VOLDEMORT'S LAST SPELL, by Louis IX
Disclaimer: Check first chapter for full disclaimer and other warnings.

Chapter 2 – Lost Civilizations
posted November 11th, 2005

He was tired.

In his long travels, he had visited beautiful places and interesting people, sometimes staying thirty days, other times thirty years. He had quickly discovered that people would become wary about him if he stayed for too long. Others were sad when he would subsequently leave and would give him gifts of some sort to help in his travels. Each time he spent more than a few years somewhere, among the people seeing him away, there were several green-eyed children. Or adults. Several times over the years, when he departed an encampment, a pregnant woman would tell him that she would name the future child after him. Especially if it was a green-eyed boy. That's why, after many many years of travelling around the continent, Har had settled on a two-syllable name: Har-Kan, in homage to his first woman – some things just can't be forgotten.

It has been long years – decades, even centuries – since his childhood in the Tribe of the Bear, and his hair had slowly turned white, but his physical appearance hadn't changed more than that. He was still strong and fit, and apparently immortal. During his travels, he had met wonderful animals and several dangerous ones as well, and, more than once, he had been trampled or poisoned by wildlife. However, the threat always left quickly, carnivorous animals not deeming him edible, and he healed quickly and quietly. And painfully.

He didn't know that these animals, after biting him and imbibing his magical blood, started to display strange genetic mutations, some of which being compatible enough to be transmitted to their future broods.

To remember his age, he had invented an ingenious system: he raised one finger for each year, and when all fingers were raised, he lowered them all and raised another finger on an imaginary set of hands. It started to get complicated when he started to need two imaginary sets of hands, and he stopped counting altogether when he found that he'd need one more. Even if he had stopped counting his age, though, he had tried to teach his way of counting to tribes he passed on his way, but none had expressed an interest in it as of yet.

After so many years spent travelling, there was still something that baffled him: the sea. He had long since discovered that wood floated on water, and that, by tying several trunks together, he could move on water. At some point in his life, he had also remarked that the wind tended to pull at loose pelts, and he had experimented, tying large pelts to a wooden pole so that his raft would advance by itself. He had never gone far from the coast, though: even if he had learnt to swim at some point, he didn't want to be lost at sea. Like all the humans of that time, he didn't know what was beyond the sea, and there were some tribes of fishermen saying that there were large beasts there. Large beasts like the ones their forefathers told them about. He hadn't wanted to experiment with it.

Until now.

He was tired of living on the run, and decided that he could try to see if the beasts beyond the sea were able to kill him or not. After building the largest raft he could, with raised sides so that the salty water wouldn't soak his reserves of dried fruits, he attached the large and thin pelt the women had prepared for him. He thanked them, and took his leave of the fishermen settlement he had lived the last ten years of his live.

The first day, he still saw the coast.

The first night was eerie, the stars reflecting on the moving water all around him.

The second day, he couldn't see the coast anymore.

The next thirty days were progressively more difficult, as the food reserve began to dwindle. He crossed the path of daunting storms and impressive fishes – he wasn't even sure he could call "fish" an animal larger than him.

He was weaker and weaker, but he still didn't die. Most of his days were spent lying in the sun-baked raft, waiting to fall off the edge of the world. But it never happened, and he began to think that his assumptions about that particular legend were completely erroneous.

After two month of riding the winds, a particularly nasty storm crossed his path, and his small boat capsized. He found himself thrown in the cold ocean's water, and, too feeble to move, he thought that his last hour had come.

He closed his eyes and, a few minutes later, felt death's warm blanket surrounding him.

Wait a minute! Death's warm blanket?

He tentatively felt around him, and noticed that there were warm and soft... things around him. All around him. In fact, he was inside a warm and soft thing. Remembering the large fishes, he shuddered, before laughing outright. He quickly stopped, though. Even if he wasn't dead yet, laughing with lungs full of water was very difficult and painful as well. He touched, and prodded, but the whale's mouth was tightly sealed, and its gullet was too small for him to pass through. He was trapped. He finally crossed his arms and waited for death to deign occur.

It didn't happen.

He felt nauseous, had stomach cramps due to his lack of food, and hallucinations due to his lack of oxygen, but he continued to suffer, alive. After an indefinitely long time, he felt the fish's mouth move, and a krill swarm was swallowed. He was pushed to the side by a massive tongue, and the plankton was quickly swallowed by the massive animal. In the midst of the swarm, though, a larger fish was swallowed as well, and swept to the side of the mouth near him. Har-Kan felt the fish, and was pleasantly surprised of finding that, by whatever coincidental circumstances, it had his ivory knife embedded in its lower jaw.

Seeing in that a sign of Fate, he took the knife and waited for the whale to come to the surface again – he knew when that happened because of the suddenly clearer tinge around him; and he didn't want to be spitted in the deepest pits of the ocean. A few hours later, it happened, and he slashed at the whale's lips. As expected, it spitted him, and he found himself in warm waters and near a coast. After coughing most of the water in his lungs, he found himself in a clearer state of mind despite the distressing hunger. He dragged himself to the beach and rested there for a while, just happy to be warmed by the sun.

His rest was interrupted quickly, though, when a wooden ball fell on a rock near his head, the shock splitting it in two halves. Startled, he found himself showered with the liquid that had been inside. Har-Kan felt some of the liquid reach his mouth and he licked it absently. A few seconds later, he realized what it was: food!

Lunging at the split coconut, he drank the remaining liquid and nibbled at the soft insides. After finishing it, he sighed in contentment before looking from where the coconut had come. Noticing some more, he shook the tree and had the pleasure of making two more coconuts fall on the sand. After slamming them on the same rock outcropping the first one had been split onto, he enthusiastically drank and ate his heart's content before lying down on the sun-basked beach, exhausted by the recent events.

Har-Kan had quickly visited his new place of residence. Quickly here meant that he had explored it thoroughly and that he had found that it was much smaller than the continent he had seen before. It only took him a dozen years to finish his exploration. By that time, he had found several herds of animals and a few human tribes as well. Spending a couple of years in each, he had the pleasure of seeing green-eyed children appear where there weren't before. He knew that he had green eyes, and he started to wonder if the appearance of these children was due to his mere presence or not.

Whatever the case, he had other things to think about. The island was always warm, and too small to switch hunting grounds in winter. As a result, the four tribes inhabiting it had settled down on a permanent basis, and had taken the time to personalize their habitat. It strongly reminded Har-Kan of the Tribe of the Cave, some... many years ago. He wasn't even sure if the tribe still existed.

He spent many years in these four tribes, assisting in their development and teaching them his counting method. With the help of the cave drawings, he expanded their knowledge, his drawings becoming more and more abstract as decades passed. Har-Kan also helped produce many green-eyed children and noticed that they were the ones following his teachings the most avidly.

With the ability to draw abstract ideas came the concept of writing, and the associated notions of knowledge exchange. Since it was now possible to actually write names, people started to give name to everything, going as far as naming each individual tree around their settlement. They also gave names to groups of people, and family names appeared, as well as tribes names, and the four tribes also came up with a name for the whole island.

Atlantis.

Once the four tribes had reached the same level, they started to learn about things from each other, and Har-Kan was happy to stay in the background for a while. Knowledge of how water mixed with some kind of earth to produce clay led to the invention of sturdy bricks, and houses began to be actually constructed instead of using caves. Clay also helped for the creation of dishes, keeping the food away from the unclean floor, and dishes soon became jugs and jars, to keep fresh water and food.

With Har-Kan' experience, the two sea-based tribes also built embarkations and explored the sea around them. It gave the sea tribes a wider area to fish in, but, from an exploration point of view, it was fruitless because there was nothing but water miles around. Most of the expeditions that left the island got caught in storms and died before reaching the land. The ones that succeeded never came back, and their superior knowledge eventually died out in the hostile environment.

A few millennia after his arrival, Har-Kan found that Atlantis was going to have a problem. In the last hundreds of years, he had peacefully lived far from the population, but he had remarked that the tribes' size had reached unmanageable proportions. There were too many people to live on the ever-decreasing herds of prey animals. He tried to warn them, but they ignored him, thinking that he was a loony hermit. Actually, none of the current inhabitants remembered him and his works.

The food crisis reached a peak when the last goat was killed. The fishing towns acquired more power over the land-based ones, and it caused unrest between the four factions. Items that had been invented to hunt and fish soon became weapons between humans. Har-Kan went to the chiefs of the different warring factions to plead for peace, but they were assassinated or replaced before he could start a proper meeting. The only one that stayed in power was just too stubborn to accept his arguments, and downright cruel: in punishment for disturbing his plans, he sent Har-Kan to be tied to a rocky peak in the mountain. His cruelty didn't involve death by hunger, though: the peak was near a well-known spot where raptors lived. And fed.

Har-Kan spent several years of sheer torture there, being eaten alive by the birds of prey. His healing factor was just replacing the eaten bits, but it wasn't less painful. Apparently, the cruel chieftain was still ruling the town during all that time, because guards were often seen accompanying prisoners to the torture spot – and raping any female that they lead there. Each time they came, they were surprised to see him alive, but they also made sure to strengthen his bonds so that he wouldn't escape.

The guards and prisoners were also his main source of news – that is, as long as the prisoners lived. He heard about horrendous acts: in the land-based towns, people were driven mad by hunger and people were actually eating each other. He shook his head and a lone tear found his way on his face before losing itself in his white beard. For hours, days, and even weeks of silent suffering, he wondered about the human mind.

He came to the conclusion that a civilization could only thrive happily if the natural resources were kept on par with their numbers. There was also a balance of power to keep between the identified elements of said civilization in order to keep jealousy and civil war from appearing. Finally, – and he knew it was his own fault because he had retreated from the scene hundreds of years ago – there had to be one power watching over the whole thing.

A year into his imprisonment, one particular night, he felt a deep rumble shake the rocky countryside. Hearing the faint cries from the town some distance away – meaning that people were yelling en masse –, he discovered that he wasn't the only one to be awakened in that way, and wondered about the reason behind it. He noticed, however, that the night wasn't as dark as it should have been: it was tinged red. And, craning his neck to look past the rocky outcropping, he discovered the reason: the mountainous area of the island had been put to fire.

He briefly wondered how a mountain could take fire, before being interrupted by the ground shaking strongly, worse than before. He was struck by a falling chunk of rock and almost fell unconscious. It shattered his bonds, though, and, with great difficulty, he started to walk away. A few minutes after the last earthquake had struck, though, it was dwarfed by something Har-Kan didn't understand, and hoped he would never see again: the mountain exploded. Like a ripe coconut falling on a hard rock.

The top of the mountain was blown in the air by red fire, which arced gracefully downward. That is... gracefully until it hit the houses and the running people. The houses took fire, trapping the few people that still had an upright home. The people hit by the fire rain were either lightly touched, and they succeeded in removing their flaming garment, or they were heavily touched, and they fell under the molten lava blob, never to stand up again.

Several other explosions shook the island, and the mountain actually split itself in two halves, which rolled on the downward slopes, crushing any sign that there had been live humans there. The volcano core exploded a third time, the largest one, forcefully pushing the fertile soil away, and the sea water invaded the depression caused, turning into vapour when contacting the lava. It took a great deal of water to quench the natural disaster, and the currents drew the fleeing embarkations right into the hellish pit.

Only a couple of these succeeded in leaving the destroyed island, eventually reaching another fertile shore. They quickly started to build the same pyramidal houses than the ones they had lived in. Noticing hat the natives were awe-struck, they thought of them as inferiors and imagined a system of beliefs where sacrifices of these would appease whatever god had destroyed their homes.

Thus would eventually come the South American civilizations, although it would take the few pioneers a very long time to reach that objective – after all, consanguine intercourse wasn't productive on the long term.

In the meantime, Har-Kan had found that his luck – for he didn't know what else it could be – had kept him alive again. When the mountainside had flattened the town around him, he had been caught in a hole in the rocky boulder, and had been knocked unconscious. A few hours later, he had awoken, only to find himself in a cave half-immersed in water. He looked around the cave and smiled: as if Nature had a liking in him (or Lady Luck), the hole he had been caught into had been his cave in his hermit years, and he found most of his stuff again – even though they had been quite disturbed.

He decided to sort through these later, and peeked a glance outside. What he saw made him gasp.

Gone was the prosperous island. Nothing remained of the once-proud towns. The island itself seemed to have exploded, as there were rocks like his own in a wide and water-filled circle. In and out the circle, he also noticed numerous bodies and parts thereof, as well as numerous floating trunks from the once-luxurious forests.

Taking this as his cue, Har-Kan returned inside his cave to inventory his belongings. Among numerous broken clay pots, he found several rolls of lianas, as well as a couple of drapes made of the thinnest skins. Three sturdy walking sticks were here too, as well as two bone knives. Finally, protected in several layers of warm furs, he also found a couple of jars of dried fruits and meat, intact. Knowing that he had nothing else to feed on, he realized that he had to leave the island soon, and collected all his belongings before heading out.

Traipsing carefully, he eventually found an almost flat expanse of rock and deposited his load before starting his raft-constructing job once again, using the lianas to bind the usable tree trunks he could find around his place.

A couple of days later, the boat was finished and he left the circle of rubble, some of which had already tilted under the water. Casting a last glance at the place where a proud island had been, he pitied Atlantis and added something in his list of things to establish a thriving civilization: prepare for the eventual disaster.

As he was following the winds, he quickly found himself in the equator, where there was almost none. He stayed blocked like this for a week, following the slow oceanic currents, and grew impatient. Well... it was a relative impatience, since he had lived long enough to suffer a week of waiting. However, his reserves of food were slowly lowering, and he didn't like being hungry again. His last journey over the sea having finished with a trip under it, he was a bit uneasy on the water-surrounded raft.

His walking stick in his hand, he blew and agitated his hands toward his sail. He knew that it was futile, but it helped him pass the time. However, a slow wind picked up from nowhere and started to push his raft steadily. Har-Kan sat down and considered his luck again: not only Nature seemed to keep him alive, but... was he also able to command her?

He shook his head, attributing the obeying wind to a fluke. He was quite sure that it would have happened even if he hadn't blown at the sail. It would take another very long time for him to discover that it was, in fact, entirely his work.

After landing on an unknown coast, he decided to continue his explorations for a while. His failure at building a civilization was hard on his morale, and he walked the land, barely interacting with the natives.

During the hundreds of years of self-imposed solitude, though, he remarked that the weather was turning colder and colder. Some places he regularly visited found themselves more and more often covered in snow, for a larger and larger part of the year. There were even places he visited where the rivers didn't move anymore, their waters transformed into a tricky ice cover.

Small tribes died of cold, while others huddled together for warmth. Hunters learned to travel far to hunt their food on a snow-covered landscape. The grouping was sufficient to keep the people warm, but it also implied that there were more people to feed, and these tribes' numbers dwindled as well because of the lack of food. In the centuries leading to the glaciation stage, it reached a point where there wouldn't be any human left in North America. The ones alive had exhausted their hunting grounds and couldn't travel too far lest they be frozen to death.

Thanks to his earlier experience with bricks, Har-Kan had learned how to build ice houses quickly, and, even with his rudimentary tools, he was able to do so in the moments before nightfall. Because they didn't have much choice, most of the clans he met in his travels were better disposed to learn the techniques he offered, and the ones who didn't... well, they died out. As someone would say, much later: "evolution means the survival of the fittest." The ones most adapted to survive the seemingly eternal winter either had a thick and warm hide, or were intelligent enough to learn ways to protect themselves from the cold.

Thus came the Inuit civilization.

Har-Kan helped the clans, teaching them how to build igloos and how to train wolves for attack, defence, travel, and warmth. With some of these clans, he also learnt how to efficiently hunt large beasts, sources of not only meat and fur, but also fat – something that was crucial for their survival in the harsh environment. He also found out that the animal's fat could be used as a slow fire combustible, providing enough light for a small igloo. After spending one or ten years in a clan, siring a child or two in the process, he left and went to another to spread the techniques.

At one point, he had taken under his wing a wounded she-wolf and had healed her, earning the animal's fidelity. After their birth, her cubs were trained to follow him as a pack leader, even helping him hunting as they aged. It earned him the nickname of "man-wolf" and the clans he visited started to tell their children stories of how he would help them in the direst times.

After a particular event, the clans he crossed stopped calling man-wolf and nicknamed him "bear-wolf" instead: the weather was so cold that polar bears had migrated to the south of their usual location, and one of them had encountered a human hunting party before fighting them over their mutual prey.

The large animal slashed at them with all its might, and the humans started to retreat. Generally, such an encounter was deadly for the humans. Har-Kan, however, sneaked behind the beast and stuck his spear in the unprotected backside. The blow didn't kill it, though, and the infuriated beast reared up, his attention distracted by the lone human. With that move however, the bear let loose his guard, and Har-Kan spurred his tribesmen to attack. Five spears struck his chest, one of them finding the heart, and the large beast slammed on the snow-covered ground. The party brought the beast back to the encampment, and Har-Kan was praised, and given the creature's pelt and head as a reward for his daring move. He reluctantly accepted, but would later find out that it was one of the best protection against the cold.

His bear-wolf nickname was of course enhanced by the fact that the head of the bear's pelt was covering his head, giving him the appearance of a human-sized bear from afar.

The unforgiving winter continued for an exceedingly long time, dozens of millennia, even, during which Har-Kan travelled through the lands again. He even walked the seas: in the place where he knew oceans were, the icy shoreline had extended far away, to the point of linking Canada to northern Europe and Alaska to Siberia, where he spent a long time hunting with the local Inuit tribes.

Har-Kan looked at the dead bodies and sighed.

He had been with the clan for a long time, and had participated to their relocations like one of them. Moving was necessary, because of the exhaustion of hunting grounds, mostly due to their prey's migrating habits. On the way, they had been viciously attacked by hungry wild animals, which had succeeded in seriously harming several of them and killing a few elders.

Now that the attack was finished, they could reflect about the reasons behind it. Har-Kan knew that predators prowled upon slower creatures, always seen as weaker. He also knew that the clan's slowness was due to the hauling of their possessions. At the first hunt after setting down, he noticed the reindeers' endurance and later convinced the hunters to catch a couple of them alive.

They had too many possessions for the two animals to carry, though, and they devised a system where the animals would pull a set of small tree trunks, tied together like a raft. There were numerous advantages, mainly because the newly-invented sled was able to carry people as well as possessions. However, the fearful animals were also alarmed at the slightest threat, and the sled was overturned several times during their displacements.

One of these times, it was because of an attacking bear. Maddened by the spears sticking from its back, thrown there by the hunters defending the procession, the large beast succeeded in killing one of the reindeers and wounding the second before being put down. Har-Kan suggested a permanent halt and they quickly built igloos for themselves and for the meat – they had done so for a long time, as it kept the meat from being stolen by carrion eaters. The wounded reindeer was unable to stand, and they took its life too – in these harsh times, pity wasn't an option, and the animal would have been killed on the spot by other predators anyways. After taking the three large animals' fur and cutting the meat in the appropriate morsels, they stored these in the largest ice-house they had built so far.

At the following clan meeting, Har-Kan proposed that his wolves drag the sled, and the elders thanked him before dismissing the session. Har-Kan took a few leather belts from the clan's stash before heading to where his wolves were resting, and tried to put the belts around their necks.

After several ineffective tries, he growled in a manner he knew would cow them – they still saw him as their pack leader – and succeeded in fitting most of the wolves with a collar. Har-Kan knew that, like the humans, the wolves had different personalities, and he let the independent ones their collar-less state. After all, he still needed them to hunt or defend.

Thanks to the stored meat, the clan stayed several days at that location, and, by the time they were ready to leave, Har-Kan had finished teaching his wolves to drag a shed. It was chaotic for the first several days, but it worked, and the invention would be, as usual, spread through the clans of northern Russia and Scandinavia thanks to his numerous trips.

Har-Kan stayed in Northern Europe for a few millennia, helping the tribes, until the weather started to heat up. After a few centuries of warming up, the tribes decided to continue their snow-oriented way of life by retreating to the north, passing the Baltic Sea on foot for the last time.

After waving after his friends for the last time, Har-Kan turned around and headed southward, followed by his current wolf – the last of a long line of specifically domesticated wolves – which he had named Dog.

As the glaciation receded, the Inuit tribes of Asia separated, some going to the north to keep their way of living, while others stayed where they were. After all, if "Khan" was an honorary title in ancient Mongolia, there had to be a reason.

In the same way, some North American Inuit tribes migrated to the north, while others stayed where they were, starting to shed their heavy garments to adapt to the warmer climates. Over time, these hunting and migrating tribes would use tepees instead of igloos, and would be ultimately known as Indians and then Native Americans.

Several of these tribes would retain the concept of a shaman – or wise man – to lead the tribes to safe hunting grounds. And these shamans would invariably have clearer eyes than their counterparts.

To be continued in next chapter: The Dawn of Humanity...

Atlantis! Lo and behold!
Done is the legend of old.
Inuits thrive while Aztecs don't,
And our hero? Rest he won't.