Fated Origins: Chapter 12: The Spirit Must Break
A/N: PLEASE REVIEW. I beseech thee. Your feedback to me is like heroin to Kurt Cobain. So, hey. It gives me incentive to update.
A/N II: THIS HAS BEEN REWRITTEN. THIS IS THE REWRITTEN VERSION.
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"There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master." ~David Herbert Lawrence
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Day Three of Cadmus' Return-Shack in the English Countryside
Light filtered in through the dirty panes of the windows; the grime upon the glass marred the pattern of the luminosity, making its imprint mottled upon the carpet. Sounds were absent; the only noises to be heard were far off in the distance, except for the occasional chirp of an early bird.
Nymphadora Tonks stirred, the black grip of unconsciousness slipping from her mind. She gradually opened her chocolate eyes like a waking cat and stretched her aching body, arching her back and throwing up her arms to relieve the tension. She was on a ratty couch in some unknown place, and that prospect frightened her to the very core of her soul.
The last thing she could remember was being blown backwards by Riddle, and the feeling of absolute weightlessness as she tumbled through the air into her kitchen. From that point onwards, her mind drew up a blank slate. The feeling was akin to the mental blankness of a morning subsequent a night of excess alcohol. Now, all that she was aware of was that her head ached, her body felt drained, and she was in some strange raggedy-ass hut.
Great.
Sitting up, she turned to get a view of the entire area.
She screeched when she looked to her left.
Him.
Cadmus stood like a tower in the center of the room, ripped arms crossed in a nonchalant manner and grinning like a feral hyena.
"Why, hello there, Nymphadora," he said, silky voice mocking.
Tonks' mind raced like a whirling conveyor belt. Riddle was here? That meant that the Aurors had failed to bring him down. She paled at the thought. If they had held no chance against him, that left her in a very poor place.
She immediately leapt to her feet, reaching instinctively for her wand. A brief look of shock passed over her features as her hand grasped nothingness. Of course the bastard would have taken it.
With a burst of speed to rival that of a trained Olympian, she attempted to make a mad dash past Cadmus for the door. The Sith Lord reached back casually and grabbed a handful of her robes as she flew past him. With a quick jerk, he flung her backwards. Mercifully, she landed like with the deftness of a log on the seats of the sofa.
"Now," he drawled indifferently. "We can do this one of two ways. The simple way, in which you sit quietly and surrender to me, or the difficult way, in which I have to tear your mind apart at the very seams and render you a mindless, simpering blob within ten minutes time."
Tonks put on an insincerely valiant face and set her jaw like a prizefighter. Like hell he was going to dominate her.
"You'll have to give more than your best to break me."
Cadmus chuckled maniacally.
"Oh, how I adore a challenge," he jeered, orange eyes alight with malice.
The Sith Lord walked forward slowly, judging his prey, searching her for areas of weakness. He halted directly in front of her, towering like a titan. She stared up at him, eyes like steel. Cadmus drew back his arm like a baseball bat and released, letting his open hand fly forward and land with a resounding smack on the right cheek of Tonks.
The force of the blow jarred her perceptions, and her head reflexively snapped to the left with a yelp. Tears instinctively jumped to her eyes, and she jumped up in a huff. She would not just accept abuse like some submissive animal. Pulling her arm back, she threw a right hook aimed at his face with all her might.
In a split second, Cadmus caught her fist before it made a half a foot from his face. He twisted it in a flash, and she screamed in pain as he bent her arm within an inch of removing it from the joint. Holding it there, he leaned in close to the side of her face and whispered:
"Do you enjoy the pain, Nymphadora? Because this is just a taste of the agony I have the power of inflicting upon you. I am giving you a choice: submit to your Master, or accept the consequences."
Tonks didn't reply. Instead, in an act of foolhardy defiance, she spat at him, and the offending spittle landed directly upon Cadmus' right foot.
He grinned like a sociopath.
"Such insolence will get you nowhere."
With a final rotation, he popped her arm from the socket. Tonks shouted in sheer anguish, her body convulsing with the pain shooting through her upper body. Cadmus reached down and grabbed a hold of her slim neck, pinching the closed the trachea with the Force. He held her down, constricting her of oxygen. Her face quickly turned blue. Tonks felt her head grow lighter than a balloon, and the curtain of darkness begin to descend on her cognizance...
With a frightening expertise, he brought her within a second of unconsciousness before releasing the clamp around her throat. She gulped at the oxygen, pulling as much as possible into her deprived lungs.
"Submit!" he commanded, before launching into her mind with the Force like a cannonball.
He tore at the nerves of her brain with the psychic machete of his power, ripping at her cranium. He twisted and stabbed her nervous centers, jabbing at them with jagged, telekinetic needles. She shrieked in response, her uninjured hand zooming up to grip her head as if it were hit with a baseball. Waterfall-like tears poured from her ducts, and she flailed her legs like a dying insect. She had experienced this pain the last time she had defied him, and it was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. No device of man could create such agony as this.
"Stop! Please, stop this!" she pleaded through sobs that wrenched her entire being.
Cadmus let up a moment, giving her the illusion that the torture was over. Tonks moaned in response, the sledgehammer of pain halting its pounding rhythm in her head. She uncontrollably reached up to touch her liberator with gratitude, but he slapped it away and resumed his role as torturer. Abruptly attacking again, he poured the essence of discouragement into her head, trying to fill it with disheartenment. Her mind somehow resisted, holding onto her frail belief system for support.
She screamed until her vocal chords threatened to give out, clutching her own skin with her nails so deeply that she bled. The Dark Lord of the Sith continued this streamline of torment, suspending the assaults momentarily before driving back into the recesses of her mind like a freight train.
Eventually, Tonks was unable to scream any longer, and her body shuddered with violent paroxysms. The distress had washed out her senses and left her a vegetative sack of flesh. Her mind had been worn to the base, and her thoughts scrambled and fizzed inside her head. She passed in and out of consciousness, the immense pain shutting down her bodily functions briefly until Cadmus revived them. Realizing he had her in the perfect position, he discontinued the suffering, stepping back and allowing her to recover.
She gasped for air like a shored trout, quivering pitifully in the fetal position. Cadmus squatted, putting himself at a level position with her. He radiated a force of dominance.
"Are you ready to accept who you must become? Or shall this continue?" he inquired softly, voice deceptively gentle.
She looked at him, body twitching, and managed to shake her head decisively, like a noble martyr. Cadmus suspected it wasn't even her cognitively performing the action; simply her ingrained credo holding on to her near broken psyche.
Cadmus sighed.
"So it must be."
Without mercy, he entered her weakened mind with ease, resuming the cruel twisting of her nerves. Taking advantage of her drained animus, he implanted thoughts and paradigms into her brain through the Force, trying to convert her. It was the ancient art of Sith mind conversion; a technique used to break extremely persistent slaves into total subjugation. Her mind resisted, throwing up its acutely-rooted conceptions of goodness and light in effort to stave off the implantation of these alien ideas. Cadmus focused, breaking them down at their base, dismantling her ideologies with Sith precepts and knowledge. He retrained the synapses of her brain, arranging them in an order to his liking. Her mind fought courageously against this Dark transformation, and one exceptionally bothersome safeguard it repeatedly fell back on was the figure of "Harry Potter", who was a savior persona to her. Cadmus was intrigued with this knowledge but stored it for later review.
Tonks' consciousness blurred and melted away. She no longer felt the cognition of existence; she was simply a tightly-bound mirage of colors infinitely progressing through a vast void of darkness. No path was set before her, and she could see no end in sight. Her senses and memory had eroded away, leaving her like an overridden computer, blank and without primal function. Her mind was a swirling, convulsing heap of garbled knowledge, sensible and unintelligible simultaneously. Thoughts were born only to be smothered and strangulated by information that was somehow streamlining into her soul. It felt both correct and wrong, but she wasn't quite sure why either way.
Suddenly, a light broke through the shadow like a glorious ray of sunlight. She felt herself being pulled towards the opening in the thick blackness, culled from the emptiness by some unimaginable force. With an audible pop, she was absorbed into the stream of effervescence.
Like a Tinker Toy set, Cadmus restructured her mind from within, burying her old personality beneath a mountain of Sith dogmas. It was a classical forced Sith indoctrination, which fully altered a person's character by trapping it beneath a manufactured one, and depending on how well the desired nature is developed, can permanently transfigure a person. Cadmus applied the finishing touches as her former identity lashed out in a final attempt at freedom and was crushed emphatically.
Tonks was effectively gone, sepulchered beneath the chains of the Sith conversion. Her brain had been reprogrammed, her synapses and thoughts rearranged into a system prevaricated upon a false and mindless sense of obedience. Essentially, everything that encompassed Tonks had been stored away in a lock box in the depths of her mind, and a new version of her personality had been instilled in its place. There was, however, a chance of her past self resurfacing at times, and those occurrences would have to be strictly controlled. But, for now, up from the ashes of Nymphadora Tonks rose the Dark Handmaiden, loyal servant of Darth Cadmus.
His servant slumped limply in the sofa amongst her shed blood and tears, the entire ordeal bringing her to the very brink of destruction. Cadmus, sensing how near to death she was, gently grasped the back of her neck, flooding her body with the aura of the Force. Sith did not have the power to directly heal like the Jedi, and consequently Cadmus could only numb the pain searing her mind and body. Her eyes fluttered open in response; breathing heavily, she grabbed a hold of her deliverer's arms and whispered statements of gratitude to him.
"I am yours, Master," she whispered, eyes morphing into a vibrant shade of pink.
The Dark Lord of the Sith quickly scanned her mind for traces of deception. To his great pleasure, he found none. The new personality was functioning perfectly. He had successfully entombed Tonks beneath his Handmaiden.
"Rise, Handmaiden," he commanded, relishing in the power. "You belong to me, now. There is no Nymphadora Tonks; only my Handmaiden. Your flesh and body are solely my property."
"Of course, Master," she conceded humbly, her mouth mechanically spitting out the title. She was not capable of defiance any longer; she simply had no desire for it. In fact, Tonks could not remember ever hating this beast of a man before her, or anything else. She only knew that she was his servant; instinctual devotion welled up within her.
Taking a bit of his Life Force, he channeled it into her body, allowing it to rebuild her damaged nervous epicenters and repair the damage he had wreaked. With a quick shove, he pushed her arm back into its socket, drawing a cry from her.
"I am gentle with my servants," her Master said. "I take very good care of all who declare their allegiance to me."
"Master, I am confused", said Tonks, her eyebrows furrowed. "I feel as if I was once supposed to hate you, yet, inexplicably, I am drawn to you. Something within me urges me to fight you, but I know that cannot be right."
"Crush those thoughts, Handmaiden," ordered Cadmus. "They are lies implanted in you by the fools of this planet. They wish to control you like some wild animal. But I am here to protect you, my Handmaiden. I only offer you the best."
She stared at him for a moment, conflicting emotions flashing across her eyes. However, the Darkness now within her reigned supremely, and she bowed.
"I live to serve you, my Lord," she assented.
He smiled proudly.
"Come then, my Handmaiden. I shall teach you the ways of the Sith."
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July 18th, 1996-Day Three of Cadmus' Return-Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Headmaster's Office
"What shall be done, Albus?"
"How will we protect ourselves?"
"I heard the ruddy bastard is so strong, he demolished Nymphadora Tonks' flat with the power in his pinky!"
"We are doomed! Doomed!"
Dumbledore had endured quite enough.
"SILENCE!" he cried, and the room immediately ceased to produce noise at his command. The teachers of Hogwarts, gathered in his office, turned collectively to look at their Headmaster, who was sitting at his desk.
He looked over each of his faculty members with a solemn eye.
"My friends, it is time to prepare for the inevitable: a war."
Madame Pomfrey gasped. Dumbledore gave her a sympathetic nod, before continuing.
"We must arm the school. This place must remain a bastion of hope in spite of the great danger we face," he said, blue eyes aflame with passion. "We cannot allow our spirits to be dampened. But to remain safe, we need to take precautions against this man."
"But how, Albus? How can we possibly defend ourselves against him?" Flitwick interjected with a squeak.
"With training, Filius!" Albus answered. "We need to collect our most capable students and begin training them for war! It is the only way we shall stand a chance."
"Trainin'?" cried Rubeus Hagrid. "Professor Dumbledore, sir, we can't train these children fer war! They're just tha': children!"
This time it was McGonagall to respond.
"They will be able to handle it, Rubeus. It was going to happen anyway: You-Know-Who is on the rise and a war with him is unavoidable. We need these children to be ready to fight."
Hagrid immediately fell silent at the implications of her statement.
"Perhaps we might even be left by the wayside," suggested Dumbledore. "Riddle may just be here to be vindicated. Voldemort might be his target. Nonetheless, preparations must be completed. Harry, as well as all other worthy students, must be gathered here at Hogwarts. Inform their parents or guardians, Minerva."
McGonagall nodded and left the room to prepare the owls.
Dumbledore looked gravely over each and every one of them.
"He is coming with great power. But, we can overcome him if we have courage and perseverance," the old wizard said.
And in their hearts everyone in the room held a spiraling doubt that it would be so.
Chapter Eleven Selected Review Responses:
Goldrune09: Thank you! I enjoyed writing the maniacal Voldemort scene. He's just so awesome in his moments of power. Yeah, I was thinking of having it be like a nuclear blast, but I didn't think that would be believable.
Sierra166048: Thanks! I usually dislike all of those stories, because the large majority of them are so poorly written. I'm glad you're enjoying the story!