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Stahl Nacht
by CrimsonNoble
A/N: I's having hella comp problems. Forgive me. Delayed to hell. My
computer doth detest FF.N... And I'm skiving off my English to do this.
I don't like Mr. Wyckoff.
Disclaimer: I make no claims toward ownership of Harry Potter. I do,
however, claim ownership of Ange. 'Cause they're mine.
WARNING: This is rated R for a reason. Should you choose to ignore
said reason, read at your own risk. Masochism, sadism, sensuality,
graphic violence, and harsh language. Possible male/male
relationships, and definite female/female. Quite probable threesome
relationship between any of the above. Ye hast been warned. Should
any of the above be objectionable to you, there is a back button on
your browser, a convienient hyperlink back to the main Harry Potter
section of the site, and a simple right-click will reveal an option
for "back", if your computer works like mine. Can't help mac users
there.
Spoilers: OotP, GoF, PoA, CoS, SS.
Chapter 15:
????, London. 0622, January 6.
Luna gazed curiously around the park. It was strangely reminiscent of
the Forbidden Forest, though without all the danger.
Upon considering the corpses at her feet, she revised that thought. It
was like the Forbidden Forest, but without the magic fouling the air.
She crouched, the wand behind her ear casting a pale light over the
closest corpse. Indelicately she prodded it, offhandedly observing the
way it nearly fell apart at her touch.
"Luna," greeted a voice from somewhere behind and to her left.
The girl nodded cheerfully. "Hello Raye..." She offered in return.
There was a moment in which neither of them spoke as Raye finished
closing the distance between them. Luna shuffled upright, her head
lolling pleasantly as she took in the surrounding forest, storing the
image in her memory for later perusal.
A limp copy of the Quibbler made its way from her pocket to her hand,
and she began to flick through it as she waited for something to
happen.
"If I said I could end the war tomorrow, what would you say?"
Luna's large, pale eyes slowly trailed over to the woman. Their eyes
did not meet, as the inverted pair were staring at something in the
canopy of leaves overhead.
"I expect something like, 'please don't kill me'."
172.194.146.58
The somewhat off-color, yet surprisingly insightful answer drew a
snort of laughter from the pale woman.
"Best answer I have yet heard." She mused through her bout of
amusement.
"Was that all?" Luna looked back down at the Quibbler.
"No. If I said I could give you the power to kill your enemy, what would
you say?"
There was an extended silence, during which Luna flicked through the
worn pages of the paper, not paying all that much attention to it.
"How?" She finally decided was not only neutral answer, but also an
accurate one.
"I could make you like me." The woman leaned against an aged tree.
"Of course, that depends on whether or not you like pain."
"Pain?" The girl asked curiously. "What kind of pain?"
Raye glanced at Luna, who was still paging through the Quibbler. "All
kinds of pain. Physical, Emotional, everything."
Emotional pain was the easiest to deal with, in Luna's opinion. Or
rather, the least problematic. She hadn't felt that sort of pain in...
Well, ever actually.
Physical pain was a tiny bit different. It didn't bother her as much
as it might, but it wasn't exactly all that easy to deal with either.
It was just... there.
"Pain is pain. It just is. I don't feel anything in particular about
it."
Raye nodded. "Good enough, I suppose. Do you want to be like me?"
Luna tilted her head curiously. "Like what?" she inquired, finally
looking away from the paper.
Raye thought for a moment. "I will give a demonstration. Keep it in
mind, it is not all we are, but it might save your life some day."
Then again, she thought, you might merely use it to amuse yourself.
That was, after all, how she had used it.
She had no need to remove her shirt and pants, seeing as she was still
in the white bikini, so she remembered.
Her neck arched, her face locking into an impression of an agonized
rictus. Her ears lengthened, tapering wildly away from her head as her
flesh darkened in color, settling on an ebony hue. Her eyes, including
her cornea and pupil, flushed a burning vermilion. Almost at the same
instant, the lower part of her face bulged outward, forming a short
snout with her bared teeth--now fangs--exposed as her lips peeled away
from her gums, as her expression seemed to go from pain to the rage of
an injured and cornered animal. Her knees locked, and then broke,
reforming as a bird's leg. Her fingers curled, and then stretched into
tapering claws the color of platinum.
As the cacophany of cracks, harmonized by a brutal sizzle and hiss,
died away, she curled forward, her back curving in a shockingly
violent arc. The skin began to move in at least five seperate places,
by Luna's count.
Cracks emenated from the thing that had formerly been a woman, and the
movement in her back grew more frantic.
And, at last, in a mist of blood, six blood-splattered contructs shredded
her back, their bone-like metallic structure resembling that of wings,
though even Luna could tell that they would never support flight.
Luna gazed at the being mistily, as its head tilted questioningly.
"That was interesting. Sounds like fun. Why not?"
A smile curved the no-longer human lips, before the process reversed
itself, and Raye once again stood before the dreamy Potential.
"Well then. You will have to join my classes. I am not creating an
incompetent."
????, London. 0659, January 6.
-------
UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!
Lie blinked as the nearly blinding sensation from his hand faded.
Curiously he looked at it, to find that it was whole again. And yet,
'I will not tell lies' had somehow faded from his skin, leaving his
hand perfect and unmarred.
Though there was the matter of his ring. While his hand was normal
again, his ring finger had grown around the metal, the only signs that
it had existed being the curving metal protruding from either side of
the finger.
Severus was vaguely aware that something was different, though at the
moment he couldn't tell what it was. He was more concerned with the
phantom agony searing his mind.
Yet he was forced to watch as Lie shoved himself to his feet, slowly
as his neural pathways were still ravaged from the burning electrical
rampages.
Lie was still half in a state of utter need for release when Cais
entered the room.
"So," she began contentedly, "how was it?"
In a voice hoarse and raspy from extended screaming, Lie attempted to
come up with a definitive answer, though he failed. "It... was...
everything..."
Cais nodded agreeably, and retrieved the mechanism that had done the
damage.
"Other hand!" She requested cheerfully, extending her own to accept
his.
Lie's second hand made its way to hers, trembling as it did so.
UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!
-------
Dungeons, Hogwarts. 0922, January 6.
"So," the pale woman began, leaning carelessly against a wall, "you
are going to accept Ange training. That is nice and all, but I suppose
you need a crash-course in our society."
Luna blinked slowly.
"So, first off, there are Sixteen. No more, no less. There are four
lineages of us, one might say. At any time there should be two Masters,
two Disciples of each line. A Disciple is free to challenge a Master
at any time, and it is a fight to the death. Understandably difficult.
These fights take as long as necessary, which is to say, there is no
stopping unless someone dies.
"I assume you already have a God, right? Good, someday you will meet
him, or her, whatever, and you will find out if they like you or not.
"Confused yet? No? Good.
"So, each of the Sixteen has a name, and a Name. Their name is their
numerical desgination. One-and-one, for example, would be the First
Master of the First Line. Four-and-four would be the Second Disciple
of the Fourth Line. Then, there is the Name."
Raye paused, wondering if Luna was actually listening. She wouldn't
put it past the unusual girl to actually have the audacity to pay
attention.
"Your Name can be anything, really. There are, naturally, restrictions
on how you create your Name, but you do not need to know those yet.
I am... was, rather, a Master. To signify this, onto my name you add
'rok, which means approximately Of War. Therefore I am Raye'rok or, to
translate, Raye of War.
"Which is, I expect, why the Second Line tends to have Names of actual
objects. My Master, for example, was Cais, which can be both cay-is,
or cay-se."
Raye paused, and yes it did seem like Luna was listening.
"As a Disciple, your name would have the prefix Iskrt, while your full
title would be Iskrt-Harêh, which would mean something like "Undisciplined
Death". I reccomend not asking.
"Confused? Yes? Fair enough. I did not learn this until I was already
remade, so I merely assimilated it.
"Now, on to the... practical part. We are... shapeshifters, one might
say, of a sort. We are limited though.
"For example, our body mass can never change. While I could, in theory
become a rat, it would be one fucker of a heavy rat, and be useless
because anywhere I could not already go would probably not support my
weight. It is a bit more complicated than that, but the details are
not important yet.
"Of course, we can add and subtract our mass, through the intake of
materials and letting them out. No, I am not going to expand upon that
yet. You would not understand.
"Should, at any point, you wish to leave my tender care, too bad. The
only way out is death."
Raye stopped, and waited patiently.
Luna gave her a look that more or less translated to, "Is that all?"
Dungeons, Hogwarts. 0940, January 6.
-------
Mental Ward, St. Mungo's Hospital. 1000, January 6.
Severus Snape sat, confined to his bed by a spell. Which wasn't all
that useful, seeing as he was in a solitary room, with cushioning
charms on everything remotely solid, and nothing that could even be
potentially sharp.
His eyes, unfocused as they were, seemed to stare straight through the
wall, but they moved, watching as if he was seeing people on the other
side.
His lips moved, but not a sound came out as they did. The words his
mouth would have spoken had he been capable of it would not have been
recognized by anyone, for they were words that would not be spoken
for eons.
Though one person would have known exactly what he was trying to say,
even though it would have been said in a heavily bastardized fashion.
"I killed them, they asked me to, so I did, so they died, so they... I will not tell lies!"
Mental Ward, St. Mungo's Hospital. 1001, January 6.
Saetan--Short chapters=more chapters. School's drainin' me and whatnot.
Relle--Bwuhahahahaha... You think that's bad? That's one of the most
mild things that happened to 'Lie'. Snapey... dunno. He's gone through
some heavy shit. ^_^ Methinks you might prefer to be an Ange, though
that could be a backup plan if you died halfway through the process.
Man, H/L/T is looking better and better.
ReginaLucifer--heh... Just a corpse. Neko's a more insidious Ange than
most others. There will be a crash-course in Ange-ness sometime. Soon,
perhaps, considering that Luna needs to meet Raye soon. hmm... Now I
know what's goin' to happen in this chapter! Heh...
What could have broken Snape so? Hmm...
by CrimsonNoble
A/N: I's having hella comp problems. Forgive me. Delayed to hell. My
computer doth detest FF.N... And I'm skiving off my English to do this.
I don't like Mr. Wyckoff.
Disclaimer: I make no claims toward ownership of Harry Potter. I do,
however, claim ownership of Ange. 'Cause they're mine.
WARNING: This is rated R for a reason. Should you choose to ignore
said reason, read at your own risk. Masochism, sadism, sensuality,
graphic violence, and harsh language. Possible male/male
relationships, and definite female/female. Quite probable threesome
relationship between any of the above. Ye hast been warned. Should
any of the above be objectionable to you, there is a back button on
your browser, a convienient hyperlink back to the main Harry Potter
section of the site, and a simple right-click will reveal an option
for "back", if your computer works like mine. Can't help mac users
there.
Spoilers: OotP, GoF, PoA, CoS, SS.
Chapter 15:
????, London. 0622, January 6.
Luna gazed curiously around the park. It was strangely reminiscent of
the Forbidden Forest, though without all the danger.
Upon considering the corpses at her feet, she revised that thought. It
was like the Forbidden Forest, but without the magic fouling the air.
She crouched, the wand behind her ear casting a pale light over the
closest corpse. Indelicately she prodded it, offhandedly observing the
way it nearly fell apart at her touch.
"Luna," greeted a voice from somewhere behind and to her left.
The girl nodded cheerfully. "Hello Raye..." She offered in return.
There was a moment in which neither of them spoke as Raye finished
closing the distance between them. Luna shuffled upright, her head
lolling pleasantly as she took in the surrounding forest, storing the
image in her memory for later perusal.
A limp copy of the Quibbler made its way from her pocket to her hand,
and she began to flick through it as she waited for something to
happen.
"If I said I could end the war tomorrow, what would you say?"
Luna's large, pale eyes slowly trailed over to the woman. Their eyes
did not meet, as the inverted pair were staring at something in the
canopy of leaves overhead.
"I expect something like, 'please don't kill me'."
172.194.146.58
The somewhat off-color, yet surprisingly insightful answer drew a
snort of laughter from the pale woman.
"Best answer I have yet heard." She mused through her bout of
amusement.
"Was that all?" Luna looked back down at the Quibbler.
"No. If I said I could give you the power to kill your enemy, what would
you say?"
There was an extended silence, during which Luna flicked through the
worn pages of the paper, not paying all that much attention to it.
"How?" She finally decided was not only neutral answer, but also an
accurate one.
"I could make you like me." The woman leaned against an aged tree.
"Of course, that depends on whether or not you like pain."
"Pain?" The girl asked curiously. "What kind of pain?"
Raye glanced at Luna, who was still paging through the Quibbler. "All
kinds of pain. Physical, Emotional, everything."
Emotional pain was the easiest to deal with, in Luna's opinion. Or
rather, the least problematic. She hadn't felt that sort of pain in...
Well, ever actually.
Physical pain was a tiny bit different. It didn't bother her as much
as it might, but it wasn't exactly all that easy to deal with either.
It was just... there.
"Pain is pain. It just is. I don't feel anything in particular about
it."
Raye nodded. "Good enough, I suppose. Do you want to be like me?"
Luna tilted her head curiously. "Like what?" she inquired, finally
looking away from the paper.
Raye thought for a moment. "I will give a demonstration. Keep it in
mind, it is not all we are, but it might save your life some day."
Then again, she thought, you might merely use it to amuse yourself.
That was, after all, how she had used it.
She had no need to remove her shirt and pants, seeing as she was still
in the white bikini, so she remembered.
Her neck arched, her face locking into an impression of an agonized
rictus. Her ears lengthened, tapering wildly away from her head as her
flesh darkened in color, settling on an ebony hue. Her eyes, including
her cornea and pupil, flushed a burning vermilion. Almost at the same
instant, the lower part of her face bulged outward, forming a short
snout with her bared teeth--now fangs--exposed as her lips peeled away
from her gums, as her expression seemed to go from pain to the rage of
an injured and cornered animal. Her knees locked, and then broke,
reforming as a bird's leg. Her fingers curled, and then stretched into
tapering claws the color of platinum.
As the cacophany of cracks, harmonized by a brutal sizzle and hiss,
died away, she curled forward, her back curving in a shockingly
violent arc. The skin began to move in at least five seperate places,
by Luna's count.
Cracks emenated from the thing that had formerly been a woman, and the
movement in her back grew more frantic.
And, at last, in a mist of blood, six blood-splattered contructs shredded
her back, their bone-like metallic structure resembling that of wings,
though even Luna could tell that they would never support flight.
Luna gazed at the being mistily, as its head tilted questioningly.
"That was interesting. Sounds like fun. Why not?"
A smile curved the no-longer human lips, before the process reversed
itself, and Raye once again stood before the dreamy Potential.
"Well then. You will have to join my classes. I am not creating an
incompetent."
????, London. 0659, January 6.
-------
UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!
Lie blinked as the nearly blinding sensation from his hand faded.
Curiously he looked at it, to find that it was whole again. And yet,
'I will not tell lies' had somehow faded from his skin, leaving his
hand perfect and unmarred.
Though there was the matter of his ring. While his hand was normal
again, his ring finger had grown around the metal, the only signs that
it had existed being the curving metal protruding from either side of
the finger.
Severus was vaguely aware that something was different, though at the
moment he couldn't tell what it was. He was more concerned with the
phantom agony searing his mind.
Yet he was forced to watch as Lie shoved himself to his feet, slowly
as his neural pathways were still ravaged from the burning electrical
rampages.
Lie was still half in a state of utter need for release when Cais
entered the room.
"So," she began contentedly, "how was it?"
In a voice hoarse and raspy from extended screaming, Lie attempted to
come up with a definitive answer, though he failed. "It... was...
everything..."
Cais nodded agreeably, and retrieved the mechanism that had done the
damage.
"Other hand!" She requested cheerfully, extending her own to accept
his.
Lie's second hand made its way to hers, trembling as it did so.
UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!UNKNOWN!
-------
Dungeons, Hogwarts. 0922, January 6.
"So," the pale woman began, leaning carelessly against a wall, "you
are going to accept Ange training. That is nice and all, but I suppose
you need a crash-course in our society."
Luna blinked slowly.
"So, first off, there are Sixteen. No more, no less. There are four
lineages of us, one might say. At any time there should be two Masters,
two Disciples of each line. A Disciple is free to challenge a Master
at any time, and it is a fight to the death. Understandably difficult.
These fights take as long as necessary, which is to say, there is no
stopping unless someone dies.
"I assume you already have a God, right? Good, someday you will meet
him, or her, whatever, and you will find out if they like you or not.
"Confused yet? No? Good.
"So, each of the Sixteen has a name, and a Name. Their name is their
numerical desgination. One-and-one, for example, would be the First
Master of the First Line. Four-and-four would be the Second Disciple
of the Fourth Line. Then, there is the Name."
Raye paused, wondering if Luna was actually listening. She wouldn't
put it past the unusual girl to actually have the audacity to pay
attention.
"Your Name can be anything, really. There are, naturally, restrictions
on how you create your Name, but you do not need to know those yet.
I am... was, rather, a Master. To signify this, onto my name you add
'rok, which means approximately Of War. Therefore I am Raye'rok or, to
translate, Raye of War.
"Which is, I expect, why the Second Line tends to have Names of actual
objects. My Master, for example, was Cais, which can be both cay-is,
or cay-se."
Raye paused, and yes it did seem like Luna was listening.
"As a Disciple, your name would have the prefix Iskrt, while your full
title would be Iskrt-Harêh, which would mean something like "Undisciplined
Death". I reccomend not asking.
"Confused? Yes? Fair enough. I did not learn this until I was already
remade, so I merely assimilated it.
"Now, on to the... practical part. We are... shapeshifters, one might
say, of a sort. We are limited though.
"For example, our body mass can never change. While I could, in theory
become a rat, it would be one fucker of a heavy rat, and be useless
because anywhere I could not already go would probably not support my
weight. It is a bit more complicated than that, but the details are
not important yet.
"Of course, we can add and subtract our mass, through the intake of
materials and letting them out. No, I am not going to expand upon that
yet. You would not understand.
"Should, at any point, you wish to leave my tender care, too bad. The
only way out is death."
Raye stopped, and waited patiently.
Luna gave her a look that more or less translated to, "Is that all?"
Dungeons, Hogwarts. 0940, January 6.
-------
Mental Ward, St. Mungo's Hospital. 1000, January 6.
Severus Snape sat, confined to his bed by a spell. Which wasn't all
that useful, seeing as he was in a solitary room, with cushioning
charms on everything remotely solid, and nothing that could even be
potentially sharp.
His eyes, unfocused as they were, seemed to stare straight through the
wall, but they moved, watching as if he was seeing people on the other
side.
His lips moved, but not a sound came out as they did. The words his
mouth would have spoken had he been capable of it would not have been
recognized by anyone, for they were words that would not be spoken
for eons.
Though one person would have known exactly what he was trying to say,
even though it would have been said in a heavily bastardized fashion.
"I killed them, they asked me to, so I did, so they died, so they... I will not tell lies!"
Mental Ward, St. Mungo's Hospital. 1001, January 6.
Saetan--Short chapters=more chapters. School's drainin' me and whatnot.
Relle--Bwuhahahahaha... You think that's bad? That's one of the most
mild things that happened to 'Lie'. Snapey... dunno. He's gone through
some heavy shit. ^_^ Methinks you might prefer to be an Ange, though
that could be a backup plan if you died halfway through the process.
Man, H/L/T is looking better and better.
ReginaLucifer--heh... Just a corpse. Neko's a more insidious Ange than
most others. There will be a crash-course in Ange-ness sometime. Soon,
perhaps, considering that Luna needs to meet Raye soon. hmm... Now I
know what's goin' to happen in this chapter! Heh...
What could have broken Snape so? Hmm...