Chapter 1: Death Context
"And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
.o.O.o.
Death is peaceful, I thought.
I couldn't really move much, and I had the most uncomfortable feeling that I had forgotten something important, but other than that, it was peaceful. I was peaceful. (help me, someone oh god anyone save me before-)
It was certainly something someone like I had never considered for my forever-after. It wasn't that I had expected to end up in some fiery pit of hell or before the shining gates of heaven – after all, those were Muggle ideologies, not Wizard ones – but considering the crimes I had committed in my lifetime (against law, against nature, I'm so sorry please forgive me but it felt so good-), I certainly hadn't anticipated this lulling tranquility, this fragile serenity, this trembling, delicatebreakableohnoohnoit'sgoingtocrumbleIknowit –
But anyways, peaceful. So peaceful. And if I didn't want to think about the future (and especially not about the past, not that, anything but-) well, it wasn't like there was anyone forcing me too. No mother, no father, no sister nor brother (though of the latter I had never had any before anyways). No, I was free to be chained in compliance by a feeling I had never fully experienced when I was ali – before.
Before. What was before? Even though I didn't really want to think about it, I felt I should. Even just a glimpse. Perhaps then I would know where I was (besides dead – I was pretty sure of that. After all, no one could survive-).
Think.
Slowly a shape convalesced out of the gloom, like a murky sea creature rising from the depths. It seemed menacing somehow, ripped and jagged around the edges as if dragging a mass of seaweed behind it. I felt scared, but more than that, I felt as if I should recognize it.
What was it?
I knew I couldn't really 'see' anything. Everything around me was no doubt the delusions of my mind, struggling to interpret whatever reality death existed in. Perhaps to the properly enlightened or to the dutifully depraved (was I depraved? Maybe when I was alive…) it would be different. A soft white. Or a swamp of grinning acid. Empty spires of rock in a wasteland devoid of all life but the whistle of the wind. Something besides my own abyss-like surroundings, empty of all but the slowly approaching monster from below.
As It neared, one of the trailing ribbons of (seaweed, smoke, cloth so shredded it screamed in protest?) twitched. Then, the true size of It was released from the dark – a behemoth so expansive I could not discern the ends.
So engrossed was I in trying to fit a shape to the aberration now mere lengths from me, I failed to notice the shivering strand that had twitched just moments before slip through the fluid I was drifting in and gently begin winding itself around my torso.
And then it crushed me.
I screamed. I must have screamed. With no voice and no air and probably with no throat nor lungs, I screamed. It was as if someone had laid me out, stripped and bound to some cold hard surface, and shoved their hands businesslike into my chest and ripped open my ribcage – I felt exposed. Violated not in a physical sense so much as a spiritual one.
My soul, I understood suddenly. It was crushing my soul.
I could suddenly see the outline of what now must pass for my body – a harshly glowing tangle of lines and contours that as I watched was breaking apart and dissolving. These shards of light were promptly sucked away by the tentacle that squeezed me still. A heavy darkness closed around my vision and – strangely enough – a dull warmth began to build in me, as if I had been cold before.
Far, far below me, below even the leviathan that had swallowed my world and me in it, a sudden frenzy of lighting sparks leapt about in the ink. Snapping and sizzling and leaving a purple and green afterimage after every move, the sparks moved like neurons in a brain. Even past the pain of having my soul shattered, I noticed the sparks.
I especially noticed when they started attacking the binding I was ensnared in. Mostly because they also began ripping at me in the process, as if hating me but knowing I was all they had left to them in this hell.
Even more of my shape became nebulous, like a jellyfish whose watery body had been nipped at and torn by both predator and environment. Even as the strand reluctantly withdrew, I felt myself fading, bits and pieces of me still spinning off into the dark, falling, falling, falling… just like my mother, just like my father and just like them.
To spell and metal and potion and claw. To enemy and ally and predator and prey. To me. (I didn't kill them all, just a few, just a few here and there, just enough to stop feeling so hollow, so empty, so alive-).
As I drifted further from coherence and deeper into consciousness (from sanity to reality, because reality was insanity) the sharp pinches of the lightening spheres (they taste minty that's important keep that in mind) burrowing into my flesh(?) served to slow the disintegration of my soul, but not my memories. Already locked but safely stored, my memories were now becoming unlocked but fragmented and disordered.
Malfoy. Draco Malfoy.
I chuckled weakly, remembering my arrogant greeting to a small, green-eyed soon-to-be-classmate all those years ago. How long ago was it? Thirteen, fourteen years ago? I had been so self-assured, so righteous in my name and in my feeble-minded beliefs. Feeble-minded not because they were wrong – purebloods were the superior of the wizardly race, and far superior to the magicless – but because I had not tasted the blood that came with forming those opinions. Had not fought the battles that gave conviction and resolution to an ideology that demanded experience to wield it with understanding.
I did now. I learned just after fifth year, when everything changed. When the Golden Trio had broken into the Ministry of Magic and when the world had finally understood that He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was back. My Lord Voldemort.
May he burn in hell.
(Or is he there already, screaming like I was just moments ago, screaming like I am still?)
After fifth year, when the Minister was assassinated just weeks after His return. When the Dementors turned against both the Light and the Dark, and became the Darker. When the ghosts abruptly secluded themselves in Haunts and Councils to debate their role in the war, and subsequently devolved into their own civil war. When secrets and sects and guilds and clans and organizations that had been lost to the mainstream Wizard World had flared out of the woodwork and started laying claims to territories and races and rights and religions.
When the whole world began to burn in madness and seethe in chaos.
When even the recently resurrected Dark Lord was caught off guard by the rapid shifts in the world, suddenly finding himself just one more faction in a sea of Lords and Ladies and High Sorcerers and Fire Maesters and Lytlings and Umeerlee Priests and Tree Thanes. Fighting suddenly not just the Light but any who would carve out a piece of the British Isles that now had so many names in so many tongues.
The world was burning, and the Dark Lord with it.
But he was vicious, and clever, and ambitious. And all too eager to indulge in a war of madness. The Light was swamped, but not completely. They somehow managed to eke out an army and a base by allying themselves to splinter groups and those whose goals roughly coincided with theirs. And if they had to compromise, if they had to look the other way to gain the loyalty of one of these factions – well, it was all for the greater good, in the end.
Right?
And so branches of magic and races of magic and levels of magic unexplored, unknown, forgotten, banned, created, invented, hybridized and mangled together were let loose upon a world that was ripe for death. New names were made and old ones perished. And only the lucky the brutal the inspirational and the efficient survived.
And the Muggles, strangely enough.
Somehow, it was mutually understood and agreed upon that should any group bring attention of the magical world to a large population of Muggles, said group would be instantly shunned and targeted. It wasn't in compassion, but most were intelligent enough to realize that involving them would perhaps tip that balance from wide-spread killing to planet-size destruction.
After all, even wizards couldn't survive the fall-out of a nuclear winter (The arcane Tengu made sure all understood that). Not that what they were doing was much better.
And so a bitterly quiet shadow war raged across all the continents.
(The behemoth drifted away, swallowed in the abyss. Or was I drifting away?)
At first, the Dark Lord held his own. He assimilated allies through seductive promises and creative torture, and easily gained a foothold in the British Isles – his primary target. While France fell under the sway of the Thanes and Russia to the Nighwalkers, while Germany was swallowed by the obscure Grey and Spain painted over in blood and rune by the ritualistic Fire Dancers, while all the world was tugged and torn to pieces, the Dark Lord marshaled his forces in Britain. Key ley lines and sources of Sap – natural wells of power – were seized and fortified. So-called Light wizards were slaughtered by the family and artifacts of Light taken and locked deep underground, or dismantled to feed the Saps.
(A fuzziness took root. A kind of white noise. Could the dead die?)
After fifth year, everything changed.
Hogwarts at first tried to resist the inevitability of true war, but after Dumbledore was ambushed and taken hostage to be tortured and drained of the power that housed itself in him, everything changed. The Golden Trio – the Savior, the sidekick, and the bookworm – managed to once again do the impossible. That, or Fate was a buyable bitch – at the right price, of course.
Perhaps I am being too hard on the deity of destiny. After all, it must be strenuous to manage a planet that seems determined to drown itself in gasoline, juggling flaming matches with little regard.
(The whatever-was-around-me was changing. A sharp, acrid scent and the sensation of being dragged through a field of wheat replaced the numbness of before. A field of wheat. A wheat of field. A field under a big red bloody moon eyeball dripping dripping pocket full of posiesweallfalldown)
-managed to do the impossible. (hadn't I already though that?) They freed Dumbledore, a Dumbledore hardened, changed, blah blah blah. Suffice to say he was now a true threat to the Dark Lord.
The Dark Lord's string of victories slowed, ground to a stop, and began going the other way. But as twisted as he was in his madness, he was still a prodigy, even half a century after his original rise to prominence. And so he plotted new ways to victory.
And that is where I came in.
(Don't think about it nothing happened I went home we left no wait my family left I just became a foot soldier nothing more nothing important nothing special just a foot I went home and we left my family don't think about it don't think it's what you were trained to do after all-)
I was a nobody. Sure, son of a lieutenant general in a Dark Lord's army. Well-bred bloodline. Incredibly wealthy. Above average grades (in all the subjects that mattered, of course). Talented in subjects not taught at Hogwarts. A few special pureblood skills that such a heritage granted. Polite, self-assured, confident, logical, maybe a little cold to those outside my inner circle, but altogether an unremarkably remarkable wizard.
(WhY DiD iT haVe tO Go sO WRONG.)
My name is Draco Malfoy, and I have a problem with purebloods. I hate Purebloods. Thank you and good night.
Bloodlines. That was the brilliant new idea my dear Master (never again) hit upon. A master stroke, by all accounts. After all, not only would it be a huge political win, but a militaristic one as well. Show them all that purebloods were the best for a solid reason (besides the obvious). A little known fact (Lost? Forgotten? Deliberately buried in shame and fear?) was brought to light (haHa) by an 'acquired' Unspeakable. (what's happening unfocused tired why haven't I been sleeping not moving for such a long time timeless so sleepy tired. Tired.)
Simple.
Every bloodline in a pureblood had at least one unique magical trait. Un-replicable.
Elegant.
Simply isolate whatever strain or strains (not a gift, never a gift, nothing like solstice day) slept in the blood. Then wake it/them up.
Deadly.
Elegantly integrate the taints into the magical core and synchronize the matrix so the subject didn't blow up. Or dissolve. Or be turned inside out. (so much blood that last one).
The resulting thing (not human not now were they ever with THAT inside them?) was then utilized. To fight, to champion, to lead, to menace, to quietly go insane from something that slept for a REASON. After all, a gift could not be given if the owner had no life to give it. And this was a gift that wanted to be passed on – a happily dormant parasite. No life. No body. No blood. No soul.
No soul. Soul. Soul…
(Bright and shiny, like a knute. Corded like gillyweed gone sour. Smells so minty. Tastes so minty. Tastes so-)
Why do I know what souls taste like?
. .nonononNONONO!
He took me. Away. Apart. He took me apart. And then he put me back together.
I wasn't one of those he paraded around.
It wasn't that I was a failure – far from it. I was a success. Those in the know complimented and clapped and smiled and praised. Lord Voldemort, of course. I was kept safe. Safe kept. Stowed, like an adolescent dragon that must be contained because I did not know my own strength. Or maybe because I did. Because even success as wondrous as I was flawed. It came with the territory. After all, I was one of the first, and certain bugs still cropped up now and then. Nothing that would hamper my ultimate purpose, but just enough to cause those around me to avert their eyes or – if they were of the more easily ensnared type – stare. As if I was a fascinating new potion that glittered, or an alchemy practical gone sickeningly awry.
(I really don't want to remember. Please stop.)
No blood. Elegant. No blood. Like a Kiss.
Like a Kiss from a Dementor.
Except I wasn't a Dementor.
Not a human – not anymore.
Not quite a wizard either.
Hell, not even alive.
As I drifted further and further into the writhing ink around me, the minty sparks now gone – maybe inside of me? – and the sea nightmare sucked away to wherever it had come from, I sighed. Maybe. (So hard to tell).
It was done. Over. Whatever had happened was out of my reach now. My place was in death. Relaxing, I allowed my eyes to slip shut, so even the glow of my soul was blocked out. Which is why I missed it when a different, subtler light began to filter my abyss. And grow and grow until with a rippling, ripping crack, I was dropped to the hard, grassy ground beneath me.
And with a startled gasp, took my first breath since I had died.
Reviews welcomed.