The first thing Parvati noticed was the sound of waves crashing and the smell of salt in the air. Next, she took in the dark grey sky, billowing with purple storm clouds threatening to douse her in a torrential down pour. The beach she stood on was completely devoid of any other person, deserted presumably due to the storm brewing. Bellatrix forced her creepy little smile onto Parvati's face and asked, "Can you guess where we are, wee protege?" It was so disconcerting to hear the intruders voice come out of her mouth, the accent all wrong and the pitch skewed horribly.
Resigning herself, temporarily, to her fate, Parvati thought back, "I would presume that we are on some coast of some ocean at the onset of some storm." She thought she could almost feel her face start to pull into her normal sarcastic smirk, but must have imagined it. The face did, indeed, pull out of the half scary smile, but continued straight into a grimace of rage, and then almost instantaneously bounced back to grinning.
Bellatrix's thoughts dripped with barely concealed anger, "No, no, no little miss cheeky. We are standing at our first destination down the relatively short road to ultimate power. We are at the Dead Sea, and it is here that we will start our journey together."
With that, Parvati felt her left arm raise, wand in hand, straight up in the air. Her hair stood on end as she felt her metal jailer concentrating with considerable might on something in the clouds. All of a sudden, Bellatrix slung her arm straight down as fast as humanly possible with the wand ending up pointing directly in front of them, hardly centimeters from her feet. Not half a second later a lightning bolt struck directly where she was pointing, but all of the energy was immediately trapped into some sort of tightly compressed bubble of magic. The energy swirled around and around inside the bubble, hypnotizing and dizzying all at once; it distracted Parvati enough that she almost didn't notice that Bellatrix wasn't done yet. She tried to keep up and memorize each of the strange gestures coupled with the required concentrations and focuses, and what was happening when each ministration was complete. She was always thirsty to learn new things, and she wasn't going to let her predicament keep her from it. After the initial capture of the lightning bolt, Bellatrix swiped the wand diagonally across their body, beginning from their right thigh, and ending above their left shoulder. This result was the ball of electricity expelled all of its energy in a beam of power directed directly across the water. When it got to approximately half way across the Dead Sea, Bellatrix brought their hands together, wand in between. Their brow was furrowed in concentration, Parvati adding her own power to the spell as she started to grasp the purpose. All of a sudden, the beam of energy exploded against some sort of force field. The air shimmered around the detonation site, the fabric of the sky seeming to ripple like disturbed water. Bellatrix, exhausted from the shear difficulty of summing, trapping, releasing, and the aiming such a primal force of nature, forced Parvati's body to sit down. Bellatrix had learned that spell from the Dark Lord himself, though he preferred to use it by channeling the bolt directly into his wand. She didn't particularly care for the damage that it caused to the wand, not to mention that she didn't know just how strong Parvati's wand was. They watched as the air began to unfold itself to reveal a castle nestled in the middle of the Sea, complete with a stone path that was slowly rising out of the ocean towards where they were located.
"How did you know this was here?" Parvati asked through her mind.
Bellatrix didn't answer in the traditional sense. "Let me show you, wee Gryffindor." And with that, her captor snatched her consciousness and dragged it into her twisted memory lane. At first, Parvati saw nothing but blurred images rushing past, felt nothing but constant, twisting pain with extremely brief moments of joy or elation. The effect was severely dizzying, but all of a sudden it stopped. She was standing in the exact spot that they had been sitting, but there was no longer any storm in the sky. The beach wasn't deserted either. A man stood on the beach, wizard's robes flapping in the wind and nose in a book, and a small girl standing at his side holding on to his pocket. Both of them had hair blacker than midnight and, while the man's was cropped short to his head, the girl's was long and curly. The castle was still invisible, it's protective barriers still in place. They all stood there as the man read through the book, skipping pages at a time as he searched. Finally, with a shout of triumph, he pointed to something on the page and showed it to the little girl at his side.
"There, Bella, you see?" he said, "It says right there. 'The castle, which houses the first part of the artifact, lies in the middle of the Sea of the Dead, and can only be revealed by a show of immense power wielded simultaneously by two who are one.'"
"What does that mean, daddy?" the little girl asked.
He looked thoughtfully at his daughter, "Well, if you take it literally, it means that two people have to join and then demonstrate their combined power." The girl vigorously nodded her head in understanding. "But," he continued, "I hardly think that is the case. Surely, it is some sort of riddle. Possibly it simply means that two people cast the same spell, at the same time, at the same place, and directed towards the same target."
The little version of Bellatrix Lestrange, the only version of her that was innocent and sweet for any amount of time, cocked her head to the side and asked, "But if it is literal, daddy, how do you do that?"
"Well," he laughed, "that would be a matter of possession, I'm afraid." His laugh was hearty and warm, but he sobered up rather quickly when he realized that his daughter was in serious thought over what he just said. "Now, Bella," he said, "We don't practice that kind of magic. Understood?"
"Yes, daddy." She looked heart broken.
The vision faded and Parvati found herself trapped, once again, in her own mind as Bellatrix began walking her body towards the stone path that had completed it's emergence during their reverie. The path was narrow, with only enough room for a single person able to walk across at a time. The stone itself was slippery, wet, and eroded from what was likely decades if not centuries submerged in salt water. With surprising finesse, Bellatrix kept from falling in even once. Impressive considering the amount of concentration Parvati could tell it was taking her captor to effectively keep control over a body that was completely unfamiliar to her. There was just one time that they almost fell into the water when one of their knee high boots slipped on a stray piece of sea weed, but Bellatrix deftly caught them by going down on one knee. The trip across went without any other incident until they were finally at the castle. There they found a square platform roughly twenty feet across that connected the walkway to the door. It was there that the guardian awoke.
A giant hand rose out of the water with a huge splash and just barely missed them as it slammed onto the side of the platform. It's match landed seconds afterward as they pulled up the largest inferi either of them had ever imagined. Both of them looked on in terror as the undead giant finished its climb onto the platform. It stood well over 30 feet tall, muscled flesh drooping in some places and well preserved in others. The dead eyes immediately locked on to the single target in front of it and lunged with amazing speed and accuracy, and without any sort of warning or hesitation. They barely dodged out the way, Bellatrix springing into action while Parvati was still dumbstruck with terror at the challenge in front of them. Brandishing their wand, Bellatrix conjured a whip of fire from its tip and struck out against the zombie's enormous backside. The creature screamed an ear splitting shriek and jumped straight into the water.
"Good thing I've got control of your body, baby Gryffindor," Bellatrix intoned with irritation, "Other wise we'd be dead meat already. Harry Potter didn't prepare you to defend against this kind of dark magic did he?" The venom was almost dripping out of her captor's voice.
"I'm s-s-s-sorry!" came Parvati's shaky reply, "I remember studying the imperi under Snape, but he never mentioned that they could made from anything other than humans! I mean, aren't giants supposed to be highly resistant to magic?"
"Yes, my sweet, they are," her captor explained, "but with enough power you do things no other witch or wizard could possibly imagine. This is what we are going to accomplish. We are going to do the impossible." The excitement in her captor's voice was palpable, infectious. Parvati found herself, not completely regrettably, lost in the thought of wielding that amount of power.
Parvatrix walked the length of the platform quickly, lest the giant imperi rise yet again. The doors the approached were huge, big enough that the guardian itself would fit through comfortably. They were wrought of what appeared to be pure gold, and had arcane symbols and writing all over them. Bellatrix lifted their wand and simply tapped the center of the doors, which caused them to open inward of their own accord.
"How did you know that would work?" Parvati asked of her captor.
Bellatrix laughed maniacally, "I didn't! It was certainly worth the try though."
And, together, they entered the threshold.
