March 2015
Fallen is Babylon.
No haunt for every impure spirit is this: Tiberius walks the halls of a tomb. Deep below the Muggle ruins of old Babylon left abandoned under the baking Iraqi sun, witness to warfare and struggle, here in the dark two magicians find only stillness. Over more than fifteen hundred years has silence reigned over shadows and spiders and scarabs. Only before the golden light of magical torches hung on the walls, alight but forgotten to all the world over but the man and woman before them, does the void recede. It laps at the flickering glow, dancing away where light reaches out to illuminate twirling columns of dust before clawing back its domain.
It is a mausoleum, a grave of great men the world buried long ago. It is place for men like Tiberius, for women like his companion walking by his side, black hair loose and trailing over her shoulders. Devana. She is comfortable here. They have each walked other, outer darkness in their lives. In other lives, perhaps. Tiberius knows not what catastrophe brought this once-thriving wizarding nexus to its knees – Alexander the Great's triumph, Rome's invasion of Parthia, the Muslim conquests, maybe – but he is happy to make acquaintance with the lost memories. Better to remember half-forgotten glory than to dwell in his nightmares.
Cuneiform patterns the crumbling sandstone columns propping up the witches' antechamber, a hexagonal hall with a vaulted ceiling that the earliest Mesopotamian practitioners of magic would have packed in the sixth century B.C. Tiberius clears his throat from the dust. He had expected traps, like they had found in the Celtic crypts when first meeting Andor in Scotland a year ago. Creatures, at least, for these old crossroads of antiquity and magic abounded with fantastic life. Yet nothing – no curses, no riddles, not even a drake or wyvern to impede them. Just silence. The pif-pif-pif of boots treading atop sand and history.
He wonders if what he seeks died long ago. What a waste of a trip this would be. What a waste of years of research, of waiting, of planning. All that time, just to miss out on the greatest sword imaginable to thrust at Dumbledore's cold new order. Potter's order now. Shacklebolt's order. Heroes, all those folks back in wizarding Britain crowed. Tiberius knows better. Men like Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter do not care for men of his lowly station.
Well, not a total waste of a trip. He is happy to tread upon the hallowed ground where so few of modernity's tepid stations dare dream of traversing. Bask in the light, scions of Dumbledore. Blind yourselves in it. Here in the blackness I find my welcome.
"Humidity," Devana murmurs.
Her whisper is a gunshot in the silence, and Tiberius grinds his teeth. But she is right – wetness in the air, and warmth too, a stickiness alien to the arid hypogeum.
Tiberius circles an unlit, rusted brazier at the center of the hall. Firelight blooms on the dull metal. He taps his wand to the brazier's stem, once, twice. Thap, thap. Nothing more.
"Incendio."
Flame leapes from the brazier, an instant of heat and light that extinguishes as soon as it spurts from Tiberius's wand. Devana shakes her head. "Fiendfyre," she says. She aims her wand, a diseased rod of redwood encrusted with veiny black and green ossification, like eldritch tendrils reaching out from the dragon heartstring core to feast upon the very fiendfyre it now unleashes.
A serpentine wave of fire roars forth. It spirals in the air, curling, burning away the dust before plunging like a falcon into the brazier. The metal rumbles, rings like a gong. Devana twitches her wand to rein the fiendfyre in, but it has a mind of its own: The flame coalesces into a sphere at the center of the brazier, roiling, raging, before shrinking down to a ball, now a pea, and with a pop it is no more.
Then the floor falls out.
Tiberius catches his wand as he drops into freefall. Only the void below. Empty, callous. For a moment he thinks to Apparate away, back to the surface, but the moment passes and Tiberius lets gravity take him down into the bowels of forgotten Babylon.
"Arresto Momentum."
Above him, Devana sinks into a leisurely descent. Tiberius lets himself go, lets the darkness swallow him up until he can no longer discern anything in the blackness. It takes him, swallows him in the clawing humidity and swampiness the clings more the air with every meter he drops. The stench: The stink of a bog, of dying matter and ancient rot. Then something else, a smell hidden amidst the others – ash. Fires dead so many centuries.
At last he thrusts his wand out into the ink and casts a flash of light, a burst of pressure. The blast throws him upward, just enough to counter the velocity of his fall so he lands on his feet with a splash. Ankle-deep water. Warm. He dips his finger in the black pool beneath him and sniffs. Briny. Here beneath the earth, in the throes of the darkness, a memory of the deep sea.
Devana splashes down a moment later. "Water?" she harrumphs. "Only water, I hope."
"Light your wand," Tiberius says.
Lumos illuminates little. They may as well be in the Netherworld, the land from which Ishtar herself escaped. The darkness stretches to infinity, and beneath them only the brackish churning of a pool disturbed by outsiders for the first time in eons. Doubt crosses Tiberius's mind again. He knew failure was an outcome. He knew they might meet naught but death, that which had claimed the rest of magical Babylon's ruins, that destroyer of worlds.
But after a minute, a specter in the blackness lurches.
First he sees the eye. The first eye, the first of many that watch Tiberius, that size him up and weigh him against the void. Devana covers her nose at the stench of rot. It reeks of a slaughterhouse, of decaying meat sinking into a bog, but Tiberius holds his ground as something older than recorded history drags itself into the light.
Eyes. Dozens of them, hundreds, blinking and sinking into blackened flesh only to be replaced a moment later by gaping mouths lined with teeth and tongues, sprung forth as a maw from where was skin and sinew. Tiberius has seen nothing like the monstrosity that sags before him, nothing in any bestiary, any textbook, heard nothing but the sole legend that brought him here. He thinks this sac of flesh and eyes and teeth should not exist in this world, magic or not.
Here lies the mother of abominations, here in the abyss.
He never averts his gaze, and the horror meets him in the dead space between man and mystery. In the midst of the darkness, as Devana keeps her wand pointed at the beast's largest unblinking white eye, Tiberius joins the monster in understanding. It seems to know – to know he wants nothing more than to uproot the sickened garden of the modern order that has thrust upon him so much pain. Voldemort. Death Eaters. The Ministry of Magic. Albus Dumbledore. Harry Potter, and the war that brought one man so high and dragged another so low. Tiberius will see no man, woman, child, or magical creature suffer the agonies he has borne.
He knows, somehow knows, that the ancient thing before him understands. It knows him. The faces that haunt his nightmares. The voices he has almost forgotten after all these years, all these days and nights since the time Voldemort reigned, and the time magic's greatest heroes failed him.
His beginning. His end. Space. Time. Lost magic. Dark magic.
A pustuled tendril reaches out from the darkness of fallen Babylon, and Tiberius offers his hand in greeting.
He touches the darkness, and the darkness is pleased.
August 2019
She's a beautiful bird, strong, sinewy. Great horned owl, brown and grey, less than a year old. And, as Lily Potter finds out, not receptive to onlookers waking her from naps.
Lily yanks her finger back from the owl's cage, redness already blotting at the end of her index finger. "Ouch!" she yelps.
"Oooh," murmurs a bespectacled old witch from behind the shop counter. "Want to be careful with that owl, young miss. Ornery temper. Give her a handful of feed, see if she calms down."
Food, the common language. The owl plucks from the handful of beetles cupped in Lily's hand, pausing every other morsel to eye her with suspicion. The other owls in the shop doze in cages of brass and bronze, some glancing at the interaction with disinterest. Afternoon sun glowing through the storefront windows lights up a veritable zoo of magical beasts great and small. Purple squids with glowing tentacle tips and horned mantles crawl around a terrarium beneath a pair of scarlet-furred bats flittering about. A mint green sloth watches over the premises above from an artificial tree branch, scratching at an armpit and grinning at Lily. A gaggle of puffskeins wriggle around the counter between the hands of a cooing blonde witch nearby. Lily had perused the selection, pet tabby cats, watched frogs hop between rocks beside a gurgling waterfall, but only the owl now stamping on her arm in wanting of more food piques her interest.
She will only ever get one chance to bring a pet to Hogwarts for her first year. Her brothers have their owls, a great black beast for James, her oldest brother, and a sinewy, quiet brown boreal owl for Al. Go in alone, Dad had told her as they stood in front of the shop a half-hour ago as she hesitated in front of the door. An owl is yours, your first friend at school. It's your decision.
"What's her name?" Lily asks the old witch.
The shopkeeper smiles. "Sigrun. A strong name for a strong bird. I think if she finds you friendly, oh, she'll be the best thing for a young student at Hogwarts."
Sickles change hands. A thank-you, a smile, and Lily steps out into the sun-kissed summer with the first kernel of real magic bursting inside her. She will be on the Hogwarts Express in seven days for the first time, and now she has an owl. Only one thing remains.
Dad waits for her in the street outside. All around the levity of Diagon Alley swirls. Prospective Hogwarts students trail after their parents from this store to that; young witches and wizards with years of schooling under their belts meet after the long days of summer recess to imagine the future. Around it all, stores, shoppers – broom makers, booksellers, sweet shops, the marble colonnade of Gringotts Bank. Laughter, shouts, footsteps. Ice cream melting in a little boy's hand. Somewhere down the winding alleys and cobblestone paths stands proud Uncle Ron and Uncle George's joke shop, where Al, James, and Lily's close cousins – Uncle Ron's children, Rose and Hugo – loiter.
It is an energy so alive Lily lets the air carry her spirits along to the heights of a world that has long since put aside names like Voldemort, a world that has long since stopped needing Harry Potter, hero, and traded him for Harry Potter, father. His hairline has started to recede, his temples have started to grey, but the man who once carried the wizarding world on his back has found a purpose so equally great in the quickening step of his young daughter. Here, now, he is whole.
He takes a moment to admire Sigrun. Something glints in his eyes – familiarity? Something long gone but not forgotten, something he recognizes in his daughter's smile when Lily strokes the owl's neck and the bird preens. What once was.
"One more stop and we'll meet back up with Mum and your brothers," he tells Lily. "You understand you're taking care of your owl now, right?"
"I know," Lily says, distracted.
"That means you're keeping her fed. You're making sure she gets out, stays active, has time to fly. She's an animal who needs her own time to be free, just like you do. When you get to school, you'll have to look out for her, visit the Owlery from time to time. An owl's not just a pet. It's a companion. One of two that'll keep you company in school for all seven years, no matter what else happens and no matter who else you meet."
Lily nods. She is eleven, and ice cream and summer breeze delight her so much more than her father's words. Sigrun's claws on her arm are a reminder that soon she will have classes, spells, friends, dormitories, and the witchcraft of dreams. The last days of being just a girl and before her rises the threshold of womanhood. It's the feeling of waking up in the morning after a long night's sleep with all the day in front of you, all the potential waiting for you to reach out and grab it, to make time your own. It is fire and blooms and warm rain with the grass springy beneath your feet, carrying you as far and as fast as you can run.
Dad puts a hand on her shoulder. "Then one more thing you need," he says, his eyes steady on her. Warm. Green. A father's eyes. "Let's go get your wand."