd inherited the blood in his veins and the curse woven into it. His line had guarded this border for generations: nobles bred and raised for one purpose, protectors sworn to a frozen kingdom that would have died a hundred times over without them. It was a duty passed down like a blade — sharpened, honed, and pointed always at the dark. The cost of that duty was written into every one of them the same way. Power, in exchange for feeling. Every time Zander called on what ran in his blood, he lost a piece of himself to it — some fraction of warmth burned away and never returned, like tallow feeding a candle that was never meant to last this long. He'd used that power more times than he could count anymore. He couldn't remember, some nights, what it had felt like to feel anything at all. Rage he understood. Hunger, satisfaction, the low simmer of aggression that never fully cooled — those still lived in him, sharp as ever. Everything softer had long since been spent. It was a fitting cruelty, he sometimes thought, that the North's only defense against monsters was a man built increasingly like one.

Updated November 7, 2026