There had always been rumors—traced back generations—about the Malfoy bloodline having tangled with something foreign. A wandering witch. A pact made in what had once been Prussian territory. A marriage never documented, but whispered about. Something to do with swamps, and ghosts, and a drowned man who came back crowned in reeds.

The Black family had tried to breed it out. The Malfoys had tried to deny it. But creature blood doesn’t ask permission. It waits.

Draco’s inheritance bloomed like a bruise under the skin. First the eyes—too dark, then too light, then both at once. His pupils slit. His teeth sharpened. His spine ached with the shifting of bones. The skin at his jaw hardened into subtle ridges, pale and iridescent like fish scales. His voice changed, like it came from under something.

And worst of all: the scent. Not to everyone, but to a select few, Draco’s presence became intolerably magnetic. Earth and wet stone. Moonlight and blood. For most people, it was repellant. For one person, it would mean something else entirely.

The Ministry had a name for it: Leszy Spadkobierca—inheritor of the Mazovian Leszy line, though in older tongues they called it wiły-mąż, or reed-kin, or worse, bog-flesh. In some stories, they were spirits; in others, gods. And always, they needed a mate.

Hermione had read about them, of course. “They imprint, usually between the nineteenth and twenty-first year,” she explained in a whisper, looking at Draco through the fogged glass of the Wizengamot lounge. “If they don’t bond… they lose themselves. Drown from the inside out.”

——————

Draco knew almost immediately that it was Harry.

The reaction was involuntary—cellular. His chest burned. The scent of Harry made his entire body ache. He could smell him in a crowd. He could hear his heartbeat from across a courtroom. He couldn’t not know. His creature blood sang in Harry’s presence.

Harry, for his part, wanted none of it.

“Don’t,” he said coldly, the first time Draco approached him outside the Ministry. “Don’t try whatever this is. I don’t want anything to do with your—your magic swamp pheromones or whatever the fuck you’re on about. Nothing changes that you’re a bully that looks like a tree stump”

Draco flinched. It wasn’t the words—it was the tone. It was always the tone with Potter.

But the creature inside him didn’t care. It needed. It wanted. It waited.

—————————

He began to change more quickly after that. His shoulders sharpened. His ears elongated, subtly pointed, twitching under stress. The spines down his back became visible in silhouette—smooth, fin-like ridges that curled when he was near water. His second set of eyelids. People started avoiding him at Ministry events. At some Pureblood gatherings, he wasn’t just shunned—he was dismissed like something contagious.

“You should be kept,” Aunt Walburga’s portrait had hissed the last time he passed her. “Not permitted to wander among the civilized.”

His mother tried, for a while, to manage it. Glamours. Gloves. Elocution potions. But eventually even she admitted, in the tired, careful voice she used when things couldn’t be denied, “Darling… you aren’t meant to pass anymore. I should have sent you to Durmstrang to meet a Rusalka.”

Etiquette changed. He stopped bowing first. He stopped speaking unless spoken to. His creature’s pride wouldn’t allow it. The Ministry started documenting his changes in secret. And Harry… well, Harry avoided him.

—————————

Hermione realized before Harry did.

It happened during a meeting. Tensions were high—something about magical land conservation near the Black Lake—and Harry had been ranting. Draco had merely looked at him from across the table, eyes blown wide, nostrils flaring.

Harry flushed violently. His words tripped. His hand shook when he tried to pick up his quill.

Hermione watched it happen. Quietly. She knew the signs.

Later, she cornered him. “Harry,” she said softly. “When he’s around… do you feel it in your chest?”

Harry didn’t answer. Not with words.

“Draco’s not doing this to you,” she said. “He’s just… reacting. You’re his mate.”

Harry whispered, “I can’t be.”

In Slavic folklore, the horse is everything and nothing at all. It’s a spectre stepping out of a grave, carrying the underworld and the very concept of death on its back. It’s the pierce of lightning through bruised clouds heavy with sleet. It’s a thunderstorm, a sacrifice, a beast of divination, the wisest companion and the very concept of life itself.

Folktales of the horse are always told around the transmutable times of the year. They’re whispered during the longest night, while ember sparks float through the black of frigid, winter air. When the sun hangs in the sky for what feels like infinity, tales of the horse gallop between groups celebrating the summer solstice. Words curl around your ears during the equinoxes as the russet, bronze and ecru leaves finally fall from the trees, and as fields wake in a menagerie of life and colour. The foal is born, it lives and dies with the year, as the world turns on.

A horse will give you sage advice, bring messages from the underworld and divine from the net of fate what the future heralds and what course to take. Listen, and heed, what words it brings.

Product Mock Up- Armour Spell Seals

This is an idea I’ve had rambling around in my head awhile, based on the Purity Seals of Warhammer 40K, but also with some real world basis, mostly ofuda in the East and prayer scrolls in Medieval Christianity.

The inspiration is ribbons of parchement, inscribed with prayers or spells and affixed to armor with wax seals. The execution of the product would be sigils made into iron-on patches, with canvas ribbons, with a spell or invocation written on them.

This particular mock up uses a new sigil based on the story of Kosciej, the Deathless, a sort of lich-wizard of Slavic myth who gained immortality through hiding his soul in a needle. The needle was then placed inside an egg, which was inside of a duck, which was in turn placed inside a hare, which finally was put into an iron chest and the whole thing buried beneath an oak tree. The idea being that you couldn’t kill or seriously injure him, without first finding his soul.

The sigil is made from his name, Kosciej, and the spell seal has the following invocation, in Polish (well, Google translated into Polish)-

“I have hidden my soul inside a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside a hare, inside an iron chest, beneath a green oak tree. No harm may come to me lest it first find that needle”

In Polish folklore the Elder was a tree of demons, of inconceivable dark power and yet protection and curse banishment.

Polish witches used the flowers, berries or leaves for:

Hag flight and flying ointments

Protection from all bewitchments

Pouring out all despair and disease onto an Elder bush. The demon that lives within its roots will feed mightily and prevent any returns.

When I die, as people make a habit of doing, my soul will escape this heavy, cumbersome bag of bones as the bird that it veritably is. I will fly above brooks and valleys, brushed by tendrils of fog and cloud. The wind will caress my body, spilling secrets to me and I to it. I will be free in this world in ways that I have never been. In ways that until then, I will never know, never fathom, never be able to perceive.

In Slavic folklore the bird and the soul have always been interlinked, crying and keening together as one, existing as two forms of a singular entity. Death, the greatest author of change, transfigures the soul from ephemeral, intangible whisps seated deep within us to cuckoos, sparrows, nightjars and woodlarks. To swallows and pipets and waxwings and wrens. To feathered, flying, flitting things.

A song of a daughter being wed against her will, of her death and finally her return home in her final, bird, form.

Andrew James Kier

or Domowy Part 2

Part 1

If the later, a thundering expression would billow across his small face, shadows would grow darker and the house eerily cold. He’d grasp plates and cups in his broad fingers and dash them across the floor, clay exploding across stone. He’d belt wizened fists across walls, doors, tables and chairs. He’d wake every last soul and forbid them the luxury of a night’s sleep.

His white, furry eyebrows would crush down in a glare at the filth in his abode. Milk would sour, meat turn rancid. Such disrespect, such insult would not be tolerated here.

If those warnings were not heeded far more dire deeds were done. This small creature would quieten down. He would shuffle down halls and steal up stairs, softly push open doors and find one of the house sleeping.

He would pull himself up trailing white sheets in the blue midnight murk and climb onto the sleepers chest, suffocating them in the dead of night, in the false safety of their bed.