For Fanfiction, School of Imagination and Creativity (Dark Wizards and Witches of the Wizarding World - write about Herpo the Foul); the If You Dare Challenge (209. Death Valley); the 10 Times 10 Challenge (creature - Basilisk); the Gemstone Competition (Hematite) and the Fantastic Beasts Challenge (Basilisk)
Shesha thrashed restlessly.
Herpo threw her an irritated look. Calm down, he hissed at her.
Master…
I know what I am doing, Shesha. Do not waste both our time worrying about me.
Yes Master, the snake hissed, cowed.
The wizard turned his attention back to the papyrus in his hands. Finding that shred of the Egyptian Book of the Dead had been a stroke of luck for him. He had searched for the secrets to immortality for nearly all of his life, and the expedition to the burial chambers of one of the pharaohs of old had been his last attempt at finding it.
And there it had been, lying in the sands next to the pharaoh's mummy. What was possibly the sole surviving remnant of the fabled Book of the Dead, rumoured to hold the secrets to eternal life within it.
He traced the hieroglyphs, casting spell after complicated translation spell. He may not have the entire ritual, but he had always been good at improvising. All he needed to know was where to start from.
That was why the papyrus was so important to him. What he could decipher from it was the story of how the pharaohs came to possess the secret of immortality. Somehow, millennia ago during the time of the first civilizations in Egypt, the most influential family at the time had found out that murder allowed them to tear away a little piece of their soul and store it away. When the time of their death came, whether through natural causes or murder, there would be some part of them left in the world, ready to inhabit the body of the next pathetic weakling who came along.
Soon, the process evolved, the greatest pharaohs training noble males to offer themselves up for possession, and each of them dividing their soul into five pieces, four being stored in the organs that would be placed into the canopic jars when they were shut away into their pyramids.
Unfortunately, the piece of papyrus did not describe exactly how the pharaohs separated the pieces of their soul after the ritual murder was performed, but that didn't matter. He was Herpo, the man who had found the hidden secrets of how to birth a basilisk from previously undecipherable Egyptian texts.
Figuring out how to divide his soul and achieve the immortality he craved would be easy in comparison.
Shesha, he hissed, We need a mundane to experiment with.
Of course, Master, she replied.
He already knew the perfect specimen. There was an old mundane woman who lived near him, who always insisted on trying to pick herbs from his garden. He had refrained from killing her because he knew that the fools who advocated magical-mundane peace would suspect him immediately, but now, at last, he had the perfect excuse to rid himself of her forever. And should anyone ask what had happened to her, he would be able to tell them truthfully that she had died for the advancement of magic. No spell or potion in the world would claim that he was lying.
Of course, he knew that figuring out the process would take him many, many experiments, but it didn't bother him. All it would mean was that more mundanes would die, not a thought that had ever bothered him overly much.
He levitated the precious piece of papyrus into the sealed drawer he had created out of Moke-skin for it, and decided that it was time for him to go to work.
Herpo whispered the final spells to bind the sheets of parchment he had written on into a book. It contained all the secrets he had found out over his long life, secrets that he would make sure survived beyond him.
He had finally found out how to separate his soul a mere five years ago, fifteen years after he had first deciphered the papyrus fragment from the Book of the Dead. A desperate man almost ready to give up, he had performed the ritual he had perfected immediately after he had killed Apollon, his greatest enemy. It was then that he had discovered the secret of the ritual – it did not simply require a murder, but a ritual murder, the dying person having needed to mean something to him.
The ritual itself was long and complicated, requiring him to drink a special brew of his own making before the actual murder was carried out, and making sure that the kill left no bodily evidence of the method of murder. Finding a spell that killed without affecting the body had taken him some work, but he had finally discovered it – the words Avada Kedavra.
He had transferred his soul into the papyrus piece he had protected for so long, adding strengthening charms to make sure no harm befell it.
Unfortunately, he had been unable to foresee the effects of Basilisk venom on the container. All it had taken was one accidently spilled drop after he had finished milking Shesha, and all his hopes for immortality were destroyed. There was no one left who would satisfy the demands of the ritual murder, and the only thing he could do was make sure that the knowledge he had collected from the Book of the Dead survived to find another master.
He wrote in Parseltongue, ensuring that only the worthy would be able to decipher his notes. He may not be able to live forever, but he would he made his mark on the world.
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