Author's note: Well, I've been reading over some other Harry Potters fics,
and I've noticed that nearly all of them have disclaimers at the top. I
guess it must be a good idea, so I'll state here what should already be
obvious: nothing here is really "mine"; even the idea for the story is
nothing more than a loose interpretation of the hints and glimpses into the
First War with which Ms. Rowling has provided us.
And now the second installment of "The Darkest Mark."
***
On the walk home, Snape hardly even noticed the Muggles who on other occasions would have warranted a sneer. He clutched Malfoy's parchment close to his chest, irrationally paranoid that it would somehow be snatched from his claw-like grip before he had the chance to delve into this new-and only-development in his dull life. The streets of London blurred around him as he receded into his head, and before he consciously realized it, he found himself at his front door. Like him, the townhouse was thin and slightly creepy, its windows dark as his own unfathomable eyes. The door, in keeping with its master's personality, squawked sharply on its hinges as Snape pushed it open and entered.
Dawn sunlight glowed warmly behind the curtains covering the living room window. It would have allowed an excellent view of the street, had Snape not bewitched the glass to show, instead, a view of the heavens as they would look without the interference of daylight or storm clouds. Snape put no stock in the practice of divination and astrology, but the brewing of potions and the use of the Dark Arts often depended upon the cycles of the moon and stars.
At the moment, however, Snape was interested neither in the window nor in brewing up darkness. Stiffly he seated himself in an old armchair in the corner of the room and barked the words "the Dark Lord is come." Once again the script spread out across the page in tidy lines of beautiful cursive letters. There was no heading or explanation, just as Snape had noticed inside the Leaky Cauldron; it started straight off in a list of instructions. It said:
Wear black robes. Conceal the face. Let no man know who hides
beneath.
At midnight on the night following the giving of this notice,
the bearer will bring himself to that place known as the Yard of
No Mercy.
He will come to the stone marked "Baron Horbis Toggernag
Velliard."
He will lie down upon this grave.
He will know fear. Later will he know power.
Snape's forehead wrinkled as his eyes narrowed at the words. He had heard of the Yard of No Mercy; it was a graveyard in which the ancient pureblood families had once buried the bodies of relations who had disgraced their family names. He knew, because his father had threatened both him and his mother with interment there, that upon the ground was laid a terrible curse that prevented the dead from finding rest, forcing them to become ghosts of the most disagreeable sort; the angry sort. It seemed to Snape that to visit such a known haunting ground must be called "unwise," to put it as mildly as possible, although "insane" seemed more descriptive and more accurate.
Insane. Severus twirled the word about in his mind. Sometimes when he let his thoughts wander as deep into his being as he could painlessly allow, a knot would form in his stomach as he considered the idea that there was really something wrong with him. Now and then, the idea seemed rather attractive. If he were mad, he might blame his failed life on that very fact, and he mused to himself that such subtle insanity was quite as incurable as any personality flaw.
Still, Snape was not stupid, and he never really believed it, himself, when he toyed with the idea. Rather, he was a man of above-average intelligence, though one who was losing his patience with this sort of existence. A stroll through the Yard of No Mercy might be chancy, even suicidal, but Snape thrilled to the idea with the clear knowledge that though he might be taking a risk, he had remarkably little to lose.
Once again Snape slept the day away on the dusty old sofa situated beneath the bewitched window. When he was awake, its moldy fibers liked to work themselves up inside his long, greasy nose and make him sneeze, but they did not seem to bother him as he breathed shallowly in his sleep.
Even as he dreamt, perhaps of the memories that so burned him to recall, his brow furrowed between his severe black eyebrows. When he awoke a little past seven in the evening, he found that he was angry and afraid without a reason or a person to whom he might direct such emotions. At first, as he rose and hesitantly selected an ebony-black robe from a trunk whose contents he had never gotten around to stowing in the closet, he was livid. But after a quick visit to the privy and subsequently a small breakfast of domestic sphinx eggs and a glass of water, he lost his grip on the irrational fury.
Agitated to the point that some might have called him nervous, Snape whiled away the rest of the evening trying to read Trodgel's Anthology of Little- Known Curses of the Early Sixteenth Century. He was not in a good humor for soaking up knowledge-his eyes kept staring off beyond the words as his thoughts wandered. But yesterday's edition of the Daily Prophet was a pile of ash, and today's must still lay in the post box, where Snape had no desire to make a move and retrieve the traitorous text.
At eleven thirty he rose from his favorite reading chair.
"Sombrus maska," he said, breaking the thin silence of the room with the spell and flicking his wand at Trodgel's Anthology. In his hand the book flowed from a grimy, four-inch thick, hard-bound tome into a silky black mask, the like of an executioner's hood. This he stowed away inside his robes. Snape's wand swished through the air a second time, and as he did so he called out the apparition spell. There was a great crack in the air as he was suddenly not there, and if any of the muggles on the street took note of the noise they were not brave enough to confront their skulking, grimy-haired neighbor.
In the same instant that his form had disappeared from his living room in London, he reappeared just as suddenly on the shoulder of a muddy dirt road somewhere out in the countryside. He frowne at the landscape as though insulted by its sudden presence about him. It was regrettable, he thought to himself, that this was the closest to the Yard of No Mercy that it was possible to apparate.
Slowly he trudged along the muddy road, moving steadily southward in the direction in which he knew the Yard to lie. For the present he stowed his wand and kept the hood in his pocket. Out here, surrounded by nothing but fields and hills and tiny copses of trees, he did not expect to meet any Muggles, but he thought it would be best not to take too many chances right off. A man wearing a robe would make them suspicious, but a faceless man in robes would send them racing for their shot-guns, and such a confrontation could only cause unwanted complications.
The air was very damp, Snape observed, sniffing the scent of a past rain and of fertile fields. The stars in the sky were nearly entirely obliterated by a gray covering of billowy rainclouds, which gave the raven- haired observer a distinct feeling of being alone. That sense of emptiness and vulnerability prompted him to take out his wand again after only a few feet, which in turn made him feel like a simpleton. Already he was angry again and looking murderous; what would he do when he was forced to cope with the menace of the old bone yard? He told himself that he would make any ghost he met there quickly wish it had never died.
It took him approximately a quarter of an hour to make his way up the road, though he had sighted the silvery gates after five minutes. Approaching them now, he made ready the "alohomora" charm, but quickly realized that someone had already magicked it open. He pushed the filigreed gate slowly inward, and rather than squeaking rustily, it seemed to hush the croaking tune of cricket song, as though it swallowed the sound.
Snape let his face relax. Nothing seemed amiss amongst the rows of graves he now saw laid out over the landscape. Not a single ghostly form walked the hills on this dark night. Relaxing a bit, so that he now appeared slightly stoop-shouldered, he took out his hood and pulled it over his angular face and greasy head. The dark landscape appeared even darker through the close weave of the hood, so that he found it necessary to light his path with the "lumos" spell. It was only a small light that he had conjured, but it seemed he had awoken something, for as the tip of his wand glowed into brightness, a cold and unnatural wind puffed across his face. Instantly he stepped backward, into the guard position, and held his wand over his head in preparation.
A few feet ahead of his location, the air suddenly seemed to congeal into a milky fluid, recognizable after a moment as the phantasmal form of a round- faced, long-haired woman.
"Hello there," she said in a pleasant-enough voice. Snape did not move. "Are you looking for a gentleman named Velliard?"
"No, not the gentleman," Snape said warily, without trusting her. "Just his grave, thank you."
"What? Oh, I see," she smiled. "you don't want to run into his ghost." She laughed ladylike into her hand, as though this were a ridiculous reservation. "Don't worry; he doesn't come around here much."
"Hmm," Snape acknowledged her with thoughtful condescension. "I don't fancy meeting any of your friends tonight," he hinted disparagingly.
"Not to worry," trilled the female ghost, smiling again. "Follow me, sir!"
She led him through the graves in an inimitable pattern, twisting around old moss-covered stones and winding through the cleaner new ones. It was difficult to tell, but Snape's innate sense of direction told him that he was being led in loops. The thought made his breath quicken and his grip on his wand grow tighter, but still he followed the dead woman.
"He we are," she said brightly, stopping abruptly in front of one of the older graves. "Baron Velliard! Do I get a thank you??" she batted her eyes and cupped a hand to her ear dramatically.
"Thank. you." Snape unwillingly spat the words, with almost a touch of sarcasm.
"Always a pleasure," said the ghost modestly, as though Snape had thought to say it himself. "Ta ta, my dear!" and she seemed to drift apart in the still air like foam in the open seas. In a moment, she was gone all together, and Severus was left alone to consider the grave.
It was just about midnight, now; he thought the cheerful ghost might have knowingly led him around until the right time, for now there was not a spare moment left in which he might allow rationality to outweigh his decision to come. Even as he thought about it, he was sitting upon the ground, on top of the grave. He breathed as deeply as his shallow lungs would permit, scratched his great nose briefly with his long fingers, and pushed the doubt from his mind. Now he leaned back so that the top of his head was mere inches from touching the headstone, just as the decaying corpse of the Baron must be laying in the ground beneath him.
He lay there only minutes, with the cool earth at his back and his eyes on the overcast sky when the clouds above him began to drift apart into invisible vapor, revealing the brilliant stars and the orb of the full moon. The fluffy veil of cloud that had kept them from looking down upon the Earth had dissipated altogether in such a short time that Snape darkly suspected some sort of powerful sorcery at work. He crossed his arms over his chest, not in the manner of the dead, but in the way that a living man would do it if he happened to be impatient, or-just possibly-nervous.
Suddenly, the darkened faces of two men appeared above him with a suddenness that gave Snape a start. Their hands shot out from beneath their deep black robes as they came to stand over him, and before Snape could stand or raise his head, they had his arms and pulled them out to the sides, at right angles to his body. One of them wrestled his wand out of the vice-like grip of his left hand and stowed it away inside Snape's own inner wand pocket. This was some small comfort, thought a part of him; they had not taken the wand away. As he thought this, another two gentlemen appeared at his legs and pinned them to the ground.
"I don't suppose any of you have heard of 'locomotor mortis?' " Snape scoffed coldly at them. The four cloaked figures did not answer. Just then, the dark shape of a fifth man strode into his line of vision, peering down at him from over Velliard's headstone.
"Indeed, my friend," said a cultured voice that Snape recognized as Lucius Malfoy's. "Though perhaps you might find 'rigor mortis' " more effective in this case, wouldn't you say?"
"Rigor mortis isn't a curse," sneered Snape, his heart lifting. "It's-oh." It sank lower than before.
"Yes," purred Malfoy, a smile evident in his words. "This bit of the ceremony cannot work with that sort of spell already in place. It would muddy the purity of the magic we intend to work tonight. And, my friend, I do think you might finding shutting up an excellent option, unless you have a reason for inviting death upon yourself this night."
Snape nodded affirmatively, though he felt the slight burn of his own helplessness at this agreement. Silence was the response, but he had the feeling that Malfoy had understood. All was quiet-even the faint singing of the crickets had been replaced by the small rustling of a warm breeze.
The robed men did not leave their posts, but after a moment Snape saw the men bow their head towards something that must be coming up upon him from the direction of his lower half.
"Master," said the five men in broken unison. Snape now dreaded the moment when he would see this "Master," but he did not have much time in which to become afraid.
At his feet, another man appeared. At least, he was man-like, with short, pitch-black hair and broad shoulders; nose where a nose would be expected, and eyes and mouth in more or less the proper position. What made Snape's breath catch in his throat was that he still managed, within the framework of a human body, to have the appearance of a great dark snake. And Severus Snape had a slight inkling that it might be of the poisonous kind.
And now the second installment of "The Darkest Mark."
***
On the walk home, Snape hardly even noticed the Muggles who on other occasions would have warranted a sneer. He clutched Malfoy's parchment close to his chest, irrationally paranoid that it would somehow be snatched from his claw-like grip before he had the chance to delve into this new-and only-development in his dull life. The streets of London blurred around him as he receded into his head, and before he consciously realized it, he found himself at his front door. Like him, the townhouse was thin and slightly creepy, its windows dark as his own unfathomable eyes. The door, in keeping with its master's personality, squawked sharply on its hinges as Snape pushed it open and entered.
Dawn sunlight glowed warmly behind the curtains covering the living room window. It would have allowed an excellent view of the street, had Snape not bewitched the glass to show, instead, a view of the heavens as they would look without the interference of daylight or storm clouds. Snape put no stock in the practice of divination and astrology, but the brewing of potions and the use of the Dark Arts often depended upon the cycles of the moon and stars.
At the moment, however, Snape was interested neither in the window nor in brewing up darkness. Stiffly he seated himself in an old armchair in the corner of the room and barked the words "the Dark Lord is come." Once again the script spread out across the page in tidy lines of beautiful cursive letters. There was no heading or explanation, just as Snape had noticed inside the Leaky Cauldron; it started straight off in a list of instructions. It said:
Wear black robes. Conceal the face. Let no man know who hides
beneath.
At midnight on the night following the giving of this notice,
the bearer will bring himself to that place known as the Yard of
No Mercy.
He will come to the stone marked "Baron Horbis Toggernag
Velliard."
He will lie down upon this grave.
He will know fear. Later will he know power.
Snape's forehead wrinkled as his eyes narrowed at the words. He had heard of the Yard of No Mercy; it was a graveyard in which the ancient pureblood families had once buried the bodies of relations who had disgraced their family names. He knew, because his father had threatened both him and his mother with interment there, that upon the ground was laid a terrible curse that prevented the dead from finding rest, forcing them to become ghosts of the most disagreeable sort; the angry sort. It seemed to Snape that to visit such a known haunting ground must be called "unwise," to put it as mildly as possible, although "insane" seemed more descriptive and more accurate.
Insane. Severus twirled the word about in his mind. Sometimes when he let his thoughts wander as deep into his being as he could painlessly allow, a knot would form in his stomach as he considered the idea that there was really something wrong with him. Now and then, the idea seemed rather attractive. If he were mad, he might blame his failed life on that very fact, and he mused to himself that such subtle insanity was quite as incurable as any personality flaw.
Still, Snape was not stupid, and he never really believed it, himself, when he toyed with the idea. Rather, he was a man of above-average intelligence, though one who was losing his patience with this sort of existence. A stroll through the Yard of No Mercy might be chancy, even suicidal, but Snape thrilled to the idea with the clear knowledge that though he might be taking a risk, he had remarkably little to lose.
Once again Snape slept the day away on the dusty old sofa situated beneath the bewitched window. When he was awake, its moldy fibers liked to work themselves up inside his long, greasy nose and make him sneeze, but they did not seem to bother him as he breathed shallowly in his sleep.
Even as he dreamt, perhaps of the memories that so burned him to recall, his brow furrowed between his severe black eyebrows. When he awoke a little past seven in the evening, he found that he was angry and afraid without a reason or a person to whom he might direct such emotions. At first, as he rose and hesitantly selected an ebony-black robe from a trunk whose contents he had never gotten around to stowing in the closet, he was livid. But after a quick visit to the privy and subsequently a small breakfast of domestic sphinx eggs and a glass of water, he lost his grip on the irrational fury.
Agitated to the point that some might have called him nervous, Snape whiled away the rest of the evening trying to read Trodgel's Anthology of Little- Known Curses of the Early Sixteenth Century. He was not in a good humor for soaking up knowledge-his eyes kept staring off beyond the words as his thoughts wandered. But yesterday's edition of the Daily Prophet was a pile of ash, and today's must still lay in the post box, where Snape had no desire to make a move and retrieve the traitorous text.
At eleven thirty he rose from his favorite reading chair.
"Sombrus maska," he said, breaking the thin silence of the room with the spell and flicking his wand at Trodgel's Anthology. In his hand the book flowed from a grimy, four-inch thick, hard-bound tome into a silky black mask, the like of an executioner's hood. This he stowed away inside his robes. Snape's wand swished through the air a second time, and as he did so he called out the apparition spell. There was a great crack in the air as he was suddenly not there, and if any of the muggles on the street took note of the noise they were not brave enough to confront their skulking, grimy-haired neighbor.
In the same instant that his form had disappeared from his living room in London, he reappeared just as suddenly on the shoulder of a muddy dirt road somewhere out in the countryside. He frowne at the landscape as though insulted by its sudden presence about him. It was regrettable, he thought to himself, that this was the closest to the Yard of No Mercy that it was possible to apparate.
Slowly he trudged along the muddy road, moving steadily southward in the direction in which he knew the Yard to lie. For the present he stowed his wand and kept the hood in his pocket. Out here, surrounded by nothing but fields and hills and tiny copses of trees, he did not expect to meet any Muggles, but he thought it would be best not to take too many chances right off. A man wearing a robe would make them suspicious, but a faceless man in robes would send them racing for their shot-guns, and such a confrontation could only cause unwanted complications.
The air was very damp, Snape observed, sniffing the scent of a past rain and of fertile fields. The stars in the sky were nearly entirely obliterated by a gray covering of billowy rainclouds, which gave the raven- haired observer a distinct feeling of being alone. That sense of emptiness and vulnerability prompted him to take out his wand again after only a few feet, which in turn made him feel like a simpleton. Already he was angry again and looking murderous; what would he do when he was forced to cope with the menace of the old bone yard? He told himself that he would make any ghost he met there quickly wish it had never died.
It took him approximately a quarter of an hour to make his way up the road, though he had sighted the silvery gates after five minutes. Approaching them now, he made ready the "alohomora" charm, but quickly realized that someone had already magicked it open. He pushed the filigreed gate slowly inward, and rather than squeaking rustily, it seemed to hush the croaking tune of cricket song, as though it swallowed the sound.
Snape let his face relax. Nothing seemed amiss amongst the rows of graves he now saw laid out over the landscape. Not a single ghostly form walked the hills on this dark night. Relaxing a bit, so that he now appeared slightly stoop-shouldered, he took out his hood and pulled it over his angular face and greasy head. The dark landscape appeared even darker through the close weave of the hood, so that he found it necessary to light his path with the "lumos" spell. It was only a small light that he had conjured, but it seemed he had awoken something, for as the tip of his wand glowed into brightness, a cold and unnatural wind puffed across his face. Instantly he stepped backward, into the guard position, and held his wand over his head in preparation.
A few feet ahead of his location, the air suddenly seemed to congeal into a milky fluid, recognizable after a moment as the phantasmal form of a round- faced, long-haired woman.
"Hello there," she said in a pleasant-enough voice. Snape did not move. "Are you looking for a gentleman named Velliard?"
"No, not the gentleman," Snape said warily, without trusting her. "Just his grave, thank you."
"What? Oh, I see," she smiled. "you don't want to run into his ghost." She laughed ladylike into her hand, as though this were a ridiculous reservation. "Don't worry; he doesn't come around here much."
"Hmm," Snape acknowledged her with thoughtful condescension. "I don't fancy meeting any of your friends tonight," he hinted disparagingly.
"Not to worry," trilled the female ghost, smiling again. "Follow me, sir!"
She led him through the graves in an inimitable pattern, twisting around old moss-covered stones and winding through the cleaner new ones. It was difficult to tell, but Snape's innate sense of direction told him that he was being led in loops. The thought made his breath quicken and his grip on his wand grow tighter, but still he followed the dead woman.
"He we are," she said brightly, stopping abruptly in front of one of the older graves. "Baron Velliard! Do I get a thank you??" she batted her eyes and cupped a hand to her ear dramatically.
"Thank. you." Snape unwillingly spat the words, with almost a touch of sarcasm.
"Always a pleasure," said the ghost modestly, as though Snape had thought to say it himself. "Ta ta, my dear!" and she seemed to drift apart in the still air like foam in the open seas. In a moment, she was gone all together, and Severus was left alone to consider the grave.
It was just about midnight, now; he thought the cheerful ghost might have knowingly led him around until the right time, for now there was not a spare moment left in which he might allow rationality to outweigh his decision to come. Even as he thought about it, he was sitting upon the ground, on top of the grave. He breathed as deeply as his shallow lungs would permit, scratched his great nose briefly with his long fingers, and pushed the doubt from his mind. Now he leaned back so that the top of his head was mere inches from touching the headstone, just as the decaying corpse of the Baron must be laying in the ground beneath him.
He lay there only minutes, with the cool earth at his back and his eyes on the overcast sky when the clouds above him began to drift apart into invisible vapor, revealing the brilliant stars and the orb of the full moon. The fluffy veil of cloud that had kept them from looking down upon the Earth had dissipated altogether in such a short time that Snape darkly suspected some sort of powerful sorcery at work. He crossed his arms over his chest, not in the manner of the dead, but in the way that a living man would do it if he happened to be impatient, or-just possibly-nervous.
Suddenly, the darkened faces of two men appeared above him with a suddenness that gave Snape a start. Their hands shot out from beneath their deep black robes as they came to stand over him, and before Snape could stand or raise his head, they had his arms and pulled them out to the sides, at right angles to his body. One of them wrestled his wand out of the vice-like grip of his left hand and stowed it away inside Snape's own inner wand pocket. This was some small comfort, thought a part of him; they had not taken the wand away. As he thought this, another two gentlemen appeared at his legs and pinned them to the ground.
"I don't suppose any of you have heard of 'locomotor mortis?' " Snape scoffed coldly at them. The four cloaked figures did not answer. Just then, the dark shape of a fifth man strode into his line of vision, peering down at him from over Velliard's headstone.
"Indeed, my friend," said a cultured voice that Snape recognized as Lucius Malfoy's. "Though perhaps you might find 'rigor mortis' " more effective in this case, wouldn't you say?"
"Rigor mortis isn't a curse," sneered Snape, his heart lifting. "It's-oh." It sank lower than before.
"Yes," purred Malfoy, a smile evident in his words. "This bit of the ceremony cannot work with that sort of spell already in place. It would muddy the purity of the magic we intend to work tonight. And, my friend, I do think you might finding shutting up an excellent option, unless you have a reason for inviting death upon yourself this night."
Snape nodded affirmatively, though he felt the slight burn of his own helplessness at this agreement. Silence was the response, but he had the feeling that Malfoy had understood. All was quiet-even the faint singing of the crickets had been replaced by the small rustling of a warm breeze.
The robed men did not leave their posts, but after a moment Snape saw the men bow their head towards something that must be coming up upon him from the direction of his lower half.
"Master," said the five men in broken unison. Snape now dreaded the moment when he would see this "Master," but he did not have much time in which to become afraid.
At his feet, another man appeared. At least, he was man-like, with short, pitch-black hair and broad shoulders; nose where a nose would be expected, and eyes and mouth in more or less the proper position. What made Snape's breath catch in his throat was that he still managed, within the framework of a human body, to have the appearance of a great dark snake. And Severus Snape had a slight inkling that it might be of the poisonous kind.
