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ACT4CH32 - The Plans of Mice and Men Part 1
🕑 Added 2024-09-09 18:27:40 +0000 UTC“The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches...
Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies...
and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal,
but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not...
and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives...
The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies.”
If the Dark Lord had the habit of sighing loudly, he would.
Really, what had he expected from a prophecy? As an accomplished necromancer, Voldemort was no stranger to the concept of Conjunctions in the universe, nor ignorant of the science of Causation or its application in the form of Dunamancy. He was no dunamantist, but he knew enough of the subject to understand that Seers didn’t exactly See the Future. There were those who claimed that magically significant events reverberated through the time-stream, sending ripples across the fabric of reality. That Magic itself would reach through space and time to Seers and make them utter its declaration to the world.
Voldemort called them fools.
The future was not set in stone, nor was Destiny some great book in which the entire start and end of the universe was written from before. It was a myriad of endless possibilities, caused by the accumulation of otherwise absolutely ordinary events happening at different places at different times with different entities, yet their effects somehow cumulated together to bring forth a magically significant outcome. A Seer was merely a person that was extremely sensitive to chronomancy, and unwittingly captured glimpses of these ordinary events or factors, which they uttered together in one long string that lesser beings called a Prophecy.
It was up to others to recognize these factors, preferably before they could happen. A task that was exponentially more difficult than one would believe.
He himself had first-hand experience in that.
He gently placed the prophecy orb on its mantle, and closed his eyes. In hindsight, he had been an absolute buffoon to have acted upon the incomplete knowledge of the prophecy. He had, ironically enough, in his hubris, set forth the third factor into effect.
Choose the baby that would become his Equal.
And as luck would have it, he chose Potter. Not Longbottom, who had a far greater standing in pureblood society, whose parents were Aurors, but Harry Potter, son of a mudblood. A baby that was a halfblood like he was.
But he will have power the Dark Lord knows not….
Anyone with brains could say that it was the easiest line to decipher. Harry Potter was the Peverell Vessel, and as such, his Family Magic of Death was the power that was absolutely unique to him.
But was it?
He unclenched his fists, and a random enchanted portrait came flying at him, resting in mid-air just inches away from his hand. Slowly, cautiously, he focussed on the power.
Nothing happened at first, but then a thin greyish tendril erupted out of his palm and struck the portrait.
It went utterly blank.
The power of Death. It was merely a sliver of the real thing that Potter supposedly wielded, but even a sliver of Death was Death. And if today’s events worked perfectly, Potter would forever become a battery for him to draw Death energy from the cosmos and channel it.
He would become the Master of Death.
But…
But…
But it was a power he knew. A power he could use to a certain degree, provided he was willing to suffer through debilitating agony, but he could use it. Between his horcruxes, his experiments with the Dark Mark, and his tangling with ancient artefacts and their myriad powers, he had looked too far into the Abyss, and the Abyss had looked into him in return, affecting his mind and emotions to a terrifying degree, gripping him in a haze of alien emotional spectrum that merged with his own personality.
One that he knew and feared as the Haze.
The Haze that was currently held back by the Peverell Family Magic of Death, the great neutralizer of all things.
So if Death wasn’t it, then what was the power that he knew not?
For a moment, he almost considered Dumbledore’s famous proclamation of Love being the greatest power in the world. Back when he had lost himself in the Haze, he had laughed at the old fool for even suggesting it.
Now though… he couldn’t dismiss it as a possibility.
Something about that line taunted him. Lily Potter had sacrificed herself to save her son. Voldemort still thought it was a weakness, the idea of sacrificing himself to protect someone else was an anathema that had no place in his personal philosophy. But even so, he could reluctantly agree that Love was powerful and dangerous. Love drove people to violence and passion, and gave them strength. It made them into fools, and sometimes fools could do what the wise couldn’t.
At least, Love’s twisted kin Hate, something Voldemort had enough experience with, worked along similar lines.
But still… Love?
The torches in the room burned agitatedly, signalling the presence of an intruder.
“Ah, Narcissa, do we have news?” asked Voldemort dryly, dusting his silk robes, repositioning himself on his majestic throne. For all of his slipperiness, Lucius Malfoy had exquisite taste when it came to grandioseness.
“News?” The woman hissed. Gone was the dainty, haughty pureblood lady and in her place was a cornered animal. “Harry Potter killed my husband!”
She barely suppressed the sob that followed. “Lucius… Lucius is dead. My husband is dead!”
Voldemort gave her a discerning look. He knew for certain that Harry Potter was no killer. However, he was prone to powerful acts of subconscious magic when faced with acute desperation.
“My son has just lost his father,” Narcissa raged. “First the Black mantle. Then wealth, and now his father. Harry Potter took everything from him.”
Ah, yes, Draco. Voldemort mused absently. Lucius had brought the boy along while Project Prometheus was in the planning process. Draco had spent the entire meeting looking down, hidden away between his parents.
Voldemort scoffed. The boy was quite a weakling, unlike Potter.
Yes, Potter. While he hated the boy with the burning rage of a thousand suns, he had to hand it over to him. Even discounting the events of ‘81, the boy had always stood up against him, even as a measly eleven-year old.And from the news coming from Hogwarts, the boy had indeed grown out of his shell to slowly become an accomplished wizard. Add in his new position was the Warden of the Sunken Vault….
Yes, Harry Potter was indeed walking down his footsteps. Even his power, Death, was borderline to Voldemort’s own specialty. Potter reminded him of himself when he was younger. If only he could have won the boy over…
He thought back to the lines of the Prophecy.
The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord….
The one with the power, not the one that would vanquish him. There was a running set of evidence that supported that claim.
Reduced to a wraith, his body destroyed, when he attempted to kill the child in ‘81.
Quirrell, burnt to ashes from the boy’s mere touch. Again, Voldemort had to escape as a wraith, his plan to obtain the Stone foiled by the eleven-year-old.
His Diary horcrux was destroyed in the Chamber of Secrets. While he doubted the Diary had enough ability to be of any substantial aid, a setback was a setback.
And then that night in that graveyard….
Yes, every time he faced Harry Potter directly, he had inevitably faced defeat.
Destroyed. Foiled. Hurt. Bested. Vanquished, in every sense of the term.
Whether it be his mother’s love, or his unexpected Family magic, or just sheer, dumb luck, it seemed that the balance of Destiny would always tilt in favour of Harry Potter whenever he and the boy faced each other in combat.
But if he didn’t fight Potter directly? Would the forces of Destiny still work in Potter’s favour? Would it simply become a battle of skill, experience and luck against the other opponent, or would Destiny still recognize Voldemort’s hand playing from the shadows and rule against him?
It had been that idea that led to the birth of Project Prometheus. A sequence of individual events that were in themselves, extremely damaging to Potter and his loved ones, but caused by multiple independent factors, all of which would lead to Potter getting hogtied into the invincible trap he and Schulz had exclusively prepared. Even now, while those individual events were happening all across Britain, he was calmly sitting inside the confines of Malfoy manor, isolated from them all.
“Amelia Bones has enacted the Bane of Discordia,” said Narcissa. “As of right now, Britain is under Martial Law, and it will be until the Chief Warlock decides otherwise. I — those bastards didn’t even allow me to bring home my husband’s corpse.” She was shaking in blinding rage. “I — I heard that the DMLE is mounting an attack on Azkaban to free the prisoners.”
Silly woman! Thought Voldemort. Amelia Bones could take over as the Minister of Magic for all he cared. A large chunk of its forces were currently held captive in Azkaban. Another attack would only get all of them killed for good.
“ —And Potter’s joining her.”
Voldemort blinked. Potter was with Bones? That made no sense, unless —
“What of the Circle atop the hospital?”
“Destroyed. Potter destroyed it. That’s how I found out about Lucius. My lord, I — I want vengeance! I want Potter’s head!”
She fisted her palms. The fear, the rage, the feeling of helplessness, the surge of vengeance that left one feeling utterly impotent… he recognized the signs too well. He had been through the same for ten years after all.
The woman wanted to blame him for Lucius’s death. For placing him in Harry Potter’s way. But more than that, she was terrified. Terrified of what he could do to her if she did that. He saw it in the minor twitches of her hands, shaking too small to be seen normally. Her heart beat faster and her breathing had accelerated. Her magic was flaring, as if ready to do battle.
“We shall avenge Lucius’s death, Narcissa.”
Her face snapped up in surprise. “W- what?” She stammered, not quite believing what she had heard. Unsurprising, given how his memories before his resurgence were those of an emotionless godlike being with contemptuous derision for everything alive.
“We shall avenge Lucius’s death,” he repeated. “Potter will pay for it many times over. But first, I must know what has transpired. Every. Last. Detail.”
And as he sat and listened, he couldn’t help but wonder why Schulz hadn’t yet reported anything to him. The ectomancer was a skillful one, perhaps even more than Voldemort himself when it came to employing subtle cursing. If something wrong had happened, if Potter had broken out of the barrier and destroyed it, Schulz was supposed to let him know.
And if Potter was truly out to avenge the DMLE and free the soldiers, why hadn’t Bellatrix, his trusted lieutenant, relayed him with any information yet?
....
....
....
The enemy was fast. Very fast. Bellatrix was herself the most agile of the Dark Lord’s lieutenants, and not even the years in Azkaban had dulled those instincts. But something about this person’s bizarre scuttling down hallways and vanishing at the most inopportune moments made him extremely difficult to kill. But as fast as he was, Bellatrix’s charge was unequalled, and the enemy couldn’t escape her forever.
Now only if she could find him.
Benjamin Nott, that old fool, was in charge of the prison. Commanding the Death Eaters. She was in charge of its protection. To answer any summons of the Dark Mark and get rid of the invading pests.
And she was failing.
Horribly.
It was unacceptable!
BOOOOOM!
“The left hallway exploded,” someone yelled. “He’s gone down the stairs.”
“Blast it! There’s someone in the lower hallways!”
“There’s Dee—argh!” ended the voice in a vicious scream.
And so on.
If a single enemy could make an entire army of Death Eaters run around like headless chickens, while being within the borders of Azkaban, surrounding by the most vicious monsters on the planet, then either this person was simply that good, or combat discipline amongst Death Eaters had lapsed during her time at Azkaban.
Bellatrix didn’t know which was worse.
Between the horrid sounds of pain and explosions, and the failed results of their attempts to find and subdue the enemy, the Death Eaters were regrouping. They had been expecting an overwhelming home advantage, but now the enemy was using it against them, leaving them utterly bewildered and disoriented.
Despite herself, Bellatrix had to applaud the enemy’s methods.
He didn’t rush. He didn’t charge ahead into the army head-on like a hotheaded Gryffindor. No long time-consuming efforts to conduct a planned attack like Aurors did either.
Just move in. Distract. Kill. And stay alive.
Blasting and severing curses aimed for the vitals. Clever use of camouflaging spells or invisibility enchantments to take advantage of the environment. An almost religious adherence to making every single spell count. Fascinating sword play, potentially coated with an absolutely lethal venom, since nobody that got scratched by that silver blade got up again. And every single time he got a chance, those purple arrows would rain down, their dark coloration camouflaging with the darkness of the night, while being imperceptible and fast as killing curses.
It was exactly what she would do in such a situation. It was how her grandfather Arcturus had taught her to fight, before she got stuck in a Dark-Arts induced Haze and turned into an insane berserker that lumberjacked her way through entire armies.
“BOMBARDA MAXIMA!” she shouted. The malevolent crimson streak erupted out of her wand and detonated an entire section of a corridor, creating a gaping hole to the outside. A piece of broken plaster ricocheted into the air and hit her left wrist, but the pain was nothing compared to her wounded pride as her prey vanished into the darkness of the ancient prison tower, using the very shadows to kill those that hunted in the shroud of masks and darkness. Everywhere she walked, she found Death Eaters crushed into paved stone paths, dementors pinned against rocks and prison walls by a power that felt so familiar, but Merlin’s beard, she couldn’t put a finger on it.
It made her angry. Very angry.
And she was known to do stupid things when enraged.
Spotting a silhouette running through the bridge beneath, Bellatrix instantly leaped off, her
robes spread out like wings, arresting her momentum to land right in her opponent’s way, launching a wave of black energy at her opponent, who hastily raised a shield, only to be pushed several steps back.
“FULMINATA MAXIMA!”
Lightning rained from her wand, a storm of blue and white streaking against the intruder, shattering stone and enchantment wherever it struck. Lightning had a pretty way of dissolving through the Protego shield, and what she had cast was less like a single bolt as much as a rain,. , striking without care of who it hit. To the naked eye, there was no visible means of escape.
So it was somewhat shocking, to Bellatrix, when her opponent escaped.
If she was a storm, then the intruder was a single mote of dust in the wind, tiny in comparison to the sheer volume of spellfire she was sending at him, and yet fluid, and utterly untouchable. He dove between spaces that looked like they wouldn’t have fit a fly, weaving through her spell and the explosions they wrought as if they were no more uncomfortable than a summer breeze.
“Blast it, you move like an insect but up close, you’re like a serpent. They don’t teach that at the DMLE.”
Her opponent spoke from beneath the hood. “The training is nothing. The will is everything. The will to act.”
His voice had a slight hiss to it, but it was flat, hollow, and almost devoid of emotion. Yet Bellatrix froze. Those words. They were —
They were her grandfather’s. Words that he had said to her…
…and Sirius.
Years of extreme dementor exposure had absolutely eroded her mind, leaving behind scraps and flashes of memories from her life back at Grimmauld Place. Flashes of grandfather teaching. A memory of her teaching Sirius how to employ Contagion. Another picture, when Sirius had crafted his first spell — a tracking charm that was immune to magical wards and barriers. Her facing Sirius in battle. Another fight. And another. Sirius again, this time in prison, sitting opposite her, not saying a single word despite all the taunts. All she could see was those scribbles on his prison wall that said one and one thing only.
I’m sorry, Harry.
“SIRIUS—”
WHAAM!
That momentary distraction cost her. A lot.
The blasting curse hit her like a sledgehammer, leaving her utterly bewildered for a moment. The next thing she knew was her enemy rushing at her, thrusting his wand again. Caught flat-footed, Bellatrix had little choice but to block.
Someone should’ve told the bastard that he was supposed to be blocked, though.
While the blow didn’t turn her bones to paste, it shattered through her shield like a battering ram through glass, threatening to dislocate both her arms by sheer force. His second strike came nearly simultaneous to the first, hitting while Bellatrix was still staggered and physically lifting herself from the floor. She tumbled along, rolling helplessly until she could finally twist into position to arrest her motion and get back up.
“Sirius Black!” she screeched. “I know it's you! Get rid of that ridiculous cowl and look me in the eye!”
Her opponent snorted. “That was fast. You are quite spry for an older woman. You fight with nothing held back. It’s admirable, but mistaken.”
“Older woman?” Bellatrix raged. “I’ll show you old! VENTUS HORRIBILIS!”
Hundreds, no, thousands of fragments — stone, rock and debris rose from the floor and the side railings and dashed at her enemy, who raised a hasty shield to hold them back. She twisted her wrist, the rock fragments instantly disintegrating to dust and blinding him from all sides, before deconstructing the floor beneath his feet and instantly reconstructing it, holding him completely trapped within save for his hooded head.
“You… What are you planning, Sirius? TELL ME!”
Levelling her wand, she aimed it in the face. “Tell me or I’ll cruciate you to an inch of your life.”
When her opponent still said nothing, she yelled, “VENTUS!”
The hood fell off his face, revealing a youthful face and messy black hair. A face that definitely didn’t belong to Sirius Black.
“Who… who are you?”
“Harry Potter.”
Harry Potter? The Boy-Who-Lived? The halfblood brat that had vanquished her Lord as a babe? That Harry Potter? Almost instinctively, she tightened her hold upon her wand, ready to face resistance.
But it never came.
This… this boy, who had single handedly levelled half of her Death Eater army, this Hogwarts student that had been killing dementors using a power she couldn’t even comprehend, wasn’t even making an effort to fight back. And his eyes….
His eyes…
They were vivid green. Like staring at an oncoming killing curse. There was no desperation in them. Anger, rage, fury, focus… nothing at all. They weren’t the eyes of someone that had been stripped of all hope and options, but someone that knew that he was right where he needed to be.
“How do you know those lines?” She demanded, levelling her wand between his eyes. “How?”
“Staying in Azkaban has made you sloppy,” he said. “I swear I had expected so much more, given how much Sirius raved about you.”
“...Sloppy?”
Bellatrix froze. She didn’t like those eyes. It would be a mistake to dally, now that she had him. He was trapped, and couldn’t attempt an escape without severely injuring himself. So why did she have this feeling that she was the one in danger?
“Yes, for one. You had me trapped and talking, and yet, you haven’t realised that my lips aren’t moving.”
She only got a moment to stare at his closed lips, before her instincts screamed something was wrong.
And then a long, silver blade erupted through her chest.
....
....
....
A member of the Azkaban guard stared at her in the face.
Amelia knew that these guards were people that were consigned by the Ministry to this hell on Earth to ensure that the dementors didn’t go overboard with torturing the inmates. Members of the DMLE Task-force that were taken away from active duty and posted here, forced to live a colourless life, away from their friends and family, in this island prison where happiness was an abstract concept.
It was an open secret that DMLE officials that got too outspoken about the flaws in the Ministry legislature or offered resistance against powerful people often found themselves silently transferred to Azkaban. Since Azkaban was one place that was directly under the discretionary control of the Minister of Magic, not even Amelia had the ability to pause or negate their transfer orders.
But that didn’t come even remotely close to being inside this place of horrors that was the heart of Azkaban prison.
Right before her was a massive tunnel that ran deep into the darkness. Maybe it was a mile long. Maybe two. Maybe it ran all the way down to Hell itself. All she could make out was that it sloped gently, only lit by the wan glow of the crystalline cubicles inside which the prisoners remained frozen. It would have brought her some pleasure to imagine that they were under a stasis charm, but she knew better.
They were frozen in mid-air, their eyes distraught and almost bulging out, their mouths open in brazen horror, screaming as something maddening and twisted and wrong wrung their souls were contorted into something unimaginably horrifying. A look at his legs revealed that part of his left calf had disappeared and in its place, was a dark mist-like fabric, one that she could associate with only one single creature in all of existence.
“Dementors….” murmured a shocked Rufus Scrimgeour. “These prisons are transforming actual people into dementors.”
“And this is the heart of the tower,” exclaimed a curse-breaker. “Whatever power is causing this, must be at the end of this tunnel.”
“I agree,” said Amelia. “There is a strange, leased violence here. The air itself feels alive. There is no saying how it will react. We’ll need a systematic plan to dismantle the enchantments before we can attack.”
“I have a plan. Attack.”
“No wait,” said Amelia. “Don’t —”
Too late.
“CONFRINGO!” said Rufus coldly, and several others followed his initiative. Streaks of light purple smashed into the crystalline barriers, fracturing the surface.
—And every single member collapsed down to the floor instantly, too shocked to even scream at the sudden crushing agony that smashed through their uniforms, pulverising their bones, giving way to an agonising numbness that left them gasping for breadth.
Nobody had struck them, she knew. Nobody had cast anything at them. She hadn’t sensed any energy signature at all. Even the violent energy in the air stayed stagnant. And yet, Amelia had felt the splintering curses fracturing her bones with an almost effortless ease. As if six different blasting curses had hit her all at once at…
She froze.
No, not blasting. Splintering curses. Those six Confringo spells… They hit us. They hit all of us. Our own spells…
She stood up. It hurt a lot, but she stood up. This place, whatever it was, was projecting its own damage upon all of them. She frowned, annoyed. If she had the liberty of time, she might have been able to deconstruct and make a hole through the notably unique wards that restrained the prisoners inside the heart of the tower, but she had never quite worked with anything that spat in the face of conventional magic.
“Well then,” she said, looking at her Head-Auror who was still on the ground, grunting. “Any ideas?”
Comments
The BlackStaff and NightMarE
An editing mistake. I corrected it. Speaking of, what do you all think of Voldemort's interpretation of the Prophecy? Specially about the entire Causation and Destiny part?
Michael Ashryver
Was a blade supposed to go through both Bellatrix and Narcissa? There’s a line at the end of Voldemort and Narcissas section that implies she was impaled too…
Based_Bass
Idk why Amelia is asking the idiot that got them injured in the first place. Maybe a better question would be “Anymore BRIGHT ideas?” Honestly Rufus is a fucking mouth breathing dumbass.
