AN: Have you ever had that moment in time where you're either sitting or standing, planning something and then when you go to plan something for the future, something just CLICKS and you have this holy shit this has to be providence or fate moment?
Jamin P. Rose: Oh it is but some pieces still need to be moved and some plays need to be played before it comes. Also blood? You never know…
Chapter 18 – Home Sweet Home?
"Originally the basement was designed for when the Black family was a lot darker in nature and so they built this place a torture chamber for their enemies, lovely I know." As Sirius led them down the stairs towards the basement, several torches sprang to life as they drew near.
"Well what do think of it? The walls have been spelled heavily to be as secure as possible with several specialist wards that come from Egypt that allow absorption of magic to help fuel the protections." Sirius gave them entry with an overly dramatic wave of his arm.
Harry and Hermione looked at each other and began to have a silent conversation between the two of them, slightly moving their head to the side sometimes with a questioning glance.
"If it's not to improper, would you allow us to employ some wards that we came up with?"
Sirius only raised his eyebrow and looked between the two of them with an interested look. "And what, my dear godson, would these wards that you have come up with, do exactly?"
"Whilst we don't doubt the protective and dark nature of the Egyptian wards considering their history with extremely powerful necromancers that wield dark magic and protecting their treasure along with their knowledge, we just don't want to destroy the house we are currently in and have it topple on top of us is all," Hermione answered with a small pout.
"What they're saying is true Sirius. I'm a part of the study group and Neville has been teaching some of them to me and Sue. Isn't it better to be safer than have half the neighbourhood go bye bye?" Ginny added in her two knuts to help convince him.
Sirius thought about it with a mock serious face for a few more seconds before giving his assent for the placing of these mysterious wards.
Both Sirius and Ginny watched in silence as the other two began to make their way throughout the room, arms spread wide with the occasional burst of light coming from their palms and disappearing into the walls.
With each flash of light, the walls of the room began to almost ripple in the air, as if the walls themselves had a slight look of waves to them. As the walls began to shift in image, so too did the presence of the warp begin to increase with only Ginny that felt the air began to thicken with power out of the three observers.
"So you never really explained what these so called runes of yours that you're placing pretty much everywhere, even the ceiling for merlins sake, actually do. Care to share with the rest of the class Harry?" Sirius asked with a raised eyebrow as he looked upwards and around.
"How to put this so you'd understand it? Well they're the generic ones. Protection, absorption and strengthening. Think of them like as if both Dumbledore and Voldemort decided to come together and try to break them. Their magical power would be considered like an infant compared to these." Sirius cocked his other eyebrow in confusion at his response and by the strangeness of it.
'Both Dumbledore and Voldemort? I'm just going to nod my head and go along with it.' Sirius looked at his fellow observers but got shrugs in return.
By the time he finished his thoughts, both duellists had reached their spot and were just standing there, looking at him as if they were awaiting his signal.
"So are you both re-BANG!" Before he could even finish his sentence Harry and Hermione had begun to launch their first spell at each other with both deadly precision and reckless abandon.
With a quick snap of a bludgeoning curse, the two spells sped towards each other that was aimed at the others head but met with an absorbing splash from the walls that protected the walls behind them.
"Incarcerous! Expulso! Confringo!" Metal chains sprang forth from Harry's wand, speeding towards his opponent, followed by dual explosions that were aimed towards the sides of Hermione as if trying to trap her.
"Protego! Come now Harry, surely you cannot expect me to fall for such a trap? Defodio! Chains? My, my dear Harry, I never knew you were into such...interesting…things." Hermione dodged with a sway of her hips and returned fire with a gouging curse, slowly bringing up the heat towards him.
Harry didn't respond with words but returned fire with an equal amount of increasing fire. "TrevnahzTria!" A trio of roaring fire birds spat forth that caused the observers to take a step back from the force of the flames.
As she saw the flames sped towards her, Hermione began to gather warp energy in the palm of her hand with a small amount of excitement beginning to grow within her. "Heating things up are we dear brother?" With a small shout of exertion, she thrust both her palm and wand out towards the flames and battered them away as if they were nothing.
With the battering of the flames away from Hermione, neither group noticed Harry's disappearance from view as he had used the cover of the flames to turn invisible, quickly running behind the flames and positioning himself behind his opponent.
A small triumphant smirk made its way onto her face as Hermione quickly tried to find her opponent to respond in kind with her own spell fire but froze up slightly as she didn't hear or feel, but sensed Harry behind her and found herself launched across the room with a searing pain on her back, as if someone had taken a red hot poker and stabbed her with it.
As Hermione tumbled very ungracefully on the opposite side of the room, Harry began to cast more spells, each one a different spell that was beginning to lean away from the 'light' side of magic.
"If this is what we can expect from your position of champion, then you might as well quit before you break a nail, my sweet sister!" The only response Harry got with a small snarl and a bright flash from a whip made of pure energy that disintegrated the spells coming towards her.
As the lash of power disintegrated Harry's barrage of spells, so too did it blow back the audience into the wall behind them, causing them a small amount of harm due to the force of such a blast.
Before anyone bar Harry could realise, Hermione had gotten up and covered the distance of the duel hall with her Blissgiver in hand, almost coming down and penetrating him straight through but quickly stopped that plan with a quick swipe of his own Deathscreamer.
"Okay then, first off ow. Second, is Harry purposefully trying to annoy her or?" Tonks quipped dusted herself off as the sound of screeching metal clanging together reached their ears.
"Well I will say this; I certainly wouldn't want to come in between them," Ginny said with slight trepidation as she continued to watch on, beginning to become both awed and scared by the power of the two champions.
With every clash and resulting sparks of the two blades crashing upon each other, their respective wielders parried and riposted after each consecutive strike with neither quite gaining the advantage over the other.
"Come come, dear Harry, if this is the best that you offer as champion, well then you really should just stick to the books and let people with proper skills be at the front." Hermione kept taunting him, knowing that eventually it would get under his skin just like he had with her.
"You really think you'll be able to get under my skin don't you? Not even your attempts at gaining entrance to my bedroom has had any successes, why do you think this will work?" Sirius' eyes lit up in amusement and glee at finally finding something he could tease his godson with.
"And here I was thinking your head was too far into your toying with things to recognise such a thing." After parrying Harry's blade to the side, Hermione gracefully leapt back to the other side of the room.
As Hermione drew a deep breath in, Harry saw what she going to do and quickly grounded himself and prepared. 'Oooh this is gonna hurt.'
"SSSSSCCCCCRRRREEEECCCCCCHHHHH!" A powerful, warp filled barrage of what could only be described as a combination of nails down a chalkboard and metal grinding against itself burst forth from Hermione's inhumanly wide mouth and towards her intended target.
Despite his firm grounding and stance, the incredibly powerful noise forced him back a few inches and all he could do in response was to grit his teeth and force himself to bear the brunt of the eardrum splitting sound.
Following straight after the barrage of noise Hermione ran, not stopping until she came within arm's reach of her opponent with warp blade in hand.
After dodging a vicious thrust towards her midsection by a rapidly recovering Harry, Hermione feinted to her opponents left before delivering her own thrust at Harry's wielding shoulder.
To the observer's horror, as both duellists dodged in an intricate manner, the two delivered a painful looking penetrating stab to each other's shoulders, clearly designed to incapacitate their ability to wield their blades.
"Ugh!" "Dammit!"
Before the pain from being stabbed in the shoulder fully entered their minds, both Harry and Hermione brought their good arms the bare and became locked in a power struggle as the two champions began to channel as much power before either of them backed down.
As their palms began to glow in an unearthly manner, the air around them began to ripple and gain an oppressive feeling to it, leaving the observers feeling as if the weight of an anvil had been driven upon their shoulders.
As the two duellists increasingly became locked in their power struggle, the observers noticed that as the air rippled around them, the residual power had resulted in strange depictions or illusions in the air around them.
The air around Harry had begun to depict faces of a cackling nature, teasing and taunting with an endless tirade of words that spewed forth without end, with one finishing and another picking up where the one before left off.
But the air around Hermione began to show something completely different. The air around her began to shimmer and rippled, slowly creating two horns from atop of a slowly shinning golden colour hair that covered her normal brown, with an air that increasingly became similar to the aura of a veela.
After a few minutes, Ginny noticed that the runes on the walls slowly but surely began to shine with a dull glow, but beginning to climb in brightness as the duellist's power struggle continued.
"Uhh, guys? I think it's time to stop because the runes on the walls? They're starting to glow and if Neville has told me anything then it's those types of runes shouldn't begin to glow or else something bad will happen. Also, you both are kinda injured and bleeding." Ginny's voice carried over to where the two duellists barely heard her, their one train of thought was to make the other back down.
As the observing group started to get nervous at their entertainment not stopping, the oppressive air within the room began to die down slowly, almost at an agonising pace for the audience as they did not know whether or not the two duellists would start up again or continue their cool down.
After a few minutes of tenseness and cooling down, the air cleared up and the power within it dissipated, leaving a room with brightly glowing runes on each wall.
"Well then. Should I really thank you both for giving my duelling room a bit of a makeover? Personally, I'm not exactly partial to the melted walls look and various sizes of scorch marks and enough chains to make a dominatrix blush." Sirius said with a bark of laughter and a whistle as he looked around the room.
"This is nothing Sirius, just a bit of a friendly contest between us. Should we ever go full out, then you can start running if you so desire." Hermione said with a cheerful smile as both she and Harry waved their hands across their wounded shoulders, wounds seemingly disappearing before their very eyes.
"And that you did just then? The whole hand wavy and poof there goes my serious injury?" The face Tonks gave clearly showed the disbelief of the whole situation.
"That my dear, is a simple thing when you have enough power for it. Come on then Sirius, shall we retire upstairs and hope that the house doesn't fall down?" Both Harry and Sirius let out a laugh as the group ascended the stairs, leaving behind a duelling room with slightly melted walls and runes that continued to glow bright with restrained power.
Scene break
For several weeks now she had been here, aggressively researching throughout the library, with Sirius' permission, of course, to look through the darker selection of books but nonetheless still could not find a result that satisfied her thirst for answers.
"Oh come on there has to be something in these bloody dusty old pages about it somewhere. The Blacks were supposedly some of the best keepers of dark magic and knowledge and yet somehow couldn't even keep a record of magical abilities and their full extent?" Tonks' fervent whisper broke the silence of the library as she stubbornly continued on with her mission.
The purpose as to why she had been aggressively researching? Because of that damned Potter boy that's why! Him and his constant referring to her as changling and not even once giving a hint or reason as to why he kept on calling her that!
"There has to be something in here somewhere. I'm just thankful I have some Black blood in me so I can handle some of the more dangerous books." Tonks grabbed the next book along in the row on the dreaded third shelf of the library.
As she continued to look through the pages of the book in front of her, just as she was about to throw the book at the wall, a voice startled her out of her frustration that came from outside the library, just outside the door even.
"What are you doing up this late Granger? One would think that a girl your age would still be in bed."
'Hang on that's Moody. Why is he up at this hour and why is Hermione up as well?' Tonks slowly crept towards the door, making sure that this time she didn't reveal herself by tripping over anything.
"And what does me being up this late have anything to concern you about Moody?" Tonks swore she could hear a small growl coming from Moody as Hermione replied.
"It's my business to make sure that no one goes looking for books of a dark nature and since you seem to be skulking around in the middle of the night, one might think you'd be up to something suspicious eh lass?"
Tonks waited with bated breath to hear what Hermione might say in response to the aurors accusation and she wasn't disappointed when she heard it.
"Oh, I see it now. Do you miss it Mad Eye? Do you miss the feeling of apprehending someone in the midst of something dark? The thrill of taking down a dark wizard?" Even Tonks raised an eyebrow at hearing Hermione's words and wondered what the hell was she talking about.
"What are you on about girl?" Moody all but growled out as Hermione slowly started to walk towards him with a ballerina's step.
"I mean your somewhat crusade against dark wizards is pretty much legendary, there must be a reason for such an action. Maybe you felt a thrill whenever you duelled a dark wizard? A certain, pleasure, when your curse struck them."
When Moody didn't respond, Tonks pressed her ear to the door even harder to try to listen to Hermione's whispering.
"I can tell the way you look at Snape, you so desperately want to take your wand and let loose with an excess of curses that bring that pleasure of taking down the filth of a dark wizard. I can just feel it radiating from you that you want to cause him pain Moody." As she finished, Moody felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up as he felt Hermione pass behind him.
Keeping as quiet as she could, Tonks slowly opened the library door and began to creep out but stopped still when she looked over towards Hermione and Moody and saw that in the legendary aurors eyes, were stark horror and disgust.
"G-get the hell out of my way Granger, and don't you let me catch you out here again or I will show you why in merlins name I have such a legend." With a small growl at the girl behind him, Moody stalked his way back down the stairs towards the lounge where he immediately flooed out of the house.
A small, girlish giggle escaped Hermione's mouth as she watched the normally unwavering auror make a hasty retreat out of the house and away from the machinations of the pleasure princes champion.
"Don't be shy Tonksie, come out of the shadows and let me see you." Tonks froze in her place and tried to get away from the creepy scene that just happened but nervously sighed and turned towards the younger girl but stopped and gaped at the clothing she wore.
The right chest side of her electric pink sleepwear was completely open and revealed the nakedness to any and all that wanted to see with small additions of jewellery adorning her right breast.
Without realising, Hermione had walked right up into her comfort zone and began to stare at her with those now frightening swirling pink eyes. "You would do so well if you were with me my sweet Tonks, with your abilities to change your sizes you'd be near the top of favourites. But then Harry would get very annoyed at me and then the game would get very messy from the on." With a small pat on her head, Hermione left Tonks she stood frozen and sauntered back to her room.
With a small start, Tonks finally began to move and retreat back to her own room in the house that Sirius had let her borrow. 'What in the hell was that and what the HELL is going on?!' These thoughts kept swirling around in her mind she crept into her bed.
'Maybe it'd be best to ask Harry for that one, Hermione did say something about him.' A voice that sounded very much like hers argued for logic against what had happened.
'That may be the best idea, cheers for that brain.' After that very small logic argument Tonks fell asleep, thankfully not dreaming of half-naked witches but strangely enough of mirrors and faces that she did not know staring back at her.
"Another piece on the board, another piece for my champion and the game continues."Tzeentch laughed as the power of corruption slowly pierced the changlings dreams, slowly doing their work on the unsuspecting mind and changing her loyalties to Tzeentch!
With the duel between Harry and Hermione ending the way it did, will the increasing power of the two champions hinder the plans of the dark gods for the material world? Will the display cause concern for Neville and Nurgle should they be outnumbered? Will Moody do anything in retaliation for what Hermione said to him? Will he warn Dumbledore about the accusations? Find out next time on The Affliction!
AN2: Yes, you don't have to tell me that my writing duel skills suck majorly. I just find writing them to be difficult to be honest.
Give it a good read, possibly even give a review as they are always welcome and it tells me if you're liking the story and you have yourself a very good day. :)