Talon Marks on a Far Moon
By The Scifanac
Volume 1
Dedicated to the world of Harry Potter,
its millions of fans world wide,
and the brilliant witch who created it, J. K. Rowling.
Special thanks to my cousin
who introduced me to the world of Harry Potter fan fiction
and helped me write this story.
Volume 1, Chapter 1: Tallon Farmoon
"Reducto!" The voice rang out in the still night air and next second the front door of the Farmoon house was blasted in and shattered on the floor in a thousand tiny wooden splinters. A man and a women were standing in the empty door way, both of them holding wands and advancing through the threshold.
"Sarah, go, take Tallon and get out of here!" said another man's voice, a gentler, closer sounding voice than the man who had just shouted the spell.
Tallon felt a pair of hands close around him and pick him up, carrying him into the kitchen and away from the scene.
"Stupify!" The man with the gentler voice shouted. There was a flash of red light from the living room. Tallon was being hid by his mother behind the stove in the kitchen. Then a cold, cruel voice shouted, "Incarcerous!" followed by a muffled scream and then the cruel voice spoke again, "Take his wand Bella."
Then an equally cruel female voice said, "Yes Rodolphus"
"Alex," Tallon's mother whimpered trembling. She picked up Tallon again and headed for the stairs that lead to the second floor
Tallon heard the cruel male's voice trail away as it said, "Now, tell me what I want to know, Alex Farmoon."
Tallon was now at the top of the stairs in his mother's arms. She was looking out of a window down onto the back yard. Two hooded figures were approaching the house, golden lights emanating from the tips of their wands. One of them looked up and seemed to spot Tallon's mother through the window. He pointed her out to his fellow who directed his wand at the window. The last thing Tallon saw that night was the window shattering as the spell, from the man in the back yard, hit it. There was a sudden unbearable excruciating pain in his eyes as if someone had stabbed needles through them. The pain was so intense that he was blinded.
Tallon rocked in his mother's arms as she ran along. A few seconds later, there was a loud bang and another sound like a wooden door being blasted apart. Tallon's mother shouted, "Expeliarmus!"
Almost immediately, her spell was followed by another, shouted by a rough male voice, "Incarcerous!" Tallon felt himself fall to the floor then after a few seconds picked up again. Then he was dropped onto a soft surface and more voices could be distinctly heard.
"What do you want with us?" shouted Talon's mother's voice.
"Don't tell them anything Sarah," said the gentle male voice.
"Quiet!" snarled the cruel male voice menacingly, "Rabastan, Barty, restrain her."
Tallon could hear his mother struggling as some of the intruders fought to keep her still, but he couldn't see a thing. The pain in his eyes was still so intense that he was sightless. It felt as though red hot pokers had been stuck in his eyes and no matter how much he rubbed them no matter how much he screamed and wailed in agony, they were not coming out. But the man with the cruel voice seemed not to care that Tallon was howling in pain and he spoke again, "I know that you have information about the whereabouts of our fallen master. Surrender that information or we will rest it from you by force."
"No, Rodolphus," said the gentle male voice, bitterly and defiantly, "I won't let you restore Voldemort to power."
Tallon heard a hiss among the intruders and one of them spitting, then Rodolphus whispered, "You dare say the Dark Lord's name, Alex? You? Being the filthy mudblood you are?
"Yes," said Alex, "I do." There was long deathly pause, then Alex shouted, "No, not Sarah, no, stop-"
"Crucio!"
Alex and Sarah screamed so loudly that they flushed out Tallon's wails of pain but then Tallon found the he was screaming louder too, not just in pain now but in horror as well. Although he didn't fully understand what was going on, he knew without knowing how he knew that both his parents were in just as much pain as he was. The screaming seemed to go on forever, like a never ending wave of terrible noise fueled by pain. Suddenly he heard his mother's screaming stop but his fathers was still terribly horrifying and grotesque.
Through the hollering, Rodolphus's cruel, quiet voice said, "I was foolish to think for an instant that you would give me what I seek. But be assured that this excursion of ours tonight will not have been in vein. When we are finished here two, no, three, of the Dark Lord's greatest enemies will be dead." Alex stopped screaming. Then there was a second of quivering silence.
Then Sarah screamed, "Noooo!" just as Rodolphus cried, "Avada Kedavra!" There was a rushing sound and flash of blinding green light so bright that Tallon could even see its glare through the blinding pain in his eyes. There was a long terrible total silence, Tallon even stopped wailing, but he was trembling and whimpering in pain and horror and so apparently was his mother. No other sound could be heard, Sarah's stricken sobs and sniffs seemed to be intruding upon a terrible ringing that was filling the room.
Suddenly Rodolphus's voice sounded, seemingly breaking the stillness like rudely interrupting a trance. "It seems pointless to ask," he said, sounding slightly amused, "But where is my master, Sarah Weasley?" Another drawling silence. Then Rodolphus's voice rang out again, "Tell me, blood traitor!" He shouted, "Or suffer the death of you only son," his voice ended in a low cruel growl.
"NO, no, stop, not Tallon, not Tallon. I'll do anything," panted Sarah.
"That's right," Rodolphus spoke in a horribly sardonic drawl, "That's right. Now where is the Dark Lord?!"
"He's…," Sarah said shakily, "He's." Suddenly Tallon felt rather than saw his mother look at him for a fraction of a second and, though he couldn't explain how or why, he felt his heart lift the tiniest bit.
Then there was a quick ripping noise and a sound like a swallow. "NO!" shouted Rodolphus, "Filthy Blood Traitor!" he raged, "Worthless Scum! Come Back, Come Back and tell me what I want to know!"
"Rodolphus, calm down," said the cruel female voice soothingly, "She did herself justice, the blood traitor, and besides, there are others who might know about our master's whereabouts, the Longbottoms are not far from here."
"Very well," said Rodolphus still sounding furious.
"What of the baby, Rodolphus?" said the rough male voice.
There was silence then Rodolphus said softy, "Tallon Farmoon is the byproduct of a mudblood and a blood traitor, Rabastan. His very existence shames our master and our cause. We shall have some fun with him before killing him." Helpless, still unable to see what was happening because of the blinding agony in his eyes, Tallon waited in terror, waited for something to happen, "Pingeramortis!"
Without warning pain exploded in Tallon's right arm, pain so powerful that it drowned out the pain in his eyes. It was unimaginable, unendurable, positively paralyzing agony. He was screaming louder than he had screamed all night. It felt as if the skin on his right arm was being melted, mutated, altered in ways that human skin was never meant to be. Even though already blinded, everything around Tallon was whiting out. The world seemed to be dissolving into nothingness, and the screaming voice was changing, it sounded as if it was growing older and at the same time it was getting closer, more familiar. Tallon could hear the screaming coming out his own mouth. He sat bolt upright still screaming. But then he stopped and opened his eyes. Although the room was very dark he could see that he was sitting upright in bed in the middle of a fairly small room. He closed his eyes again and took a deep steadying breath. He had only been dreaming, it wasn't real.
Or at least, just now it had been a dream. What he was dreaming did indeed happen. Ten years ago, four Death Eaters had come to his house, Rodolphus Lestrange and his brother Rabastan Lestrange, Rodolphus's wife Bellatrix and Barty Crouch Jr. They had come to Tallon's house believing that his parents had information regarding the whereabouts of their master, Lord Voldemort. Mere months before that, Voldemort had been vanquished by the most unlikely person in the world. A one year old baby by the name of Harry Potter. Voldemort had tried to kill Potter but the curse rebounded off him and back at Voldemort and there after, Voldemort was defeated and vanished. Harry Potter survived with nothing but a lightning shaped scar on his forehead and had gone to live with his aunt and uncle, who were supposedly muggles.
But some of his Death Eaters had tried to find Voldemort and restore him to power. And after deciding that Tallon's parents didn't have any information about Voldemort after all, Rodolphus Lestrange had killed his father, Alex Farmoon, with the "Avada Kedavra" curse. His mother, Sarah Farmoon, had then taken her own life with a tiny, poisonous ball that she swallowed. Tallon had wondered a lot why she did that. He settled often on the idea that she had killed herself to prevent the Death Eaters from getting any information from her as it was the only explanation he could think of. And he reasoned that he had felt his mother looking at him in the last moments of her life as if in reassurance that everything would be alright.
Rodolphus had then cast a scar on Tallon's right arm and it was the memory of this that had awoken him. He didn't remember very much about what happened after that. What he knew had been told to him after the whole thing was over. Right after Rodolphus had finished giving Tallon the tattoo, the Aurors had shown up and drove away the Death Eaters but they were unable to capture them. The house was nearly destroyed in the struggle. He had been also told that it was only after the Death Eaters had tortured the Longbottoms into insanity, a week later, that they were caught and sentenced to life in Azkaban.
Tallon had been taken to St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries to have the scar Rodolphus gave him examined. As he was only a year old at the time, he didn't understand what was happening when they had set him down on a soft table and poked painfully at his scar. And it wasn't until he was seven did the Auror called Mad-eye Moody explain to him fully everything that had happened on and following the night his parents died. For he was one of the Aurors that had drove the Death Eaters away from his house.
His scar was a receptor of pain, Moody told him. The healers at St. Mungo's concluded that whenever the Dark Mark was near him the scar on his arm would hurt. How badly and what exactly it would feel like they could not know. They also said that the skin would never heal fully and the curse on it would never wear off entirely.
Tallon never had any other vivid recollections of his parents, except for one. He must have been an infant because he couldn't remember very much about it. All he remembered was his parents' faces, smiling as they held him close to them. His mother with long flaming red hair, a short nose, a full-lipped mouth and deep gray eyes and his father, with messy dark brown hair, pale blue eyes and a prominent chin, nose and ears
Tallon got out of his bed and went to the oil lamp, turned the gas knob and slowly orange light flooded over the room illuminating it. The room was almost perfectly square shaped. The bed was placed opposite a wall, facing the door. On each of the other opposite walls was a desk scattered with old books and slips of parchment on one of the walls and a tall, hansom, wooden wardrobe on the other. On each side of the wall against which the back of the bed was propped, there was a small window looking out onto the countryside. Tallon went over to the mirror which was on the side of the wardrobe closer to his bed and examined his own reflection.
Tallon Farmoon's overall appearance is slightly alarming at first glance, perhaps because of the fact that he had a number of very distinguishing features. He was slightly shorter than average for eleven years old and quite skinny but lean and sleekly built. He had long arms and legs with somewhat bony fingers. He could see the scar on his right arm glinting eerily half in shadow from the light of the lamp. It was green and shaped like a human skull with a snake protruding out of its mouth like an obscene tongue. Tallon's faced looked like an exact half and half mixture of his parents. His large ears and chin were the image of his father's but his mouth was just like his mother's and his nose looked like an exact middle between his parents'. He had a thick, flat-laying sprawl of very dark, untidy brown hair but if he looked closely he could see a slight underlying tint of red among the near-blackness. He had eyebrows that matched his hair perfectly. His eyes were his most distinguishing feature. They were blue like the sky on a bright summer's day but they had an oddly shinning crystal like quality about them. They looked like blue stained diamonds, tiny blue stained glass windows stuck in his eyes. Tallon stood there gazing into the reflection of his own eyes reminiscing about how they had come to be like that.
On the night Rodolphus and the Death Eaters came to his house, a window was shattered in the commotion and very tiny shards of glass had flown into his eyes. The healers at St. Mungo's had tried to remove the shards by magic but were unsuccessful saying that there was no way to remove them without doing permanent catastrophic damage to his eyes. They had said that there was a chance that they might just come out by themselves, although they couldn't see how that might happen. Tallon had been blinded for three and a half years after the night the shards of glass flew into his eyes. But, eventually the pain wore off and when he regained his sight, he discovered after a few weeks of experimenting, that if he concentrated hard enough, he could position the shards of glass within his own eyes so that they enhanced his vision. He could magnify his sight to various degrees and he was in general more sensitive to light and had an easier time seeing in the dark than most people. This affect worked in reverse though too, any light that came directly at his eyes was intensified by the glass shards so it caused him more pain in his eyes than ordinary people.
A loud bell sounded somewhere in the distance. Tallon opened his wardrobe, changed out of his pajamas and into a pair of baggy navy jeans and a red shirt, opened a small hidden compartment on the back of the wardrobe and pulled out his most prized possession. A necklace with a two inch baby dragon tooth pendant. It had belonged to his father and was recovered from the wreckage of his house after the Death Eaters had fled. Moody had passed it on to him when he told Tallon exactly what had happened that night. Tallon placed the pendant around his neck and made for the door of his room.