A/N: Fic is rated M. This is your only warning about dark topics.
Disclaimer: Last I checked, Harry Potter still belonged to JKR.
Summary: Voldemort has won, and what was once Dumbledore's Army has scattered to the winds.
On the run from the past, a troubled Ginny Weasley finds herself in Ireland, caught between a Muggle conflict and fulfilling a life debt to Thorfinn Rowle, the one man she thought she'd never see again. Splintered from the DA and alone in the world, Ginny sets off on a suicide mission to avenge the deaths of her loved ones, against all advice. Instead, she finds herself captured by the Dark Lord, and sentenced to death. At the last hour, she agrees to a marriage of convenience for her own protection - a marriage to Thorfinn Rowle, bound by the old gods in a ritual of deepest magic - and then she runs... and Thorfinn knows he will have to move heaven and earth to find her - before the killer in the ranks of the DA gets to her first.
Main pairing is Thorfinn x Ginny, though there is also a Seamus x Ginny pairing as well. The fic is set fifteen months after the Battle of Hogwarts. In this fic, Thorfinn is 8 years older than Ginny, and was in the same year as Charlie Weasley at Hogwarts.
The inspiration for Thorfinn's nickname of "Viking" was borrowed with permission from Freya Ishtar. If you haven't read her amazing fics, you're missing out!
I don't have a beta, all mistakes are entirely my own, but I did want to give a shoutout to StopTalkingAtMe, who gave me an excellent concrit. This chapter & Ch1 have now been edited to reflect that.
XxX
A Dark Reckoning
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind. - John Donne, "Song".
The best of men cannot suspend their fate; the good die early and the bad die late. – Daniel Defoe.
Prologue | Apostasy
August 1999
When Susan Bones Apparates to the appointed meeting place, she at first thinks she's made a mistake. She is standing in a skeletal forest, the mist rolling in thick and white from the sea. In the distance, she can hear a faint ringing, and the harsh shrieks of gulls on the wing. It is too far for the tang of the sea here, but a distinctly metallic scent hangs cold and heavy in the air.
The thick carpet of ferns, nearly to her waist, are sodden with dew, and she finds herself pulling her cloak closer together as she navigates the treacherous forest floor, every misstep a possible plummet to her death.
She's going to bloody well kill him, she really is.
"Where are you?!" Susan yells, and her voice echoes in the forest. You... You... You...
Something stirs behind her, and she turns. A yellow-eyed crow is sitting on a low-hanging branch of the yew tree, and as she lifts her head, it opens its beak and lets out a loud Caw! Caw! before flying straight at her. Instinctively, Susan ducks, and the crow swoops over her head. All the hair rises on the back of her neck, and she draws her wand back out, gripping it fearfully. The forest around her breathes.
She is suddenly overcome by the intense urge to flee.
That is when she realizes that the trees are full of silent crows, sitting and watching her. She feels a wet droplet hit her head, then another. The metallic smell is stronger than before, and there is another smell now as well, a rank, overpowering scent, at once both sweet and sickening. When she draws her hood back over her head, the droplets splash onto her hands from above, fingers coming away sticky and black.
"Fuck." Susan looks up, and then she begins to scream.
The wood fills with the sound of crows, and they rise, circling above the canopy, their cries eerie and piercing in the muted light.
They plunge all at once, in a great dark whirling funnel of feathers and sharp beaks, and then there is only silence.
All but for a single word, carried on the wind...
(Esus.)