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Chapter Text

Thirst. Crusty sore eyes. Wiping them you find your hands are gritty with sand. Struggle to stand, limp a few steps and fall again to hands and knees. Thirst. It seems it might never end. Reach for your wand; find it absent. "Aguamenti", you mutter anyway. Nothing happens. Repeat it again and again until you’re screaming your dry throat raw. No water fills your hands.

Oasis. There must be an oasis. Decide it, looking down at the sand you are nearly lying in. Close your eyes and insist on it. There is an oasis and I WILL get to it. Force yourself to stand and walk. No desert is going to kill a Malfoy, and if it does you will NOT die on your knees. You won’t give it the satisfaction.

And ten steps later there it is. A clear blue pool surrounded by lush trees and shrubs. You wade right into it, robes and all, and plunge your face into the water, drinking deeply.

Eventually you begin to wonder why there are no animals here, and immediately you hear a thundering of hooves. Maybe they’re not thirsty. Maybe they’re running from a lion...and a roar follows on the thought. Several roars. A whole pride of hunting lions. Lions make you think of Gryffindors, and like you conjured it a griffin flies overhead cawing raucously.

What is this place? How did I get here? Is it a place at all, or am I trapped in my mind by some curse?

You decide that whatever it is, it’s obviously responding to your desires, and decide firmly that you’ll be safe. The predators are busy with their natural prey, and have no interest in one slightly-battered wandless wizard.

Time to think, then, and remember.

~~~

Tile. Blood. Pain. Someone else's horrified screaming. And then black, empty, nothing.

An unknowable time later, you awoke in a soft bed with a girl your age looking down at you. Slim, freckled, short brown hair and green eyes, wearing a brown shirt and trousers rather than robes but somehow she doesn't look Muggle. She didn't quite look sixteen, either; those eyes were too knowing, too deep.

"Who are you?"

She turned it around. "My name is Dara. But the real question is, who are you?"

You scoffed. "I am Draco Malfoy, son of Lucius, son of Abraxas. My father sits at the right hand of the Dark Lord."

She scoffed right back. "I eat jumped up sorcerers like your Voldemort for breakfast. Try again."

Oh, shite and bugger. I've been captured by the other side, and they're idiots. Naming that name, arrogant little... "Potter, you're an idiot. He can hear you."

"I said, I eat jumped up sorcerers for breakfast, and my name is still Dara. I will tell *you* who you are. You're Narcissa Black's son, true enough, but your father is my stepson. You can call me Grandmother if you must, but I'd really rather you didn't. Makes me feel old." She offered you a hand to help you out of bed, but you ignored it and stood up. Somehow it made you feel better that you were taller than she was.

"I don't believe a word of it." You looked around the room trying to find your wand. It was quietly lying on the table beside the bed, and you snatched it up. "Incarcerous!"

She smiled, and the conjured ropes fell away into flames that went out instantly. "I should tell you, as of right now, that I've decided your magic will no longer work here. I need you to listen to me." It was like a gray cloud just smothered something in your mind...no, that's not right. The cloud was outside you, somehow, but it cut you off all the same.

You stepped to the window, which looked out over ...a whirling disorienting mass of color and shine. The walls of the room you are in were just visible to the left and right, but there was nothing that looks like land. "Where AM I?" You were almost shrieking, you realize now.

She smiled again. "You're in the Ways of Sawall in the Courts of Chaos. You're a long way from home...or more accurately, you've finally come home." You fainted.

When you woke again, you were back in the bed and there were two voices talking. You pretended you were still unconscious.

"Doesn't believe me, poor child." This was the same voice from before. Dara, you remind yourself.

"The Logrus will fix that right up." A male voice, cold and mocking.

"No excess of fatherly feeling, I see, Mandor."

"No point to it, if he can't survive the initiation."

Squinting carefully, you saw that the second voice belonged to a tall thin man dressed all in black and with yes, white-blond hair and aristocratic features. You squeezed your eyes closed again and wished you were back in the bathroom bleeding to death. It was too much, all too much.

The next thing you can remember, you were standing at a tunnel mouth and the thin man pushed you through it. There was darkness, there was terror, there was cold, there was anger, there was endless sand and heat.

~~~

This is the Logrus, then, whatever that is.

An answering presence somehow communicates a 'yes' without any words either aloud or in your mind.

What do I do?

Resignation, knowledge, peace, all flow into you, and suddenly you laugh out loud. Power. It's all you ever wanted, and now it is yours. Yes, you could eat Voldemort for breakfast. Or Potter, if that's your preference. No mere shadow sorcerer can stand against the unleashed true forces of Chaos.

Chapter Text

I want out, I thought, and there was a henge surrounding my oasis. Sunlight streamed through between the stones, and I suddenly noticed that my desert was dark. Night had fallen around me while I drank in and exulted in the power surrounding me.

I walked to the nearest portal and stepped through it. A man stood in the clearing, leaning against a tree. I knew him; I remembered his voice mocking me in my semiconscious state. I didn’t think, I just reached for that new power and flung it at him.

He shook his head, laughed, and tossed a metal ball at me. I reached to catch it, Seeker reflexes acting without thought, but it fell to the ground without fulfilling its trajectory and began circling the spot where I stood.

It felt like my air had been cut off, although I was breathing. He’d somehow disrupted that vital new connection to power. I could not move.

“Hello, Draco,” he said. “My name is Mandor, and I am your father.”

“Forgive me if I do not show an excess of filial feeling,” I spat.

“Heard that, did you? And just what would Lucius Malfoy have done with a Squib child, if I may ask?”

“You mayn’t,” I hissed. Another metal ball joined the first, and I was elsewhere.

~~~

Three years old, you hold tightly to your mother. Pale she is, and tired, and weeping. Your father is holding a screaming baby by its ankles out an open window. You stare, biting the thumb in your mouth to keep from making any sound. Already you know that you must watch in silence.

He lets go. The wailing stops abruptly and there is nothing but silent weeping to be heard in the room. Your mother’s lip is bleeding; she has bitten through it.

~~~

Legilimency. But not of any kind I’d met before, and my shields were useless.

I stood silently, angrily, and squeezed my eyes closed against the prickles of waiting tears. I would not give him the satisfaction. Finally, I grated, “Point taken.”

He went on as if nothing had happened. “You’ve gained knowledge of the what. What you are. What you can do. But you do not yet know the how or even all of the who. That is what you must learn, while you decide what you want from the rest of your life.”

“And I’m to learn it from you?” I asked, striving to hide the curiosity that was welling up against my will.

“I am an experienced teacher, and quite accomplished. The day may come when you defeat me, but today is not that day." He gestured, and a table and four chairs appeared set for a formal dinner. The table was covered in white damask, the wineglasses were Waterford, the china was...I had eaten every dinner of my life off that china, and I knew it. It was pure white, edged with silver, and imprinted with the Malfoy crest. Cold seized me by the arms.

"Are you hungry?"

I was still bound. I could not move. Speech had deserted me as well.

“You don't trust me. An instinct that will serve you well in Chaos, over the many many years you may hope to live. Never trust anyone. But if I meant to kill you, you would already be dead. I've had any number of opportunities already, starting with leaving you to die where you were." He shrugged. "Such intentions may change with time. However, I am justly lauded for my culinary spells, and I will never poison anyone at a dinner I have catered. That much will not change."

"One of his little foibles," put in Dara, strolling out of a rainbow-colored shimmer in the air. Mandor slid a card into his breast pocket and drew out another.

Recovered, I finally demanded, "How did you get that china!"

"Summoned it," he said absently, turning his attention to the card in his hand as the cold in my arms reached the bones. Moments later, he reached out a hand and a sturdy dark-haired man appeared clasping it.

"Draco, meet my stepbrother Merlin, King of Chaos."

"Your majesty," I said, bowing.

"Cut the crap, this isn't court," he said. He turned to Mandor. "Family dinner, flag of truce and all that jazz, yeah?"

"Just dinner, no strings."

Merlin snorted. "Our last no-strings family dinner you finagled me into this job."

I was startled into another comment. "You're American?" Somehow this was the most outlandish thing yet.

"From the center of the universe," he replied. "San Francisco." A chuckle, a pause. "And Chaos. And Amber."

Information flooded into my conscious mind: Serpent, Unicorn, Logrus, Pattern, eons-long contention, treachery and wars and rapprochement. I shook my head—it was too much—and the flood subsided, but I knew I could call on it later.

Clearly I needed the information and training these people could provide. What would happen afterward remained to be seen. "Dinner and a truce, then," I finally said to Mandor, and he released the bindings on me.

Chapter Text

I refuse to feel guilty for not describing the food, whether it hurts Mandor’s pride or not. It’s not like he’s reading this. It was food. I was hungry. It was, in fact, excellent food, but I was not interested in that. There was little conversation during the meal. Whenever I wanted to say something, somehow between forming the thought and the words reaching my mouth I found myself reaching for the fork instead.

Finally the dessert was served and eaten, and the dishes banished presumably back to the cupboards at Malfoy Manor, and I could speak again. “You Imperiused me!”

“Nonsense,” Mandor said. “Not even a minor compelling.”

I waited for more explanation but none was forthcoming. Instead, Merlin took out a sketchpad and pens and began drawing. He had turned the pad at an odd angle, so that I could see it, and in moments I recognized my own face. Remarking on this seemed superfluous, so I simply gave him a raised eyebrow.

He gave me back a minimal shrug and continued drawing. When the image was complete, he stared at it for a few moments and then I felt like someone was knocking on the walls of my mind. “Legilimency?” I closed my eyes to make sure no one had eye contact, but the questing sensation continued. “Without eye contact?”

“Communication,” Merlin said. “You can refuse it, by locking all the doors of your mind. Or you can accept, and speak to whomever has contacted you. Works over any distance, too.”

I don’t know why I decided to trust him. Maybe he’d amused me with his Americanisms, or because it really was a very fine drawing of me, or because I was no longer hungry and it really had been an excellent meal, or because we had all agreed to a truce. I opened a side door in my mind and then I saw him double. I shook my head a bit, and closed and reopened my eyes. The second Merlin persisted, translucent and shimmering over whatever else was in view.

“Interesting,” I said.

“You can also travel to the location of the person you’re talking to, or to a known location.” He walked a few dozen yards away and reached a hand to me. I took it, and he pulled me to him. No squeezing, just stepping from here to somewhere else.

We walked back to the table and sat back down. He took out a pack of cards and fanned them over the tablecloth. I recognized Mandor and Dara and Merlin himself; there were also many other people and a number of strange places. “These are Trumps; many of us can draw them, as you just saw.”

Another thing to learn. I was giving in. “Any known location, any known person?”
“Yeah.”

This was too good to be true, and I was remembering the instructions to not trust anyone and regretting my impulsive trust earlier. “What are you not telling me? What did I just give you the opportunity to do to me?”

“Smart boy.” This from Dara, who had watched the whole proceedings with an air of detached amusement. I scowled at her.

Mandor answered the question. “A person can use the contact to make a mental attack. It works both ways, either the caller or the recipient of a contact can attempt an attack. We do rather consider it gauche, however, and one would be burning all one’s bridges to do so. No one would ever accept another call from that person.”

“So it is distance Legilimency, then.” The Dark Lord would love to have this. “Who can use it?”

“The cards and drawings use the power of the Logrus. Merlin, let him see the drawing more closely.” He passed it across and I looked at it intently. In the shading and lines I could see the writhing shapes of the Logrus. It started to feel icy and I felt a very odd twisting in my mind as if I was contacting myself. I closed my eyes tight and tossed the pad away. Merlin caught it.

“Only Logrus initiates can use them, then?”

“Pattern users can draw Trumps based on its power, too,” Merlin said. “I can do either, but I learned Logrus first so it is quicker. And it’s difficult to draw on the Pattern this close to Chaos.”

“An understatement,” commented Dara.

So He wouldn’t be able to use it himself, but I could gain some power and status for myself. Even better. Or even... jumped up sorceror... breakfast... echoed Dara’s voice in my thoughts.

“Teach me.”

Chapter Text

Drawing lessons. It was like I’d been sent to Agatha Entwhistle’s Finishing School for Pureblood Witches. Line and shade, perspective and tedium. With extra bonus Logrus headache. By the time Merlin thought I’d grasped the process well enough to let me try it by myself, I had filled five sketchbooks with drawings of everything and everyone I knew in Chaos. Not many people, either. I was sick of drawing the same three people over and over and never getting the Trumps to activate.

“But it looks just like him!” I tore the last likeness of Mandor from my sketchbook and crumpled it angrily, throwing it into the corner of the room where it vanished into the shadows. Dara on the page before, suffered the same fate, and Merlin himself the page before that. All perfect likenesses, all infused with the power of the Logrus so that the corners of the page writhed when I looked away, and all completely dead and useless.

Merlin sighed. “Maybe you don’t know us well enough. The physical likeness is not enough; you also need an intellectual or emotional connection and knowledge of the subject. Try drawing someone from home.”

Anger and resentment are emotional connections, I thought bitterly, and turned to a blank page.

Clear the mind. Let it go. A field of new snow, quiet stars, no moon. Clear the mind. Let it go. A pool of deep water, surrounded by mossy stones. Clear the mind. Let it go. Reach for the presence under the water, under the snow.

The Logrus flared to life in my mind and my hand began to move.

Mother is levitating toy blocks in front of the fireplace while you chase them. She is laughing from the edge of a clearing while you whoop with delight on your first broom. You are opening your Hogwarts letter and she is smiling.

I opened my eyes—I hadn’t realized they were closed—blinked away the betraying wetness at the corners, and looked down at a perfect likeness of my mother, sitting by the fire in the drawing room, her needlepoint basket by her side. I reached out for her, through the drawing, and the scene shifted. She was lying alone in her bedroom, weeping. “Mother,” I called, but she didn’t respond. She just kept crying, wiping her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief.

I squeezed my eyes closed and turned the page, breaking the connection.

“It worked,” Merlin said.

“She couldn’t hear me,” I scratched out.

“She was distracted.”

“Crying. She thinks I’m dead, you arsehole!”

“It’s safer for both of you that way. You will see her again.”

“Get out. I’m done.”

He left, and I collapsed onto the bed.

The next morning, I was angrier than ever, and there was only ever one thought in my head when I was angry. I picked up the sketchbook again and began to draw. Scruffy clothes hanging off of bony shoulders. Stupid holey red trainers. Rats’ nest of dark hair. Round glasses and green eyes and the blasted famous scar.

And before I even realized the drawing was finished, I heard him. “MALFOY?!?!”

I slammed my hand down on the page and broke the connection.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Slow and deep, over and over. You can use this. Yes.

I looked at the page again, and the connection reopened. “Hello Potter,” I said. “Miss me?”

He shuddered and backed into the corner of his fourposter, pulling red curtains around himself. “You...you…I killed you!” he said.

Oh yes, I can use this. “So you did,” I said matter-of-factly. “Excellent Saving the Wizarding World, that was. Kill a scared sixteen-year-old kid. I’m sure that will be great practice for offing You-Know-Who.” I grinned at him and he shied further away.

“I didn’t mean to! I didn’t know what it did!”

“Oh like that makes it better. I’ll just try an unknown Dark Curse on a fellow student for funsies!”

“I didn’t know it was Dark!” he protested.

I laughed at him, and decided this was a good place to leave that. Let’s see how he feels tomorrow. I waved my hand at my drawing and Hogwarts faded from my sight.

Chapter Text

By morning I had decided to leave Potter to stew in his guilt for a while longer. He’d be that much more amusing to taunt for a bit of delay. Instead, I retrieved the drawing of Mother and stared at it until it grew cold in my hands and I felt the evening wind blowing through the curtains of her bedchamber. She was still lying in bed weeping. I called to her. Over and over, until she finally cried out my name.

“Yes, Mother, it is I.” I reached out and grasped her hand; she did not resist, though her hand trembled where I held it. I drew her to me and she stumbled gracelessly through the infinite-negligible distance.

Regaining her footing and some shards of her poise, she stared at me and demanded, “Where am I?”

“In the Ways of Sawall, the home of my father,” I said.

She backed away into the wall. “They told me Harry Potter killed you,” she said. “They couldn’t even send your body home to us…”

“Not for lack of trying,” I replied, “but Mandor found me before I died and brought me here.” She sat heavily in the chair beside her and sighed.

“Tell me all of it,” she said, taking a handkerchief from the pocket of her dressing gown and drying her eyes.

~~~

“I need proper clothing before meeting anyone,” Mother said, when she had extracted the story from me. “Let me go home.”

Oh. Problem. I managed to contact her, one of my only two successful Trumps, but now that she was here, how to send her home again? No way I wanted to ask Mandor or Dara for any kind of favor, and they didn’t know our home anyway.

“Is Father at home?” I asked.

“No, he’s on a mission for the Dark Lord.”

Merlin’s saggy tits, I thought, and then I laughed like a maniac. I just swore by my...cousin? Stepbrother? Uncle. Circe. No, she’s probably my aunt. I was going to have to learn some new swear words.
When the laughter ran out, Mother was staring at me, and I still had no answer to getting her home. I was going to have to attempt a Trump of Malfoy Manor. I reached for my sketchbook and pencils.

You’re lying awake in bed anticipating your eleventh birthday party, staring at the furnishings of your room. The sun streaming in through an open mullioned window. The green hangings on the heavy fourposter, the toy broom discarded on the floor. The orrery spinning endlessly on its shelf above the fireplace.

The drawing remained stubbornly inactive, and my head ached with the Logrus. I crumpled it and threw it at the wall. It vanished midflight.

Mother coughed delicately. “Draco, what are you doing? I need to go home.”

“I’m trying.” And failing.

~~~

I kept trying for several hours. Mother watched impassively, twitching her dressing gown close around her. Finally she said, “If you can’t send me home, can you at least find me some clothing here?” I realized that at home, we’d have called for an elf, and wondered at the absence of servants. Were they just so self-effacing that I had yet to see one, or did these people do everything for themselves. By magic. Oh.

I thought back to the dress I’d seen Mother wearing at the last society tea, pale blue with layers of sheer fabrics floating around her, and reached into the Logrus. A dress fell into my arms a few minutes later. “I can’t seem to send you home, but I can offer you appropriate clothing,” I said.

She took the dress from me and waited silently until I left the room. When she knocked on the closed door I let myself back in.

Her hair had been brushed smooth and swept back, her face showed no sign of the tears she’d been shedding, and she stood tall and unwavering. “I am ready to meet your hosts,” she announced.

I led her to the hall at the center of the Ways where Mandor and Dara were accustomed to take their breakfast, and they were there with Merlin. Mandor rose from his chair at the sight of her, and bowed deeply. Mother dropped into a curtsey equally deep. After neither of them moved for several minutes, Merlin started laughing. “All right,” he said, “I don’t even let people bow to me for that long. Rise, already.” Dara frowned at him.

Mandor rose from his bow and offered his hand to Mother, who took it and stood. He looked at her wordlessly. I’d only known him a few days but I had never known him to be without words.

Mother slapped him. “You left me,” she stated, and repeated, “You left me. With. Child. You left me a child to raise alone, forcing me into marriage with a man who killed his own daughter and abases himself to a madman.”

I never had any illusions that Mother and Father were a love match, but I did believe that they shared the same allegiances. And I always had my suspicions about my sister’s death...But Mandor’s callousness about my own life was no better. “He would have let me die if the initiation ritual failed.” I nodded at Mandor. He shrugged. “If it had failed, it would be because you were not my son. Shadows die. It’s what they do.”

I could read the numbers of the Arithmancy. Mother is a Shadow. Whether he had ever cared for her, it would be as nothing to his long long life. And yet, it would matter to her.

Clearly, Mandor could make the same calculations. “I apologize, Cissa,” he said. “I was caught up in a war as well, and I could not return. I hoped you would forget me and find another love. I am sorry you were hurt. Will you stay?”

“Can you send me home if I wanted to leave? Draco’s drawings have all failed.”

“He is but new to his power and Trump is not the only way. Yes, I can return you to your home. We can even overthrow the madman if such is your wish.”

“I will allow you to woo me for some few days and then decide.”

Chapter Text

Mother left the breakfast chamber side by side with Mandor, leaving me with Dara and Merlin, who muttered something about someone called Fiona that I didn’t quite catch. I looked up at him and he shrugged. “Never mind.”

Wasn’t there a Fiona in that complicated family tree he recited for me when I first arrived here? I found myself wishing for a family tapestry. Maybe I’d better draw it out. I excused myself back to my room and picked up my pencils.

As I wrote down my recollections of the family relationships, I remembered the other first lesson. “Trust no one.” Mother ought to be well practiced at the art of skepticism and cynicism but I wondered whether she would fall into trusting Mandor too easily. What had their relationship been like? Why would she even give him a second chance after all these years?

It was clear that she married and stayed with Father--no, I shall stop calling him that: Lucius--out of desperation, but was it so terrible that any escape Mandor might offer is so enticing that she would forgive his abandonment so quickly? How will she cope without her friends?

How will you?

Do you even have any?

I thought back to my Trump drawings. I didn’t even attempt to draw Pansy or Greg or Vince or any other classmate. Somehow I knew there was no real connection present. You’re all alone. Your only emotional connections are your mother and someone you hate.

~~~

I will not admit how long I cried after that.

~~~

Redsky was long past and purplesky was fading. Strange stars appeared and shot like meteors past my bedroom window, and danced back into being again.

Even if I went home, there was nothing for me there. Unless…”I eat jumped-up sorcerors like Voldemort for breakfast,” Dara had said, and it was clear that a wielder of primal Chaos had nothing to fear from such as he. And even I had the power to wield primal Chaos, if not yet the knowledge or control. What if we overthrew the Dark Lord?

You still wouldn’t have any friends. Adulation is not love.

My intrusive thoughts were getting out of hand. Destroying a perfectly good daydream before it even got started.

Not wrong though.

Fine. But a goal is at least a reason to keep going. And maybe I’ll find a way to make some friends.

Everyone here is at least a thousand years older than you. Except maybe Merlin? Who is King. And also very American.

I sighed and buried my face back into my pillow. I missed Tally, who used to rub my back when I was small and sad.

Could a family house elf hear me from here? “Tally?” I whispered, and she appeared, wiping floury hands on the embroidered tea towel she was wearing.

“Master Draco has been crying. Tally sees. Tally is here.” She rushed to my side and patted my arm.

I cried again. She rubbed my back. I don’t know how long it went on. Eventually she snapped her fingers and a tray appeared with a bowl of soup.