The Inferius had no illusions about its situation. According to all that was known about the recently developed variety of undead, there was effectively no way for it to have an illusion. The facts well established that there was no chance of escape and there was no chance of anything else that would be productive. With its arms and legs hacked off, there was really no way of doing anything, though that would have been fine as long as the Ministry had more of the real Electrum lying around somewhere, as well as the memories he had shared with them. Sooner or later, the undead would be no more, and life for the living would go on.

It had no idea precisely where it was located, but it was not like the prison where the wizard whose memories it knew had died; it was more like a laboratory. All around it there were vials of potions, equipment for making potions, rune circles on the ceiling, walls, floor, as well as on the body of the other captive. He was a boy, young enough to be in school, though the entire time he had not said anything, so there was no other information about them. Crouch, wherever he was, was being held separately.

"I presume there are secret protocols in place, things that only you would know in the event that someone ever attempted to pretend to be the most... powerful wizard in the world," Voldemort had said. His tone took on a similar one to those who had said they were joking. "I can peruse the memories of the Inferius at my leisure, but you may require a more skilled wand, and at the moment there is only the most skilled there has ever been. I suppose I am in luck."

That was when the dark wizard led the Minister somewhere else. It was not possible to say why they were separated, as the undead would not be able to stop it in any way if information would be tortured out of the other captive, but that was not something it had the chance to explain to anyone, if it mattered. It had not lost the ability to speak, but found itself unable to directly disobey the powerful dark wizard.

"Excuse me," it said.

"What?"

"Who are you?"

"What's it to you?" The boy looked gaunt, by all appearances he had been there a long time, perhaps years. It was within expectations that he would grow surly. "It doesn't matter who I am. Voldemort is using me as a way of testing a long term mental link."

"A mental link?"

"There are spells to establish a mental link, but from time to time they are naturally occurring. It's been seen in twins, in rare cases, and the theory is that because their souls were on the same wavelength, so to speak, for long enough, they can easily reach out to each other. It's possible there are other effects than just a faint mental connection, but that's what's been seen the most often, allowing scholars to come up with a consistency. There are books on the subject in the Hogwarts library."

"No longer. The school no longer exists." The Inferius updated the time frame based on the boy's ignorance of notable events.

"I see. I should have expected as much. There was some evidence that the wards were degrading, and it is doubtful that the Headmaster who took over after Dumbledore would have cared to reinforce them. Alas, my eyes were averted." He seemed to place an unusual amount of responsibility on his own shoulders. "How the hell did you get here? You look like Electrum, sans limbs."

"The Department of Mysteries created an Inferius with his memories. It makes no difference."

"To you, I suppose. As the subject of countless experiments, I do not envy your relative immortality. Perhaps, however, your detached nature would have been amenable when I was tortured with visions of loved ones suffering. Without even elementary study in Occlumency, I was rather powerless to resist the discovery of my secrets. Every manner of coercion imaginable was inflicted on me, and if those I would protect still live today, I can only credit it to the failure of my foolish plans to be implemented. I have been worthless to them. Everything I attempted to do is for naught." He smiled. "Well, almost everything."

"You have not introduced yourself."

"You have not told me what it is to you."

"That is a question for which there is no answer. The undead have no identity. The undead have no soul."

There was a pause as no words were exchanged. The Inferius could suppose that it was inherently more interesting for a live human to be in the laboratory with it, since there was otherwise no point to any of the things that existed therein. There was nothing that needed to be considered, nothing that needed to be done, not that anything could be done. In a sense, the fact that the boy existed was the only thing giving the undead something resembling a purpose.

"Is there any way out of here?"

"I've looked. I've even looked inside his mind, whenever he allows it. Sometimes it seems he's more than just allowing it, sometimes it seems like he actually wants me to try to see what he's done, what esoteric secrets of magic he's discovered." There was another pause, though this one was shorter. "I can tell you there's no way out of here for you. I know that when I die, my soul will continue to exist, and for that reason my journey is not at an end. You seem to be aware that there is no journey for you; there is no 'you'. That does not, of course, bother you, as there is no one for it to bother."

If he was actively working out the exact nature of the Inferius that the Department had developed, it was a futile insult and indicative of a succinct understanding at the same time. There was reason to suspect he had been a reasonably smart student at Hogwarts, but the mental connection with Voldemort would have poisoned him somewhat. Unfortunately, though he was company, though it was worth talking to him, he did not seem to see the undead as company, so no productive discussions would be had.

An indeterminable time passed. There was no point in keeping track of how much passed, because it appeared to make no difference to anyone. The time simply passed. If the young wizard intended to waste away and die, he was on the right track, though it was doubtful that would work. With at least two years to try so far, if he had not succeeded yet, it was because there were active magical effects keeping him alive, whether force-fed potions or curses on his own lungs that insured they drew breath.

Voldemort returned.

"There are no secrets remaining in your vaunted Minister."

All of a sudden there were not two individuals who mattered, but three. Receiving again details about Crouch, it was as if he were in the room again. The undead could process the information, for all that it was worth to process it. There was even the possibility of weighing him above the other captive. He does not seem to care about himself.

"Have you come to see if there are secrets remaining in here?" the young wizard asked. "I can see how it would not be worth establishing a mental link with the undead. There has never been a mind less interesting."

"I disagree," the dark wizard said. "While a lower order of being than myself, there is nothing on earth that can claim to be a higher order of being, and this one is interesting in that it could be used as a servant in some capacity. What are its abilities?"

"It seems to possess no magic. I have no ability to guess how a corpse could be reanimated with that particular ability."

"Neither have I," Voldemort said. "That is, of course, because such a thing is impossible. At this point I can confidently state that if anything exists in human understanding, it exists in my own as well. Your idea for killing me, creative as it was, would no longer function, if there were ever a chance of that; I now have an effective counter. Whether you have learned it from me or not, there is even a dark shield that I may use to block killing curses. Perhaps the Death Eaters were not useless after all."

"Perhaps not. If I have been any use to you, it was Selwyn and some other that brought me here."

"Ah, that you have. You gave me reason to take the occasional excursion to lesser known parts of the world, to research things I had not yet thought of studying. These peoples have some true understanding and it has been valuable to me at least in the sense that it can no longer be used against me. Their tricks that perform but simple tasks are of no interest, neither are the multitude of oddities that do not exist in explicit terms. I find it more productive to kill those who claim to have some secret knowledge that I cannot understand and let them take it to the grave with them."

"As ever, I have no response. If there has been anything productive in all of my comments regarding your approach to magic, it has already been accomplished. There is nothing more I can share with you."

If he had been hoping to be killed for being useless, his hopes were dashed. The dark wizard ignored the human and turned to the undead, casting an absurd amount of spells that could not be identified. These were advanced diagnostics, it could be presumed, and they existed for gathering more information about the subject. The undead saw its own memories drawn out and put back in, its outward nature changed three or four times before being reduced to a grey mass with no form, and there was pain, though whether that served any purpose or not was impossible to determine.

"Are you confident in your ability to replicate such an Inferius?" the young wizard asked when it seemed he was done. The grey mass was reverted to its previous state.

"I am, if such a thing would ever serve my purposes. I do not intend to make you into one until such a time as you are truly without use. Thus far, simply by having an intact soul, you have been of more interest to me than many of my own followers, twisted by dark magic as they are. It appears you have experimented with it, at least if your memories are to be believed, but you have never successfully killed anything with a soul."

"That much is true. The trouble, Lord Voldemort, with having an intact soul, is that you can still feel guilt, which is to say that it can be rent over and over. My only boast is that for perhaps a minute while I think of other things, I have an intact soul, at all other times it is as fractured as yours."

"If you attempt to provoke pity there will be no result. I remember your earlier attempts to convince me that there was an advantage to having an intact soul, and I remember that I could restore my own if I ever felt remorse for my actions, but I have cursed my mind to be redirected to practical matters if ever there were a train of thought that seemed to lead to remorse, not that one has left the proverbial station in the last seventy years. No one without far greater knowledge of the mind arts than I possess could ever force me to feel remorse, or anything for that matter, and as such my horcrux will remain as it is, with a single soul fragment preserved as long as life endures for the boy."

"Perhaps there is nothing more to be accomplished, here, then. I have an inkling about how you intend to keep the boy from ever rebelling against you, though I have not seen any clear indication in all the time you have allowed me into your head. Perhaps you can see it in mine."

"Very well. I suppose your Occlumency may have marginally improved in the time that I have allowed you to learn the secrets of magic."

"Secrets, yes. Secrets and tricks, never a true understanding. It's as if you've never been inside your own brain, I want to say you should really see the way you pack details in there and then curse it in place, but I'm sure you're already some form of proud that you have done such a thing. I truly have no understanding as to why you behave the way you do, and this is after over a year of being allowed to observe your mental processes. I can only conclude that you simply don't care what the truth is, and you just want power by any means necessary."

The Inferius could only think that the boy was provoking a dark wizard who had killed people for much less, but he had already asked to be killed, so this hardly made any difference. Their captor seemed none too perturbed by the critique. He seemed to disregard it entirely.

"What of it?" Voldemort asked. "For all you and your prepubescent friends have searched, were you any closer to a general case theory of magic?"

'She'll find it. As long as she's still out there, she'll find it."

"I wonder. I wonder if she still lives, not whether or not there is any solution to be found. Magic is simply a filtration for the strong, to seek power and the clever, to make it work for them. A spell is nothing more than a means to an end, a path to greatness for those capable of taking it. Wizards like you with no ambition, who would use it only for the improvement of life, are scarcely better than muggles. Did you know that when I first met Albus Dumbledore, he chastised me for the way I treated them, the nonmagical?" He glared, perhaps momentarily lost in memory. "Can you imagine any point to caring whether they live or die? It is no better, I suppose, to care about inferior wizards, those who would not even take immortality when offered, or those like you, who would take death over life."

"In death I would remain what I am," the young wizard said. "If to live I have to become a monster like you, I would rather die. You have made death no less inevitable; one way or another, the person that I currently am would die, and- it's actually a lot like allowing someone else to live in your place. I would never have figured Tom Riddle for the sacrificial sort, but it appears that's precisely what happened. You were so afraid of death you turned yourself into something everyone in the world wants to kill. You made yourself the enemy of your own horcrux, even as the two of you pretend to be on the same side, you cannot be on the same side because each of you only cares about himself, or rather, whichever version of himself can survive."

"I have transformed much since the days of my youth," Voldemort confessed. At no point had his expression, a minute smile, faded. "And yet, can any claim to the contrary? What is this loss of self you describe and how is it any more than aging?"

The undead would have thought it was a rhetorical question, but the boy answered anyway.

"That is a question that only you can answer; only you can know that even though you still have a piece of your soul, it is our choices that make us who we are. If you were always this twisted then I suppose you're right; I suppose you haven't contorted your soul with dark magic; but I don't believe you were any different from most other orphans, you still had a soul and the rest of us are just as capable of darkness. There was a chance for you to become someone else, and in leaving behind your fear as your primary motivation, you could have seen-"

"There is no point to this discussion." 'Electrum' did not doubt that the dark wizard could have thought of some response for the assertion; he was being truthful when he stated that he was leaving because there was no point. Leaving without elaborating further, the young wizard smirked.

"He couldn't get inside my head this time," he said. "Most likely, he thought it was more trouble than it was worth. All I was offering was one possible way of dealing with Evan, and he probably already has one in mind."

"Then you intend to keep something else from him?"

"Of course. It is for this reason that I have been training my Occlumency based off his own knowledge of the subject."

"If you keep something from him, what purpose would that serve? Who would gain if you could preserve a secret inside your head?" Perhaps someone more skeptical would say that the undead was just asking questions to fill the space, but having only just wondered about its own purpose, there was some legitimate interest in what kind of purpose a young wizard trapped in a laboratory could have other than his own purpose, and it seemed unlikely his situation would ever improve. "Are you implying that there could be other people down here? Can we help them?"

"I don't know of anyone else down here except your Minister and an old man who groaned a lot before they killed him a few months ago. That was all I knew of him." He seemed to think about something for a moment. "Generally, the Death Eaters and their master do not take live captives. Almost all of the people who have ever interacted with them in any way have died."

"Then no one will come looking for you."

"Almost certainly, that would be a futile endeavor. Even the least practical people in the world would never come here to rescue me. I have, as a result, no expectation of rescue, and that I have been forced to remain here until my eventual death is no particular surprise. Voldemort has chosen to keep me alive for the time being, and he likely will until he has a way of defeating Evan that he will not expect."

"That's something that has not been explained," the undead said. "Why is he having so much trouble with an underage wizard? If the memories are correct, he was good at curses, but there is no way he would win against his master in a regular duel."

"He knows that. They both know that they know it. Neither of them is sure when the other will act. Voldemort also has some reason to keep Evan alive, because he needs the soul fragment to stay attached to the world."

"Won't he eventually die, being alive?"

"Of course, unless he has made a horcrux of his own," the young wizard said. "It takes some amount of skill, and the method is not commonly known, but it can be done. There's some chance that this is why he was so interested in how you work."

The Inferius stopped with the line of questioning. There was no point in wondering about who would win between Evan and Voldemort, or if it was even a contest, as long as there was nothing either of them could do about it. Though it seemed wiser to support the younger one and have a weaker dark wizard instead of a stronger one, there was still nothing they could do.

"What have you hidden with your Occlumency?" the undead asked. "You must be trying to help the-"

"I'm not telling you. At the same time, I do not have a long time left to live. Lord Voldemort has accomplished essentially everything he wanted to accomplish in the world, and now is the time for something to be done about Evan." He had no wand to hold aloft, and yet it was clear he was about to cast something. "Expecto Patronum."

Silver light shone brightly and there was no discerning what form it took.

"It matters only that the memory is happy," he said. "I may not have been happy in years, but there are others who will not befall the same fate, not if I can do anything to inform them." He whispered to the Patronus before it quickly moved out of the laboratory, traveling through the walls unperturbed. "Voldemort nver had a use for such a spell," he said by way of explanation. "At the same time, I wonder if he can perform it. He has lived for over seventy years now, and I wonder if he has ever been happy."