Tempus Edax Rerum
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Chapter 1: Hinc Illae Lacrimae
Only the hushed moans and groans could be heard. The overpowering stench of the damp walls blanketed the senses of the forlorn and inconsolable. A lonesome young man crouched in the corner of his chamber. He did not shake with sobs. He did not recoil in fear. In fact, he seemed completely impervious to his surroundings. When one has no emotion, there is nothing to be taken away. After all, he was just waiting. Waiting for the future he knew could never be. After all, they were dead. He knew he had as good as killed them. His only family.
The locks clinked softly, unfastening themselves once more. Two entered the room. He was unsure if it could be happening now. He had no idea how long a decision could take. After all, it could still be the same day as when everything happened. Everything had seemed to stretch on for a millennia – all concept of time was completely and irreversibly fucked. But whatever the day, two of them had managed to make him feel more pitiful and alone than he yet had been. Their cloaks grazed the floor as they glided into the gloomy cell. His lone, scraggly head of black hair looked up in slight surprise before what little color lingered in his face quickly left it. A pungent hand of a long dead creature emerged from a sleeve and reached for him where he remained on the floor. His eyes did not widen in horror as his fate was revealed. It could only be expected. All had already been lost.
An unearthly scream cut through the air, unrepressed. The man never registered this anguished cry as his own. It rang out and reverberated, echoing throughout the cell. No one answered his desperation. Any others near were lost for the same reasons, ensnared forevermore in the trappings of their minds, unseeing and uncomprehending. He was feeble and weak. He held absolutely no concern for himself anymore. There was so little left they could take from him. He had acknowledged his imminent departure the moment the two had entered the cell. They were two of the most evil things to inhabit this Earth, two monsters of despair. Empty and soulless, they are deprived of any essence of mercy or compassion. They exist only in the filthiest and darkest pits of Hell.
He kneeled under these creatures. What one might think was just an abyss hidden under the hood of that cloak was suddenly revealed – a diseased, shapeless skull unmasked, very much less than human, with rotting flesh hanging from the gaps that might have been features, and a mouth, that mouth, to which nothing could ever compare. The shapeless hole that precedes the worst of fates.
Time slowed. The man on the floor had his head forced back, and for a long moment, he stared at this demon. Everything moved as though through water, thick and drawn out, delaying the apparent and inevitable. The mouths met in a Kiss, the Kiss of Death. Everything so slow. The man's once bright eyes were deprived of light.
Time stopped.
Sirius Black awoke screaming.