Year One — Chapter 2: The Black Heir
The manor was quiet the night the owl came. Narcissa was the one who broke the seal. Lucius only watched, his jaw tense, cane tapping once against the marble floor as the words bled across the parchment.
Sirius Black imprisoned.
Regulus presumed dead.
The Black line requires an heir.
And so, in 1982, when he was barely three years old, Ivar was named Heir of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.
Too young to grasp the politics, yes — but not too young to feel it. Old magic does not wait for comprehension. It coils around blood and bone, whispers into marrow. That night, as Narcissa tucked him into bed, the Black crest flared on the family tapestry, the silver thread shifting, burning bright where it now marked his name.
The air in the nursery thickened. A weight pressed down, not cruel, not gentle — inevitable. Ivar's green eyes glowed faintly in the candlelight. He reached for the stuffed dragon by his pillow, then, without knowing why, whispered something soft in French. A word his governess had used. The shadows stirred as though they understood.
By dawn, he was no longer simply Ivar Malfoy. He was Ivar Black, and the old bloodlines began to answer.
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The Wand
Two months later, Lucius brought him into the family's warded vault. The wand waited there, locked away since the days of Armand Black, a relic too wild for lesser hands.
It was a thing both beautiful and terrible:
Elderwood, once struck by hellfire until its grain burned black.
A triple core: Thestral tail hair, a Basilisk fang, its venom tempered in Phoenix tears.
When Lucius placed it into the boy's small hand, the wand thrummed like a predator scenting blood. Green fire licked at its seams. The candles guttered out, one by one, until only the wand's glow lit the vault.
Narcissa gasped and tried to reach for her son, but Lucius held her back. His pale eyes, for once, were not calculating — they were afraid.
The child lifted the wand and whispered in a language he should not have known. The hissing syllables of Parseltongue.
A copper viper, coiled as a decorative clasp on the vault chest, uncurled itself and slithered toward him. Ivar giggled — not in fear, but delight. The snake brushed against his wrist as though acknowledging a master.
The wand was his. The legacy was his.
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Years Later
By the time he reached Durmstrang, the mantle of Black heir was not a story told to him — it was carved into his rituals, etched into the fire in his blood.
Where other boys bragged of family fortunes, Ivar spoke nine languages fluently — Latin, French, German, Russian, Norse, and more besides — switching between them like blades in a duelist's hands.
Where others fumbled with new wands, he wielded his ancient one as though it had always been an extension of his arm.
And where others sought favor from professors, Ivar carried an invisible crown: the Black line, the Malfoy fortune, the Peverell shadow, the Slytherin tongue, the Helheim fire.
No one had chosen him. Destiny had.