5. Words, Words, Words, Something Wicked this Way Comes

The sounds of potion-making seemed loud but distant – clear arrows of noise pecking at a mind muffled by fear. Lucius kept his balance on a floor that was at once his own yet foreign, still as the stone beneath the rich carpeting yet rattling his legs as an unsettled heap of his ancestor's bones. Perhaps even a ghostly image of his own whitened bones could be glimpsed through the carpet's complex patterns, coiling before his fear-addled eyes.

Determined to avoid his morbid reflection on the floor, Lucius let his gaze sweep the room, back and forth, back and forth. He stood perfectly still save for the swivelling of his head, like a sentinel keeping the silence at bay by giving it the very coldest of Malfoy stares.

Looking at those walls, his own that now seemed so alien to him, Lucius found himself wondering if perhaps they marked the end of the world, a thin shield against a nothingness that had consumed all else. It seemed to him that the room existed now in a vacuum, adrift in limbo. Not a sound was heard, the subtle presence of the world around him became clear to him now only by its omission. To his mind, there existed only the room, and the strange presence haunting it, freezing his limbs and agitating his heart.

'Lucius!' exclaimed Voldemort. 'How, exactly, did you come by this sample?'

Lucius startled out of his frozen vigilance and turned an apologetic face towards his master's scaly back. 'My lord?'

Voldemort did not turn away from the metallic liquid rippling softly in the small stone basin before him. 'The sample, Lucius! How did you acquire it?'

'I assure you, my lord,' faltered Lucius, 'it's – it is what I have said it is. Surely, it is enough that you have a gentleman's word—'

'NO, it is NOT!' roared Voldemort. 'That would imply trust, and trust is a weakness I do not allow myself. You should know this, Malfoy. Now, tell me exactly what you did to get the sample.' His voice was measured and cool. It was a voice his followers either learned to obey the first time they heard it or not at all.

And so, Lucius told his lord, told him all but the most intimate of details.

In the hearth, the fire fought a losing battle against a harsh, cold wind.

The room had no windows.