A/N: This is my first proper fanfiction here, so if anyone who takes the time to read this could take another minute or two to write me a review and help me improve, that would be more than appreciated. I'm mainly writing this to get some practice in with short stories and concise writing before I start out properly on my novel project, so any help with improving my writing style would be met with open arms. I'm more than willing to offer help in return.
Next, some of the material in this story is based off of The Kings Raven's World of Darkness fansplat Leviathan: the Tempest and if you recognise anything from there, it's not mine. Mind you, I am taking some liberties with it, so don't expect it to be identical (for one, it won't be quite as grimdark).
This work had not been betaed, although I have done my best to pick up any spelling and grammar errors.
Finally, I own neither Leviathan nor Harry Potter. If I owned the former, I would be working on it instead of my own fansplat and if I owned the latter, this would not be fanfiction. Logic.
Harry Potter had always loved water.
While his parents were still alive, they took him weekly to the swimming centre in the next town over from their cottage at Godric's Hollow and watched him splash around in the pool, seemingly more at home in the water than out of it. They developed a suspicion that he have an extremely strong magical affinity to water, but had no opportunity to find the answer, considering their murder within their own home only a scant few weeks after Lily Potter formulated her theory.
Later, after the wand of the Dark Lord Voldemort was discovered in the Potters' nursery (nestled atop a pile of stinking seaweed on the saltwater-flooded floor in front of his crib) and the scar in the shape of a lightning bolt on his head caused him to be touted as the hero of the wizarding world, his foster family, the Dursleys, took him swimming with their own son. They did this more out of fear that one of the neighbours would hear him crying while there were no adults in the house, but they took him nonetheless.
They did not do it again. This was because within a minute of climbing into the pool in his boxers – the Dursleys not wanting to spend good money on swimming nappies or trunks – he was giggling merrily and joyfully splashing around, while the water swirled around him like a playful puppy. They snatched him from the water and never returned to that pool again. They thanked their lucky stars that they had gone a couple of towns over and prayed that the gossip did not spread to Little Whinging.
Denied the chance to swim, the young Harry made the most of whatever contact with water that he could, luxuriating in the short baths and showers that his aunt gave him every couple of weeks when he began to smell too much.
When he was old enough – by the Dursleys' reckoning of five years old – to work in the garden, he looked forwards to the days when the sky was overcast and wept its rainy tears upon him, cooling him and running over his skin beneath his baggy, second hand clothes. Sometimes, when he had some time when he was neither gardening not cleaning nor cooking not doing whatever miscellaneous chore his relatives devised, he would sit outside in the rain and look up into the curtains of falling droplets. Occasionally, he would see patterns or shapes in the rain, patterns which made him think of great sinuous creatures, curling and writhing in the air. Then he would blink and they would be gone, but the feeling remained. A feeling of being regarded and approved of, as if he had accomplished something by seeing them.
Harry wondered if that was what having parents felt like.
Magic was difficult for Harry. It wasn't so much that it was difficult to use, just difficult to be around. It was like a discordant sound, a warped bell ringing in his ears or like a too-bright light. He didn't like the feel of it, but it was better than the hateful stares and slaps he got from the Dursleys and the big man, Hagrid, was nice and liked him and brought him a birthday cake, so he went with him through the barrier at the back of the run-down Leaky Cauldron and followed him into Diagon Alley.
The goblins at Gringotts Bank had been strange and had looked at him strangely as well, as if they could see something in him that set him apart from the others in the great marble hall of the bank. He was glad when they went underground, partly because there were no more goblins – except Griphook – to stare at him and partly because the magic down here was different, somehow. It was bigger, slower and resounded in his bones like a great, throbbing heartbeat. Instead of giving him a headache with its not-quite-brightness, it comforted him with an enveloping warmth and darkness, like a great blanket. He hardly even registered Hagrid stopping the cart to take a small item from an otherwise empty vault and only snapped out of his comforted stupor to marvel at the piles of gold in his trust vault and to gather up a few handfuls of the enormous coins to put in the pouch that Griphook handed him with a sharp-toothed smile.
The wizard in the wand shop, Ollivander, was quite strange, even by what Harry had seen of wizards so far. He pottered around his shop, taking one wand after another, thrusting them into Harry's hands, only to tear them away a second later, muttering under his breath about 'awkward children' and 'core-length-phlogiston channel differentials'. Eventually, he reverently placed a wand which he declared to be 11 inches, made of holly and with a core of phoenix feather in the boy's hand, before looking utterly mystified when it twisted itself up and cracked the moment it touched his skin, as if it was wringing itself out.
Eventually, he settled Harry with a 7 inch wand of intertwined ivy and sequoia wood. He explained that the core of the wand was one of the heartstrings of an aspidochelone, an enormous shelled whale known for tricking sailors into landing upon its back and then drowning them. He warned that the wand was, although powerful, likely to be stubborn and opinionated, before charging the young wizard 10 Galleons for the wand and the rare materials used in its construction. The wand felt good in his hand, like it belonged there. He left Ollivander's shop with the old wandmaker's last pronouncement ringing in his ears.
"I think that you will accomplish great things, Mr. Potter. Although I'm not so sure that you'll need my wares to do so."
After enduring a last few weeks with the Dursleys and a bit of a fiasco trying to find the entrance to Platform 9 ¾ (he eventually located it by listening to the off-note that the magic of the barrier struck in his head), Harry boarded the Hogwarts Express, a train pulled by a garishly red steam locomotive. He arrived at the castle some hours later, having had the peace and quiet of his claimed compartment violated by over a dozen people. First, a redhead named Ron Weasley had barged in and demanded to see his scar, before being laughed out by a platinum-blond who proclaimed himself to be Draco Malfoy, a Personage Of Quality. He eventually left the compartment after being ignored in favour of watching the rain outside, as did his two minions, Crabbe and Goyle, apparently.
After being led away from Hogsmeade Station by the same Hagrid who had helped him around Diagon Alley, Harry was delighted to learn that Hogwarts was situated next to a lake, unimaginatively called the Black Lake. He wondered if students were allowed to swim in it.
The castle itself was at once beautiful and horrible to Harry. It looked magnificent, its many lighted windows picking it out against the dark sky. It stood like the spiked crown of some entombed giant-king, a millennial guardian over the lands surrounding it and the lake in its shadow. To his newly-dubbed 'magic-sense', though, the castle was horrific, even from just at the door. It seemed to sing in a thousand discordant tones, each loud enough to rattle his bones and together making him want to cover his ears to block it out, although he knew that that would do nothing to help. He only hoped that he would become accustomed to it, as he had to the magic of his school things. He hoped it happened soon.
The Sorting Ceremony which so many of the other first years seemed to be fretting over turned out to consist of putting a talking hat on one's head and letting it shout out what house you were going to be in. After a small hiccup during which the hat commented that the inside of his head was quite uncomfortable for it, it sorted Harry into Gryffindor House, the house of the brave and the reckless. Also the house where his parents went, if the ha was to be believed.
Between learning to turn beetles into buttons and levitate feathers, the at once suspicious and adoring stares of the rest of the student population and viciously difficult Potions homework, time passed swiftly at Hogwarts. The first major incident happened on the night of Halloween, when a troll appeared in the school, announced by the stuttering Defence Against the Dark Arts professor, Quirinus Quirrel. Harry lived up to his House, going to fetch the bookish Hermione Granger who had not come to the Halloween feast after Ron Weasley's hurtful words to her leaving Charms. Unfortunately, it turned out that the troll was in fact on the second floor, not in the dungeons where Professor Quirrel had claimed it to be. It had cornered Hermione in a bathroom and, in desperation to stop it, Harry had pointed his wand at it and shouted the first thing which came to mind.
To anyone else, the syllables would have been sibilant and unpleasant to hear and the magic that erupted from his wand and enveloped the troll would have been like swamp-filth and broken glass on the skin, entwined with unfathomable cold and awful pressure. To Harry, it just felt right, as if this was the magic he should have been using all along. It burrowed into the troll's body like writhing worms or the pseudopodia of an amoeba, uncaring for the troll's magically-resistant skin. It permeated its flesh, turning its blood to putrid seawater and filling its lungs with filth and alien bacteria. It collapsed, coughing up water and slime. Harry grabbed Hermione's hand and ran back to Gryffindor Tower, tasting blood in his mouth. He never realised that it was from his own teeth, which had become needle-like and pointed, puncturing his gums. By the time he reached his dorm, they had receded again, leaving only ordinary, human, teeth in his mouth.
Following the incident with the troll, Harry struck up a firm friendship with Hermione. The two formerly-lonely children found solace in one another's company, even if Hermione sometimes irritated him with her insistence upon the following of rules and excessive study time and him her with his obsessive love of water. The teachers concluded that the troll must have got on the bad end of one of the castle's many wards and protections, for after all, what child could cast a spell powerful enough to kill a full-grown mountain troll?
The rest of the year passed mostly without incident. Hagrid's hut burnt down at one point and there were rumours that it was a baby dragon that started the fire. Professor Quirell vanished only a few weeks before the end of the year. Nothing was ever heard of him again.
At first, the summer between Harry's first and second years at Hogwarts was excellent for Harry. Although the Dursleys still made him do the chores around the house, he now had a room of his own and a way to keep them from doing anything too outrageous, in the form of a threat of magic. It did not matter that he could not actually follow through with his threats, but the Dursleys did not know about the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery.
Unfortunately, the state of affairs did not last. Only a few weeks into the summer, during an important business meeting for his uncle, a small, wrinkled creature wearing a soiled pillowcase and with long ears, drooping ears popped into existence in his bedroom. It asserted that its name was Dobby and that it was a house elf. It also made clear – between banging its head on the walls and wailing about the 'Great Harry Potter – that Harry was not to return to Hogwarts, because terrible danger was brewing there. Naturally, he refused. The wretched elf then got it into his head to expose Harry's deception of his relatives by hovering the expensive dessert that Petunia had made for the guests over to them and then exploding it in their faces. This would have been enough of a problem by itself but the true damage was done later, when a letter from the Department of Magical Law Enforcement arrived and exposed the fact that one deliberate act of magic by Harry would see him expelled from Hogwarts and his wand broken.
A viciously joyful smile spread across the young wizard's uncle Vernon's face at this. He had sent Harry to his room and installed bars on the window and locks and a cat flap in the door. The rest of the summer was spent in abject misery, as he was trapped in his room, allowed out only to go to the toilet once a day and fed only on canned food pushed through the cat flap. Unable to use magic to escape or get a message out to Hermione for help, Harry made the best of his situation. He feverishly studied the school books that his uncle had left him with, becoming intimately familiar with theories of magic, courtesy of Adalbert Waffling and the myriad creatures that inhabited the magical world, thanks to Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. He memorised the different potions and ingredients detailed in One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi and Magical Draughts and Potions. By the time he was eventually released by the ill-tempered potions professor who came to investigate his conspicuous absence at the Welcoming Feast, Harry Potter was well-read beyond all but the most studious of Ravenclaws his age.
On his return to Hogwarts – and the deathly worried Hermione – Harry was quite different to how he had been a year previously. He spent hours at a time on the weekends swimming in the Black Lake, having finally secured permission from his head of house, Minerva McGonagall. At first he wove warming charms around himself, but he quickly discovered that the cold of the lake did not seem to bother him as it did others. He was more withdrawn with all but his closest friends (Hermione being the only individual belonging to that particular denomination) and threw himself into his studies. He discovered, through long conversations and practice with the diminutive charms teacher, Flitwick, that he had a flair and talent for enchantment that was rarely seen. He also began to see an improvement in his transfiguration abilities. The process of changing matter, warping it into a new shape, simply seemed to come easily to him. The thing that bothered Harry the most in the new school year was the new DADA teacher, one Gilderoy Lockhart. The man was a fraud, it was plain to see. Even his devout fans among the students began to doubt him after a few weeks of being taught by him.
On Halloween, again, the peaceful rhythms of his year were interrupted. The caretaker's cat, Mrs. Norris, was found petrified beneath a bloody message declaring THE CHAMBER HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR BEWARE. Suspicion ran rampant throughout the school, rumours and accusations spreading and burning themselves out like wildfires. It was professor Snape said some, before they were drowned out by those who claimed that Slytherin's ghost had returned and was acting through his monster to complete the eradication of muggleborns within the school.
Harry and Hermione largely ignored the turmoil over the message, preferring to investigate Harry's new talents, as well as his newfound ability to speak in parseltongue, the language of snakes, and to the merpeople which lived in the depths of the Black Lake. They were largely untouched by the crisis. Until another student was petrified. And then another. The two friends began researching creatures capable of petrification, but only as an idle hobby of sorts.
That lasted until Hermione was petrified.
With the loss of his friend, something awoke within the young wizard. A terrible determination overcame him and he spent nearly all of his time attempting to discover the identity of the creature. With the eventual realisation of the creature's nature as a basilisk and the location of the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets – gleaned from interrogating the ghosts which roamed the castle and one Moaning Myrtle in particular – he prepared to bring Hell down upon the monster with a hatred rarely found in adults twice his age. He went down the hole beneath the sink with a grim expression on his face and his wand clutched tightly in his hand. In his chest he could feel something cold and horrible where he imagined his heart would be. It wasn't courage, but the cold hatred and diamond-hard will would do.
After making his way through first a cavern full of bones and an enormous snakeskin and then, after going through an immense door inlaid with reliefs depicting an enormous pair of entwined serpents, he arrived in a long hall flanked by great stone snakes leading towards an enormous depiction of what he assumed was Slytherin himself set into the wall. He could – somehow – smell the thing behind the wall, curled up behind the mouth, and called out to it in parseltongue, taunting it with its cowardice and failure to kill even a single muggleborn in the school above. It hissed angrily and the mouth of the statue opened, issuing forth a green-black serpent twice as long as the lorries that he had seen driving past Privet Drive that summer. He saw nothing of its size, though, nor its wicked fangs or its killing eyes. He saw only the monster that had hurt his friend – his only friend. The cold thing where his heart had been seemed to open like some kind of macabre flower and something came out.
Harry was never able to remember the next few minutes except in vague flashes. Images of claws and savage teeth biting into the basilisk's flesh. Venomous blood spraying into eyes that saw the serpent from dozens of angles. Water rising and thrusting itself down the snake's throat. Eyes and teeth and claws and poison and water woven together in a horrific symphony of destruction that left the basilisk a savaged corpse on the stone of the Chamber's floor and Harry himself exhausted and wounded beside it, his blood mingling with that of the monster that he slew.
When he woke again, Harry felt almost distanced from his blood-soaked body, as if he stood outside himself. He saw his body stand up and walk its way back through the bone-strewn cavern. He saw his hands twist into wicked claws and bite into the cold-smooth stone of the chute that lead down into the Chamber as he climbed his way up to the school proper. He seemed to float beside himself like a ghost as he climbed his way back to the showers on the third floor, cleaned the blood off and then returned to Gryffindor Tower, a walking corpse in all but name. He felt nothing. The frigid anger and all-consuming hate that he had felt for the monster that had petrified his friend was gone. All that was left was a void where it had been, a black immensity like the abyssal plain at the bottom of the ocean. For all that he had defeated the monster and prevented any more petrifications, it wouldn't help Hermione. All he could do was wait for her to wake. Having exacted his revenge, he felt… empty. Useless.
It was all that he could do to tear himself away from her bedside in the hospital wing to do his homework or go to class. When she finally woke, with help from a mandrake draught prepared by Professor Snape, he was anxiously waiting for her. He would forever deny it afterwards, but he shed tears of joy when her body relaxed from the unnatural stiffness of petrification and her eyes opened again. He could almost have said that he was perfectly happy, were it not for the cold, alien thing that still resided where his heart should be.
When Harry returned to the Dursleys that summer, he was not alone. After the last summer, he had asked Dumbledore if he could stay somewhere - anywhere - else, enduring the burning, stinging touch of the man's magic. All that it achieved was to make Dumbledore's customary eye-sparkle turn into something altogether more unpleasant, as if he was remembering something terrible, and a point-blank refusal to consider it. With no other options, after McGonagall ignored his requests as well, citing Dumbledore's ineffable wisdom, Harry went to Professor Snape, hoping that he, as the only one who had actually seen what the Dursleys had done (and even now the thought of that summer trapped in his room made the thing in his chest swirl in hatred), he might help.
It was a remote hope, but one that was fulfilled, albeit accompanied by a cavalcade of snarky comments and biting remarks. Snape - who Petunia seemed to recognise, for some reason - seemed to take great pleasure in putting the fear of God into the Dursleys, telling them that he had cast a charm on the house which would alert him to any abuse or mistreatment of Harry at their hands. He, in turn, would alert the Ministry of Magic, who he had made clear would be more than eager to creatively punish anyone who harmed their savior.
Luckily, it seemed to work, and Harry spent a relatively pleasant summer at 4 privet Drive, only having to endure chores and the spectacularly unoriginal insults of the younger Dursley, Dudley. He discovered that he was able, with a great deal of concentration, to change parts of his body, manifesting claws, a number of extra eyes (which was incredibly confusing), a distended jaw full of vicious teeth and, to his delight, a set of gills at one point. He discovered that it was easier to do when he was immersed in water - like when he managed to steal a short bath - and, more unfortunately, that it tended to work on its own when he was under stress or high emotion, especially emotions like anger.
Like he was now. Vernon's horrible dog-breeding sister, who Harry knew only as Marge, had come over for the weekend and the whole family was currently sitting at the table in the Dursley's dining room, nodding along with her as she casually insulted him and his family. Harry was gritting his teeth, holding back the cold thing inside that wanted nothing more than to come out and tear her limb from limb. He wanted to as well, and that scared him. He could imagine it clearly, how it would feel, for her skin and muscle to part beneath his claws, for her bones to snap. He could almost taste the scent of her blood in the air. He would not let it out, though, no matter how much he wanted to. Then he would be no better than the monster that killed his parents, no better than a beast. It was hard though. He had to excuse himself to go to the bathroom when he felt his teeth sharpening into vicious points and it took him a few minutes to get control of himself again. As he walked back towards the dining room, though, he heard Marge speaking again through the door.
"It's one of the basic rules of breeding." she said, between gulps of wine and stabbing her finger at the table. "You see it all the time with dogs. If there's something wrong with the bitch, there'll be something wrong with the pup-" At that moment, Harry lost the will to hold back entirely. She was comparing his mother, who had given her life for him, to a dog. How dare she!
He barely noticed that he was changing until he reached out a clawed, misshapen and elongated hand towards the door. The skin was mottled in shades of grey and black, with bony plates forming before his eyes. His vision split and now he saw door from six angles at once. As well as his ordinary vision, he could see the shapes of the Dursleys through the thin, plasterboard wall. He grew in height, his head now brushing the ceiling and his clothes straining at the seams. He felt his jaw and face lengthen to accommodate a full set of razored fangs. The pipes in the walls rattled and he could feel the water there. He knew that if he wanted, he could call it to him and set it on them, thrust it down their throats and into their lungs. The thing in his chest seemed to spread and take root, ensnaring his mind with the thought of taking vengeance upon Marge for what she had said. After all, she had insulted him and his kin. She deserved nothing but DEATH-
No.
A moment before wrenching the door open and unleashing the monster on the Dursleys, Harry pulled himself and was horrified at what he was thinking and what he had become. He fled up the stairs to his room and slammed the door behind him. His throat felt choked, but no tears fell from his six lidless eyes. He drew digitigrade legs up to his chin and wrapped misshapen arms around them. Slowly, ever so slowly, his teeth retreated back into his gums. The strange, pale spectres of things through walls vanished as the eyes that saw them closed once more. Finally, hot tears began to fall, punctuated by quiet, body-wracking sobs. He fell asleep there, against the wall, staining his second-hand clothes with the salt of his tears. And he knew not whether he wept for what he had almost done, or for not doing it.
When Harry woke the next day, he made a decision, there in the darkness before the sun rose and shone in through his window. He decided that he would not return. That he would find somewhere else to go, anywhere but here. He did not know whether he did it for the sake of the Dursleys, that they might not die at his hands, or to save himself the guilt, but he decided. He pulled up the floorboard under which he stowed the few belongings that he had managed to smuggle up and pulled out the empty pillowcase that they were kept in. He crept down the stairs and went to the cupboard beneath them, where his school trunk had been stowed. With a moment of concentration, he shifted, just enough to break the lock on the door when he pulled it open. He felt the cold thing inside him rear up in anger, rebelling at the thought of leaving the Dursleys unpunished but he wrestled it back down. He pulled out his trunk, absently noting that it seemed so much easier to carry it like this, before dragging it to the front door, turning the key that had been left in the lock and leaving the house.
He took the Knight Bus to Diagon Alley, having learned of it from Snape the year before, as apparently Snape disliked Apparition and portkeys with a fiery passion. He managed to persuade the innkeeper at the Leaky Cauldron to let him stay in one of the rooms there and to keep quiet about his presence. The rest of the summer was probably the most enjoyable that Harry had ever had as, after talking to the goblins who managed his accounts, he discovered that the money in his trust vault was not, in fact, all he had for his school years at Hogwarts but was in fact refilled annually from the Potter family vault, which apparently had quite impressive reserves of money thanks to some wise investments by his parents. With his newfound financial security, Harry was more than happy to explore the shops in and around Diagon Alley, especially the various bookshops . He had learnt from the previous summer that knowledge, while not the same thing as power exactly, it certainly helped, and he was determined not to be weak again, never to be at the mercy of another, not the thing inside him, not his relatives and not even Voldemort, if he could help it.
And so it was, that two weeks into his stay at the Leaky Cauldron, Harry Potter ventured into the seedier side-street of Knockturn Alley under a glamour, tempted by both the promise of books and tomes with magic that he could use to improve himself and by the 'scent' of a watery, cold and comforting power. The buildings on either side of the alley were tall and seemed to lean out over the filthy cobbles below, blocking out the light of the sun. The other occupants of the alley seemed to scuttle furtively past like crabs at the bottom of the sea, clutching unidentifiable bundles to their chests underneath voluminous cloaks that permitted only the sight of a crooked nose here or a too-long, bony hand there. The shops were just as mysterious, with only a few having actual names attached, while the rest seemed to get by on people already knowing what they sold.
Harry followed the 'scent' of the familiar power to a small, wood-fronted building squashed between a large pawn shop called Borgin & Burkes and a much taller structure painted in lurid pinks and purples. Easing the door open and wincing at its loud creeeeak, Harry saw that the shop was filled from floor to ceiling with books. Books towering like the trunks of dead trees, still reaching for the light, peeking out of shelves like mushrooms and even taking the place of floor tiles in some places. The air was filled with the smell of old paper and the faint corruption of mould. The scent of whatever had brought him here was strong, though, and directed Harry to one of the tallest shelves at the back. He pulled down the tomes of the pile with an almost manic energy, desperate to see what had drawn him.
He knew, when his fingers touched the strangely smooth leather of the thin tome, that this was what he was looking for. It seemed to just fit in his hands, despite the strange, almost sharp feeling of the cover and the way that just looking at it seemed to twist the mind, like looking at an optical illusion. He was just about to open it to have a look inside when a hand fell onto his shoulder. He whirled around to see who it was.
Behind him stood a tall, bald man, his craggy face deeply incised with scars and wrinkles in equal measure. He looked like an amateur sculptor had tried to sculpt the embodiment of decrepitude. His other hand lay on a twisted and gnarled cane and it was obvious the amount of weight that he was putting on it. "You want that one? I warn you, there's some ugly magics on it," he said, before breaking into a coughing fit. "I don't know why you'd want it anyway, no one's ever been able to work out what it says." Harry nodded silently, a bit intimidated by the man. "Well, if you're sure, that'll be seven galleons. And don't say I didn't warn you."
Harry counted out the coins from his purse before making a hasty retreat from the shop, clutching his prize to his chest. He quickly made his way back to his room at the Leaky Cauldron, dodging what he suspected was a hag along the way. He locked his door and flung himself down on the small bed and opened the book. For a moment, the first page seemed to be covered in strange, impossible symbols, square triangles and round squares torturing his eyesight before they seemed to resolve into a legible, if spidery, hand.
To my kin, I leave this book and the ways, secrets and histories of our kind within, it read.
I know that your life has been a lonely one and that you, like myself, have no parents to guide you. You too might one day learn the way by which I know of this, but for the moment know that you are heir to a legacy that originated in the days before man had even climbed down from the trees. Perhaps it even predates the very Earth itself, but know this: you are Leviathan and of the bloodline of the seven Progenitors. You might embrace your heritage or flee it, but you cannot deny it. We both are of the Wicked Tribe, but what I have made and you will make of that is in our hands.
I will waste no words: we are, in many ways, monsters. But we are as much god as monster and as much man as god. Our road is a hard one, for we do not belong in this world, but if you tread it well and with resolve, you might yet fend off the madness of godhood and of beasthood and live to achieve that which I have seen you might.
I leave you the knowledge of my life, that you might learn from my mistakes.
- Alden Malok