Author's Note: To illustrate how much I love all of you, let me tell you about my November. NaNoWriMo - it's National Novel Writing Month! But despite the fact that I intend to clock 75k (25k more than the 50k required), I'm still writing Fractal, to ensure no one hangs dry for a whole damn month!
It's funny how the Kaleidoscope segments are the hardest to write nowadays.
Have a Christmas gift, ladies and gents! I'm not actually dead! And I still respond to all of your PMs and reviews, as you know!
I'm not dead, somehow. O.O
Kaleidoscope
"I am the daughter of Winter."
Her eyes were closed and her right hand has drawn into a fist.
"Bereft of humanity, stark of compassion."
A caricature of a smile was now visible on her ethereally beautiful face, her left hand clasped over her fist and held against her bosom.
"The warmth has left."
A standing mirror shattered, sending a spray of glass and mercury about the room, ripping past the wards as if they didn't exist.
"A suicide mission." The old man was placid and in control and it infuriated her. The room dropped several degrees.
"You have offended far too many people in your old age, Gellert Grindelwald."
He smiled. "Now now, I don't think anyone can say they held true to their principles without offending a group of fanatics or two."
"My Queen is not a fanatic!" Her teeth were bared.
"Oh no. Lady Mab is certainly not quite as insane as she would like everyone to believe."
"Do not speak her name!" she spat.
"I can call on the Queen as often as I enjoy without having to worry. Mab."
"Say it again…" she trailed off in an unformed threat.
"Mab. Is she summoned? No."
Despite her anger, the relief in her face was palpable.
"Are you here to kill me?" Gellert intoned. "There is nothing but a cage between us, a little bit of metal that your magic seems to reach through with ease."
She stared him down, suddenly suspicious.
"You certainly had no problem with deposing of my guards."
Her suspicion increased.
"So tell me, young Maya Rorkin, do you believe you have what it takes to kill me?"
Her name tore through her like a hurricane, spoken from the lips of God.
She crumpled to the floor, the Winter she released pulling deep into her body once more.
"I may not have access to a wand." Gellert grinned almost wolfishly, "I have lost my thirty two mystic codes to the keeping of Albus Dumbledore and the Association." Gellert's smile was full-blown now. "But I still know far more about magic, true or reproduced by humanity, than you do, my dear girl."
Gellert showed the manacles that kept him bound to a promise not to attack anyone. "Neutralizing magic is still within my paltry ability. Come back when you gain some power, girl. Then, we'll see about my death."
Through her sobs of anger and disappointment, she opened a portal and disappeared through it. Gellert felt her will freeze solid.
He laughed to himself. If only Albus could see him now, corrupting even the damned with a few honeyed words.
Raise Your Armies
The man was old, the man was so gray that he might as well been white and the man was powerful. His name was Albus Dumbledore and he looked rather displeased at the moment.
"Linus. I want to know. What. Did. You. Do?"
"Brother Albus." Ollivander closed his eyes for a moment, steeling himself to tell the man before him, who had guided him through his life, through his adventures under Livius the Light Mage, through the two Great Wars, through his time selling wands and biding his time…
"Linus," Albus thundered, but Ollivander had already begun speaking.
"I was behind Tel Aviv. You're too bright to think that these are separate scenarios, aren't you, Al? The arrest warrant from Germany that you're shielding me from, and Knockturne coming after me. The Knockturnes have always been one of the many trafficking arms of the Italians, and you gave the speech, you did on the crime families that have been in Venice and Genoa for so long."
"What did you take from them?" Albus had calmed down quite a bit.
Linus frowned. "Something that doesn't belong to them to begin with. They're small fish. Piranhas, but they'd never challenge you, if they'd attack me. They're working through Germany because they want to divert your attention."
Albus drew a mental map through the continents. The Italians and the Germans were bitter about their defeat in the Great War and blocked his every attempt for trade relations between the British Isles and the rest of the world. The Italians were controlled by a false democracy with ties to nearly every shady marketplace in the world. One of them was Knockturn Alley.
"What did you take," Albus reiterated, a lot less angry now he had a grasp on the situation.
"Master's book."
Albus would never presume to call Livius the Light Mage his master - the man was far less powerful than him and had only pointed him in the right direction, to the right people, but Linus had always worshipped the ground the man walked on.
But despite all of that, his attention sharpened dramatically. "The book."
"I took a crossbow bolt with an unknown poison to the back, but I'd take many more. Nothing a bezoar couldn't send away," Linus chuckled grimly.
"Let me see your back." It wasn't a request. Albus waved his wand and the curtains drew shut. "Lumos," he whispered.
The wound was angry and infected.
"You need to take better care of yourself, Brother Linus," Albus said quietly, rather disappointed in the lack of treatment.
"Not my fault. They won't storm my store without a warrant, but I'm pretty sure they have people in St. Mungo's."
Albus cast several rudimentary healing charms and wrote a quick ritual of cleansing on a piece of extremely thin paper for Linus to perform in his spare time. "For the life of me, I don't understand why you prefer this," Albus ripped off a corner experimentally, "over good parchment."
Linus smiled, but some bitterness showed. "It's harder for me to write runic sigils than it is for you, Al. Not all of us can be powerful beyond belief."
For a moment, Dumbledore looked almost ashamed, then his attention turned back to the scenario at hand.
"The book."
"The Nine True Chords of Spirit. Master never showed it to any of us, remember?"
Albus was immensely interested.
"I took a quick reading of it. It's not something that will make me as powerful as Master was, unfortunately." Linus seemed bitter. "It's almost a nonsensical list of philosophies that he taught us anyway. All about balancing and cleansing and choosing a simple trajectory of thought for every great scheme we planned. A roundabout copy of The Light Arts."
"Did you expect a spellbook that would augment your magic and allow you to gain recognition beyond what you currently enjoy? To join the Lords of the Light?"
"As you have," Linus said, the bitterness showing again.
Albus didn't deny it. He could afford to be far more straightforwards with Linus than he could with many others.
"May I take a look at it?" Albus queried. Linus nodded, pointing at a dusty tome on the table.
Albus flipped through it, trying to make some sense of the inane scribblings on the margin. It wasn't in print, but rather the flowing script of the Master's hand.
"I cannot believe the First Great War was fought over… this."
"I think everyone was under the same misconception that I was. They were unstoppable," Linus said, referring to Livius and Arcus the American. "They wrote The Chords together and everyone thought…"
Albus chuckled. "Now, they should have given this a little more thought, shouldn't they have? If they were so very articulate, would they have ever needed to take students? How can one book, no matter how powerful and specific, give you the tools necessary to approach the knowledge of a sage and the power of the First Blaze?"
Linus drew Albus's sleeve up and stared at the yellowish-gray patch of flesh on his right forearm. "The First Blaze." Albus noticed that the reverence had been lost.
"What did it every give you, besides a Phoenix and a license to through around Fiendfyre like a first year's charms?"
Albus could not, or would not answer.
Birthing a Wizard
"Firs' yers, o'er here!" boomed the giant of a man, his voice echoing through the fog. The majority of the students were shivering in the cold, unused to robes. Upper years were casting what they referred to as warming charms at as many people as they could see. Someone had the misfortune of being hit by three at once and his robes caught fire. The boy yelped, but the flame was quickly sealed away by wandwork from a girl with a Prefect's badge.
The first years were piled into an dock that Harry took especial care in observing. The ceiling retained a sort of cave-like feel to it, while the walls were smooth and uniform stone, too uniform to be built, but rather duplicated by magic. There was a dock that extended out into the water, either wet or dressed in a dark wood. Harry stared at the ceiling, sensing something amiss with it.
In an instant, his vision changed and a single idea was burned into his mind - protection. It would be safe here. It was an old and venerable command rather than something truly protective, reflecting intention rather than utility. Hogwarts, as a whole, was intended to be safe.
Harry climbed comparatively gracefully into a boat with Daphne and Neville, the latter of whom almost tripped, but righted himself by grabbing the dock.
"May I get on your boat?"
Harry looked up and saw the bushy-haired girl they had forced out of the compartment in order to deal with Malfoy. He nodded without a word. Neville shrugged and Daphne chose not to respond.
She tumbled into the boat with slightly more finesse than Neville and within a minute of silence, broken only by splashes and whispered curses, the boats were loaded.
"Ready ter go?" Hagrid boomed. Without waiting for a response, the boats began to move in tandem across the still pitchblend that reflected the lantern lights.
"Duck yer heads," Hagrid cried out suddenly and most students chose to bury themselves below the rim of the boat, but Harry looked dead ahead, examining the neck that led into the lake.
At first, his eyes were concentrated on a forest of ancient trees that carried a promise of mystery, but inevitably, his eyes were drawn to the huge castle, glowing with light and power to his left.
It was a magnificent sight. Shouts of wonderment filled the air, but Harry reacted by sucking in his breath deeply, tasting the cloying scent of the magic saturating his tongue. They were passing through some sort of barrier that he had not crossed before, and it showcased the strength of the castle far better than what he had read in the dock.
The boats glided into a long underground tunnel one after another and Harry turned his attention to the other people in the boat.
Daphne's eyes darted from one person to another and Neville was idly picking at his nails.
"What's your name?" he asked the other girl.
"Hermione. Hermione Granger," she said softly. Harry nodded at her and looked away again, his mind elsewhere.
The boats came to a stop along another lit dock and Hagrid pushed himself out of his boat, clambered to a rather menacing wooden door and slammed a fist against it as the first years followed his example.
The doors swung open and Professor McGonagall, the middle-aged Transfiguration professor, stood on the other side of the doorway. She introduced herself over the din and led them into an antechamber as Hagrid slipped away.
"Wait here," she ordered as she too followed Hagrid.
"The Sorting's going to happen now," Hermione said to anyone who would listen. "I do hope I get into Gryffindor. That's the house that Professor Dumbledore was in."
Daphne and Neville conversed softly about what the sorting could possibly entail and Harry looked from one person to another.
A red-headed boy was talking about wrestling a troll and Malfoy was bragging that he'd be in Slytherin in seconds.
In several moments, the door that McGonagall had passed through opened, and the first years filed in to be judged in front of an assembly of their elders and peers.