Year One — Chapter 1: Crossing the Ice
Wiltshire's dawn wore a veil of mist the morning Ivar left. The walled gardens of Malfoy Manor steamed faintly where dew touched the warmed paths; peacocks stalked the hedges like minor gods gossiping. Narcissa stood with her hands upon her son's shoulders, angling his collar just so, as if neatness were a ward against the world.
"You'll write," she said, and then—because she knew him—added, "with details. Not merely triumphs."
Ivar allowed the smallest smile. At ten he already looked too composed for a child, all black hair and green eyes that seemed to know how people were put together. "Details," he said. "Even if they're ugly."
"Especially then," whispered Narcissa, and kissed his brow.
Lucius waited beneath the portico, cane balanced in a gloved hand, the faintest impatience in his posture. "Carriage," he said, which meant: it is time. It also meant: remember the script I taught you.
Draco, a wobbly-legged toddler with a determined jaw, made for Ivar at speed, hugged his knee, and scowled at the carriage as if it were a personal rival. "Back soon," Ivar promised, crouching so their eyes met. "I'll bring you something northern and terrible. A story you can terrorize tutors with."
Draco's scowl softened into pride. "I'll get better," he declared. "So you don't have to fix everything."
Ivar ruffled his hair. "Do it because you can, not because you must."
They climbed into the lacquered carriage, wards sighing closed like a held breath released. As hooves struck flint, Lucius studied his son's reflection in the window's glass.
"Charm them," he said, voice low and precise. "Then frighten them. In that order."
"I intend to," Ivar replied.
"And remember," Lucius added, softer, "we are neither Dumbledore's choir nor Voldemort's chorus. Grey is not weakness. It is control."
Outside, hedgerows surrendered to heath, to windswept chalk, to the shivering line where England gives way to sea. They met their contact at a fogbound pier that smelled of salt and iron. The man waiting wore a fur-lined cloak and expression like carved ice. His ship—if ship it was—sat too low, its hull ribbed with black wood veined by something that wasn't wood at all. Runes crawled there like sleeping ants.
"Malfoy," the man greeted. His accent carried snow. "Boy."
"Ivar Black," Ivar said evenly, watching the faint flinch cross the man's eyes at the old name. "I'll answer to either."
A good beginning: set them a half-step off balance.
They crossed to the vessel over planks slick with brine. The crew did not speak much; their silence felt curated. Narcissa's pale figure grew small on the pier and then was a figure no longer but a memory tucked behind the stern. The ship pulled the fog with it as they went—no sail, no oar, only a patient forward motion like a thought becoming a decision.
Cold found bone. Cold said: do not mistake me; I am not England.
Ivar stood at the rail and let the cold in, all the way down. He breathed it until his lungs agreed to the terms. When his fingers protested, he flexed them, coaxing a whisper of warmth through blood and will. Once, experimentally, he let a pinprick of dark fire dance at his palm—hellfire, the old Helheim spark—then snuffed it. Not for show. For self.
"You're young," said a voice to his left, the ship's contact again, eyes on the sea. "Durmstrang takes them hard and keeps them harder."
Ivar considered the line of the horizon. "Then it and I will get along."
The man's mouth ticked. Approval, or amusement—it didn't matter. A gull screamed without conviction and wheeled away.
---
Durmstrang did not rise so much as emerge, shouldering out of glacier and night like a fortress that had taught mountains how to stand. Dark stone drank the light. Spires shouldered up with none of Hogwarts' romance—no storybook turrets, no whimsical gargoyles. This was architecture made by a culture that preferred winters long and prey short.
They disembarked onto a quay sculpted into ice. It did not melt beneath warm boots. A procession waited: robed figures in scarlet-lined black, a scatter of students, and—set apart by nothing more than stillness—a tall witch whose hair had gone white in purposeful streaks, like frost finding the edges of a blade.
"Director," murmured the contact, saluting with two fingers to his brow. "The English boy."
"English," the woman repeated, tasting the word, then let it go. Her gaze took Ivar's measure with a duelist's economy—stance, eyes, hands. "Durmstrang is not a nursery, Mr. Malfoy."
"Nor am I a sapling," Ivar said, very polite.
She shifted, the faintest repositioning that could have been a nod. "We see."
There were no floating candles in Durmstrang's Great Hall, no enchanted ceiling simulating weather. There were banners—deep colors, old sigils, iron rings and wolf-tooth patterns, the memory of wars. Heat came from a long trench of coals that ran the hall's length; the light it threw made faces into moving masks.
The first test came before bread.
Students new and old formed a half-circle, space left at the center. The Director lifted a hand. A scullion scurried forward with a shallow brass bowl charged with a darkness that was not shadow, exactly, nor smoke. It had the weight of smoke. It troublesomely suggested depth.
"A courtesy," the Director said, as if offering him a chair. "Durmstrang receives prowess, not pedigree."
Lucius' lessons hummed at the back of Ivar's skull—never show a card you don't intend to play twice—but another lesson overran it, Narcissa's: trust your own temperature. He stepped forward, bowed with a sliver of courtly perfection, and reached into the bowl.
Cold licked up his wrist.
The substance clung, climbed, aware as a cat. It knew doors in him. He felt its inquiry against the dark spark in his blood—there, Helheim's ember—and against that other, more serpentine signature that had always slept coiled in the green of his irises. It nosed the faint crackle of the Peverell's inheritance, the thread that tugged toward thresholds one does not return from.
If you are a mirror, Ivar thought, then look.
He did not recoil. He showed it—carefully—the architecture of his will: a hall with lit sconces and barred windows, a hearth banked but hot. He did not bare the whole of his fire. He let it see enough to be satisfied and enough to be warned.
The darkness hesitated, then softened. It slipped from his arm into the bowl, leaving behind a scent like snow on stone.
There was a small sound, not quite a murmur—more the absence of one. The Director's face did not change, but something in the hall's posture did, marginally, the way a pack shifts when it decides who is not prey.
"Seat him," the Director said.
A boy with prairie-blond hair and eyebrows like slashes made of straw smirked as Ivar passed. An older girl whose gaze held earthquake stillness inclined her head, imperceptibly. Another boy, anxious and keen, noted every beat with the hunger of someone used to being overlooked.
Ivar ate with an efficiency that signaled neither gluttony nor fear. He listened. He let accents map themselves in his head. He learned names without asking for them, because people say each other's names if you leave silence for it.
Later, when the trench-fire had burned to an orange whisper and new students were shepherded to their bunks, he found himself in a dorm carved partly into rock, partly into something older. The walls here remembered tools that were not iron.
His bedframe was dark wood banded in metal, the mattress firm enough to teach posture. A window, narrow as a spear-slit, offered a view of a sky that had more stars than England allowed itself. He unpacked without fuss. Wand—yew—went to the right-hand pillow seam. A small case of inks and quills sat at the foot. A sheaf of parchment, already annotated with tiny, unsent letters to future selves, slid beneath the bedframe.
When the others slept, he didn't.
He sat cross-legged on the mattress and drew the first circle with a finger dipped in nothing but breath and intent. Runes are less about pigment than permission. He whispered names of power—not shouted, never shouted—and felt the line of the circle cool and then warm beneath his fingertip.
"Good evening," he said softly, not to the school, but to the place beneath the school—whatever bone Durmstrang had grown around.
The stone sighed back. Not words. Notice.
He let a filament of hellfire run to the circle's edge, barely there—a hairline of night with a heart. He breathed it back in. Rule one: always end the ritual with more of yourself than you began.
When he finally lay down, he did so like a soldier, already turned toward the door.
---
Morning broke knife-clean and blue. Orientation at Durmstrang was less "welcome" and more "weather report": brutal honesty, followed by assignments. No Houses—only tracks, chosen and earned. Combat. Theory. Elemental. Ritual.
Ivar took Ritual and Combat both.
In the training yard, snow had been tamped into a floor of compressed silver. Targets stood at irregular intervals—some straw, some thick roped bundles, some iron silhouettes with rune-etched chests that, disconcertingly, moved.
"Pairs," barked a witch with hair braided so tight it sharpened her cheekbones. "Demonstrations are earned."
The prairie-blond boy sidled near, all insolence lacquered over curiosity. "English," he drawled. "Hope you brought a sweater."
"I brought a spine," Ivar said, without heat.
"Jannik," the boy tossed, offering the name like a chip to be cashed later. He jerked his chin toward the most battered practice circle. "There's a story about that one. They say a first-year bled in it last term and the circle remembers."
"Circles remember what you teach them to," Ivar said, eyeing the faint stain. "And sometimes what you forget."
"Poet," Jannik accused, but his grin conceded points.
They weren't paired. A stocky girl with a scar like punctuation across her knuckles fell in at Ivar's side. "Klara," she said. "I hit first; you think first."
"Trade on the third exchange," Ivar suggested.
Her nod said: acceptable.
They moved. Not yet spells—not the grand, operatic stuff of wandwork—but feet and weight and a kind of chess the body plays. Klara's strike was as advertised: no flourish, clean violence. Ivar drifted at the edge of her force, adjusting angles, making small suggestions to momentum that made big changes to outcomes. When they finally raised their wands, the initial blasts were simple—Stinging Hex, a quick Shield, a Transfiguration feint that turned a snow-scoop into a brittle barrier.
He ended their final exchange with a tiny, mean piece of battle transfiguration that turned the ice beneath Klara's heel into rubber for a heartbeat. She didn't fall—she was too good for that—but she stumbled, and in real combat stumble often rhymes with grave.
Klara caught herself, bared her teeth, and then laughed. It was a good laugh—teeth and throat and approval. "Again," she demanded.
By the time the instructor called halt, Ivar's lungs were burning in a way that felt like friendship.
"Combat: competent," the instructor announced, chalking a crisp V beside his name. "Ritual: assessed this evening."
A different fear would have pricked a different child then—the fear of being measured and found wanting. Ivar felt something else: the pleasure of a test he had not designed.
---
Ritual assessment happened in a chamber below the main halls, where the air tasted faintly of iron and old wind. The Director herself waited with two assistants and a circle already inscribed: concentric rings of sigils that looked almost, but not quite, like the Anglo-Saxon he had studied at home.
"Stand where you believe you should," the Director said.
Trap question. There were three rings. The outermost was safe but noisy. The middle demanded flexibility. The inner was a throat.
Ivar stepped into the middle.
The Director did not nod. Approval here was not a currency; it was a rumor. "Name the circle."
"Ward of Discernment," Ivar said. "Modified to dislike liars, but not punish them; to value intent over diction."
"Spellwork?"
"Silent, or it bites."
She gestured. Begin.
He did. Not with fireworks, not with any of the ostentation Durmstrang's rivals sometimes mistook for power. He simply spoke to the circle the way he had to the black brass bowl, inwards and down. He offered it the architecture of his will again, a little more this time, and then—just at the edge—let a hiss escape the shape of his mouth, a Parseltongue syllable that wasn't a word so much as a texture.
The circle listened harder.
"Enough," the Director said, and the air softened, like muscle unclenching. "You will do."
Her assistants exchanged a glance. One said, reluctantly, "More than do."
On his way out, the Director's voice followed him like a hook in velvet. "Mr. Malfoy."
He paused.
"Charm them," she said. "Then frighten them."
Ivar did not smile. "In that order," he agreed, and the Director's mouth did something complicated that might once, years ago, have been called a smile.
---
That night, in his narrow window, the northern sky performed strange mathematics. The stars did not twinkle; they stared. Somewhere far below the school the earth turned over in its sleep.
Ivar wrote three letters: one to Narcissa with the promised details, one to Lucius with the graded report he would expect, and one to Draco, all blunt edges sanded away into a shape a younger brother could hold. Then he folded them and sealed them and set them aside.
"Good evening," he said again to the stone.
The stone said nothing—and that, too, was an answer. He closed his eyes and built a hall in his mind with more sconces lit than last night.
Tomorrow there would be rivals, and alliances, and the first true tests with wands bared and teachers watching.
Tomorrow, he would begin to be inevitable.