Year Three — Chapter 1: The Weight of Two Worlds
The ships cut the black northern water without sails or sound, as if the sea itself had decided to carry Durmstrang's children home. Mist crawled low and pale across the surface; the sky hung pewter, heavy with a weather that felt like a threat. Ivar Malfoy stood at the prow, gloved hands loose at his sides, letting the cold cleave him clean. It steadied the mind. In cold like this, frivolous thoughts died first.
He stood straighter than the older boys who crowded together for warmth. Not taller—just straighter. It had the same effect.
Durmstrang broke out of the ice like a black tooth, all angles and old stone, the color of the inside of a raven's wing. No romance; no illusion. Hogwarts, he had been told, pretended at stars on its ceiling and candles that floated like gossip. Durmstrang offered torches and wind and a promise: if you wished to live here, you would earn the right.
"I swear the castle grew larger over summer," Jannik said behind him, breath fogging. Straw-blond hair escaped his fur-cap like sunlight trying to remember itself. "Like it ate a mountain and decided to keep the bones."
Klara grunted. She never wasted words she could spend on action. She stood solid at Ivar's left—scar-knuckled, winter-pale, eyes like iron under snow. "Mountains don't eat," she said. "This place does."
Ivar allowed a corner of his mouth to shift—almost a smile. The raven-gray water bumped the hull and slid away, as if even the sea wanted no trouble with the fortress ahead. He spoke in Russian for the deckhands' benefit, crisp and clean. "We'll dock in six minutes."
One of the sailors flicked him a glance and nodded respectfully. At twelve, Ivar drew those nods without thinking. Respect came to him the way torches bent in wind.
The gangplank thumped against the quay. Cold plunged its hands down everyone's collars. As they stepped onto the carved ice, Jannik breathed, "Gods, I missed this," and immediately lied, "No I didn't," when the wind slapped his teeth.
Durmstrang's gates lifted with a groan that felt like an oath. Inside, the long hall blazed. Not cozy—never cozy—but charged with heat from the trench of coals that split the room. Banners of old wars hung like warnings. The scent was wax and smoked meat and iron.
The old rituals began: names recorded, trunks levitated down stone corridors by first-years trying to prove their spines, instructors watching with wolf-still faces. Above it, a current moved that only a few could feel—something electric, anticipatory. News traveled faster than owls. Hogwarts had opened its doors to a new generation. A half-giant had crossed a lake with a boy named Potter in a boat. A red-haired family had waved so vigorously their elbows tried to leave their bodies. McGonagall's hat had spoken its riddles.
"Year Three," Jannik announced as if he were calling a campaign. "Which means we are legally entitled to more bruises and fewer lectures."
"Lectures never saved anyone," Klara said, tugging a strap tight on her bracer. "Decisions do."
"And runes," Ivar said lightly. "Do try not to forget the alphabet that keeps your blood inside your body."
Jannik clutched his chest. "Your kindness warms me more than the coals."
They ate. Durmstrang food had never heard of mercy. Ivar's hands moved neatly: meat, dark bread, pickled something the color of regret. He didn't wolf it. He never wolfed anything. Across from him, two second-years argued in whispers whether he had once burned a dueling circle into glass with nothing but a glance. He let the rumor live; it cost him nothing, and fear did good work while the body slept.
A professor with frost-streaked hair—Director Karkaroff's second—took the dais. "Tracks," she said without flourish. "Combat, Ritual, Theory, Elemental. Choose two. The unwise will choose three. The foolish will attempt four, at which point the school will choose your burial site."
A murmur ran the length of the hall. Ivar didn't move.
Karkaroff stepped beside her, black robes falling like a verdict. His gaze swept the crowd and, as it always did, snagged on Ivar a heartbeat longer. "Exceptions," he said mildly, "exist."
Jannik elbowed Ivar. "Care to show us how exceptions work?"
Ivar's green eyes—bright as wet emerald—didn't leave the dais. "I have been an exception since the day I walked in."
They filed forward in threes to declare tracks. When it was Ivar's turn, conversation thinned, curious, hungry. He said, very politely and in Russian, "All four."
Karkaroff studied him as one examines a blade for hairline fractures. Then he let his mouth curve by a millimeter—Durmstrang's version of applause. "Prove it again," he said. "As you did before."
Ivar inclined his head and turned. The hall breathed out, disappointed or relieved. Jannik caught up with a grin big enough to violate several local ordinances. "Fine," he said. "I'll carry the crown. But I'm charging rent."
"Your hands would freeze," Ivar replied. "Best keep them for casting."
Klara snorted. "You two and your pretty words. Try pretty footwork. The yard in ten."
They went.
The training yard was a white jawbone—snow packed hard, torches stabbing their light into the early dusk. Wind came in from the lake with ideas about conquest. Ivar took off his cloak and rolled his shoulders, letting the cold bite to the bone. The wand in his palm thrummed. Elderwood, charred by hellfire long before he owned it. Thestral tail hair and Basilisk fang braided in a core tempered with phoenix tears. Old as sin. Hungry as a kingdom.
"Pairs!" barked Makarov, who had been cut out of the same rock as the yard.
They paired. They moved. Spells made the air taste like tin. Ivar's magic came out quiet as ever—not flashy, not wasteful—only exact. Shields formed where they were needed—not a breath sooner, not a breath late. When Klara bore down on him with a combination that would have broken a lesser boy's ribs, he stepped to the wrong place on purpose, turned wrong into right with a twist, and let her momentum spend itself against nothing at all.
She grinned, teeth bright in winter light. "Better."
"Always," he said.
They ended only when breath became steam that tried to be storm. Makarov grunted something like approval, which, in the Durmstrang dialect, meant I will not kill you for wasting my time. They trudged back toward the hall, boots squealing on old ice, faces hot and numb.
A raven awaited Ivar at the dormitory slit-window, black as a midnight promise. It tapped the glass with dignified impatience.
"From home," Jannik guessed, peeling off gloves with his teeth. "Place your bets: Father says 'be polite to your enemies,' Mother says 'be impolite to your friends if they're stupid,' Draco says—what does Draco say?"
"That he will be brilliant," Ivar said, gentle and almost amused, "and that I should be watching."
Klara's glance flicked, curious, and softened a line you rarely saw soften. "He's started, then."
"Yesterday." Ivar opened the latch; the raven dropped a leather tube into his hand like a transaction between bankers. "Hogwarts delivered him a hat and an opinion. Slytherin."
"Of course," Jannik said. "What else do snakes do but find other snakes."
Ivar slid the seal free. Narcissa's hand—lithe, elegant, every stroke a page in a book of etiquette and war—flowed across the vellum.
My son, it read, the hallways feel emptier without your quiet footsteps and fuller with the echo of your name. Draco is well, proud, and annoyingly composed. He has already written to tell me he does not need his father's name to navigate boys and bravado. I suspect he means: he has yours.
Be… careful, Ivar. A strange thing is happening in Britain. Your name and Harry Potter's have begun to share sentences. Two boys, both born as July dies. It is gossip now. It will be something sharper soon. Professor Dumbledore is not a fool, which means he is dangerous.
I love you. Remember that love is leverage, but it is also the belt that keeps the armor on when you are too tired to lift the buckles yourself.
Narcissa
He read it twice, letting the words settle where warnings liked to hide. Then he opened the second letter, and everything in his body prepared itself for angles. Lucius wrote like an edict:
Ivar,
Britain notices you. This is both hazard and instrument. Greengrass is pleased. Bones is cautious. Delacour is French. Do not let flattery replace function. Contracts are not romance; they are architecture.
Your brother is where he belongs. You will advise him when he asks; you will not advise him when he does not. He will learn the usefulness of silence and the utility of allies. He must be seen to solve his own problems, but he may use your shadow as wind.
Regarding the boy everyone insists on naming: let them. Do not chase prophecy. Let prophecy attempt to chase you. If it can keep up, we will speak.
—L.M.
Ivar smiled at that, the way one smiles at a chessboard. He wrote nothing back yet. Letters written hot went cold in the wrong ways.
A third message had traveled without wax or bird. The stone itself had been speaking to him since last year—quiet as snowfall, unmistakable as a knife. As he tucked the letters away, a pressure came through the floor, like the slow heartbeat of a beast beneath the school.
You are watched, the sense said. Not words. A weight.
"I know," Ivar murmured in Parseltongue, because the old language slid around truths with less friction.
"What's the Prophet saying?" Jannik asked, toes toward the brazier, as if he could boil himself like tea and drink himself back warmer.
Klara answered. She'd unfolded a two-day-old copy one of the professors had left on a table like bait. "Not your name. But you can taste you between the lines. 'Durmstrang prodigy'. 'Foreign boy commanding classmates in winter drills'. 'A talent for serpents'." She flicked a look up under lashes. "The Ministry will pretend not to read it and read it twice."
"Dumbledore won't pretend," Ivar said. He set his wand down across his knees. The elderwood drank torchlight and offered none back. "He will watch. And think he is the only one who can do both."
"Harry Potter," Jannik said, not reverently, but the way you say a weather pattern.
"A myth until he chooses to be a boy," Ivar said. "Or a boy until he chooses to be a myth. It amounts to the same."
"You sound like a professor," Klara observed.
"Which one?" he asked.
"The one who worries about knives becoming crowns."
They were quiet a moment. Beyond the walls, the lake cracked loudly—ice shifting its opinions. The sound rolled through the stone and made the brazier flame lift in a single startled tongue.
Ivar stood. "Yard again," he said.
"You're a sadist," Jannik sighed, but he was up in a breath.
"Sadists enjoy it," Klara said, already lacing her boots. "He's a realist."
They trained until their lungs scratched and their laughter sounded like the solution to a problem. They sparred until Makarov told them to stop practicing victory and start practicing patience. They ran the outer wall until their breath made a ghostly army. When they were done, the night had gone deeper. The sky was a bowl of ink someone had breathed on; the stars looked like the teeth of something ancient.
Back in the mess, students tracked Ivar with the eyes of soldiers watching their general cross a camp. Some rose as he passed; some bent their heads over bowls and pretended not to. He registered all of it without letting any single gaze settle on his spine. He disliked daggers in the back only because they were a waste of the dagger.
He answered a question in German. He corrected a wand grip in Russian. He complimented a first-year's footwork in French. He charmed a lantern to burn steadier for a girl whose hands shook. Leadership lived in gestures more than speeches. He had learned that in a cradle and then again in a ritual chamber.
When the hall thinned to embers and whispers, he went where he always went when the noise of being inevitable threatened to drown out the music of becoming: down. The ritual chamber swallowed torchlight like hunger. Chalk ghosts of last year's circles still fainted across the basalt. He didn't draw a new one. He only stood in the center and listened until listening felt like an organ in his chest.
"Good evening," he said in Parseltongue. Speaking the old tongue here was not necessary, but it pleased whatever lay beneath the school, and it pleased him to be polite to power he did not own.
The pressure rose under his soles. The stones remembered the wolf of ash he had called and consumed. They remembered the way death had breathed in his mouth and found itself out-breathed. They remembered hellfire styling itself a leash and choosing his wrist to bind.
Two worlds, the sense said. Not words. Weight again; implication. North. West.
"North for now," he said. "West soon."
He saw them briefly then, because ritual trains the mind to accept that seeing is sometimes only the act of calling. Draco, writing at a too-large table, jaw set in a boy's idea of a man's line. A red-haired girl—Ginny, he thought, but heard, gently, Jenny—chewing a quill and frowning at ink like it should explain itself. A dark-haired boy in too-big robes staring at a vaulted ceiling that pretended the night ended above the school and did not continue outside. Harry, small as all legends are at the beginning.
"Will they put you in his path?" Klara had asked earlier, when the dorm had been loud and the year still waiting to make up its mind. "The old wizard and the old families?"
"They don't need to," he said now to the stone. "We walk toward each other whether they like it or not."
The chamber warmed—not in heat, but in recognition. Like a hand not touching your shoulder and still managing to be there.
When he returned to the dormitory, Jannik was already snoring the sleep of the righteous and the exhausted. Klara lay on her back with her forearm across her eyes, a warrior's version of "I am thinking." Ivar made no noise as he crossed to his desk. He set Narcissa's letter in the top drawer. He left Lucius' on the table. He picked up a fresh sheet and wrote three letters, three beginnings.
Daphne Greengrass, he wrote first, ink steady, I prefer candor to choreography. If we are to share a future, even in the language of contracts, I will not insult you with lies that wear jewelry. Tell me what you want from a bond, and I will tell you what I refuse to be.
Susan Bones, he wrote next, your aunt values truth as a weapon. I value it as a shield. Between us, perhaps it can be both. What do you fear about this? Name it, and I will not laugh.
Fleur Delacour, he wrote last, switching into French so the words would fit the blade he needed, France does not bow, and neither do I. Good. Let us meet on our feet. If we are to bind, it will be because iron respects iron, not because ink demands it.
He sanded the letters, sealed them, and set them aside for the morning's ravens. When he finally lay down, he did so as a man lies down on a battlefield he has already walked tomorrow: not with surrender; with strategy.
The castle breathed around him. The north wind put its teeth to the eaves and worried them like a terrier. Far away, under another sky, a boy named Harry Potter dreamt of hats and keys and a stone he hadn't yet touched. Somewhere between them, a line ran taut—the kind of line that hums if you pluck it, the kind that, once you hear it, you can't pretend silence is honest anymore.
Ivar's last thought before sleep took him was practical and cruel and true: Prophecy is only a rumor with better PR. I don't need it. If it wants me, it can try to keep up.
The dark did what it always did when he spoke to it without moving his mouth. It tilted toward him as if gravity had decided the boy was a planet. And then the torches sighed. And the year began in earnest.