Year Four — Chapter 1: A Castle with Too Many Stories (~1,950 words)
The Hogwarts Express ran on arrogance as much as coal. Steam belched like applause; iron wheels screamed their authority; a conductor shouted times as if time would listen. Mothers pressed biscuits into pockets as if pastries could stop destiny. Owls complained because that is what owls do when people insist on being dramatic.
Ivar boarded last.
Not because he was late—winter had taught him punctuality—but because last let him study the stage before he stepped onto it. He took the measure of the platform the way a duelist measures reach: families knotted by color and crest, students orbiting older students as if gravity were reputation, prefects attempting to regulate chaos with badges. His trunk rolled behind him on a charm that looked like politeness and felt like obedience. His raven—insulted by southern skies—launched, dissolved into a smudge of smoke, and went to sulk north of the station lamps.
Inside, the corridor smelled of polished wood and ink, pumpkin pasties and nerves. He moved down it without hurrying, green eyes bright under a fringe winter hadn't forgiven yet, every sense scanning: laughter here that didn't match the joke; a whispered insult there balanced on a shaky spine; the flicker of a wand in a sleeve where there shouldn't have been one. He made a list in his head without appearing to notice anything at all.
"Compartment?" Draco's voice, half relief, half complaint, hooked him from a doorway. He looked smaller in these halls than at home—same slick hair, same sharpness to the cheekbones, but the castle air hadn't settled around him yet. He was floating, a boy waiting for gravity to choose him.
Ivar slid the door shut behind them with two fingers. "You're late."
"I was being scolded by a woman in tartan who could kill with eyebrows," Draco muttered. "I survived. Barely."
"Congratulations," Ivar said gravely. "Survival is habit-forming."
There were other boys already inside—Blaise Zabini, relaxed as a rumor; Pansy Parkinson, eyes sharp enough to cut a lie into ribbons; Theodore Nott, slouched like a man hiding the piece that made him interesting.
"You brought the weather," Blaise observed, casual, nodding at the frost still glittering in Ivar's hair.
"I always do," Ivar said. He palmed the trunk to a corner, sat, and made the compartment feel smaller by deciding what would matter in it.
Pansy's mouth curved. "So you're the Durmstrang export. The Prophet said you're disciplined."
"The Prophet said I'm many things," Ivar returned pleasantly. "It's a newspaper. It likes nouns."
The train lurched into motion. London blurred; brick turned to hedgerow; hedgerow gave way to green that hadn't forgotten winter. Conversation tried on several shapes and settled on gossip. Draco gave Ivar the highlights—Gryffindor theatrics, Quidditch as religion, Snape as a weather system—and Harry Potter as a walking punctuation mark.
"He's everywhere," Draco grumbled. "Like smudges on a window no one admits to making."
"Clean the window," Ivar said.
Draco blinked. "What?"
"Don't stare at the smudge." Ivar's smile flicked. "Open the window."
Blaise chuckled. "I do enjoy a metaphor with a draft."
The door slid open without knocking. A lanky redhead peered in with the sort of curiosity that arrives before tact. "Malfoy," he said, spotting Draco. "Didn't know you had a—" His gaze bumped into Ivar and tripped. "—brother."
"Some families have layers," Ivar said, friendly as a frostbite warning.
Ron Weasley—because who else could it be—flushed. He spotted the Black ring on Ivar's hand and tried not to. "Right, well, enjoy your… expensive compartment."
Pansy tsked. "Your jealousy is showing."
Ron reddened further—then was tugged back by a boy with round glasses and polite confusion stamped into his brow. Potter. Close, he looked exactly like the rumor didn't: not radiant, not regal, not a prophecy in sensible shoes. He looked like a boy who had never been given a room and still managed to fill one.
"Sorry," Harry said to no one in particular, honest reflex. "We were just—er—looking for a seat."
"Try the third carriage," Draco said smoothly, the insult wrapped in directions.
Harry nodded anyway. Ron scowled. The door slid shut. The compartment breathed.
"They're children," Pansy said.
"We're all children," Blaise said lightly. "Some of us with better tailors."
Ivar watched the corridor for a heartbeat after the Gryffindors vanished. Politeness, then honesty; that would be the order of things. He turned back to the room.
"The Sorting Hat," Pansy said, aiming mischief at a safer target. "Where do you want it to throw you?"
"Want is a dangerous verb," Ivar said. "I will go where the angles are."
"Slytherin," Theodore murmured, the first words he'd spilled since Ivar entered.
"Perhaps," Ivar answered, and Zabini smiled because he liked people who answered in doors instead of walls.
They passed the journey becoming acquainted with each other's silences. Ivar let Draco complain about first-year incompetence and Snape's affection for unfairness (Ivar approved), let Pansy slide barbs into blank spaces (he sidestepped), let Theo test the edges of the conversation like a man who'd been burned by one. Ivar never showed the knife; he only showed the sheath and watched who imagined the blade.
Midway through, a trolley witch clattered past. Ivar bought more sweets than they could realistically eat and redistributed them with the unstudied authority of a boy who expected people to let him be generous. He palmed two extra pumpkin pasties and pocketed them without explanation. Draco understood before anyone else: Harry hadn't had any.
The train hauled them into dusk. Hogsmeade station arrived with its collection of surprised lamps and very sure mountains. Night gathered its skirts around the castle and went to stand where it would look best.
They disembarked into air that smelled like the practice of magic—old stone, new breath, cold water keeping secrets. A giant called for first-years; little bodies shuffled toward him with terror disguised as enthusiasm. Ivar followed the prefects and fitted himself into Slytherin's river of green and silver without splashing. He touched the wall before the doors—palm to stone, the way you greet a horse you intend to ride—and said in Parseltongue, quiet enough that only architecture heard: "Good evening."
The stair shivered. The doors opened onto a hall that pretended to be a sky. Stars sang lies above them—beautiful ones—and the candles kept house the way bees keep a queen.
He let himself be impressed. It cost nothing and earned everything.
The Sorting began like every story trying to remember its first line. Names. Scrapes of bench. Hats and cheers. When they called "Malfoy, Ivar," the hall rearranged to see.
He walked without grace or swagger—just the poise you get from doing difficult things until your bones understand them. He sat. The Hat fell.
"Well," it sighed into his skull, voice dry as book dust and knives. "You've been busy, haven't you?"
"Keeping warm," Ivar replied inwardly.
"Black," the Hat tasted it. "Old magic, old manners. Malfoy, with all the furniture that implies. And… oh, my. Helheim—properly cured. Someone in your line learned from the last time it ran their house instead of heated it."
"Several someones," Ivar said. "I pay my dead to mind their own business."
The Hat chuckled, honest delight. "I haven't smelled that blood behaved in a century. And your wand—elder burned and baptized. How very impolite of you."
"Politeness is a tool," Ivar said. "So is impoliteness."
"You would do exquisitely in Ravenclaw," the Hat mused. "You like problems more than praise."
"Correct," Ivar said.
"You would be a disaster and a sermon in Gryffindor."
"Also correct."
"You would make Hufflepuff dangerous."
"Hufflepuff is already dangerous," Ivar said, amused. "They hoard competence."
The Hat hummed. "But you want angles. Allies who like shadows. Rooms that don't require you to explain why you reach for knives and teacups with the same hand."
"I want a table," Ivar said. "Not a throne."
The Hat warmed on his scalp, as if pleased to be party to a secret. "Then the House that will give you both privacy and an audience is—SLYTHERIN!"
The cheer broke like a wave that didn't trust itself. Ivar lifted the hat off, handed it back with respect, and turned to the table he'd already decided to attend: Draco half-standing, Pansy satisfied, Blaise amused, Theo watching like a cat who'd learned not to trust open palms.
On his way he felt other eyes: McGonagall's, exacting and fair; Flitwick's, curious; Sprout's, practical affection; Snape's, a pin pulled from a grenade that never explodes because no one dares throw it; and Dumbledore's, twinkling as if the twinkles were a language he wasn't tired of yet.
He took his seat. The feast arrived as if the kitchen had been promised politics in exchange for extra gravy. The hall roared. He ate with the unapologetic appetite of a growing disaster. Between mouthfuls he answered polite questions in three languages, told two jokes loose enough to be heard by neighboring benches, and ignored a deliberate slight from a seventh-year who wanted a reaction as payment for his insecurity.
Across the hall, Gryffindor tried to pretend it hadn't been staring. Harry Potter laughed at something Weasley said, then looked back at Ivar with that new-blue gaze that hadn't learned how to be suspicious yet. Hermione Granger measured him, pen already poised to decide who he was; Ivar admired her for it. The twins conferred and grinned like men who had found a match and were debating which fuse.
Beneath all of it—beneath the candles and the roast and the chatter—he felt it: a draft that had learned to be a whisper, a whisper that had taught itself religion. Stone remembered a door. The door remembered a snake. The snake remembered being a law.
Good evening, he thought downward, a breath shaped like Parseltongue. The reply came so soft he almost missed it, like silk deciding to be a blade.
Soon.
Dessert arrived. He stole a treacle tart from Draco and sent a pumpkin pasty drifting to the Gryffindor table along a path only a few would notice. It bumped Harry's elbow, landed on his plate. The boy looked around, baffled, then smiled at no one and everyone, and bit in. Ivar ate his tart and accepted the universe's gratitude.
The speech—kind, rambling, twinkled into submission—ended with warnings about forests and corridors and deaths that would be so inconvenient. The benches scraped; the tide of houses retreated to their cliffs.
Slytherin sank.
The common room lived under the lake, all green shadows and glass that insisted water could be a wall if properly asked. It was beautiful and faintly ridiculous in the way expensive things are when they take themselves too seriously. Ivar approved. He liked rooms that admitted what they were.
Draco hauled him aside the moment the prefect finished explaining discipline. "They're all staring," he hissed in the space between pillars.
"Let them," Ivar said. "They'll get bored if we don't feed them."
"Potter gets fed without trying," Draco snapped, jealousy showing like a rash. "He walks into rooms and the ceiling claps."
"Then let the ceiling clap," Ivar said, perfectly calm. "Applause is a door you don't have to open."
Draco blinked, lost, found. "You sound like Mother and make it sound like mischief."
"Mother is mischief with manners," Ivar said. He clapped a hand on Draco's shoulder—weight, not ownership. "Listen. Headlines are loud because they need to be shouted. History is quiet because it knows it's permanent. We'll be quiet until it's time to be very loud once."
Draco absorbed that like a boy gulping air after a dive. He nodded, grudgingly hopeful. "Fine. But if Potter smirks at me again I'm hexing his shoelaces to quarrel with him."
"Acceptable," Ivar said gravely. "As long as you use proper grammar."
They took an initial lap of the common room so Ivar could be introduced to people who already knew his name: Pansy (barb collector), Millicent (boulder with a heart, he suspected), Daphne's younger sister Astoria (observant and pretending not to be), a handful of older Slytherins intent on being important to him before they'd decided how. Theo Nott offered his hand as if it might bite him. Ivar shook it as if it were already forgiven.
He didn't stay long.
He liked castles better when they forgot they had audiences.
The corridors cooled as he walked them, as if the stone were closing its pores. He moved like a man accustomed to floors that shift beneath you and stairs that believe in drama. When he was certain no prefect would call his name and no portrait would startle, he went down.
Not far. Not to the heart. Just far enough to let the castle notice him without flinching.
The draft found him in a cold corridor where the torches burned as if they were being watched by something that disliked light. He leaned his shoulder against the stone and said it in Parseltongue—the tone reserved for secrets that don't want to be hunted.
"I am Ivar," he hissed. "I speak to you with respect. If there is a serpent who listens, I will listen back."
Silence. Then—like a knife dragged gently across silk—the world replied.
Name, the stone shaped around him. Not a demand. An acknowledgment sharpened into a question.
"Ivar Black," he answered. "Heir of the House you once called ally. Heir to manners older than our furniture. I do not command. I offer terms."
The cold smiled in the way only old cold can: by not warming.
Soon, it said again, and he knew it was not the castle speaking anymore. It was a curve in the dark and a patience in scales. It was a law that had learned loneliness. It was a queen who had been told she was a weapon.
"Soon," he agreed. "But not as a master. As a partner."
The reply tasted like iron and approval.
He left the dark before it became rude to stay. On the way back he found a boy in a tapestry alcove pretending tapestries are doors when you face the wrong direction. The boy started when Ivar breathed.
"What are you doing?" Ivar asked, not unkind.
The boy—second-year, cheeks raw with new embarrassment—floundered. "Hiding."
"From?"
"Everyone."
"Very ambitious," Ivar said. "Hiding from everyone at Hogwarts is like hiding from water in the lake."
The boy blinked. "I… can't do my transfiguration right. They laugh."
"Of course they do," Ivar said. "Children laugh at things that feel like mirrors. Give them something else to look at." He took the boy's wand, adjusted his grip, and set a simple practice on the flagstone—match to needle, needle to match, the kind of rhythm that teaches hands how to trust themselves. The boy tried. Failed. Tried again. The match trembled and became a needle for half a heartbeat, as surprised as its caster.
"Good," Ivar said, precise praise. "Do it ten times and sleep. When you fail in front of them tomorrow, you will fail better."
The boy grinned without permission. "Thank you."
"Don't thank me," Ivar said, already on his way. "Win."
He found his bed by the sound of Draco's sleeping irritation and the lake deciding to lap the glass with its tongue. He wrote three one-line notes by wandlight before sleep took him by the collar.
To Daphne: Angles exist; I took the obvious house.
To Susan: Your school lies beautifully; I approve of any ceiling that protects softer truths.
To Fleur: The English castle has scent of honey and prophecy; I will send you a better reason to admire it when I convince its bones to tell me a secret.
He tucked the notes under his pillow to send with the morning post and closed his eyes.
Elsewhere, letters had already moved in more interesting ways. In London, Amelia Bones skimmed a briefing with Ivar's name in the third paragraph and drew a small star next to polite and a smaller one next to factor. She wrote: Monitor. Not priority. In Hogwarts' highest office Dumbledore poured tea into the idea that he was watching the right boy. He told himself wisdom and mercy were the same thing; he was right often enough for it to be a habit. In a back room off Knockturn, a book-shaped parcel changed hands and changed stories as it went, so that by the time it reached a trunk with the wrong name etched on a tag, it had become three different lies and one very old truth.
And under the school, in a place the floor remembered when it chose to, something woke a little more. It tasted the air the way snakes taste names. It did not yet know Ivar, but it knew the language he carried in his blood: not command, not flattery. Contract.
He slept like winter sleeps when it trusts the door. Dreams came loud and left quieter. Morning would bring classes he'd already outgrown and teachers he would charm by not showing them his teeth all at once. It would bring Potter across a corridor with eyes that had learned to be wary overnight. It would bring Ron Weasley's shout and Hermione Granger's questions and a Weasley girl writing Jenny on her name in a diary that wrote back in a voice that was not her own.
The ceiling above him lied beautifully. The floor below him prepared to tell the truth like an axe.
Polite first, he had told the stone. Honest later.
The castle, which had hosted many children who thought they were storms, considered the boy who knew he was weather—and turned one degree toward him to hear what kind of season he intended to be.