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Rookwood stepped over the recently deceased corpse of his fellow Death Eater.
Lord Voldemort did not tolerate those with no use. His recollection of what happened with the other group only raised more questions instead of answering them, so Voldemort took care of the extra baggage.
"Come, Rookwood," his master told him, gliding down the hall.
They hadn't gone more than a hundred feet before they heard what sounded like people falling.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Voldemort instantly became quieter in his movement, silencing his footsteps with a flick of his wand. Rookwood followed suit.
They continued toward the sound, walking along corridors that seemed unusually clear of bodies. They were clean. Suspiciously clean.
"Something is either eating the bodies or magically removing them," Voldemort concluded. Rookwood nodded his agreement.
As they got closer, they began to hear a second sound. That of quill on parchment.
Soon, the entrance to another corridor came into view. The corridor was alight, letting them see a shadow of someone moving deeper within.
Voldemort gestured for Rookwood to peer around the corner.
Rookwood scowled. Not in front of the Dark Lord, of course, nobody scowled in front of the Dark Lord.
He snuck closer to the edge of the wall, shaking almost imperceptibly with every step. He hid it well, but he was terrified. He could barely make himself move forward at all. Only the fear of Voldemort kept him going.
The tickle in the back of his throat wasn't helping things.
Augustus ever so slightly budged his nose and part of his eye around the corner and saw the source of the noise.
Around the corner, lit up by many floating balls of brilliant light, Professor Flitwick was laying bodies side by side. Every time he added a new body to the line, he wrote something on a long scroll of parchment.
There was something wrong with his movements, they were alien, jerky, unnatural.
Rookwood considered his actions. If he killed the small man now, he would get no explanation. He didn't want to be useless like the last Death Eater that stood before his Lord and provided no answers.
He made a decision and jumped out from cover, silently casting a Stupefy spell at the diminutive teacher.
The charm shot for the tiny professor, but his wand arm jolted behind him, and before Augustus knew it, his attack was countered and his wand was gone.
He tried to move, but he found himself suddenly stiff as a board. Unable to balance himself, Rookwood fell forward onto the unforgiving stone. He couldn't cry out as his nose crunched and began to bleed, but oh how it hurt.
Voldemort scowled, stepping over his henchman and into view of Flitwick.
"So, that's what Granger meant by improved defenses," he noted. "Hello, Voldemort, we have been expecting you."
"Ow air oo ee a' ay!" Rookwood growled through clenched teeth.
"What my follower intended to say was How dare you speak that name?" Voldemort hissed. "And I must agree with his statement. You dare?"
"A dead man does not need to fear another man, much less a name," Flitwick intoned.
Voldemort pushed aside the insolence and questions it raised. He needed answers for something else.
"Finite Incantatem," the Dark Lord freed his servant, the superior wand easily breaking the enchantments.
His wand had felt a little resistant, dead even, but he supposed that was simply the wand learning to submit to a new master. Unless his theory about Severus proved to be true.
That would be…problematic.
"Now, Filius," Voldemort ordered. "What has happened to Hogwarts."
"You will have to speak with Miss Granger about that," Flitwick admitted. "But I can tell you one thing for sure. It is a sickness."
Then, the little half-goblin set fire to the bodies. The cloth wrapped around them burned quickly and the smoke that rose was a sickly green, like the killing curse.
"A cursed illness," He continued. "All these poor children. Miss Granger may have found the source of it. Last I heard, she was heading for the dungeons to check on the Slytherins."
Voldemort raised his wand, Flitwick had given him all the information he needed and was now useless to him.
But, before the spell even began, he realized something.
Flitwick hadn't been moving his jaw at all. It was slightly open, but not moving up or down.
"What happened to you, Filius?" He asked.
Noticing the jaw, others began to become more obvious.
The charms teacher's mustache was stained with dried red fluid and uneven streams of fresh blood dripped from his ears and mouth. He noticed now that the jaw was broken.
"As I said," Filius said. "A dead man. One of the symptoms is lockjaw. The constant clenching of the muscles there makes you bleed out faster, but with the proper charms, I can still bring voice from my vocal cords with a broken jaw and I can live longer than the illness would have me."
Voldemort gestured for him to continue.
"I'm currently running under an animation charm by Miss Granger, and she is under one that I am holding. This way we will know if the other dies. She noticed that the sickness was airborne, and had the older students place bubblehead charms over the younger ones and taught the ones that didn't know how to cast it. And with the charms on ourselves, we won't be able to spread it to anyone else."
Rookwood's mind was running with thoughts and theories about the cause and effect of this. He mentally applauded the quick thinking that saved wizard children. He couldn't stand that it was a mudblood, but the news that she had already caught it was enough to make up for it.
"We saw Potter died, what of the other one? The Weasley brat?" Rookwood asked.
"He was a hero as well," Filius said. "He found the only place in the entire castle where the sickness could not spread and opened it for the students to escape into. He passed shortly after, the sickness liquefied his insides entirely. By that point though, Miss Granger was out of tears to shed."
"How many?" Voldemort asked. "How many are dead?"
"Seven hundred are dead. One hundred were free of sickness and quarantined. A further twenty are sick but are doing everything in their power to cleanse the rest of the castle. And a final twenty we are waiting to see."
Rookwood gulped. That was the entire next generation of wizardry. Possibly more. He was devastated beyond words.
Abruptly, a sharp glow pulsed inside Flitwick's shirt pocket.
A second later, Granger's voice spoke out of it.
"Professor Flitwick," her voice was quivering and weak. "He's killed them. All of them. Draco Malfoy seems to have been one of the patient zeroes and he fled to the dungeons. His ignorance has killed them all."
They heard a deep, shaking sigh.
"I added their names to my list and now I'm out of room. I'll meet you at the library, I'm finished here. Also, add Colin Creevey to the list, I just burnt the remains and vanished the ashes, you've been remembering to do that, right?"
Flitwick muttered an affirmative.
"One last thing, the Death Eaters are here. I found the remains of five of them, including Dolohov," she gave a bitter laugh. "They succumbed to the Cough rather quickly. By my estimation, it only took fifteen minutes. It might be mutating, or they did something particularly stupid. Don't forget, library."
"Uh, Miss-"
Then the glow stopped.
"Well it seems you will have to be a surprise," Flitwick sighed. "We can go in a few minutes after the fire stops. You can't vanish the remains until they're ashes. Something about the cursed affliction."
Voldemort wet his lips, he was thinking. Now was the opportune time to use the mudblood. She might have information that would be useful to him. In the best-case scenario, he could weaponize the illness.
"Very well, Filius," he agreed. "Lead the way."
With a jab of his wand, he scorched the remains instantly to dust. Fiendfyre was very useful in small doses. He vanished what was left.
"To the library."
Filius nodded and started moving.
Voldemort admitted privately that the way his body moved was unsettling.
Rookwood silently renewed his bubblehead charm and cast an anti-nausea charm. Almost forgetting, he cast Episkey on his nose and vanished the blood. That would take care of that.
As they walked, Flitwick continued to speak about Hermione Granger.
"If it weren't for her, I'm not sure any of us would have survived," he admitted. "She came up with the idea of animation each other and I'm frankly shocked that she was able to cast that spell despite the pain she was absolutely in. She even pulled up a spell to slow down the bodily functions. I sometimes forget to breathe."
He chuckled, downing a blood-replenishing potion. "She had read about it, if you can believe it, in a book she found in Malfoy Manor before she escaped. I am truly fortunate that she is the smartest and most determined student I have ever had."
Voldemort listened tentatively, maybe the dying creature would let slip something important he had neglected to mention before.
"I'm amazed she is still alive," Rookwood. "How long ago did she get sick?"
"She was one of the first. Three days ago, during the original outbreak," Flitwick specified. "It is truly remarkable that she's still not dead. I have no idea how she keeps going. Her entire digestive system and even her lungs must be completely liquid by now. I've only survived this long due to my hardy goblin heritage."
Rookwood fell silent. The tickle at the back of his throat was growing steadily worse and he was beginning to dread what it meant. The Death Eater pushed down his suspicions and continued listening.
"Apparently, Ron, Harry, Crabbe, Goyle, and Draco unleashed something from the room of requirement. Ron said it came from a box of dust that they accidentally knocked open."
Rookwood blanched. He had completely forgotten about the chest. It was still floating behind him, following at a distance.
Voldemort similarly remained silent on the subject. To him, it was fairly obvious why they were in the room of requirement. They had destroyed another one of his Horcruxes.
Flitwick noted their reactions but didn't make it obvious.
"Young Potter was gone within minutes according to Ron, he had inhaled an entire face full of the stuff. We believe that Ron survived longer than the others because he was the farthest from the box when it opened. Miss Granger observed the catching rate of the illness and concluded that it had to have been airborne since there was no other method it could have traveled."
Rookwood spoke to ask a question. "Why do you call the Weasley boy Ron but the other two by their surnames?"
"There is only one Potter and only one Granger, but there are many Weasleys, and I need to differentiate him from the others," Flitwick explained.
That sounded like the end of the conversation, but the ex-unspeakable had more questions and he was going to ask them.
"What happened to the portraits?" he asked.
Flitwick's eyes flicked to the rows of empty frames along the walls of the corridors they walked.
He spoke up. "Most of them we convinced to bundle up in larger portraits and keep the students calm. They are receptacles of ancient knowledge after all. If anything can help them after I've gone, it will be them."
Voldemort and his servant nodded at the revelation. It made sense.
"Although," The tiny professor continued. "Some of them just vanished entirely. We have no idea what happened to them and none of the other portraits could tell us either. Not one of them could enter the mysteriously emptied frames."
Rookwood pondered on that for several minutes, filing it away for later study before asking his next question. "And the ghosts? I presume the same?"
"No," Flitwick told him. "They all vanished almost simultaneously around the time that we believe the box was opened. Some students reported hearing terrified screams from deep in the castle. Ghostly wails of fear."
"That's…" the death eater trailed off and fell silent.
They were nearing their destination, and Rookwood remembered the path from his days at Hogwarts. Another bend and it would be right down the corridor.
They turned the corner and Hermione Granger stared at them from the library's entryway.
It didn't take a second for her eyes to turn from homicidal to gleeful.
"Please tell me that Bellatrix is here too," Hermione said sweetly, her jaw hanging somewhat open.
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Authors' Notes:
Conquest: sorry if there's a bit of an exposition dump here. We do, however, think it flows nicely. Let us know if you feel otherwise!
Forsooth: I concur. In addition, fancy, fancy, fancy. Am I wrong?
Conquest: very
Forsooth: Tch. Tsk. Pshaw. Hmph. Pfft. Yeah, whatever.
Conquest: …
Forsooth: …
Conquest: anyways.
Forsooth: anyways.
Conquest: we finally get some answers here, not all the answer, of course. For we have cleverly hidden-
Forsooth: pfft hahahahaha!
Conquest: …several aspects of the story. Why are you laughing?
Forsooth: "cleverly hidden".
Conquest: it IS cleverly hidden!
Forsooth: …READ AND REVIEW
runs*
Conquest: HEY, GET BACK HERE YOU PIECE OF CRAP!
