WARNING!
This chapter is more gruesome and violent than any other yet, I had to change the rating to M because of it, so if you're too young or can't deal with blood or the like, please don't read.
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"Accio!"
The boisterous laughter that erupted at his words made Draco spin around angrily, scowling at the ginger buffoon behind him. The Polyjuice potion had already worn off. They were in trouble, and all the moron could do was laugh at his efforts.
"Honestly Weasley," he hissed, the insult clear in his voice. "Will you ever stop being a complete and utter idiot?"
"Shut it Malfoy. Oh and by the way, you're the idiot here. I thought we had already covered that Horcruxes DON'T RESPOND TO MAGIC."
The patronizing tone was practically dripping from his tongue, turning Draco a light shade of pink as he went silent and contentedly glared at the ginger wizard he was having to deal with, clutching his right arm against him. These stupid plans were starting to bruise him apparently. It's all for the sake of Hermione, he kept telling himself to stop his hands from strangling the idiot bastard.
"Come on Ron," said Harry, stepping between them. "Let's get this done before someone realizes something is wrong!"
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Voldemort and his double agent arrived in Alcazar Castle in a flourish of black robes. Their prey had already arrived at his destination in the French Citadel, the Dark Lord's current 'highly valued prisoners' confinement hideout, a building not two miles from there.
Severus Snape held back a yawn. The sun wasn't even up yet. It had taken them the night to get back, as the creature (he hardly seemed like a man nowadays) besides him refused to use any magic that was not his own. Besides, he wouldn't want the germs of inferior beings who set up the portkey to infect him. He had some sort of standards, apparently. Ha! The man was demented. How did no one care that he was a Half-Blood? Severus pursed his lips silently at these thoughts. Once, he had also followed him blindly. What a fool he had been. Not that what he was currently doing was any safer... and he still needed to find the Granger girl!
"Honestly," he thought. "Draco has an obsession with that girl, follows her everywhere!" But he couldn't deny that he was worried too. Even if he found her, and that was a big 'If', there was no telling what state she would be in.
Severus was just about to take leave from his master, or rather was patiently waiting to be dismissed, when a woman in her fifties knocked and entered without waiting for an answer. That in itself was a huge and blatant sign that something had gone wrong. Voldemort's snake eyes snapped to her face, squinting angrily as he did so. The woman, none other than Mrs Parkinson, stood shaking in the doorway, before she spurted out her information.
"We have lost communication with the Citadel as of this morning. We were going to check, but we ran into a bunch of Half-Bloods camping in the surrounding forest first. We were just bringing them back here when you arrived."
There was no easy way to tell the Dark Lord that they had failed at their task without getting incinerated on the spot. Snape actually thought she did an acceptable job of that. Surprisingly, the woman was quite intelligent, and she proved it in the next few seconds.
Indeed, without waiting for an answer, she ran out of the room without another look back and disappeared into the nearest adjacent corridor, as if she was scared of staying in the Dark Lord's line of sight. In fact she probably should be, as an angry curse from the man in question suddenly set on fire a series of tapestries that hung on the walls she had just been walking between.
"Severus," he whispered sickeningly to him. "Go to the Citadel, make sure our monk is being obedient."
Snape lowered his head in his usual polite, but honestly stuck up, bow. He turned to leave, and had his hand on the door handle, when the voice behind him made him stop, eyes wide.
"Oh and Severus..." he said offhandedly. "Check on the Granger girl while you are there. I want to hear of Bellatrix's progress."
The shiver than ran up Snape's spine could not have been faked. He now knew where she was, but he also expected to be horrified, no matter what had happened to stop communications. The girl had been left to Bellatrix, and Bella was as unforgiving as her master.
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The Citadel at night had never been a kind and welcoming place. The full moon shone on the old grey stones of the main tower, stones that had turned black with time. This place was old, much older than most buildings. And it had a dungeon. The two put together anywhere in the world have never meant anything but fear and horrible past deeds. Even as a Death Eater, Snape couldn't help an ominous shiver creep up his back.
Something was wrong.
The water of the small river that ran round the east side of the building and by the front door was a pale silver, its boisterous waters overflowing with the recent rain. The air smelt strongly of humus, overturned soil, and iron. The silence was deafening.
Not a bird.
Not a mouse.
Not a sound but the river keeping its course.
Drawn by the only source of movement and life, Snape inched closer to the river bend, his wand held safely in his fist. He stopped when the rim of his cloak skimmed the water, eyes falling upon a strange and worrying sight. The rain and the river might have washed away whatever might have happened here, but the grass on the riverside had been so soaked in something other than water, that it had turned a different colour entirely. It was a dark, maroon red. The colour of blood left to soak into the soil. The entire riverbank was soaked in blood.
If it weren't for his years of watching Voldemort slaughter innocent people, Severus would have retched there and then. He came close, but turned his gaze away from the river just in time. Ahead, as though mocking him, the Citadel was daring him to walk in, drowning him in shadows as it blocked out the moon.
He left the river behind him; fist clutched nervously around his only weapon, and followed the black stonewalls to the entrance. The front door, strangely enough, was facing the mountains, not the path used to get there. However, any abnormality of the Citadel's structure was forgotten, as his gaze landed on the full-blown horror of what had become of the men and women once stationed here.
They were everywhere.
A woman was slumped against the left side of the open grand oak doors, a stream of blood staining the wood from above her head to the floor, disappearing behind her hunched back. Her eyes were open, lifeless. Her right arm was on the other side of the doorway, still hanging onto the handle, severed from its body at the elbow.
The creeping morning light stopped at the entrance, as if the darkness within was pushing it away. Snape's wand illuminated the inside as he took one, only one, step over the threshold. The first room was large, with only a single archway opening in the centre, leading to the next circular room. To his left lay a wooden table big enough to seat ten people. It was snapped straight down the middle, and lay lopsided on the ground, a mound of clothes stuck in its core. A leg was visible underneath the cloth. On the other side, more bodies, unmoving and torn savagely in different places lay abandoned in the silence. The darkness hid the extent of the horror, but Severus had seen enough. He turned around and managed to take a few steps forwards before the entirety of his stomach came hurling back up, staining the remaining green grass at his feet. It took him a few minutes to calm down.
Snape stood up carefully, ordering his mind to become cold and calculating, turning his stomach into an unmovable stone. With a whip of his long robes, his spun around and marched purposefully into the stone building, averting his eyes of any details of the massacre around him.
"Lumos," he whispered, walking into the darkness, ignoring the dead bodies and the overwhelming stench of iron in the air.
He walked through the chaos of the meeting room, moving the only chair that remained intact out of the way. The others all lay in pieces in different corners of the room, scattered between the limp bodies. More curiously, one of them hung from the ceiling chandelier, as if it had been projected upwards so hard that it had collided with the hanging candles and stayed stuck there.
But Snape's sharp eyes drew him away from the curious spectacle as they finally found what he had been looking for: a series of steps leading downwards, stopping at a heavy, nailed door. He strode over and, after having pulled away the dead man lying in the way of the aperture, holding his breath as he did so to refrain from emptying whatever was left in his stomach, he yanked the door open and stepped inside.
It was an even stranger sight that he found upon entering. As Snape took one, tentative step forward, he raised his wand and stared, astonished and horrified, at what he saw. In front of him, two cells took up a half of the room. Both were empty. But both were not untouched.
With another, shaking step, Snape brought himself closer to the metal bars. Behind them, an entire part of the brick wall was doused in maroon, the grey stone having given into the dark red tint of blood. The floor was no different, though something shiny lay in the middle of the dried pool of liquid. The single strand of grey morning light that fell between the bars of the window shone an even stranger feeling on the place.
Eyebrows furrowed, Snape took another two steps forward. He then stopped. Although he could now touch the metals bars of the cell, the limits of the cell itself only started another meter and a half from there.
Something had grabbed the metal bars from outside the cell and pulled them towards it. Like they were made out of caramel. They were bent outwards; creating an opening made out of bent metal and snapped bars. Snapped. How in the world was that even possible?
After years of staying by Tom Riddle's side, seeing horror after horror and losing the one person who had meant the world to him, Severus Snape was not one to be easily frightened or moved. In fact, there wasn't anything he could think about that would make him even shiver, bar Lord Voldemort of course.
But this, this was different. It was strange, terrifying, and these metal bars were the last drop for him. All his reasoning had gone into supposing a mass attack had overcome the Citadel, but this seemed to prove him wrong. It reminded him of the gruesome, stomach-wrenching scene he had seen not two minutes earlier. He could only imagine a werewolf doing this, but the Death Eaters would not have let such an obvious attacker get so far into the building. And the eventuality of a group of attackers making it all out alive from the fortress? Not likely. But there had been only supporters of the Dark Lord back there, and not one of them was alive.
Shaking in fear, Severus closed his eyes and thought about the happiest memory he could conjure. Out of the tip of his wand erupted a feeble silver light, taking shape in front of his eyes. The silver doe gently nuzzled his hand, before calmly walking around the room, reassuring him as she did so. If his patronus was calm, then there was surely nothing to fear at this moment.
Feeling stronger again, Severus brushed his robes backwards and leant forward, gingerly making his way into the cell. Part of him worried that this looked like the perfect trap, but then again, the doe had remained calm. Crouching, he crabbed the chain that stuck in the dried blood, and peeled the pendant away from its muddy prison. It was a small white stone encased in a silver ribcage shaped like a teardrop, and on the back of it was written in graceful italic writing:
Malfoy
Adrenaline coursed through him as he suddenly realised what this was. This was what Narcissa Malfoy had been talking about not two days before her disappearance. This was what Draco had had with him when Granger had pulled him from the Death Eater's clutches. This was what she had worn when she had been captured. Across the front of the white gem were two, slim lines of red. It was quite clear what they were; these were finger marks, where someone had clutched the pendant. The implications were just too sad. Snape stood up again and, after having clambered out of the cell, he strode out of the room, his patronus following behind.
He was halfway through the destroyed meeting room when he came to a dead stop, horror and revulsion pulsing through his veins as the taste of bile came to haunt his lips again. Across from him was the worst thing he had ever seen, a sight he had missed as he had walked in, turning his back to the wall behind him. The stone wall by the entrance was painted with a sentence, the letters drawn in blood, their lines shaped like fingers grazing the stone:
BEWARE THE MOONSTONE WOLF
He couldn't help the whimper of horror that escaped his throat. The letters were gruesome, savage, only rendered worse by the many bodies that had
been somehow thrown towards that particular wall. A dark stain in the shape of a man's silhouette had been left on the stone.
The patronus behind him had seemed to sense his distress, and she passed him, nearing the wall carefully, as if to check for danger. She was unaware though, that the light emanating from her was making matters worse. As she neared the man-shaped stain on the wall, Severus saw the man to whom it belonged, sprawled on the floor at the foot of the wall, his back torn to shreds so badly that it looked as if he had no skin at all.
But the doe continued on, shining her light onto something much, much more revolting: Bellatrix Lestrange was nailed to the wall, midway between floor and ceiling, several chair legs sticking out of her sternum. Her head hung sideways, her dark hair cascading down, leaving her face partly visible. On the other side of the room, as if an exact opposite, an old man in tainted yellow and burgundy robes sat calmly, as if only resting against the stone behind him, his legs crossed beneath him. The only giveaway of his departure from this word was the gaping whole in his stomach. His right hand was smothered in blood.
It was all Snape could do to realise the monk had been the one to leave the message, before he ran out of the Citadel, his patronus fading away as the happy memory was overwhelmed by the horror of the night.
Finally withdrawing from the macabre building, Severus crouched on the grass again, several feet away from where he had been earlier, holding his stomach back by breathing deeply, trying to rid himself of the thoughts of what he had just seen.
Somehow, his eyes fell upon something in the grass that caught his attention: There was blood on the only patch of seemingly untouched, fresh green floor.
If he looked carefully enough, he could see where the strands of vegetation still lay flat from someone walking here, leaving red stains along the way. No, actually it looked more like they had crawled. And judging by the way the grass had folded over, they had not been crawling away from the forest, but from the Citadel.
Something had gotten into the small fortress, taken out every single living soul in it, and someone had gotten away. Snape stood straight yet again, before following the streaks of blood towards the forest. Soon though, he altered his previous thought: Someone had tried to get away. But they had failed. The trail ended at the feet of a young man dressed in black, his left sleeve torn off revealing the Dark Mark. His eyes were a pale white, his chest unmoving. He had three parallel open wounds on his broken throat. Something had ripped the life out of him. Something with at least three terribly long claws.
And a few meters behind him, sprawled on the forest flaw, hair sprawled around her, lay a woman dressed in brown rags. She had a messy amount of auburn curls covering her face, and her limbs stuck out at strange angles. She was covered in slashes. Underneath her, he could see a red patch of liquid that seemed to spread under her entire body. There was no need for him to go and check. He knew who she was from the moment he had set eyes on her. But Severus stepped forward nevertheless, brushing the hair out of the woman's face, checking her pulse.
It was already too much to bear for any man, and Snape took a step back, throat so tight he couldn't utter a single sound. He had known, yet he had still had to check. And he had been right.
He disapparated on the spot, knowing full well that the girl in front of him had been Hermione Granger. There was nothing left for him to do there.
Indeed, there was nothing he could do for the dead.
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A/N: Hello dear reader, stop for a second. Take a pause, breaaaathe, we are now moving to a less morbid part of the world. This serves as an interlude to give you the time to realise that maybe you don't hate me that much... ? Okay, hopefully that worked... keep reading! ;) x
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"HOW COME YOU DON'T HAVE AN ESCAPE PLAN?!" bellowed Draco as they ran through a long corridor, spells bouncing off the floor behind them.
"I didn't think that far!" answered Ron, running next to him, his wand nearly acting alone as it blindly sent curses flying behind the both of them.
"Stop fighting, keep running!" shouted Harry from the front.
He was holding Luna's hand as she kept getting distracted and stopped running at random moments if he didn't. The woman was mad.
"Besides," continued the ginger demon as he shot spell after spell fearlessly. "We've got the damn thing, so technically everything is going according to plan!"
"ARE YOU STUPID?!" Draco barked at him, stupefying a goblin on his right as they kept running. "HOW ARE YOU NOT ALL DEAD YET?!"
"Sheer dumb luck I reckon." He laughed as they barged into a huge hall surrounded by towers.
"You're all barking mad!" replied Draco, spinning around and casting a Bombarda Maxima so strong it collapsed the entire twenty last metres of the corridor upon itself.
"Somehow I've ended up coming to terms with that," chuckled Harry as he walked back towards them, having let go of Luna's hand to help secure the path behind them.
He patted Ron on the shoulder once, making them exchange a look of perfect camaraderie. After all these years, Ron and he still got into trouble, and they still found times to laugh at it, some way or another.
"Oh look, a dragon." announced a eerily calm voice behind them.
The three young wizards spun around, noticing in horror that Luna had wandered off again, and was now getting dangerously close to a huge, old, dinosaur-like dragon. A DRAGON!
"Luna!" Harry and Ron shouted in worry, running forward and yanking her back together, as if synchronised. "Honestly, thought Draco, they spend way too much time together. Wait, I've thought this before. What the hell are we supposed to do against THAT? Wait, I should be saying this out loud..."
"What now Weasley?! Any other bright ideas?" he said without any true hatred in his voice.
Instead, he was slowly backing away from the giant deadly creature in front of him, as were Ron and Harry, dragging the blond haired witch along with them.
"I'm serious Weasley, I'm actually asking if you have any ideas." Draco said as they finally got behind a huge stone pillar and took a few breaths they hadn't realised they were holding in. "You know, your brother working with dragons and all. Merlin knows it's the only thing you're proud of."
"We could ride the dragon," answered Luna, dreamily, distracting Ron from glaring. It took all the guy's self-control not to smirk, snort or make fun of her.
That's when the wall behind them exploded, sending boulders bigger than them rolling into the room.
"DRAGON IT IS!" shouted Harry from the front as he sprinted out from their hiding place and made a run for the opposite side of the room, Ron on his tail with Luna's hand firmly grasped in his. Draco stood there for a second too long, and a rock the side of his head crashed into the wall only centimetres from his nose.
"Malfoy!" shouted Ron, still racing. "Run, NOW."
Draco launched himself into a desperate sprint, dodging flying rocks and boulders as he did. "Yup, there's your sheer dumb luck!" he swore to himself as he nearly got squashed by a rock the size of a megalith.
"Why are they chucking the walls at us?!" he shouted to the three crazy people in front of him. Harry had nearly reached the dragon, whose tail he was now desperately trying to dodge, but Ron and Luna were still thirty meters behind him.
"They're trying to force us towards the dragon," shouted the ginger boy over his shoulder. "And I'm guessing the squashing part is an optional bonus point."
"Isn't that obvious?" chimed in Luna.
"And why does it sound like you still aren't exhausted?" Draco breathed difficultly. Malfoys do not pant.
"See," laughed the ginger. "If you'd been something else than a prat in Hogwarts, maybe you would have hung out with us and gotten better reflexes."
Draco remained silent for a moment, agape, before he bellowed:
"WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! You should NOT be this calm!"
"Oh loosen up Draco," laughed Luna between them.
"Yeah, and run faster Malfoy!" urged Ron, seeing him nearly get hexed in the arse.
"I'M STILL WEARING WOMEN'S CLOTHES!" he roared back, realising a little too late that that was something he should not have pointed out.
"Guys... DRAGON! CONCENTRATE!"
They looked up to see that Harry had gotten past the tail... and that it was heading straight for them. Ron yanked Luna to the ground with him, leaving Draco to throw himself sideways. The pointy end of the huge dinosaur-like creature scratched a half-a-meter deep ravine in the rock just inches from his head, before it slammed into the pillars behind him, resulting in a flurry of screams and, strangely enough, bells.
A deep chuckle rang next to him, and Draco turned to see that Ron and Luna were getting up, Weasley laughing again. Honestly.
"Use a dragon to fight off enemies... check!" he said, ticking of some imaginary list in mid-air.
"Seriously guys!" said a voice from behind the dragon. They looked up to see that Harry had already climbed a huge flight of stairs and was standing just above the white, now curiously quivering beast. "If I have to wait any longer, I'm going to leave without you!"
He then started to counter all the colourful spells that flew his way with brio. Draco simply thought he looked like a madman on a tower with a death wish. It was only when they were all at the base of the tower and were running up the staircase that he realised that Potter had probably been protecting them from those nasty spells too. Including him. Bloody 'brave and helpful' Gryffindors. He was an idiot, that's what. Who breaks into the most secure bank-slash-prison in the world and DOESN'T HAVE AN ESCAPE PLAN?! Harry fucking Potter, that's who.
"On three then!" shouted Harry as they hid behind the two top pillars of the tower. Thinking about it, this place looked a little like a Quidditch pitch. "One. Two... THREE!"
They launched themselves forward, jumping off the tower and falling down onto the neck of the massive dragon. It seemed even bigger from on top of it. They all clung onto the spine horns (Was that what they were? Spine horns?) as Draco had decided to call them, and hung on tight as the spells kept on crashing against the other side of the dragon. But the bells were still ringing, and the dragon was still a prisoner of Gringotts.
"I think we should get rid of that awful sound..." complained Luna from Draco's right, setting off an idea in his head.
"That's it!" he said victoriously. Then he turned respectively to Ron and Harry, announcing as he did: "Watch and learn boys."
He pointed his wand forward between the 'spine horns', and spoke:
"Expecto Patronai!"
From his wand flew out one very real, very big and very solid silver Hippogriff. It spread its huge wings and dived forwards, letting the goblins' spells go right through him. It charged at the bell ringers with so much force they were knocked unconscious upon impact, before it flew at the other attackers, just for the sake of it being able to. Hagrid would have said that Hippogriffs are mighty proud animals, and the Patronai was just as bad a show-off as the real thing.
Draco was very disappointed to hear the sound of muffled chuckling coming from his right.
"Is the spell that is saving your ass funny to you Potter?" snarled Draco, insulted.
"I'm sorry Malfoy," replied the Wonder Boy, still trying to contain his laughter. "It's just, I'd forgotten your patronus is a hippogriff... "
"Ha! Yeah, that is funny." seconded Ron, finally closing he mouth and replacing his astonished expression with an amused smirk. "Oop, heads up!"
They all looked up again to see the patronus come galloping back towards the dragon, before it dove at a sharp angle and crashed into the chains holding the dragon down. It disappeared into silver smoke, revealing the broken links just as Harry clutched a spine horn with one hand, shouting "HOLD ON!" to his friends. He lifted his wand and sent a harmless stinging hex at the dragons' behind, before the animal (dinosaur?) sprung up to the ceiling with a mighty roar and crashed into the middle of London.
The dragon struggled to get in the air, an effort not gone unnoticed by the owl that had been circling Gringotts from above, patiently waiting for the recipient of his message to show up. Now, the owl was having second thoughts. Funny fact: owls do not like dragons, who knew?
The bird followed suit nevertheless, pursuing the dragon off and out of London, desperately trying to catch up with the gigantic prehistorical creature. To its leg was attached an urgent missive from Severus Snape.
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A/N Oh My Salazar, I had SOOO much fun writing this chapter! xD Well yes it was gruesome and all (I'm a Slytherin inside, not my fault if I like torturing you all a little :P) but then it was so fun to make Draco and the guys bicker like that hahahaha
Well, hope you all liked it! Reviews will help me improve SO much... Also I will love you ;) xx
PS: please don't hate me! I swear it gets better!
PPS: I was told I beg for reviews, so on this occasion, no one leave any reviews please! Because we all know they are pointless and don't help whatsoever. xx ;)
