17.
Fallen Hero
Clutching the deceased body, Harry stepped forwards. Grimy with blood and panting, the body soon came tumbling down from his arms, laying as though asleep in the grass. Cedric then was swarmed all around by weeping and mourning witches and wizards. He felt nothing for he had been dead for a very long time. The bodies, attracted to death like flies, howled laments.
Standing in the field, dead grass creeping up their legs, the Death Eaters roamed like plagues. But the Dark Lord had no eye for any of them. He turned away and went first to reward his riser. He ignored the man who sacrificed his finger and went straight to the man who supplied the recipe. The Dark Lord was not to be deceived of where gratitude, if it could be called so, was due. He swept through the field and yonder back he discovered the two.
Feliciano stood chilled with nothing but his own inner temperature. His black robes clung to his body, stained darker in certain areas. He looked up once the Dark Lord approached, a chill jumping down his spine and festering in his neck like a ball of electricity.
Feliciano barely understood what Voldemort said to him and only nodded. He bowed his head several times and then he passed. Feliciano bit at his two small, soft lips and turned away, heading back to his home.
Then the Dark Lord approached Arthur, standing in his Death Eater gowns, his eyes gleaming wickedly like a snake, green as poison, and his lips slyly smirking.
"You have risen, my Lord." Arthur said, bowing.
"I have a task for you." Voldemort grinned, his nose, pressed into his face, sharply lit by the dim lights of stars and the moon. Neither celestial being seemed clean or pure but instead ugly whites of ghastly prisoners and of bone. The light they poured down was chalky and dry, lacking of poetic quality and only adding to Arthur's stature.
Voldemort regarded it quietly. The grisly, foul nature of Arthur, seeping evil and murder, his very smile a hound's and his very look enough to create toxic waste was the perfect degree of evil to instill into his victims. Arthur was born to this.
Arthur did not think he was born to this. He believed he was born in a pinnacle, a high apex of a sharp incline that on one side led the glorious and warm gold and silvers of kings so noble their land was fair and only so. The other side was the abyss of which torture and pain were the most delicious of treats. Arthur had wobbled dangerously from side to side now.
Hermione's lessons were a farewell to the noble and good, so he could dive into the base.
"What does my Lord wish me to do?" Arthur asked.
"I do not clearly understand what you are, exactly, but you are obviously of great power and you have been an asset. Though it angers me that you will never say what you truly are, you understand my motives…"
Arthur remained silent.
The Lord before him, snaky and flimsy in the presence of other evils but in himself disastrous and frightening, said three words that even Arthur began to hesitate.
"Weaken Harry Potter."
"Yes sir."
"Do not kill him. Only use whatever abilities you hold to your name to weaken him enough that he may fall into my clutches."
"Yes sir. With pleasure."