Severus found himself being thrust out of the girl's mind. It was a little disorienting; there were memories in the girl's mind that simply weren't intelligible, almost as though she was seeing the world from a million different perspectives all at once.
It made his head hurt to even think about it, and so he'd been focusing on the memories that he could interpret.
"What was that?" he asked finally.
"Leviathan," she said.
"And the little girl?"
"Bonesaw," she said. She looked away. "There were things about my world that were pretty fucked up."
He didn't bother to correct her language. From what he could see that was an accurate assessment. Even the Dark Lord rarely bothered with any forms of torture other than the Cruciatus.
Bellatrix would have been impressed by Bonesaw.
"She was how you died?" he asked.
"It wasn't even my worst injury," she said. She shook her head. "Being shot in the head was my reward for saving the worlds."
Severus grimaced.
"This isn't something that can be accomplished with one event. We have to continue to do this until you can successfully keep me out every time."
Hopefully it would be sooner than later, for both of their sakes.
She nodded grimly, then gestured for him to continue. He sighed and lifted his wand again.
Immediately he was in her mind. This time the maze created by her mental static was more intricate. Whatever else the girl was, she was a quick learner. It took him longer to get inside.
They were in the middle of a devastated cityscape.
Leviathan was there, surrounded by muggles in colorful costumes. No one had a wand, but at least twenty of them were shooting at the monster. The beams didn't seem to make much of an impact on the creature, but whenever a beam missed and struck the surrounding area, the impact was huge.
Twelve men and women in costumes were fighting the thing hand to hand. Worse, they were losing.
The thing was incredibly fast; so much so that it was terrifying. It cut a man in half with its tail as Severus watched.
The men and woman were wearing armbands; as each of them died a litany of the dead was called out.
Severus heard the sounds from behind him. He turned and saw Taylor wearing her costume. She was staring up at the monster, which was less than a hundred feet away from her.
Water flooded everything up to people's knees, which slowed them even further.
Some of the capes were almost as fast as the monster, including one flying woman.
Taylor was talking to another cape.
"She needs her face cauterized," she was saying. The woman she'd rolled over was clearly dying; her face had been ripped off.
She other man was shaking his head, but eventually agreed. The smell of burning flesh was particularly pungent.
She left the woman with the other man, and she followed the monster, which was now being fought by an even larger group of other men and woman.
A pureblood would never have understood what CPR was, but Severus did. She was struggling with an obese man when she looked up with a look of horror on her face.
Hesitating only a moment, she looked down at the man she was too weak to drag. She dropped him, but her expression was one of regret.
She darted close to one of the men and a glowing shield surrounded him, protecting several other people.
Severus turned around and he stared.
A wave of water taller than most of the buildings slammed into them.
Leviathan... the city killer.
He tried to pull out of the memory, and he did, but the names of the dead followed him, being called out with a certain inevitability.
When the world righted itself, he found himself in a muggle high school. He'd never been in one himself, but they weren't that different from primary schools, and the children were similar in age to fifth through seventh years in Hogwarts.
Taylor was faced by several people in costumes. Some were children themselves. From their body language it was clear that they were at odds.
"Students!" the girl called out. "I've described you as a jury. Now it's time to vote. Stand if you side with me."
A third of the three hundred children in the auditorium stood. They surrounded the girl, forming a human shield.
The consternation of the others was obvious.
The next few minutes showed the girl slipping away from the others, primarily because they didn't want to hurt her followers. It was adroitly done; the girl changing into a hoodie while the others shielded her from her enemies.
Had she always used children in her fights against others?
After the escape, Taylor seemed at a loss as to what to say to the teenagers. There was none of the easy camaraderie that existed with her current group of minions.
"You saved my dad," one girl said.
"Fought the Slaughterhouse Nine," another said.
"Those bastards at the ABB."
"Leviathan showed up at the shelter, and I heard you..."
There were so many stories that it was hard to take them all in. Severus felt himself being yanked almost viciously away from this memory.
He was back in the real world.
The Taylor he saw in her memory had a body that didn't look anything like this one, but the more he watched her, the more he could see similarities between the two of them. Her body language had always been strange; both girls shared the same, odd, mantis like way of moving and holding themselves.
"It wasn't even my school," she said. She looked down. "It was a shot in the dark; I didn't expect it to work so well."
She was more embarrassed about the last memory than the one before.
Even the previous memory only bothered her because she'd been forced to abandon a man. The fight itself had been normal for her.
"The fight?" he asked. "How many were killed?"
"Capes?" she asked. "Over forty. If you're asking about regular people, who knows? He destroyed half the city and it was a good day."
"And on a bad day?"
"Millions dead," she said. "He's sunk entire islands. He was the weakest of the three, and we later found out they were all sandbagging."
"Sandbagging?"
"Pretending to be hurt when they weren't, not being as deadly as they could. If they'd shown their real power, no one would have even bothered to fight. The real horror was that they gave people false senses of hope just so they could slap us down."
The monster had killed more people in a few minutes than the Dark Lord's people had in their worst year during the last war. That only included the people directly fighting. Undoubtedly the flood had to have killed thousands if not tens of thousands.
It was like fighting a Nundu, if the Nundu were fully intelligent and capable of destroying entire cities. Severus doubted that an army of wizards would have done any better; some of the costumed men and women had been supernaturally swift.
He'd seen the look in the thing's eyes; there was a malevolence there that even Bellatrix would have been hard pressed to match.
"Do you wish to continue?" Severus asked.
Part of him wanted her to say no. The things he'd seen would need time to process. They had a great deal to say about the person she had been and about the person she was now.
"No," she said. "I can take it."
He forced himself not to sigh as he pointed his wand again.
The images flashed through his mind this time; she was actively trying to reject him.
Falling from the side of a large metallic structure in the middle of a bay, an explosion of golden light and half of her body dropping away. She was wearing something like a backpack, something that was spraying out air and slowing her fall.
He was pulled away from that memory.
She was kneeling beside some sort of memorial; it was a list of the names of the dead. There were so many.
A girl was crudely scratching the names of dogs into the memorial; her dogs, dogs who'd fought and died.
Arms and legs were tangled together, ebony skin and pale.
Severus pulled himself from that memory as quickly as he could, hoping that she didn't choose to obliviate him for this alone.
It was like a storm, riding from one memory to the next.
A naked woman with skin striped like a tiger's, tearing through metal, flesh and bone.
A black six legged monster the size of a van, covered in spines and scales and thick armored plating. His flesh healed and changed as he was attacked, becoming more powerful.
The flying woman from before. The most powerful woman in the world, in a conference room with Taylor, who was in handcuffs.
A body bag being pulled into a morgue; officially looking men laughing cruelly. It was a memory that was strangely scattered and distorted.
Taylor was kneeling, and somewhere in the distance a man was screaming. She had her eyes closed, and Severus couldn't see anything but her.
"Not a promise, or an oath, a malediction or a curse," she said. "Inevitable. Wasn't that what she said? I warned them."
There was a sound of insects everywhere, and Severus was pulled from that memory even faster than the one before.
He tumbled, unable to control his pathway through her memories. They were coming faster and faster...
Learning how to fight from a black teenager.
Riding on the back of gigantic, monstrous dog monsters while laughing with other costumed teens who were riding similar monsters. Her posture with them was relaxed, much more relaxed than it had been with any of her minions in Severus's world.
This was a Taylor who was happy, or at least as happy as she could be in the kind of world she lived in.
A much younger Taylor, at least as young as the Taylor in his world. She was talking on the telephone, chattering happily.
A sound from the phone, the screech of tires, the sounds of metal against metal, followed by a horrible silence and a growing realization.
The sounds of sobbing.
A black dress, drizzling rain.
Mom would have hated this; the sobbing in the background, the shine of the box as it was lowered into the damp ground.
Her father a shadow of his former self, as much a remnant as a Wizarding ghost. It was as if he'd been Kissed but had somehow been able to still talk and move.
It hurt as he was yanked from this memory, and for a moment he found himself trapped in the dark. He tried to withdraw, but there was resistance.
Suddenly he was inside a strange craft. It was unlike any kind of craft he'd ever seen, all cool metallic lines. It was like something he'd seen on the telly when he was a child.
There were screens everywhere, and on the screens a winged woman. Cameras were focused on different parts of her body; she was waif thin but wore no clothes. She had multiple wings, three of which were wrapped around her, nominally protecting her modesty.
Her hair was white with tints of silver; it wreathed her head in gossamer strands that floated as though she was in the water and not in the air.
Her face was like a doll's, with a stare that saw nothing and everything at the same time. She was beautiful as an angel would be beautiful; inhuman and horrifying. No man alive would even consider himself worthy of someone who looked like this, even without knowing what she was.
Hopekiller.
She reminded him of a verse from the Christian Bible, one his muggle grandparents had made him read.
The Seraphim had six wings; with two they covered their faces, with two they flew, and two covered their feet. Apparently feet in the Bible were often a euphemism, at least according to a conversation he'd overheard from a religious Ravenclaw.
A flash of images, of entire cities locked away, of people turned into curses waiting to trigger.
She could see the future, and she slipped into a man's mind. All it took was the urge to say a few words into the wrong ears, to inspire the wrong person, to set off a series of events that ruined lives and destroyed hearts.
Entire cities were walled away because of this creature, innocent people trapped because of the possibility that she might turn them into someone who would kill their friends or family, or maybe just say the wrong words to someone else who might.
This was the world that Taylor Hebert came from. A world of hopelessness, a world where the best outcome was waiting for death.
The girl beside Taylor was speaking.
"We're here because we're asking you for help. For vengeance, for your strength. We want you and the rest of the Endbringers on board to stop Scion."
What?
They were trying to ally themselves with that thing? Taylor knew what this thing was, what it did to people. She knew it could never be trusted. A brilliant human might be able to see a dozen steps ahead; she could see ten thousand.
Why would Taylor ever ally herself with something that was responsible for tens of thousands facing fates worse than death?
What had she said?
That she's saved not only her world, but every world?
The Simurgh didn't act like it heard them. It simply floated in the air, as though it didn't actually need its wings at all.
Taylor was arguing with the other girl, their faces turned away from the screen for a moment.
It was confusing that he was seeing this at all if she wasn't looking, but the monster finally moved its head.
It was a subtle shift in expression, but for a moment Severus thought that the monster was looking at him.
That was impossible, of course. This was only a memory, a shadow of the past.
Still, it was unnerving even if she was just staring in his direction. Snape checked; there was no one or nothing behind him that she could be staring at.
To reassure himself, he pushed himself with his mind, trying to get another view of what was going on. It wasn't as easy as it would have been with a pensive, but he found himself on the other side of the two girls.
The monster was staring at him still.
An uneasy fear settled in his stomach. This was a creature who could see the future; was it possible that she'd realized that he'd be here now, and that she'd foreseen exactly where he'd be?
She screamed and he felt a stabbing pain in his head.
A moment later he was back in the real world, staggering backward and falling to one knee. He could feel the blood draining from his face.
"She saw you?" Taylor asked. For once she was just as pale as he was.
Apparently she'd seen more in his mind than he'd thought.
"It's impossible," he said. "Preposterous."
"She turned people into time bombs," Taylor said. "Made them dangerous, and sometimes not because they did something terrible."
"Are you suggesting that she could have affected me?" Snape asked. It should have been ridiculous, but there had been something about the sound of her scream that had deeply unsettled him.
"Powers are bullshit," she said soberly. "And the Endbringers had powers that were more bullshit than most. Scion hobbled everyone else's powers, but theirs weren't hobbled at all."
"I never saw your powers from before," Severus said.
A look of guilt flashed across the girl's face. Was it possible that he had seen those memories, but that she'd removed them?
A quick glance showed her hands nowhere near her wand. That was suspicious in itself. Normally she'd never allow someone to point a wand at her without a wand in her own hand.
Was knowing about the Simurgh making him paranoid.
"It was the worst thing about her," Taylor said quietly. "You couldn't ever trust that your thoughts were your own. They kept me away from her, you know, until the end. They didn't think I was stable enough, and the damage that I could have done would have been unthinkable."
"How did they fight her?" he asked. If she was anything like the other one, with the added power of driving men mad, it would have been almost impossible.
"In short bursts," Taylor said. "And it was a death sentence to fight too long; no one could risk a Cape becoming one of her proxies."
They killed their own then.
Severus felt nauseous. The thought that the thing might have violated his mind was more than unsettling. It was horrifying in ways that he was only beginning to comprehend.
Would he spend the rest of his days wondering if this was the moment that he'd finally lose control and follow her will?
If she could see him from a memory, what was to keep her from simply coming to this world? What was to keep any of the others?
Taylor had apparently killed whatever creature had created these things, but no creature lived in isolation. Where there was one, there would be others.
"You lived in the future, didn't you?" he asked, his memory of chrome and steel still vivid in his mind.
She nodded.
"When?" he asked.
"2013," she said. "At least toward the end."
"And how bad was it?"
"Worlds were destroyed," she said. "Billions, tens of billions dead."
"Here?" he asked.
She shrugged helplessly. "There were a lot of worlds; I didn't really keep track."
So it was possible that this world only had twenty years left before... something happened.
"Maybe this isn't the past," Taylor said. "Maybe time just runs a little slower here."
He stared at her.
She shrugged.
"If it happens, there won't be anything we can do about it. I try not to think about it too much."
When he could finally speak, he said, "I think that's it for the lessons for today."
He rose to his feet, and he left without saying a word.