Klaus Mikaelson fell into darkness.
The White Oak stake had pierced his chest. The final act of a life that had stretched too far, too cruel, yet never far enough. For a heartbeat, there was only silence… and then the faint echo of Hope's cry, distant, fragile, threading through the emptiness. He had saved her. He had failed everyone else. And then… nothing.
A voice broke through. Smooth. Cold. Infinite.
"Ah. You persist."
Death. Not a shadow, not a figure—just that voice, familiar and impossible. Klaus wanted to sneer, wanted to curse, but even his mouth felt hollow.
"You are not done," Death said. "You will rise again. In another world. A world that does not know your name… and a world that does not deserve you. There, you will meet her. Your mate."
Klaus's chest tightened. "She?"
"She will change everything about you," Death whispered, "not just your path, not just your curse… but the very essence of who you are."
He wanted to scoff. To mock the cosmic cruelty of it. But inside, his heart—his cursed, endless, impossible heart—tightened like a fist.
Light tore through him. Cold. Sharp. And he fell into it.
When he awoke, the world was not his own. The sky above was violet, strange and deep, and the air smelled of pine and iron instead of blood and fire. His body… it ached with life, with unfamiliar strength and ferocity. Muscles he did not remember flexed perfectly. His senses sang with sounds, smells, and whispers he could not name. Hunger stirred in him—a whisper, a memory, an ache.
And he was alone.
Loneliness, sharper than any blade he had ever known, sank into his chest. He was predator and phantom, stranger in a world that did not understand him. Even the forest—the trees, the wind, the unseen eyes—seemed to recoil from him. He had survived death countless times, yet this… this felt endless.
Then a scream tore through the trees. Fragile. Terrified. Human—or almost human. He didn't care. Instinct answered first. Hunger second. He moved, faster than thought, stronger than any living thing should be.
And then, instinct became choice. He bit.
The taste was electric, alien. But it carried something older than venom, older than fire: the curse. And it passed only to her, to those whose veins carried the faintest spark of magic. It burned him with a strange, cruel satisfaction—he had created life again, yet cursed it. A reminder that he would always be alone.
And then he heard it. A whisper across the night. Soft. Patient. Infinite.
"She is out there. She exists. And when you meet her… everything you have built, everything you are… will change."
Klaus Mikaelson, the Original Hybrid, the first cursed, stood in a world that did not know him. A world that would fear him.
And he waited, because he had no choice.
And because some curses are meant to endure… until love finds a way.