Book 4: Astoria Greengrass and the Curse of Quennell Park
Song rec: "Ni dieu ni maître" by Rome
No Cruciatus Curse that Astoria had ever received felt the way Rabastan's did. He had dressed up the process with the rusty tools in his belt, and even though he was perfectly aware that Astoria would have given her family's secret away to avoid any part of this, he kept her Silenced so he could taunt that she hadn't told him yet. At long last, his curiosity about the Fidelius Charm overpowered his lust for torture. The first thing on her tongue when he lifted her out of silence was Quennell's curse. There could be no loss telling Rabastan about it, not after what she'd been through, not after blinking the blood from her eyes.
Wrong.
Rabastan was completely fascinated with the Greengrass's curse, and even more interested in the fact that this night was the Vernal Equinox.
"Now how funny is that," Rabastan said. "And here you are with me of all wizards."
The taste of her own cursed blood trailed down across her lips. He wiped them with his thumb.
"Couldn't I break your nasty curse for you, ma voyeuse?" he mocked. "Just say the word. I can help."
Rabastan leaned his earhole over her mouth. Astoria grimaced and held her breath, not making a sound.
"What's that look for? Tsk tsk. Don't flatter yourself, now, my dear," Rabastan cooed. "The disgust is mutual. But don't fret. It still won't be your blood curse that kills you."
He coiled his whip-wand like a snake in a basket, and within the motion, there appeared a conjured glass jar. Rabastan shook the jar in front of her face threateningly. There were so many revolting things he could do in the school of blood magic.
"That Carrow thug told me you're familiar with blood magic, too, Astoria. How well-read you are! You must know what I'm doing."
Making her into an Inferius the manual way appeared to be his goal. He set her wand arm free but held it tight in his grip and stared at her reactions. He dived once more into her brain, lapping up her memories of how she had checked out the Blood Magick book at the beginning of the school year. It made her feel like a horrible person again.
I only read the one curse, she thought. I didn't read about blood magic, really.
She was probably trying to tell God, whom she thought she would see shortly. It was not God who answered her, but Rabastan. He dug inquisitively at her experience with the book. Astoria wouldn't have remembered the single, cacophonous incantation she'd come across had Rabastan not stirred it up so hungrily. She didn't even know what that spell was called, only what it looked like.
Rabastan set the jar afloat right beneath her arm. Then his wand started wrapping over her outstretched arm like a python squeezing out life. He started muttering something iniquitous, and, like any time he spoke, she began to sear with pain. Her arm felt wet. He was going to take too much blood.
She would die.
The hour she had for someone to rescue her was up. Her need to survive led her to say aloud the very last thing he had pulled from her head. She knew there was enough blood running from her to use it…
"Ceargealdot steorran ríed, unlybban spiwe blðdþigen!" she screamed.
She could hardly believe it. Rabastan's hand dropped from his wand, which was still tight round Astoria's arm, and he fell to the floor, writhing like a freshly killed centipede. Astoria at last gained the ability to move, and she rolled off the table and untwisted the wand from herself. It was very difficult to see with the injuries to her eyes, but what was clear was that the screaming Rabastan was not meant to be double-jointed. He was shaking, twisting, knotting, and thumping against the floor in positions the world's best acrobats could not flex to. But Astoria was not safe yet. The dried blood on her face was painful, but more importantly, she had to stop her continual blood loss in the arm with a wand she didn't know how to use. She ran upstairs, tripping on a broken stair. Unlike Rabastan's well-lit torture chamber, the upstairs of the abandoned funeral parlour was clumsily dark and full of hazardous floorboards and clutter. She tried every position of the wand and whip she could think of, muttering all kinds of magic she wasn't sure would work.
Her veins and arteries were showing black through her skin. Rabastan had made quite some progress in what little time he had worked blood magic on her. Astoria yanked down a dusty curtain and started ripping it. It was very difficult to make a tourniquet for oneself though, especially when no one had ever felt the need to teach it to her. Tourniquets were for Muggle first-aid, not well-behaved witches. Astoria spat at the dusty fabric held between her teeth. With the curtain tied as tightly as her physical strength would allow, she once again tried to stop the bleeding with the wand, this time folding the whip like an accordion to cast healing magic. Everything she had learnt through Crouch Jr's class in her third year, books in her fourth year, Snape last year, and Dark magic this year was fair game in the fight against death. Then something worked. She had moved so quickly she didn't know what it was, so she cast all the most recent things again. Her wounds were made from Dark magic, but something worked. She was not going to die from blood loss.
A distinctive crack of Apparition sounded in the basement along with Rabastan's continual screams of anguish. Astoria could not afford to excite at the prospect of a rescuer. Anyone who would be able to Apparate directly to this location was on Rabastan's side, not hers. A man's voice started booming along with the screams… Counter-curses to save Rabastan? Not on Astoria's watch. With the building so fallen in, the darkness, and her swelling wet eyes, it was hard to find a door to the exterior, but when she saw streetlights through a half-moon arch, she tossed a Bombardment Charm from the whip to get out. She ran out to the street, and no matter how much she wanted to scream for help, she knew she could not. Drawing Muggles to the area would inevitably kill them. She turned back to the building and flung the whip over and over…
"CONFRINGO, CONFRINGO, CONFRINGO, CONFRINGO, CONFRINGO!"
Explosions like she had never created before destroyed the building, each angrier and more powerful than the last, as the pain in Astoria's arm reacted perfectly to the wand she now commanded. Pieces of the building were flying everywhere, rubble fell into hot flame, and dust billowed out between the white and orange, igniting into embers. The sound was incredible, the explosions were meaty fireworks. He would die! Lestrange would die!
A rumble came from the appalling mess of the structure, and before Astoria could even squint at what had happened, a huge hole appeared in the crumbling, flaming foundation, with more of the building falling into it.
Oh no.
From the hole in the building's carcass erupted a massive serpent, at least twenty feet thick in its gut's diameter. In its seemingly invincible tread, the serpent carried a large, black sphere at the base of its head — the Nidhogg Shield. The same street lanterns that polluted the skies with bright, aimless light illuminated the Shield along the gargantuan snake's back. Rabastan was still limp, and his allies let him roll and slide aimlessly along the globe of the Shield. The caster of the Shield was none other than Rodolphus Lestrange, his wretched brother's saviour, but the master of the beast was a pale witch with calf-length blonde hair. Working wandlessly, her arms were in a ritual dance controlling the creature's ascent. She was held intimately by Rodolphus at the waist, but she was not Bellatrix in disguise. She was something new.
Astoria held the image of the countryside surrounding Hogwarts taut in her mind and turned into a frantic, compressing Apparition, hoping that two months' teachings were enough to move her in one piece.