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Chapter 1- When you have just one path
Prologue
Harry Potter died one afternoon of winter war. Surrounded by red snow, frozen mud, and suffering.
Ten years had been born and died from that day, when the long darkness came. And even today, still, the events are remembered. Echoes that are forbidden to be speak about aloud.
Yet, they are whispered in the darkness of the night, when there is nothing to cling to beyond the hunger that bites your stomach, and the cold that makes your meat shiver. They are whispered in grimy alleys, and crowded sooty factories.
"The icon of light is dead. Press your lips and resists in silence, because nobody will come to end the suffering."
This is the mantra that all children of the new regime learn, almost suckled from their mothers' breasts.
A decade has passed since then. Ten years is a long time, and it has transformed the wizarding world into a community harassed by poverty, tyranny, taxes, and martial law. When food is scarce, morality becomes a good too expensive to maintain. Theft, prostitution, murder ... have become the daily bread, of every grimy fateful day.
And yet, the wizards that exist in misery, clawing for a piece of something to put in their mouths, console themselves with what little they have.
The vision of a muggle crawling pathetically behind his master, is enough to remind them that their fate could be worse. Creatures like animals, less than slaves. Ancient humans, crawl after their masters with their heads down, and shoulders slumped. Decimated to be no more numerous than wizards themselves, they have been molded in the flesh that sustains the regime on their backs. Labor for sale, for those who can afford it.
And who has the wealth to buy their own share of skin?
Death Eaters.
Sanguinary supporters of the regime. The bones of its structure, and its most violent whip.
Men and women who can be seen patrolling on brooms, hidden inside of expensive horse carriages, palanquins and elegant cars. Always high, icy, rich and cruel. Every day more numerous, and more powerful.
They've taken everything.
They have it all.
No wonder, then, that so many young men and women, are willing to join their ranks.
When the prize is to escape hunger, and enter the select circle of banquets, parties, meetings, plays, concerts, recitals ... that such admission asks the sacrifice of your own soul, begins to not seem so expensive.
No, it is not uncommon to see one renounce his humanity, and surrender to servitude with the Dark Lord.
However, these new recruits will never reach true power, not any political position. Those are for the inner circle. The wealthy elite, heavily militarized, and with white hand to exercise "justice".
The new nobility.
Formed by the most loyal, most powerful, purest families. Those with the fickle favor of Lord Voldemort. With his approval, and under his orders, this elite controls the ministry, the schools, all institutions. All decisions are theirs.
But the really powerful, true thoroughbreds of this new world, their favorites. That family considered royalty itself;
Are the Malfoys.
Perhaps for this reason, his betrayal, was even more surprising.
The betrayal of the only son of the family.
The betrayal of Draco Malfoy.
oOo
Chapter 1- When you have just one path
It was a night of blizzard, and fog tinted silver by moonlight.
Hogwarts could be seen from afar, like a lighthouse made of dozens of windows, spilling the warm golden light of fireplaces and torches, into the night. But the heat they gave did not go far, and it didn't reach the fields around the old school, where the spectral brightness of the moon, and the huge, pale snowflakes, falling from the clouds like ghosts, were all there was.
The thick white crust, more ice than snow, covering land and stunted leafless trees, had the depth of several years of uninterrupted winter, to hide the stones and roots, that could become hidden traps.
Although tonight, no one seemed ready to fall into them.
It was quiet, even the air wasn't moving. Even the lake in the distance, looked like an inert and rigid thing, stuck under an ice sheet meters deep.
Only someone who put special attention, would have detected a slightly darker than the night around him, black silhouette.
A man, hidden among the craggy rocks of the hillside, and the folds of his thick coat, who didn't look away from the path that ran parallel to the dark forest; a squiggly line, almost indistinguishable in the snow, no one used.
The man knew it was quite possible he was there wasting time, curled up in the bitter cold, waiting for the appearance of someone who could not come.
But his instinct said, and still they had not failed him in his many years of life, that soon, his prey, without other way to the last bastion of the light, would have to go through the twisting path, just below his position.
If he had escaped the first trap in Malfoy Manor, that was.
But to trust that someone like him, that had successfully spied the dark Lord and survived all these years, without raising suspicion, didn't manage to escape from between the teeth of the initial stocks, it would be stupid.
And if he had fled, the blond man, would come to warn the Order, of the spy in their own ranks.
"Of me." - The curve of his lips twisted in a gesture halfway between a scornful smile, and a grimace.
And his gaze drifted down the road, following a small movement beyond the line of twisted, thorny trees, as infery fingers emerging from the ground, that marked the edge of the dark forest.
Surely it was only some snow falling too laden branches ... But despite everything, he could not contain the beginning of a shudder.
The inside of the forest could only be guessed, darkness all that could be seen. Although he did not need to see, to know, as everyone knew, that the darkness hid the last redoubt of magical creatures.
No one who had ventured into its depths after the start of the war, had returned alive. His remains, devoured by who knew what creatures, appeared later at the forest's borders, unrecognizable except for the remaining clothes… if there were any remainings at all.
Regardless of their origin, be them Death Eaters or members of the light. The result was always the same.
The popular belief said that at the beginning of the war, when the magical creatures were being massively hunted by both sides (in their need for spells and potions ingredients) they, diminished and terrified, had desperately sought shelter.
And the dark forest, a wild place, owned by atavistic magic since immemorial time, had opened its arms and offered protection. Closed his embrace around them, and since then, never opened it again.
Now the place vibrated by the magic of its inhabitants, every tree, every bush, every flower, was a fierce guardian, and a murderer.
He had heard stories of thorns sprung from bushes that drained the blood of their victims, trees whose roots trapped limbs and ground them to pulp and bone splinters. Common flowers, made poisonous.
But perhaps the most dangerous, were those beings who now populated its depths. Of these, little or nothing was known with certainty. What, or who, had joined the original inhabitants? There had never been a survivor to speak about them.
He looked away from the deceptive calm of the trees, and their rings of icy fog. But despite it, the discomfort remained.
He better tucked himself in his coat, and waited.
oOo
(Draco)
Breathing was raspy in his chest.
The ice of the winter night air, felt like a blade on his skin, reddening his cheeks, and condensing his breath.
His left arm throbbed painfully.
His heart was pumping at a frantic pace.
He looked back.
Snow, and the vague silhouette of the trees, was all that was distinguishable in the dark.
However, he knew that not seeing them, did not mean they were not there.
As if answering his thoughts, a blue lightning cut the night direct to his chest.
"Shit!"
He threw himself aside to avoid being hit, and only managing so through years of training, as the corner of his robe calcined, and part of the yarn fell into ashes.
He broke running again.
His muscles creaked, in the verge of collapse, but he ignored the warning. If he stopped now, he could well curse himself with avada Kedavra. He would suffer less.
He knew what awaited for traitors like him.
For years, he had witnessed, and participated, in dozens of those "disciplinary sessions". The screams of the victims, the smell of blood, burned flesh ... were things that still, sometimes, arose in his nightmares.
He was not proud of the fact. But it had been necessary.
Someone had to continue the work of espionage that his godfather, Severus, had been forced to leave.
A Bombarda spell went over his shoulder, and exploded a few meters ahead, in a violent cloud of snow and stones. Shrapnel hit him full, and raised cuts on his cheeks and clothes.
Blood began to slide down his face, thick and wet as hot wax. Mingling with the traces of ash and soot, already there, after his hasty trip by floo.
The snow dust came into his lungs and made him cough violently, threatening to choke him.
But he didn't slow down.
Much rested on him managing to reach Hogwarts.
He had to warn them of the danger. Someone had given away his position. There was a traitor in the castle, someone in a position of power.
Very few knew that he, Draco Malfoy, son of the right hand of Lord Voldemort, a member of the most trusted Death Eater circle, and one of his closest, was a member of the Order of the Phoenix since his twenty-first birthday.
Too much had depended on its reports to risk it.
Only the highest order members had access to such information; Dumbledore, his godfather Severus, and Lupin himself, were some of them. Which it meant that the traitor, whoever he was, was part of the same circle, or had found a way to gain information from a member.
Whoever he or she, was, could very well get away with destroying everything he wanted to protect.
He forced his pace even more.
His muscles were burning as ropes placed under too much stress, about to tear. His lungs strained, unable to take in more air, expanding the most they could, choking under the crazed pace, pressing painfully against his ribs. Some strands of hair had escaped the restricting black silk tie, and blond tresses stirred by the wind, hindered his vision, slowing his reaction time.
He had lost his wand in the initial attack that caught him by surprise.
Unarmed, wounded, the only thing still keeping him standing, was the adrenaline coursing through his blood, like a chemical bomb. But soon, even that would not be enough. His energies were scarce.
The escape from Malfoy manor had consumed almost all his strength.
Witness to this were the burns on his left arm. Now, thanks to Merlin, desensitized. Although he knew it was not a good sign. The mass of blackened flesh and cloth, mangled, charred, looking more like a tree branch than an arm, did not give him much hope. Possibly, even if Madame Pomfrey could deal with it in the next hour, he would lose it.
Snow sank beneath his black boots on fast crunches. Leaving behind a too obvious trail to follow. But he had no time to mask it.
They were too close.
Now his only way out was to be faster than them.
Suddenly, a series of screams broke the night stillness.
"There he is! Catch him! Lord Voldemort wants him alive!"
He cursed internally.
The shouts behind him reminded him a pack of hungry wolves. The sounds in the snow, while they shortened distances, that of a group of hunting dogs.
He turned a corner of the path ... finally, in the distance, through the snowflakes, the night, his own exhaustion… he could see the lights of Hogwarts.
The last refuge of the resistance in this world dominated by darkness.
If he could climb the rock hillside bordering the dark forest, he would be inside the magical barriers within the school, and safe. He held the sound of relief that he wanted to issue.
Draco started toward there... but something ... his senses screeched a danger warning.
The snow in the area, was dirty.
He strained his eyes. And there it was, a silhouetted against the light of the waning moon. If he had not known what to look for, he would have overlooked it.
Camouflaged behind the rocks, someone kept the limit of the barrier, waiting for the traitor.
Behind him, some lit wands pointed at him.
"Give yourself over, Malfoy!"
He ignored the shouts and swerved to the left. The only way left. All other sides surrounded by an increasingly tight encirclement of enemies.
The ground sloped down there, and at the end, only a few meters away, stood the edge of the dark forest.
The reason why they had not surrounded him on that side.
Everyone knew going in that direction would be crazy.
But Draco didn't have more choices left. It was that, or be captured.
And he decided to risk it with the monsters that would kill quickly, before those who would torture him for weeks.
To be continued
Note: There goes the first chapter. It's short, but there would be more soon. This is a translation of an old fic I am trying to correct, and change somewhat. So posting will be fair frequent, at least until we reach what I have written so far.
See you soon.