Chapter Text
Dimmuborgir
Chapter 1: Iceland
He steps straight out of the shadows one late autumn evening.
She is on her way home. There are cars and buildings and other people. That treacherous safety found in civilisation, in the constant proximity to other people, even if they aren't actually near. The white noise of a large city humming all around her.
She is coming up the old stone steps from the embankment when he moves from darkness into the even pool of light thrown by an ornate lamppost. There is the massive white stone lion, there is the river. Then there is him, appearing suddenly at the top of the stairs, looking down at her.
She is not afraid.
At least not at first.
She ascends another two steps before she falters, stops, realises the man above her isn’t moving. He’s just standing there, right in her path, but she’s not worried. There is, after all, nothing threatening about neither his stance nor countenance. Indeed there is a small smile playing on his lips, even if his eyes lie in shadow. He appears finely dressed, well kept, slight of build and average of height. Not a threat, supplies her logical mind, and she takes another step up the stairs towards him.
“Can I help you?” she calls out, still not concerned, but perhaps something small starts stirring in her hindbrain. Because she is close enough to him now that she ought to see his face clearly in the streetlight, but it is still painted in claire-obscure. She gets the sense of high cheekbones, bird wing brows, a full mouth with a severe slant to the Cupid’s Bow, but the light doesn’t hit him right, seems to shatter on contact with his skin.
“Hello,” he says to her, and she can see his mouth stretch wider, a true smile now. Straight white teeth. Sharpness. “Yes. You will do. You will do quite nicely.”
With that he takes one step down towards her, and she finally sees his eyes.
She goes cold. Tingles in fingers and toes. Her heartbeat loud in her ears. Flight instinct takes hold of her. Ancient. Primeval. Adrenaline with nowhere to go. Her hand scrabbles for the stair railing, and she finds weak solace in the solidness of chilled metal as she slowly begins backing down again. Step after step downwards, carefully feeling for purchase with her feet, because even though she is desperate to turn and run, she doesn’t want to take her eyes off him. Doesn’t want to give him her back.
Each step is mercilessly matched by the dark man as he follows her down, and her body can’t ever recall terror such as this.
“What is your name?” asks the man, a lilt of laughter to his voice.
“Hermione,” she answers automatically. Throws it over her shoulder in the leap, the vowels of her name hanging in the air she used to occupy. Because she has turned, and she jumps the last five steps down, sending leaves whirling, pigeons high up in the air.
Then she runs.
He lets her get quite far. Far enough that she actually believes herself in with a chance. A calculated cruelty of course; soon enough she will come to understand that about him.
“And you can call me Tom,” he murmurs as he catches her, grasps her arms and pulls her back into himself. A grotesque mockery of an embrace. His arm across her chest and his lips against her ear as he uses her own momentum against her to swing her back around. Her handbag slides from her shoulder and falls to the ground. She struggles against his grip, but he is entirely unmoved as he half carries, half drags her back towards the large staircase. The lion grows in her vision, enormous above her, so very white against the hazy night sky, solid and lifeless.
Not once does she think to scream. Later she will wonder why.
“I remember that this beast used to be red,” he murmurs while nuzzling her curls. It’s a peculiar aside that she doesn’t hang onto in her fright, because it doesn’t make any sense, because it was over fifty years ago that lion was painted red.
She’s got just enough time to realise that he’s pulled her back into the deep shadow of the lion’s plinth, then they are gone.
Everything disappears around her. The city lights, the black taxis, the red buses, the boats on the river and the clocktower on the other side of the bridge; it all swirls into a noxious whirlwind. She at the centre of it, tugged every which way, there is no solidity except the man at her back.
Screams are blowing in the air around her as she is ruthlessly wrenched through space, atoms and molecules split up and then put back together again. The pain of the transition is white hot, her nerve endings raw and exposed. Her thoughts are stripped bare of anything but a conviction etched deep into her bones: she won’t survive this.
Then she’s spat out on the other side, and she falls down onto ground that is uneven, rocky; no longer the smooth paving stones by the river Thames.
Even though she’s on all fours the vertigo in stillness is merciless, and she vomits, her whole body seizing up, cramping. She breaks her nails and bloodies her fingers clawing at the stone underneath her as she attempts to ground herself, hold on to something solid and real.
Eventually, her heart slows, her head stops spinning. Her retching lessens. A mixed blessing, because now, when her body is no longer trying to turn itself inside out, she grows very aware of the temperature.
It's cold. It’s freezing. She’s in a dress and tights and ankle boots, and a trenchcoat suited to the autumn temperatures in London, a city warmed by a lid of pollution. Here, the air feels arctic, the wind easily penetrating clothes, skin, bones. Her breath is billowing around her in frosted clouds, and her teeth begin chattering immediately.
She stands. Brings her torn fingers into her pockets to warm them. Looks around.
The man that brought her here is a little ways away, moving away from her at a brisk pace. She spins, tries to make sense of where she is, see if there is help nearby. Buildings, people, vehicles.
There is nothing.
The landscape is so other that she at first, quite hysterically, thinks he has brought her to a different planet. But, she’s intimate with stars, and so she tips her head back and sees that they are the same above her. Familiar constellations, nebulas in their rightful places. A waning gibbous occupying the same slice of sky as it did back in the city.
But there is nothing familiar about these vistas. Desolate, stark; black ground with powdery snow being constantly moved about by the wind. There are no trees, no vegetation. Off to the sides and behind her she sees snow-capped peaks at the horizons. And just ahead…
Something like dark towers and turrets rise up above them. Twisted and torn, jagged, broken. Meeting the star-strewn heavens with haughty impunity, their darkness of a quality so solemn as to drain the night sky of its living energy.
She’s never seen anything like it.
The disquiet she feels as she studies those queer formations is bone deep. Instinctual. A conviction coming from a place deep within her that she never knew existed: something enormous happened here, a long time ago, something….
She looks around again, and back. Desolate nothingness. No life that she can see. The only other human here is the man that somehow brought her to this place. She’s shaking from the cold and she’s terrified and nothing makes any sense, nothing, but...
Better the devil you know.
She runs to catch up with him.
She reaches his side just as he begins walking in among the dark structures and pillars. He glances sideways at her and his smile is openly mocking.
“Not that hard a decision, was it?”
“How did you do that? Bring me here? I was in London. I was on my way home, I…”
“Hush,” he interrupts, “your gabbering will give me a headache.”
She falls quiet, but only because her attention becomes wholly stolen by the dark, wrought shapes surrounding them. Her eyes are wide as she tries to make sense of it all, take it in.
Mythology in petrified shape. Raging fire turned to stone. A black hell-scape imbued with primal beauty and ancient rage. The stars flickering far above it all, too far away, too cold and too aloof, to be the comfort to her that they would usually be.
She’s walking on snow and lava.
They move in between two leaning spires, ever deeper into this place, and it gets darker, the towers and pillars crowding in above them. Moonlight can barely reach them here, and with a quiet mutter he raises his right hand. A little ball of light begins to dance in his palm. It doesn’t appear to burn him, but gives out a warm glow, causing shadows to flicker off the formations around them.
“What are you?” she murmurs through stiff lips just before she tries to break from his side. The hand not holding the light shoots out and grabs her by her wrist, pulls her back to his side with a cruel twist of fragile bones.
“I am just someone who wants to go back home, little one.” He stops then, turns to face her. He looks at her, truly looks at her, and it’s terrifying and it’s mesmerising. His eyes, once again shaking her, urging her to run, but there is nowhere to run to , and he is holding her too hard. “And you are going to help me. Are you not?”
“I don’t know what you mean, who you are, but if you take me back home I promise I won’t tell, I won’t…”
“Come.”
He ignores her words entirely, but his hold on her wrist remains vicious as he urges her to keep walking. The snow has started to seep through the fine leather of her boots. The wind blows cruel little ice crystals up into her face, whips her cheeks, her brow. Her steps falter, from exhaustion, from the uneven ground, and several are the times she stays on her feet only because of his grip on her.
He, the man, Tom, he said his name is Tom, he seems entirely unperturbed, untouched by weather and exertion. She glances at his profile, partly obscured by his upturned collar; the straight nose, the shadows thrown by his cheekbones, the facets of midnight in the corner of his eye.
“Where are we?” She can barely speak now, the shatter of her teeth so severe that her jaw is hurting. She’s lost feeling in her fingers and toes, the tip of her nose.
“You call it Iceland,” he murmurs, obliging but distracted, his attention on something in front of them. He stops, and lifts his hand high, the little ball of light dancing merrily on his palm. In the flickering illumination cast she sees crumbling steps raising in front of them, crudely eked out in the suspended lava. They lead up to…
She strains to make sense of what she’s seeing.
A perfectly shaped, domed archway. An entrance. She tips her head back, and Tom raises his hand higher, and an impatient flick of his wrist sees his fey light burn much higher too. Brighter. She gasps at what she can see, discern.
A fallen dark citadel shrouded in moss and snow and time, a broken, gnarled church. Whispers, so many many whispers. The betrayal of nature is at its greatest here, she senses; this is the very point of origin of the event that long ago rearranged this landscape forever.
She turns to him, looks at him voluntarily. No wonder the moon shines so dully here, she thinks: its light slides off of him, and she’s cold, so cold.
“I don’t...no. No. Please.”
She doesn’t even know what it is she’s begging him not to do.
He hushes her, nearly croons into her ear as he ushers her up the slippery, uneven steps, and he’s almost gentle. His breath on her neck though, his hold on her, promises violence in a fraction of a second should she choose to resist, go against him.
Once they are right by the entrance he releases her. She stands in front of that gaping maw, and her terror becomes something living; fingers over her jugular hampering her breaths, teeth in her spine, tongue lapping at her marrow. A harsh wind is blowing outwards at her, whipping up ever more snow in her face. Snow crystals clinging to her eyelashes, her lips. The force of the wind tells her that this is a cave wide open through and through, straight out on the other side.
With the positioning of the space high up on the rock face she should be seeing the sky, the stars on the other side. She should be seeing Orion, the Seven Sisters, Sirius.
She sees only darkness. Dull, impenetrable, thick enough to almost touch. And beyond it, inside it…
Tom walks through the high gothic arches as she begins backing away, heading for the steps down. Even over the wind she can hear his footfalls echo, indicating high ceilings, a space much larger than ought to be possible. She knows, she is more certain than she’s ever been of anything, that she does not want to see what the light in his hand will show her.
“I really would not,” he calls to her without turning around. His voice is greatly amplified by the cathedral space in which he stands. “There is nothing and no one but us for many miles, and you are not dressed for these conditions. You would freeze to death out there, and be of no use to me at all.”
She’s starting to think that death might be preferable to whatever it is he has in store. She has reached the first step, is preparing to hurtle downwards and take her chances, when he comes back for her.
There is nothing faux-gentle about him now. He grabs her hair in the leap and she howls in pain when he wrenches her backwards and spins her in the movement, slams her headfirst into his chest. Then he pulls her head back so that he can see her face, brushes flyaway strands of her hair out of her eyes as he tsks at her.
His light is hovering cheerfully by his shoulder, she sees.
She tries to avoid looking at him, but he won’t have it, gets her chin in a grip that will leave a wreath of fingerprints behind. Forces her to meet his gaze. Light blues bleeding into greens, and that pinprick of crimson deep in the blackness of his pupils that had sent her running back in London. The noctilucency of his irises devouring stars, bending their light wrong .
He suits this landscape, that’s what he does, with the white of his face and the black of his hair and his northern light eyes. He looks like he belongs here.
She, on the other hand, she needs to get the fuck away.
He doesn’t quite seem to agree. He smiles at her, and it’s savage, vicious, beautiful. He looks like he enjoys her struggles, the way she thrashes against him.
“I know you are hurting, little one. I know you are cold. Soon it will be over. Soon you will not have to hurt, or freeze, ever again.”
With that he forces her by her hair back to the arched entrance. There he kicks her legs out from underneath her, sends her falling heavily to the ground by his feet. He stands behind her, and uses her hair to wrench her head back, exposing the frailty of her throat to the enormous black space, the whispers inside.
His knees hard and sharp against her shoulders and chanting ricocheting in the air above her head.
She doesn't know the language. It’s like nothing she’s ever heard before. It sounds as archaic as the lava formations surrounding them. His voice grows with it; echoes, booms, curls. His words seem to rouse the wind ever more, it rises and whines around them, and his language clings to it, ascends with it.
And, this chimera of wind and words also winds itself around something inside of her.
Nestles around her spine, her ribs. Forces something awake, something she’s never felt before. Something dormant, but now it comes into cognisance, yes, it stretches, arches its back, then pushes up, outwards. Up her oesophagus, out her eyes and mouth and nose. It hurts, and she screams with it, screams and screams until her voice breaks into tiny little pieces.
And it gets darker, much darker, and she thinks maybe it emanates from him. Something of jet and pitch, stygian, rising high above them, enveloping them both from behind.
His voice reaches a crescendo then, a fearsome resonance of command and puissance. It’s so forceful it heaves her forward, and only his grip on her hair saves her from cutting her face open on the uneven ground. His voice rings out with a final howl, it feels as though it ought to move mountains, tear this whole place apart...
A fat lot of good it does him. Absolutely nothing happens.
She can feel how the wind settles back into something natural, the air around them lightens into night. His angry swearing is definitely in English, the frustrated tugging on her hair very human.
“What’s wrong?” she eventually asks, even though her voice is broken, even though she doesn’t care, because she’s pretty certain she’s about to die from pain or hypothermia or both.
He crouches down behind her, and she can feel his cold sweat freezing to ice against her cheek as he leans forward and whispers in her ear.
“Let us just say that this will be slightly more complicated than I had anticipated. I need more...ah, keys. More keys to go home.”
His voice is faltering, raspy. The words are not being shaped quite right in his mouth. Exhausted, she thinks, he’s exhausted. Whatever he attempted to do here has drained him, sapped him of strength.
But she has no idea what he’s talking about, whatever it is he’s doing, and she’s distracted, confused. Vaguely she attempts to recall what she’s read about hypothermia, and she wonders how long to unconsciousness. Minutes? Seconds?
She would welcome it.
“You are slipping away, are you not? A fine pair we make.”
He clasps her shoulders with that, and from his hands emanates warmth. It spreads outwards from the points of contact, out into her limbs, into her chest, her heart. It rids her of all the cold, regains the feeling in her finger and toes. Her teeth stop chattering, her mind clears.
So he really does need her alive then.
“You fucking bastard,” she says hoarsely but clearly, “you could have done this from the beginning.”
He chuckles lowly.
“Easy now, little one, and do not distract me. I have barely enough strength left to get us both out of here.”
Then he moves even closer to her, wraps his arms around her from behind, and she realises too late what he’s about to do.
Her no, don’t! is the only thing left behind as the two of them disappear, the words falling flat to the frozen ground.