*It goes without saying that The Originals – the story and all related characters – belong to the writers, cast and crew of the show. I claim no ownership or association to the TV series titled The Originals. This was written by a fan solely for the enjoyment of other fans.*

Prologue

The Black Cube

If you're reading this . . . congratulations, you're alive.
If that's not something to smile about, then I don't know what is.

– Chad Snugg

"Do you know the deepest desire of your heart?"

A boy asked me this, over cappuccino and almond cream éclairs at a chic café in the city.

I was sixteen, then, and thinking back on that evening I found it telling how close he'd come to getting me into bed on the strength of a good line and my own inexperience. How terribly impress I'd been by him.

I thought it was love.

Two years later I couldn't even tell you his name.

But I remembered the question.

Did I know – did I? No.

I couldn't have known, then, the significance of that evening of that things, invisible, intangible but still very real things had already been set in motion. There were too many coincidences to allow for chance, and in those periods of calm almost lost to me a new question would surface. Why?

Why me?

Why . . . him?

XxXxXx

White votive candles floated in crystal glass bowls.

I let my fingers slide over the delicate flame, a perfect little spade of light. Orange fading to yellow, and brilliant blue at the base where it was hottest.

How my parents managed to score an invitation to the political fundraising dinner masquerading as a Christmas party I might never know, but I'd bet I was the only guest wondering how close I could get to the fire before it burned me.

I'd done my part.

I danced with the mayor's son. Made conversation with the people at my table, ate the catered turkey dinner and did not embarrass my parents. At seventeen, I was the youngest person here – by quite a lot, in most cases.

The guest list consisted of the affluent and the influential. My parents, shameless social climbers, were not above using their only daughter to buy their way into these esteemed circles. I was only nine, the first time they took me to a party.

Still too young to realize that I'd been blessed with my father's crown of golden hair, my mother's sparkling turquoise eyes; I looked so much like an angel that it couldn't have been more perfect if they'd designed me.

Their precious blue-eyed blonde.

I remembered that evening. How I'd felt so grown up, so beautiful in my brand new dress sparkling under the crystal lights of a hotel ballroom. Like a princess in a fairytale. To me it was magical and more than a little naughty, being allowed to stay up so far past my bedtime.

That party had been my first; this was my last . . .

I stood from the table as if yanked by my shoulders, the sharp flavors of heavily seasoned turkey and stuffing souring on my tongue. The thought eliciting a clutch of panic that surprised even me.

I smoothed damp palms over the skirts of my festive dress.

Crushed velvet in cranberry red; my mother approved the dress for this evening. Curls of hair swept my neck, stiff with spray but glistening in the soft lamplight. No need to catch my own reflection to know that I was a vision.

Men stared when I stood. Women stared. Upstairs, the deep, ponderous dong of a grandfather clock chimed once. I pretended not to notice the eyes following after me as I left the dining room.

The house was huge. Not quite a mansion but a far cry from our two-story with a yard in the 'burbs. Fresh green pine boughs were hung like mistletoe in doorways, their spiciness mixing with the perfume of cinnamon-scented candles.

Warm light spilled from the spacious sitting room.

A crackling fire in a wide hearth, the ambience enhanced by the sparkle of a blue-green spruce decorated for the season. The wink of colorful lights on shiny wrapping paper. Those were empty wrapped boxes, not presents.

And of course that's where I found my mom; standing with our host and his wife, her polite laugh rising over the melody of holiday classics crooning through discrete speakers. She held the flute of a champagne glass in one delicate hand, the small diamond of her wedding ring catching the firelight.

Frustration began to smolder as I watched her there.

It was already one in the morning and she didn't look ready to leave . . . ever. My heart thudded heavily. I slid off the doorframe, leaving smudges on the dark lacquered wood.

The intimately lit hall seemed to sway a little. I didn't rush. As late as it was, the party had died down to a few dozen people milling about. In the dining room, in the foyer, at the front door where I retrieved my coat –

Nobody stopped me from slipping out. I always expect that someone will, even if no one ever does. The instant bite of freezing air on sweaty skin acted as a balm to frazzled nerves and I sucked in the first breath of clear air I'd taken all night.

The sheer, dizzying relief I felt to be away – just away – reinforced the idea that I was doing the right thing. The right thing for me because I was leaving.

Not now, certainly not tonight but soon.

My parents would be so hurt. So disappointed . . . and I couldn't shake my father's influence, that I was making a selfish decision.

Fat, heavy snowflakes kicked into flurries swept the yard, shooting like glittering meteors through the glow of decorative lanterns. That crisp, December cold strangely lethargic.

I inhaled, filling my lungs until they burned.

My life had become a carousel of images; dinners, fundraisers, ladies lunches . . . each memory melting into the next, blurring into a collage of sameness. Like a performing monkey in heels, my purpose was to charm the people my parents were trying to impress.

As much a prop as those empty boxes under the tree.

I sucked in another deep, cleansing breath and maybe it was that I knew how late it was but for just a second I was struck by the most incredible sense of surrealism. A bit of holiday magic. Was this really happening?

There was something out there.

I blinked to clear the flakes that'd caught on the ends of my lashes. Eerily silent. I could hear the rush of snow settling on my coat.

The crunch of boots on ice-slicked brick –

My breath came in plumes of steam.

"Ethan."

He appeared like a ghost from the storm; the icy dark wind whipping his hair dramatically around his face. Even from a distance, his was a handsome face. Sculpted high cheekbones, the straight line of a jaw only lightly dusted with stubble a shade darker than our mother's chestnut locks.

My brother.

I was wrong.

This would go down as the most surreal moment of my life – my brother gliding from the snow as if he were dragging the blizzard with him, to the faint thrum of Feliz Navidad through the door at my back.

Ethan moved into the light, coming to stand at the foot of the wide brick step decorated with holly and tinsel. He was gaunter than I remembered; the leanness of hard muscle under a heavy gray coat that billowed around his legs.

"H-how? How are you here?"

"How long have I been back in town?" His gaze tipped up, scanning the red-brick face of the house with its multitude of warm-lit windows lightly webbed with frost and holiday greenery. "Or what am I doing here at the Governor General's house?"

Right. Because it's not like we left him a note on the kitchen counter.

Two years.

I hadn't seen him in two . . . years . . .

"You kept me waiting," he went on. "I was starting to worry that I was going to have to come in after you."

Air left my lungs in a hot rush, scalding my throat.

"You wouldn't have come inside."

Ethan had such a careful smile. "I made you a promise."

Out of everything he might have said to me, that was a mistake. Hurt struck like a match, and then the searing cut of anger so profound it staggered me. "You made me a what? Promises mean nothing when you lose faith in the one who made them."

I meant to hurt him with those words.

The accusation couldn't have been clearer; his response was a little harder to pin down. No apology. No fumbled attempt to explain himself, to justify . . . the wind tore at my clothes, but Ethan didn't move a muscle. Didn't even seem to feel the cold.

"Do you know what mom and dad did when you left?" I bit out. "They told everyone how proud they were of you," and was furiously happy at the flicker of suspicion in my brother's eyes "How they all so proud that their oldest had gone off to university . . . in France."

His lip twitched. "Did they really?"

"A perfectly acceptable explanation for why no one had seen you in a while. You were in Europe. Yes, of course they did."

I felt the sting of tears and drove my fingernails into the palms of both hands, fighting the lump that rocketed into my throat.

How was I supped to live up to our parents lie?

They were so worried of what would happen if he ever came back; it became my job to do justice to my brother's imaginary success.

He wasn't in France.

He hadn't gone off to university.

The embarrassment of having to confess to all their important friends that their son had had himself emancipated.

In the lengthening silence I searched my brother's face for what he thought of what I just said.

"You're right," he said at last. "I took too long."

The admission did nothing to take the edge off my hurt. I wanted him to fight me, to argue, and maybe he understood that's what I was looking for, and as childish as it was I felt slighted that he would deny me the opportunity to vent that anger.

To hurt him too.

"You left me."

"I was seventeen," Ethan countered. "God, 'manda, what did you think I'd fight our parents for custody?"

From inside the house, right on the other side of the heavy wooden door with its pretty green wreath, I could just make out the low croon of Silent Night; when had Feliz Navidad ended? I ran numb fingers through my hair, dislodging the ice that'd caked on.

"You know you can't . . . come inside."

He actually snorted. "I don't intent to."

"So what did you want? Other than to keep some benign promise, Ethan, why are you here?"

I asked it because I wanted to know but I also expected evasiveness, some non-answer, which is why it surprised me to catch a shadow almost like vulnerability in his eyes. Ethan climbed up onto the first step of the governor general's house.

I started to move away but my feet felt frozen to the brick.

"Would you believe, I missed you?"

"Ethan . . ."

"I did," he said. "You know I never meant to leave –"

"Yes you did."

His gaze landed on mine.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he amended and I that I believed.

The music changed again. A whisper of nostalgia diffused through the heavy door at my back, like listening to it from my bed. Distance softening the notes.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas . . .

Just like the ones I used to know.

Pain squeezed like a fist closing in my chest. The huge decorated tree was framed in the window to the left of the foyer, it's twinkling lights spilling out onto the snow in the yard. Catching on falling flakes, glittering red and green and silver bright.

Our mom was in that room.

Ethan cleared his throat.

"I have something for you," he said. "An early Christmas present, given I missed the past two I thought . . ."

Only then did I notice what he was holding down by his hip, partially hidden in the folds of his coat. I stepped down to my brother's step, drawn by the strangeness of the thing.

"What is that?"

It was a dense black block, about the size of a square tissue box. Undecorated, not particularly pretty but the block – a perfect cube – was striking. Without waiting for him to hand it over, I took the cube from my brother's hands and he let me.

It was heavy. The sides ultra smooth.

I ran my hands over the sides, feeling the rounded edges where one face turned into another. The thing was much, much heavier than its size accounted for. I could feel the weight of it tugging at my wrists.

"How much did this cost you?"

He tilted another of his careful smiles and stuck both hands in the pockets of his gray wool coat.

"'manda, I will tell you a secret." Ethan leaned closer. Warmth wafted from his body and just the barest hint of wood smoke. "I'm broke. If you want an expensive gift, ask mom and dad. I found it."

"Y-you found it? Where?"

I held the cub lightly between both hands, my palms pressed to the flat face on either side of the box. I stared into the depthless black surface and there, faint but undeniable, a spray of silver lights. Soft, sharp, like champagne bubbles bursting before they could surface.

What happened next was sudden.

As if hurtling from the very centre, tiny bright lights like stars . . .

Millions upon millions of stars. I could feel their light on my face. See their glow on my fingers. All at once I couldn't feel the cold. The sharp bite of ice and frost, snow prickling bare skin and my jacket flapping open.

Something else was happening. They surfaced as if from impossible depth, lines in the glass-like surface of the cube. Their color at first indistinct – blue, green, white. Electric purple. I watched, enthralled, as those lines coalesced into recognizable numbers.

0-0-15

I looked at my brother.

The shine from those glowing numbers lighting in his eyes.

0-0-13

He found it. Where, in the yard? Of the governor general's manor home. Counting down.

0-0-07

By every right I should have let go of that cube. Dropped it in the snow, put it down or . . . or . . . I might never know why I did it. Why apprehension had me tightening my grip, locking my fingers in place.

0-0-02

"Ethan?"

0-0-01 . . .