Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent, falls the shadow. This is the way the world ends.
~ T. S. Eliot
Draco stood at the helm, watching land come into sight. The boat rocked, waves jumping alongside like eager dogs. Not so long ago, even the thought of traveling alone (to a foreign country to boot) would have galled and intimidated him. Now, he was so preoccupied, it just seemed too taxing to worry about something so small.
Lily had journeyed through Hell. Draco needed only travel through land and sea. The weather for the trip had been mostly calm, the wind accommodating him north, and Draco had spent most his time on the starboard side of deck, keeping out of the way of the crew. The sea was beautiful, full of color he'd never known existed. There had even been a herd of dolphins that swam, leaping playfully, alongside them. The ship plowed and planted over the cant of waves like a woman's undulating hips, and despite himself, Draco found himself faintly enthralled.
At night, the blanket of sky unfurled uninterrupted. All his life, he'd kept to the city and country. There had always been something reaching up, trying the tempting taste of the stars. He'd never thought that the sky could be so long. He felt as if he was inside a glass dome, that some grand and terrible giant was staring down at him from it. It was a cold feeling. Though he tried to conjure up feelings of resentment to such a crude reckoning, he could not, as if the part of him that stored indignation was numbed.
Altogether, the trek only took three days. He reached port and slipped off the ship without notice. There was a beacon in his chest, leading him on. Struggling a few times with pantomime and fuzzy translation charms, he managed to purchase a carriage ride. He left the window open, watching the mountains.
This was Dyre's homeland. As much as he'd been born in England, Draco knew this was the country he loved. There was beauty here, the language had a lilting enchantment, the land striking, and Draco only thought that Dyre should have been the one to show him. They took a meandering road, soon passing from hillocks into steeper terrain. The driver stopped where the road had narrowed to a pinch.
Between two sentries, the gates to Durmstrang were tall and strong. The panels were well-tended, emblazoned with the sagas of their country. Naval battles, wars between dark elves, between magic-holders and kings, all in a blaze of glory. Draco laid his hand on the unmoving wood. How often had Dyre come through these? How often had he looked at these pictures and dreamed of becoming a warrior?
With the carriage jumping down the craggy road, Draco turned back to the mountain. Of course, these gates were for show. A young student in a grey uniform appeared as if from the side of the mountain, beckoning him to follow. He lead him through a much smaller, well-used door into the compound.
It was not a monolith like Hogwarts. There were many halls spread along the fortification, creating a militant-like milieu of practices and drills, but the central structure was still a castle, hewn into the mountain. It looked older than Hogwarts, though less ornate. Stolid. Enduring.
Hámundur Diðriksson was a smaller man of greater reserve than his predecessor. He'd taken charge of the school's maintenance after Karkaroff. Draco had never had reason to meet him. He was a staunch, paunchy man, the acumen behind his eyes less violent and more cunning than Karkaroff. Once the student was dismissed, Draco bowed.
"Thank you for accommodating me. It was short notice, and for that I apologize."
Diðriksson sat back down, out from behind his desk to engage Draco over a short table. Draco took a seat.
"Your matter is urgent," he said, offering a cup of ale. He sat down. "I know you."
Draco paused from drinking. "What do you mean?"
"You laid with the cursed one," Master Diðriksson said, swirling his cup. He took a drink.
Draco looked down, thinking. In the end, he he found no defense, no insult. He nodded. "I did."
Diðriksson gave him a long, dark look before speaking again, the moment passing. "So, what does a young English lord want of Durmstrang?"
"Of The Tower, Lord Diðriksson."
The headmaster's motions stopped. "That is not my influence."
Draco bowed his head. "I know. But I believe it has something to give me."
Diðriksson's stare was no less intense and unreadable. Draco did not look away.
"Já, you have the look about you," he said at last, leaning away resignedly. He tapped his belly. "Not men's magic."
"Odin partook of it," Draco said, making the norsemen give him a startled, reassessing look.
"That's the way of gods," he said softly, staring at him. Draco stared back.
"Not men's work," he said after a long minute. "Do what you will."
Draco thanked him and bowed. He felt the northman's eyes on his back all the way through the door. As he stepped from the mountain hold, into the sun, he couldn't help turning his face to the sky. There was something indistinguishable in the difference between here and Scotland. He knew, feeling it, but it was as impossible to articulate as... He opened his eyes. As why he loved Dyre, he supposed.
He tried to compare the boy who had fallen in love with the abused boy aboard the Durmstrang ship with the confused, not-quite man he was today and failed. That boy, his emotions and determination, were so obscure to him now. It felt strange to look back on all of it, feeling so old, when he was only nineteen, when so much still lay ahead. And at the same time, he knew he was still caught in the spiral of the choices he made when he was sixteen. Still on the path he'd chosen when he'd slipped out of the Great Hall, following Karkaroff's beautiful, cursed servant.
Why am I here?
He honestly didn't know, yet somehow, even without yet anything to show for his efforts, he was glad that he was in this place. This beautiful, summer-filled land where Dyre had once walked and lived.
A young boy, by his livery not a student, approached him, twelve, certainly not thirteen, biting his lip and wringing his hands. He spoke in Icelandic, a lisp in the gap of his teeth, freckles poured over the bridge of his nose. Draco shook his head to show he didn't understand. The boy narrowed his eyes and pointed up the mountains. Draco followed the line to a pass, wedged between two crags.
Draco turned back to the boy. He nodded. The boy made a jerky motion and ran off. Figuring he'd have to go alone, Draco began to walk. Soon, the sound of ironworks, shouts, and sparring faded. The wind tumbled through the sparse mountain fauna, the walls so close that Draco had to step up the stones to pass. Above, there were lines of pulleys, tedious footholds. A few nimble goats watched him in disinterest, braying and skipping on impossible mountain teeth, disappearing into the crags. A few birds called, desolate sounds that Draco found strangely lovely.
Suddenly, Draco found himself in a descent. Stones skid and slipped beneath him. He made a fastidious journey, studying his feet. The Tower came upon him suddenly, where he thought he'd been feeling the mountain. The beaten, grey stone had little mechanical shape. He suddenly looked up and found himself at the base of a needle, pushed through the earth's fabric as if by the thumb and thimble of god.
He gaped upward into unfathomable height. Nestled in a valley, it could have topped the world. As he stood in silence, stone pressing all sides, Draco thought he heard it hum. He felt along the barrier, searching for an entrance. There were no doors, not even a window to shout up at. His feet were beginning to ache, and he was sure he had not even managed a quarter of the Tower's circumference. There was a narrow path that separated the Tower from the mountains surrounding it, sometimes so close that Draco had to grab croppings of stone to heave himself over. Sometimes the path broadened, as if the mountains managed to undulate around it like a sea. Dirty and sweating, Draco collapsed against the wall, fiddling with his wand, contemplating his own stubbornness.
His back brushing the stone, Draco imagined his cause for coming here. Dyre's spirit, or whatever, floating, or something, behind this wall. It was difficult even to imagine. That behind the jagged rock, poking into his back, there was something like that. He felt too visceral, too real, to really understand how something like a soul or spirit could exist.
The motion of the sun told him he'd been walking for hours. Even though he'd followed one route, he was quite sure he was lost. There was no way to remember which of the narrow crevices he'd come through, even if he felt his way back along the wall.
"Is that it, Dyre?" he said quietly, leaning his head back on the stone. "Do you want me to die here?"
He closed his eyes.
Something promptly landed on his foot. Looking down, he was startled to find the raven, the white raven that had catalyzed this tepid adventure, staring at him. He held his breath.
The raven opened its wings, gave him a single, chiding caw, and flew right towards his face. Draco winced, bracing for the creature's claws, but he felt only the sharpness of the bird's primary feathers. It banked, flapping, around the side of the mountain, and pulled up to a stripped ash.
A girl sat in the boughs.
In three years, she'd grown, but Draco knew her. The child they'd left, disappearing in the lake, was a woman.
"Yrsa?" he said incredulously, trying to stand.
She smiled, and it seemed slightly feral. Her hair, unbelievably, was wilder, a cache of nets, strings, and briars. There had been something vulnerable in the girl, an undisturbed youth, a pond waiting for the pluck of a stone. Here, she was potent, face balmy and full. Her eyes no longer looked mortal.
"Draco."
In the word was everything. A statement more than a name, a recognition of everything Draco had tried to hide. He winced, feeling suddenly, horribly seen. He'd not sounded the depths of his conscious in three years. Tucked in the darkness, the sudden light burned and peeled.
Her grin stretched, but she blinked, and it seemed as though the focus, the intensity, shifted. Draco was left staggering, breathless. The last time Draco had caught her in a tree, she'd been bare as a bairn. This time at least she wore a dress, a white overdress that reminded Draco of the color of sunning bone, atop another white undergarment. It swayed eldritch in the wind over the branches.
"I am glad to see you, Draco."
Draco shook himself out of his stupor. He stepped forward until he was beneath her. He could barely accept that she was here, this specter of the past grown into... This. Yrsa said nothing as he stared up. Draco grabbed the nearest branch and, ignoring all protest in his legs, climbed upward. Yrsa pressed her lips as if she were smiling, watching his ascent. He plopped down on the boughs beside her, and she tilted her head to the side, to look at him.
Suddenly in reach, Draco didn't know what to do, if he was allowed to touch her. She said nothing. Close, he saw that the blue of her eyes had changed as well, going deeper into dark sapphire.
One hand balanced on a limb, Draco reached towards her face. When she didn't bite, he held his breath and touched her cheek.
She was real. He released his breath in a ragged bark, not understanding why he was so happy. They knew each other only for a short time, but they'd been connected through Dyre, sharing a love that confused Draco more than anything else in the world. He was shocked to find tears in his eyes.
"You're here," he whispered.
She smiled, this time with something much more human. She touched Draco's hand.
"I am."
Though he wanted to, it was awkward to embrace in a tree, and Draco settled for stoking her cheek and scooting so their thighs touched.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
She flashed him a wry look. "I live here."
Draco glanced at the mountain. Yrsa took his hand.
"You came," she said, sounding suddenly young. "I wasn't sure you would, after..."
So she knew. Draco was not surprised, but he knew no more how to finish that sentence than she did. He had been terribly hurt, but he was still somehow here, trying to convince himself that it didn't matter.
"Do you still love him?" she asked.
Draco looked down. "I don't know."
He thought Yrsa might yell at him. (She certainly would have when she was fourteen.) But she clenched her jaw and nodded. She too must have learned over the years that things were never as simple as they were when you were children.
"Do you want it then?"
When Draco stared at her, she pulled a wrapped cloth out of a fold of her dress. She unfolded the linen, presented a palm-sized box made of black walnut. Blanching, Draco took it from her. Some artisan had likened a flower on the surface. It looked like a woman's jewelry box, not a broken piece of soul.
He couldn't speak.
Yrsa turned her face. Though there was nothing but stone to see, her gaze seemed to travel far away. "You don't know what happened that night. You can't." When Draco still did not speak, she sighed. "Dyre died, Draco," she said, giving his name the dark accent that Dyre used to. "The thing that makes a man is not a puzzle. It's not something you can try to fit together. Dyre was human, Draco. For all that most of him was forged in a curse instead of a womb, he was human. He died human."
Draco thumbed the box. "What is this then?"
"Something else." She moved closer, pressing the side of her breast against his arm. "It is what we were given. Listen, Draco. Loved ones die, and people are left behind. So few get the chance that I'm giving you," she said, eyes imploring.
He was so confused. The frustration welled inside him seemed so great that he felt the tremendous urge to throw the box against the Tower.
"Draco," Yrsa called. "Dyre loved you. He asked you to believe in him. If that is too much for you," she released his hand, "then throw it. Damn everything, Draco. Don't think that anyone can judge you for it," she said kindly. "He choose you."
Draco looked down at the box and didn't move. How much easier would it be, just to let it drop? But his thumbs continued to trace the whorls, obsessed and demented, as if they could equate such a thing to Dyre's skin.
"A man is more than his parts," Yrsa said in his ear. Her hands cupped his, and the box between them. "This treasure," she spoke, "has waited a long time for you. It has been passed through the Maidens, always. If it is not the Dyre you remember, it is part of him."
Draco shuddered, not taking his eyes from the box.
"I... I don't... The norns..."
"The norns are a wheel, Draco," she said, finally sounding a bit impatient. "They turn, and they spiral, over and over and over again. Do you think they appear at whim? Do you think they care for mortal wars, that they'd pluck up a babe to save you?"
"What are you saying?" Draco whispered.
He felt Yrsa moving behind him, as if her body was no long attached to the tree or such a meager, mortal thing as gravity. "The Three only follow patterns." She touched his temple tenderly. "I know, Draco. You do not understand. You think it's unfair, that you should lose what you love because of a prophecy."
Yrsa kissed his cheek and laid there, her hair stiff and scratchy against his own. "Have faith, dearest, beloved Draco. He loved you. Even when he was nothing but a murderer's sickness."
His fingers tightened around the box. "It's hard."
"Waiting is always hard," Yrsa said, drawing away. "That's why we weave."
"What's going to happen to you?" he asked, knowing better than to look up.
"The tale is not yet end," she said with a smile in her voice. "Not yet while lovers live."
"He loved you too, Yrsa," Draco said, as she drifted away.
He was alone once more. The sounds of the mountain, the birds and rustle-wind, filled again. With the box against his chest, he continued down the path back to the school.
o.O.o
The boy was still sleeping, the elder and the diminished soul that Lily had claimed from the netherworld. Narcissa was worried that Draco had returned like Lily, changed. He didn't know how to assuage her, not when he wasn't entirely sure it wasn't true. He had returned to Scotland in a daze, hardly remembering most the trip back. He thought Diðriksson might have sent him with an escort, just to make sure he didn't tumble in a ditch or the ocean on the way back.
The room Dyre had been given was peaceful. Magic made a breeze to shift the curtains over a landscape of English hills. The walls were somber, but that was more because they thought he might like that more than bright colors. The only decoration was the vase of daffodils Dumbledore had set on the nightstand. Dyre was beneath calm blue sheets, the soul snuggled against his side.
Draco stood before the bed. His parents, the Marauders, Dumbledore, Snape, and even Victor Krum were beside him, encouragement that felt a great deal more like fear. Yrsa words repeated again and again in his head, riddles he couldn't decipher. He felt miserably lost.
The fake breeze shifted the curtains again, climbing across the room. The child on the bed, for the first time, moved. He took a deep breath, rolling over on his back. He made the motions of someone coming from a deep slumber, opening sleep-fogged eyes.
They'd frozen, no idea what to do. The child gazed about the room sleepily before locking on Draco. His eyes widened, revealing such a wealth of green.
Dyre's eyes were never that bright, Draco thought, mesmerized.
The child scooted off the bed, the nightshirt bunching up over his porcelain thighs. He slipped down and padded to him. Standing before Draco, he barely came to his hip. His blazing eyes fixed on the box.
Draco swallowed and offered it to him.
The boy took it. He pressed the side, the sides that Draco had fingered so religiously, hoping to divine some presence from its mediocre surface. The lid popped open. The boy's nimble fingers lifted it from the wood. In a bed of down was an egg.
Draco gaped at it. Such a small, innocuous thing. It was as small as his thumb, round like the moon and soft-looking, like a snake or turtle egg. The boy set the box on the ground, holding the little thing like a marble. Draco stared at him, mouth dry.
The boy looked up at him. Draco knelt. Cupping his empty hand around the shell of Draco's ear, the boy whispered quietly, tickling his hairs. Draco leaned back and stared at him.
With a shy, innocent grin, the boy tampered off, climbing back up on the bed. Shakily, Draco climbed to his feet, reenforced by a hand at his elbow.
The boy leaned close to Dyre's ear, whispering the same way he'd whispered to Draco. He placed the egg on the tip of Dyre's lips then climbed on top of him. With a giggle like a child at play, he lowered his mouth and together swallowed.
Draco didn't know what to expect. The clap, like a sonic boom, was not it. The boy dissolved into millions of crystal light, swirling together as the nightshirt fell to the bed. The light flew into Dyre's open mouth, the world rumbling and shaking around them like an exorcism. There was a strong whooshing, a mountainous sucking, growing louder.
Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. The sound clapped off and the room steadied. The angry flapping of the curtains lulled, the only sound as they had all stopped breathing, staring at the bed. Had a rogue Death Eater stormed the infirmary, Draco would not have been able to move. Save for that insipid curtain, time had stopped, waiting.
The body on the bed was pressed backward, its mouth still dangling open.
Draco's heart skipped as the body sighed, a long, pent-up breath that seemed to come from its very toes. It fell back against the bed, one hand dangling off the side. Draco felt a horrible sense of loss, wondering if that was it. Then, its eyes blinked tiredly open. In the tense, unbelieving silence, the man blinked again before his eyes closed, head lulling to the side to dream again.