Year Three — Chapter 10: The Mirror of Death (~1,900 words)
Durmstrang liked to teach with knives and weather. It tolerated books the way wolves tolerate fences: as temporary inconveniences. But every so often, the school allowed a quiet lesson, as if to remind the loud ones who had taught them to roar. The day Ivar decided to build a mirror, the fortress had one of those silences: a white sky with no promises, wind gone thin, the lake still as a held breath.
"Why a mirror?" Jannik asked, walking backwards in front of Ivar with the agility of a man who had negotiated successfully with gravity before. "Can't you just ask the castle to gossip? It seems to like you."
"Gossip tells you what people want you to hear," Ivar said, green eyes bright under a fringe dusted with frost. "Mirrors tell you what you aren't ready to admit."
Klara paced at his side, steps measured, scarf tied so neatly it could have been a uniform. "Mirrors lie, too," she said.
"Only if you teach them how," Ivar replied, mouth curving. "I plan to be a very strict teacher."
They crossed the yard, ignoring the cluster of fourth-years pretending not to watch them. The air had that crisp taste that meant mistakes would shatter rather than bend. Ivar liked days like that. They made people honest.
In the hall they passed a copy of the Daily Prophet pinned to a pillar. Someone had scrawled beneath the coy column about the "Durmstrang prodigy": TALENTED BECAUSE HE'S A BLACK. Someone else had added, less elegantly: OR BECAUSE HE'S A MENACE. Under that, a hand Ivar recognized as Mila's had written, tidy and small: OR BECAUSE HE WORKS.
He didn't stop. He didn't need to. The right words had already found the page.
They ate quickly—dark bread, meat that looked like it resented your teeth, pickled something that tasted like a dare—and left the hall through a side passage that most students avoided because it felt like a throat. Ivar palmed the iron latch at the end, pressed a thumb to a sigil he'd traced there last year, and the door opened with the reluctant respect of old metal.
The ritual chamber waited like a secret that thought it was a church.
"Ground rules," Ivar said, setting his satchel on the stone. "No fiddling with the circle. No improvisation unless I ask for it. No dying."
Jannik raised a hand. "May I go on record as being pro-rule-three?"
"You're on many records," Klara murmured. She examined the coals in the brazier, chose two, and set them to burn while Ivar chalked.
He drew wide, clean arcs. Latin for structure, the grammar of stone. Old Norse for weight, the language that puts iron in words. Parseltongue for resonance, the tongue that makes power listen. Between the runes he wove a fourth script that looked like cracks in ice—Helheim glyphs, the family's inheritance that wasn't in the ledgers. The circle hummed low, like bees under winter bark.
"What does it do?" Mila asked from the doorway, brace gleaming faintly where runes slept under leather. She had started coming without asking; Ivar had started expecting her to.
"Shows," Ivar said. "Not the future. I don't let glass tell me what to be. But it can show where threads touch. Whose weather blows toward whose door."
"Also," Jannik added, stage-whispering, "he wants to peep at Hogwarts' ceiling to see if the stars are smug."
"Everyone says the ceiling lies," Ivar said, smiling. "I want to see who taught it how."
They laid the ingredients out: a hand mirror hammered from a plate of conjured steel—the kind that remembered it had once been ore; a shallow bowl for water clean enough to be mistaken for air; three black feathers (raven, willingly given); ash from a burnt oath (small, sharp, saved in a vial from a duel where someone had said I swear and then didn't); a coin from Britain, Queen's face dulled by fingers; a short strand of silver hair (gift from Narcissa, tucked into a letter with a note that read simply: for bridges).
"Ready?" Ivar asked.
Jannik leaned against a pillar, grin crooked, eyes serious. "Say the word and I'll pretend this is entirely safe."
Klara took up a post at the circle's edge. "I'll count your breaths."
"Good," Ivar said. He set the steel mirror inside the circle and poured water over it until both surfaces vanished into one. Then he pricked his thumb on the tip of his wand—elderwood enough to drink it—and let three drops fall. The water took them like a promise.
He began in Latin—steady, slow, the cadence of foundations set right. He built the frame: let what is woven be seen as threads; let what is shadowed show as weight. Old Norse next—harder syllables, winter-words that gave the thing heft. He bound the view to the coin, to a time and place: this year, this island, the roof that pretends it is sky. He hissed in Parseltongue and everything in the room leaned toward him: snakes do not exist without an audience; he had learned that from Snowflake and from himself.
The water stilled. The steel did not shine so much as stop being a surface and become a place.
"You're frowning," Jannik whispered. "Is that a worrying frown or a 'I'm having an idea that might get us arrested' frown?"
"Shh," Mila hissed, but she was smiling.
The image came up faint, like breath on glass, then clearer. A hall the size of a myth. Candles hanging like tame stars. The ceiling making the correct noises and the incorrect promise that it ended above the school and did not continue outside. Children in black robes making noise that pretended to be order.
"Is that—?" Jannik began.
"Hogwarts," Ivar said, voice soft, not reverent. Interested, the way generals are interested in terrain.
The mirror slid of its own accord—no, he guided it with intent: across the tables, over a red-headed knot that could only be Weasleys, past the staff dais where a tall witch poured tea with the precision of a soldier (McGonagall, wearing patience like armor). It paused—not because his hand did, but because something in the stone of the other castle noticed being noticed and decided not to shy.
A boy with dark hair laughed at a joke he didn't understand yet.
Harry Potter wasn't beautiful. He wasn't regal. He looked like a boy who had worn clothes that didn't fit for so long that even tailored ones remembered the posture. But when he looked up—at nothing, at the ceiling that lied and at the piece of air that had moved differently for a second—the mirror breathed.
"Small," Jannik said, soft. Not pitying. Something gentler. "He looks small."
"Everyone does at the beginning of their legend," Ivar murmured.
Klara's hand tightened on the pillar. "And the scar?"
Not a brand. A sentence that hadn't learned to end. The mirror showed it the way a lake shows the moon—faithful and changing. Ivar didn't flinch. He did not envy. He's not me, he thought, not like a rejection, but like a map drawing a border it respects.
He let the mirror drift. Quirrell's turban passed like a storm cloud that didn't know its own forecast. A half-giant somewhere below laughed, a sound like avalanche and lullaby. A lanky red-haired boy gestured wildly with a fork; a girl with bushy hair read while eating, solving three problems and causing two. The school hummed like a hive that thought honey was a philosophy.
Ivar closed his eyes for a moment and listened to the sound of it: the confidence of a place that believed good things could be taught. Durmstrang didn't do confidence; it did proof. The difference tasted like salt and citrus both.
"Enough?" Klara asked quietly.
"Soon," Ivar replied.
He turned the thought that turned the mirror, felt the familiar drag when you ask the world to show you more than it wants to. The water trembled. The steel groaned. He pushed—not with force; with ownership. Helheim glyphs warmed under his hand, runes that remembered death and decided against it.
The image sharpened to an alcove of stone. Not the Great Hall—elsewhere, quieter, where drafts carried secrets. A man stood too still in a shadow that didn't fit him. The turban again. The scent of wrong like a finger pressed against a bruise.
"Quirrell," Jannik said, without his usual joke.
"Not just," Ivar said. The mirror turned its head the way a cat turns its ear—toward something behind the something. For half a heartbeat the water blackened, not with absence but with intent. Not the mirror's. Someone else's.
The circle tightened around Ivar's ankles as if the chalk wanted to remind him which side of it he stood on.
"Close," Klara said, voice low but flat with command. "Enough."
He could have insisted. He could have pushed and learned the name behind the wrong. But he didn't like prying with borrowed tools. He liked invitations and keys. He let the mirror slide away, back to the center of the hall. Back to the boy with the not-quite-smile trying to be a life raft.
"Good evening," Ivar told the boy, because he told the stone good evening and it had learned to answer. The mirror did not answer. That was fine. Some greetings are seeds, not doors.
He lifted his hand. The water stilled to plainness. The steel remembered it was metal again. His breath came back like profit after risk.
Klara counted one more inhale and stepped into the circle, fingers checking his wrist for steadiness the way one checks a bowstring. "All in one piece," she said, and pretended annoyance to cover relief. "Annoying."
Jannik flopped down on the edge of the dais. "Well? Did we assassinate destiny? Are we smarter than prophecy now?"
"We're not chasing prophecy," Ivar said, wiping chalk from his hands. "We're just building a better map."
Mila edged closer to the bowl. "He seemed…ordinary."
"He is," Ivar said. "For now. So was everyone before the moment they weren't."
"Do you envy him?" Jannik asked, because friends ask rude questions kindly.
"No." Ivar's smile was small and real. "He can have the spotlight. I'll take the backstage keys."
He dismantled the circle with the efficiency of a man who respects fire even when it is asleep. Latin first, closing the frame; Norse next, easing the weight; Parseltongue last, releasing the listening. The Helheim marks faded like fresh scars deciding to behave.
They left the chamber and the stone followed them up the stairs in its own way, the torches brightening at their approach, the draft slipping sideways to avoid their coats.
---
Outside, the lake wore a perfect mask. On days like this, when the world made mirrors of itself, the gulls from the coast would mistake water for sky and hesitate in midair, confused by a world that had doubled. Jannik threw a snowball across all that symmetry and whooped when it hit a statue square in its nose.
"Take that, former headmaster whose name I do not know," he declared.
"Respect your elders," Klara said, no heat in it.
"I do," Jannik replied. "But they started it."
They cut across the yard and into the mess hall just as the students who thought timing was a talent, not a habit, sat down. The long trench of coals down the center spat sparks like punctuation. Ivar mounted the bench and clinked his cup once.
"Announcements," he said, as if the school had hired him to be its bad idea in chief. The room quieted like a trained animal.
"One: whoever keeps drawing mustaches on the gargoyles, meet me after dinner to negotiate commissions. Two: we are instituting a glove amnesty for the rest of the week. If you stole it because you thought it was a trophy, you were correct. Return it anyway. Three: theory session tonight for whoever wants to learn why mirrors are braver than people."
That got laughter and a smattering of volunteered hands the professors pretended not to approve in public.
"And four," he added, the grin changing shape without losing its light, "today's courtesy: if you think someone looks small, don't say it. Offer them a larger chair. If they refuse, throw them a rope. If they still won't take it, tell me and I'll drag them up by their ear."
Jannik threw both arms wide. "Customer service!"
Klara smacked him on the back of the head. "Discipline."
Mila leaned forward. "What did you see in the mirror?" she asked, too honest to be subtle.
"A ceiling that lies beautifully," Ivar said. "A boy who doesn't know yet what his life will demand. A teacher who listens to the wrong voice. And a school that believes in good. Which is its own kind of armor."
"Does that change—" Mila gestured vaguely, meaning everything we are planning to be.
"It changes nothing," Ivar said. Then, kinder, "It changes how we prepare."
They ate—the way soldiers do when the next bell comes quick. Between bites, Ivar scribbled three notes.
To Daphne: Logistics for the table. If Hogwarts invites me to walk its halls as a guest, I'll go as Black and Malfoy both. Choose two names for two chairs you want filled when I do. One from your house, one from a family with nothing to lose. Bridges are stronger when built from both banks.
To Susan: I saw your school today. It reminds me of the best parts of a good country. If your aunt asks: yes, I plan to visit when invited. No, I won't play at politics in corridors. I will shake the right hands and remember the wrong eyes.
To Fleur (in French): I looked at their sky and it looked back. Truth: their lights are soft; ours are stern. I like both. Tell me one thing in Beauxbatons that would impress a boy raised by a fortress. I'll send you one rune in return that will make your dueling circles jealous.
He sent the letters with a raven whose dignity could have cowed a Ministry clerk and a hawk that only respected speed. Then he did the most dangerous thing a boy of his velocity could do: he lingered.
He stole the seat of a fourth-year who had been glaring at him for a week and asked—pleasantly—where the boy had learned to draw his wand like a man trying to scare a horse. When the boy stammered something unhelpful, Ivar demonstrated, once, cleanly, and put the wand back in the boy's hand with a correction that burned pride without bruising it. Chaos for friends; free tuition for enemies; nightmare reserved for those who forgot the difference.
By late afternoon, Volkov had conscripted half the hall into a theory lesson on mirrors whether they'd signed up or not. Ivar stood at the front with chalk in one hand and trouble in the other, explaining the difference between scrying and trespassing in a tone that made trespassing sound like a misdemeanor and scrying like mountain climbing.
"Mirrors reflect," he said. "Scrying insists. The first asks; the second takes. We do not take unless we're ready to pay."
"What's the price?" a sixth-year asked, skeptical but listening.
"Usually clarity," Ivar said. "Sometimes safety. Always ignorance. The more you see, the less you can pretend not to know."
The room shifted the way rooms do when honesty walks through them and refuses to take off its boots.
When it ended, Mila stayed to trace the runes again, slow, committing them to muscle. Jannik offered to name the glyphs, was threatened with chalk, and named them anyway—"this one's Kevin, he's insecure"—until Klara folded his paper and returned it to him with each line corrected and two new scars on the margin where her knife had grown bored.
Evening fell with the efficiency of a guillotine. Ivar ducked out of dinner early, crate of materials tucked under one arm, and went to the western parapet to watch the lake pretend to be sky again. Footsteps behind him scraped politely. He didn't turn.
"Good evening," he said, because he said it to darkness and to people alike.
The man who joined him wasn't a professor. Not a student either. One of Karkaroff's "visitors," the sort of adult who thinks schools are safer places to hunt new mistakes. He had the Knockturn Alley posture: guilty back, expensive boots. He watched the lake for the number of seconds cowards use to decide if conversation is safe.
"You're the Malfoy boy," he said at last, which was either an insult or an attempt at flattery depending on the listener.
"I am a boy," Ivar said mildly. "And I am Malfoy. And Black. And several other nouns. Which one are you interested in offending?"
A pause. Then: "There are people in Britain who think you might be…useful."
"People in Britain think a lot of things," Ivar said. "They have newspapers to keep it from getting lonely."
"They think the prophecy belongs to Potter," the man said, as if revealing a market secret. "They think you are—" he hunted for a word and found the worst one—"ornament."
"Do they," Ivar said, and smiled in a way that made the winter wind remember it had better places to be. "How reassuring."
The man cleared his throat, tried again. "But some of us recognize talent. We could help you make a place—"
"I am making a place," Ivar said, friendly as frost. "That's what tables are for."
The man shifted his weight, annoyed at being charmed and dismissed in the same sentence. "You're very sure of yourself."
"I practice," Ivar said. He let his grin go bright. "Tell your some-of-us that if they want a seat, they can learn my manners. We use both hands to pass the dishes. We do not poison the soup. And we do not talk about killing children in rooms with windows."
The visitor went pale. "I didn't—"
"You did," Ivar said gently. "In a different life. In a different voice. Don't bring it to mine."
He left the man and the view to negotiate with each other and went down to the ritual chamber one last time, because endings belong where beginnings are comfortable.
"Good evening," he said to the stone. The weight rose to meet him like a bow.
"They think I'm just a talented Black," he said. "They think Potter carries the sky. They think fate chose a single chair."
The chamber tilted its approval like a crown adjusted.
Shadows thrive when lamps point away. The idea pressed against his knees. Mirrors are brave when their maker is.
He laughed quietly. "Then I will make brave mirrors."
He saw Harry again—not in water this time, but in that mind-place where the world signs its name—laughing too loudly among new friends because loudness hides the shape of fear. He saw Dumbledore folding kindness into strategy, and strategy into kindness, as if the two had never been strangers. He saw a turban turn like a door with the wrong key.
"We'll meet," Ivar said, to the dark, to the boy, to the year. "And when we do, I won't bring envy or apology. I'll bring a table."
He turned to leave. The chalk line of the earlier circle, half-gone now, caught the light as if to say remember me. He did. He always did.
Up in the dormitory, Jannik had fallen asleep across three beds like a man trying to solve a geometry problem with his spine. Klara sat awake, cleaning her knife with the ritual care of a priest, eyes flicking to Ivar and away again in a gesture that meant: you lived; good; don't do that again; do it again tomorrow.
Mila had left a sheet on his desk: her copy of the mirror runes, exact, with small notes in the margins—questions, not doubts. He penciled answers between them, wrote excellent once (the only adjective he trusted on first drafts), and left the page where she'd find it.
He slept the way storm fronts sleep on maps: poised, almost polite. The lake crackled. The wind rehearsed. Far to the west, a boy who didn't know him yet dreamed of keys and a stone and someone who would, one day, speak to snakes without making them angry.
Morning would come, rude and punctual. The mirror would cool, modest again. Britain would keep believing what it already believed: that Harry was the prophecy and Ivar was weather.
So be it, Ivar thought, smiling into the pillow. Weather moves continents while people argue about umbrellas.