Love Immortal by Kit Vincent

Author:Kit Vincent [Vincent, Kit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sky House Publishing
Published: 2024-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

The Kellogg-Hubbard Library is a gorgeous nineteenth-century building with a granite façade and columns and a marble-lined portico. The main floor has heritage golden-yellow walls with well-preserved oak wainscotting, carved stairways, and pillars. It’s warm and welcoming and manages to lessen my anxiety.

At the service desk, I inquire where I might be able to find books on symbols in European art. It’s impossible to tell Dacian’s ancestry just from looking at him, but judging by his skin color and accent, that part of the world is a good place to start.

The librarian directs me to the second floor, where I find several encyclopedias and art history tomes relevant to my search. I bring my haul to a secluded reading nook and start skimming. Somehow, being buried in books makes me feel almost normal. This is how I planned to spend my fall break anyway. If only I could pretend I’m working on a class assignment instead of investigating the dark origins of my vampire professor…

Since I don’t know what era I’m supposed to be looking for, it takes a good hour of randomly flipping pages before I stumble on a relevant image. My heart jumps at the discovery. I have to reread the caption several times before the information sinks in.

The wolf-dragon I’ve been looking for is in the chapter dedicated to the architecture of Ancient Rome, a close-up of a relief in Trajan’s Column depicting a military standard. It’s one of the most peculiar designs I’ve encountered in heraldry. The standard’s long tail is made from fabric, meant to soar in the wind like a dragon, while the wolf head has sharp teeth and appears to be forged from metal.

The caption notes that the column was erected in the second century AD to commemorate Emperor Trajan’s victory in the war with the Dacian people. My heart skips another beat. Dacian. And the wolf-dragon is known as Dacian Draco. Now that I know what dates to search, I quickly find a helpful volume about ancient Roman history. I discover that before the Dacians were defeated by the Roman Empire, they comprised a number of tribes who occupied the area around the Carpathian Mountains, including the region of Transylvania. They were fierce and proud warriors who covered their bodies in tattoos, wielded sickle-like swords and marched into battle accompanied by the howling sound that their wolf-headed standards made when air passed through them. Those warriors terrified the Roman Empire. They considered themselves one with the wolves, and the very name Dacian might have come from the Phrygian word with that meaning. A popular legend says that a wolf deity even fought alongside the Dacians, defending their capital from the Roman invaders.

Sadly, not much else is known about their ancient civilization. The last Dacian kingdom was wiped out in the first century AD when Rome decided the rich gold mines in Transylvania were an ideal source of funds to pay for their burgeoning military campaigns. After the bloody conquest, thousands of Dacians

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