A/N: The first in a cycle of stories about Valentine and Jocelyn. Someday they'll be chapters of one long fic, but for now I'm posting them separately as I go along — they don't seem to be getting written in order!

Canon: My fics take the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).

As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.

The glancing homage to Voldemort in the second chapter is deliberate.

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For Darth Ouisa
who knows what evil overlords have for breakfast

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Odi et Amo
by Midwinter Monday

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Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requieris?
Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I love and hate. Why do I do it, perhaps you ask?
I have no idea; but I feel it happening — and am in torment.

Catullus 85

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Prologue

Blackness, vast and absolute: pressing down deep as snowdrifts on the bare peaks and knife-edged valleys lying silent beneath the moonless sky. Nothing stirs; the only sound is the hiss of the night wind, which has lost none of its biting edge even in high summer, and the distant, bitter jangling of the river hundreds of feet below. The torches flare wildly in the wind, throwing monstrous, rippling masks of dark and light onto the sharp features of the man who faces him across the strange sign scratched in the dust between them — not the expected pentagram, nor any other symbol or glyph he has encountered in a lifetime of encyclopedic study. On this lightless and barren mountainside, it almost seems a living thing, its jagged lines stirring dimly with a weird grey light.

A harsh smile flashes like a blade in the dark and is gone. "Kjo është bërë — It is done." Beneath his lank hair, the Illyrian's face is expressionless, though the hard, bright eyes are fixed on him with a vixen's watchful gaze. A face to watch in turn, and to mistrust — but enlightened self-interest is the strongest guarantee of all. For the gold he covets, the warlock will take care to deliver what he has promised.

That the Illyrian can do what he has undertaken, there is no doubt. The esoteric knowledge preserved in this remote mountain fastness, handed down the generations from father to son, stretches back to the days of Jonathan Shadowhunter.

"Leave me now. I can get back down without help." His command of the language is still rudimentary, but it is sufficient to make himself understood.

The warlock's feral gaze narrows, eyeing the bag of sovereigns which has been weighing down the left pocket of the Shadowhunter's coat since they began their arduous ascent. Without warning, a short, wicked-looking dagger appears in his sinewy hand, the breath hissing between his broken teeth.

If it was to utter a threat, it never reaches his lips. With an easy, almost bored motion, the Shadowhunter plucks a knife from the sheath at his wrist and throws; the warlock crumples to the dirt without a sound, blood pouring in a dark fountain from his throat. Bending impassively to retrieve the clotted blade, he pauses for a moment, considering, before carefully wiping it clean on the rough cloth of the dead man's sleeve. Better to use his own blood as he had planned: it can only increase the potency of the rune.

The wind is picking up; he has no desire to waste any more time out on this dreary ridge. Laying the razor-sharp tip of the knife against his wrist, he opens a vein with clinical exactitude. Blood wells up silently around the cold steel; he watches as it runs down the gleaming blade until the surface is dark to the hilt. Shifting the knife to the other hand, he reaches for his stele and scrawls an iratze mechanically above his bloody wrist, but his eyes are already fixed consideringly on the glyph shimmering in the dirt beyond the dead warlock's corpse.

As if fanned by his gaze, the rune seems to flare brighter, sending a pool of cold white light spilling wider and wider towards him until it is lapping at the soles of his boots.

In that instant, the torch wedged into the rock face behind him gutters and goes out.

Despite himself, he feels the hair rise on the back of his arms — but he moves forwards not backwards, and his hand gripping the knife is perfectly steady. Raising the blade in salute, he approaches the shining rune slowly and it almost seems to his tight-wound senses that the eerie light dips and curtseys in acknowledgement as he comes.

And then he is standing before the glimmering rune, his senses awash in its unearthly glow. Drawing a quick breath, he stretches his arm out over the flickering lines, sending bars of light and shadow dancing along the dark cloth of his sleeve. For an instant he hesitates, blade poised, and then driving it hard into the earth, he drags the bloody steel through the rune in a long, deep gash. As the blade passes, the glowing lines dim and go dark for an instant, before leaping up into blood-red flames which writhe and dance in the black night nearly to the height of his knees.

Demon fire. Scarlet as heart's blood, glowing like the mouth of hell: nothing earthly burns with a bloody fire like that. Although he is barely a foot from the flames he can feel no heat coming off the blazing lines of fire, but he doesn't expect to. The flames themselves, he knows, are hot enough to vaporize stone.

The crystalline stuff of the demon towers is another matter. His stele is in his hand; with the smallest of pauses he reaches out and thrusts the end into the bloody flames. Instantly, the tip begins to glow — not the usual red ember-glow of the stele, but with a blinding white light like the arc of an acetylene torch that sears his eyes and lights up the dark mountainside to electrifying day.

He turns his head hastily, glaring after-images detonating behind his closed eyelids, and pulls the stele back from the fire. The wind has got up again, but the low sound that quivers at the edge of his hearing now is something else: a deep, dissonant almost-tone, like the twinned strings of a piano slipped infinitesimally out of unison. He can feel it too: a faint jarring vibration like a low-voltage current running up his arm from the stele gripped in his fist.

Cautiously opening his lids a fraction, he gazes down through slitted eyes at his tingling hand. Out of the flames, it is just possible to look at the dazzling stele through half-closed lashes. There is a kind of harsh and terrible beauty about it, he thinks, blazing diamond-bright against the dark night with this hard, clear, ferocious brilliance. If hatred had a colour, surely it would be this — the pure, bright hatred of goodness for evil: the instinctive loathing felt by all things of this world for the black foulness battening on it.

The cold, terrible splendour of the refiner's fire.

Get on with it, then.

Setting his teeth, he brings the stele down onto the flesh of his bared forearm. Agony explodes up his arm, pinwheeling in starbursts of white fire through the nerves of his clenched hand.

Slamming his mind shut against the pain, he tightens his grip on the stele and begins to draw.

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|o|

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A/N: Can a prologue have a epilogue? Seems absurd — but nonetheless that's what seems to have happened in some wayward corner of my imagination...

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(Coda)

He's barricaded inside his mind, beating back the pain that is battering relentlessly against the walls of his endurance. The rune is fiendishly complex, but he has studied it well, and the lines flow like molten silver from his stele without pause or hesitation. But as he draws the final stroke to complete the ring of fire circling his right arm, a wave of such obliterating agony breaks over him that even his own iron mental discipline goes down before the white-heat of its fury, smashed to splinters, swept away in the surging tide of unendurable pain. His vision goes white and he hears himself scream, the stele falling from his hand — the whole world is white, consumed with blinding fire, burning up to pure, blank, unbearable nothingness like the day of Judgement...

When he comes to, it is to blessed darkness, the empty mountainside black and silent as it began. Suppressing a groan, he pulls himself up onto one elbow and peers into the night. Of the terrible shining rune, there is no trace. The dust is smooth and bare; glimmering lines and blood-red flames have all vanished like smoke drifting on the night wind. There is only the faint, heavy scent that lingers darkly in the air, a flat, metallic odour like a mixture of ashes and old bronze — and branded deep into his flesh, this alien steel-blue Mark which throbs with a savage, fiery ache that threatens for a moment to push him back into deeper blackness.

But it will do what he needs it to do. His task here is done. And he knows how to live with this sort of pain. Getting carefully to his feet, he casts a last glance around the bare mountaintop, which he devoutly hopes never to look on again, and then, without a backwards glance, begins his arduous descent to the world of living things, whose safety rests upon him.

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