The snows of the fjord came early that year. They drifted through the great pines like pale ghosts, blanketing the longhouse roofs until they sagged under the weight. For the children of Mikael the Hunter, the snow had always been a place of play — the thrill of wolf tracks, the promise of fresh kills for their father's spears.
But this year, Aleksandr watched the flakes drift down with a wariness his siblings did not share. His eyes — when no one else could see — glowed with the telltale flicker of the Alpha Stigma, threads of magic dancing in the frost-laced air.
He could feel it: a tremor in the weave. The shape of tragedy, coiled like a snake beneath the snow.
It happened during the full moon, just as it always had — the night that would split the Mikaelsons from their mortality.
Henrik, so small, so eager, begged to follow Niklaus into the forest. Aleksandr could have stopped them — should have. But he remembered the lesson from his other life: some moments must happen. They were not just knots in the weave; they were foundations. To save his family, he would first let them break.
So he watched, unseen, as Henrik and Niklaus stole away into the darkness to watch the wolves turn beneath the moon. He stood at the edge of the trees, the snow whispering around him, the Alpha Stigma blazing behind his eyes.
He saw it — the clash of fur and fang, the terrible beauty of the transformation. The moment the beast turned on Henrik, its hunger unbound by any human bond.
Aleksandr's fingers twitched. He could have undone it — burned the wolf's magic to ash with a thought. But he did not.
A single moment. One life for eternity. That was the price.
When he lifted Henrik's tiny body from the bloodstained snow, Niklaus sobbing beside him, Aleksandr's face was carved from marble — cold, resolute, untouched by the grief that shattered the rest of his family. Inside, something twisted so tightly it nearly broke him.
I'm sorry, he thought, pressing his lips to Henrik's cold brow. Your death will not be in vain. I swear it.
Esther's wail shook the village. The witch, so strong, so wise, broke before her sons' eyes. But in the ruin of her grief, a seed of defiance sprouted — one Aleksandr had nudged into place from the shadows for weeks now. He had whispered it to her dreams, woven it into the wards around her bed: There is no law of nature that cannot be bent. There is no death that cannot be conquered.
So when Mikael raged at the wolves, when he demanded vengeance not just on the beasts but on mortality itself, Esther did not resist. She prepared the ritual, as history demanded she would. But this time, Aleksandr sat by her hearth as she ground the white oak into powder, his eyes bright with secrets she could never guess.
They gathered at the sacred tree that night — the oldest oak in the fjord, roots tangled with the bones of forgotten kings. Esther's voice trembled as she spoke the words, ancient and lilting. Her children drank deep from the goblets she offered — wine spiced with blood, thick with the dark heartbeat of her magic.
Aleksandr watched the spell swirl through the air — threads of life and death binding into a coil. He saw the weakness, the fracture points, the flaws that would haunt the Originals for a thousand years: the white oak, the unbridled hunger, the sun's deadly burn.
He touched Rebekah's hand before she could drink. Her wide eyes looked up at him, trusting as ever.
"Do not fear," he murmured, his voice low enough that even Esther did not hear. "I will make it right."
He lifted his own cup, lips brushing the rim — but as the blood touched his tongue, he pulled on the Alpha Stigma. He bent the threads of Esther's spell, tightening the weave around his body. Where his siblings would be cursed with a hunger they could never control, he siphoned off that piece of the spell — burying it deep within himself, taming it with the Stigma's insatiable analysis.
When the others felt the burn of their new immortality for the first time — the agonizing snap of bones knitting themselves unbreakable — Aleksandr felt only a steady, controlled pulse of power. No raging hunger clawed at his gut. No feral roar thundered in his mind. He was vampire and something more: the Original who was both master and jailer of his own curse.
When the spell was done, he held Rebekah close as the sun rose — the last dawn they would ever see as mortals. She buried her face in his chest, trembling.
"Will we be monsters now?" she whispered.
Aleksandr stroked her golden hair, his eyes glowing faintly in the dawn light. "Only to those who would hurt us."
In the days that followed, the village learned what it meant to share ground with gods. Mikael reveled in his new strength, driving his spear through werewolf packs without a scratch. Finn looked on with quiet horror; Kol danced through the forests drunk on blood and power. Niklaus — poor Niklaus — would soon learn his own secret, his hybrid nature yet another fracture Aleksandr would someday seal.
But Rebekah clung to Aleksandr's side. He taught her how to feed without slaughter. How to close her eyes and listen to the heartbeat of the forest, to drink only what she needed. She was his shadow, her small hand wrapped around his fingers as they walked the frozen woods together.
"You don't fear the hunger," she said once, watching him draw the life from a deer with a single flick of his wrist.
"I control it," Aleksandr said simply. "The beast bows to me."
She looked up at him with wide eyes — eyes that trusted him above all others. "Will you teach me?"
He smiled — a real, soft smile that belonged to Elias Norwood as much as Aleksandr Mikaelson. "Of course, my little dove. I will teach you everything."
It was in those first weeks of their immortality that Aleksandr made his second move.
In the dead of night, while Mikael hunted alone, Aleksandr gathered a handful of trusted warriors — men who had followed him even before the turning. These were not his siblings; they were humans, still bound by the fragile thread of mortality.
He brought them deep into the forest, to the same sacred oak where the ritual had begun. There, beneath the moon, he offered them a choice.
"Kneel," he commanded, his voice carrying the weight of his new power. "Swear yourselves to me — not Mikael, not this village, but me. And I will give you eternity."
They knelt. Some with fear, some with awe, some with the hollow desperation that mortals wear when the cold wind of death whispers at their door.
Aleksandr's eyes burned silver as he wove a new spell — his spell. He fed on their blood, binding them to him with a corruption of Esther's magic. But where her ritual had made monsters who hungered without limit, Aleksandr's creation was something different: loyal, restrained, their thirst dampened by the Alpha Stigma's control.
They would never rival an Original. But they would be stronger than any human, more enduring than any wolf. They would carry his mark — a sigil burned into the skin over their hearts.
The first fangs of the Order.
When the new dawn broke, his fledgling immortals disappeared into the forest — scattering through the old trade routes that snaked across the continent. Traders. Mercenaries. Priests. They would become whispers, stories around the hearth, shadows in the courts of kings. Always listening. Always waiting.
He named them the Ættar, the Norse word for kin — but to the world, they would be called by many names. Cultists. Shadows. Loyal to none but the eldest Mikaelson.
Aleksandr stood alone beneath the white oak, the last leaves rimed with frost. He looked down at his hand — at the faint glow beneath his skin where the Alpha Stigma pulsed. In the threads of the world's magic, he saw the centuries unfolding: blood feuds, betrayals, a coffin that would trap him for centuries if he made a single misstep.
He would not make that mistake.
Rebekah's voice cut through the hush of the forest — the one person who could find him even when he wished to vanish.
"Brother?"
He turned. She stood there, wrapped in a fur cloak too big for her, hair tumbling like spun gold over her shoulders. There was a smear of dried blood on her cheek — her first hunt alone.
"Did you feed well?" he asked.
She nodded, but her eyes were shadowed. "Will it always feel like this? Like we're falling?"
Aleksandr walked to her, brushing the blood from her face with a tenderness he'd thought long dead. "The first century will be the hardest," he said honestly. "But you will have me. Always."
She pressed her face to his chest, breathing him in as if he were a hearth against the endless night.
"Promise?"
He looked past her, into the forest — to the world he would bend, the Order he would raise, the wars he would wage so that no blade could ever touch her heart.
"Promise."
And far away, in the drifting snow, the first seeds of his empire took root — an empire that would stand when the old gods fell, when kings died screaming in their halls, when witches burned and wolves were chained.
The eldest Mikaelson watched the dawn. And behind his eyes, the Alpha Stigma gleamed like a star waiting to devour the dark.
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