The crush of the void stopped abruptly when Harry's face slammed into a solid surface. His glasses gave the second sickening crunch of the evening then, and he was aware of the metal frame compacting. The right lens, which had already cracked after being attacked by the hidebehind, was now shattered on the ground before him.

He didn't quite feel up to mustering any sense of gratefulness that the glass hadn't crunched directly into his eyeball.

Groaning, he pulled in a deep breath through his nostrils, registering the smell of fresh wood-polish—a scent he couldn't easily forget after some of his aunt's most labour-intensive chores. The gorgeous parquet design of the floor beneath his head he might have appreciated more under any other set of circumstances than the those he presently found himself in.

Kidnapped.

He felt too winded to pick his head up, so he instead curled his knees and legs into his chest, attempting a foetal position and hoping it would ward off the impression that he'd sick up all over the lovely floor.

After all, someone had taken very good care of it fairly recently. He couldn't be certain as to why such a silly little detail might matter to him at such a time. Perhaps it was the intimate knowledge of precisely what went into the back-breaking undertaking that was polishing a whole wood floor.

"By all means, take your time," a smooth voice intoned, the inflection sardonic. "For the price you'll be fetching me, I ought to ready a guest suite."

Harry responded by rolling his aching forehead against the wood, using it to massage out the fugginess that lingered after the unexpected apparition.

"But I never was a particularly gracious host, at least so far as Mater told me. I can't say I see any reason to attempt to change my ways now," the voice chuckled. "You'll understand, I'm sure."

Harry loosed a strangled moan that sounded almost more like a sob. His glasses were broken. He probably wouldn't be able to see. In fact, he suspected that, even had his spectacles remained intact, the dizziness from such rough travel would have rendered him delirious, even if temporarily.

The beautiful pair of boots paced in a semi-circle around him, coming from his back to his front, until his unfocused vision was centered on the polished black tips of the wizard's luxury cordwaining.

"Dear me," the wizard tutted. "You aren't stupid, are you? Although I don't suppose it matters if you are. No matter what use you're put to, brains aren't more efficacious merely because the person who once owned them was bright."

Harry watched the man's plain, black robe sweep around his ankles as he paced before him. The motion of it was slightly hypnotic.

In any case, what would be the point of attempting to rise from his place on the floor? At least here he could rest his aching head and attempt to get his bearings. He suspected that if he moved he may well be worse off than if he merely remained a mute mass, plastered to the parquet.

"Have you any idea what duties you shall be assuming, boy? Any inkling at all?" Harry hated how the man's voice was soft. Gentle almost. He again got the impression of a strange, age-less quality; though with his hair the colour of tarnished silver and the impressive bags under his eyes, his captor couldn't have been all that young.

"Speak." The tone was anything but imperious, but when Harry declined to do as he was told, he felt the polished leather of the mysterious wizard's toebox slam into his ribs, putting paid to the idea that his host was in any way the accommodating sort.

A pattern of black and white stars danced across Harry's vision and he coughed before tightening his lips around the surge of sick that wanted to come up from his depths.

"Must I describe the role you shall occupy, boy? Or may we dispense with the tedium of me having to explain to you—"

"D-donor..." Harry gasped, not able to forget the word from when Severus had said it the summer before.

Snape had, with great reluctance, explained what he'd meant at a later date. Harry had been pressing him for an explanation, and by the time one was—resentfully—supplied, he'd wished he'd never asked.

"G-gonna sell me. F-for parts—"

"Well!" The wizard clapped his hands, sounding delighted. "It sounds as though I've underestimated young Severus! Tell me, child: did Snape ever take your tears? Ever ask for your spit? Maybe a bit of urine—?"

The worse the suggestions grew, the more Harry was tempted to turn his head toward the ground where he could simply act as though none of this was happening. As though the man wasn't suggesting... what he was now suggesting.

At a certain point, he'd begun naming things Harry had never even heard of. At least now he knew better than to ask. It was enough to know that he wouldn't care for the answer.

"M-my kuya would never—" Harry gasped out, hoping he could stop the filth he was hearing. "Didn't Yax and Wulf tell you anything? Severus saved me!" Harry finally turned his head and cast a baleful glare at the man's golden features.

If he wasn't so transparently evil, he might have appeared angelic.

"Your kuya!?" His kidnapper choked on a startled laugh, his warm, amber eyes rolling heavenward in his mirth. He clutched a delicately boned hand to his chest, patting his doublet over his heart as he stilled his breathing and fought to stop chuckling. "Oh, if Mother wouldn't have been horrified, I'll bet she'd be tickled!"

Harry frowned and aimed a hopeless kick in the general direction of his captor's ankles out of frustration. He didn't manage to hit anything at all with it, and the other wizard didn't even attempt to step out of the way. "Who bloody well cares what your clarty mum thinks?"

This renewed the man's laughter and he acted as though he were wiping away a bit of a tear with an unnecessarily theatrical flourish. "Here, here, young Potter! Who indeed? Not I, as unfortunate as that is for you."

Wishing he could roll his eyes but refraining because he feared retribution, Harry instead mashed them closed, shaking his head a bit as if to clear from it cobwebs which had accrued. This wizard had bats roosting in his belfry.

What was it that Gammy liked to say?

Mad as a March hare. That was it.

"Why would it be bad for me that you don't care about your own mum?" Harry finally pushed onto one elbow, testing his sense of balance as he did so. His head swam a bit, but he didn't feel the same rush of nausea he had when he'd landed, or when he'd been kicked in the ribs, telling him that the imminent danger had passed. Still, he wished he could begin sobbing when he saw that the entirety of his right lens was smashed on the floor where his head had lain.

Apparently he posed no threat whatsoever to the well-heeled madman in front of him. His captor didn't bother to move or react to Harry's decision to sit up finally. The boy could have reached out and yanked at his trouser leg, he was so close, and evidently, the older wizard still perceived no threat to himself.

That was... discouraging.

"Mother never has appreciated how hard it is to make money. Neither does Father, for that matter, but," here he affected an eloquent shrug, "such is the purview of those with no memory of how their families' fortunes were formed."

He returned to pacing, his hands clasped behind his back as though he were a professor readying himself to begin a lecture.

"Fortuna smiles upon those adepts who sacrifice, boy. We daring few who take risks. Are you following?"

Not entirely, Harry could have answered. But he understood well enough.

"You want more money," he answered in a deadpan voice.

"Anyone would want more than nothing!" The man hissed through his teeth, his sudden bitterness wrinkling his face and betraying his age. His snarl of rage stretched his mouth and pulled against his low cheekbones and weak chin. His anger, in that moment, was that of the adolescent: resentment, cynicism, and entitlement at war with the greater virtues of truth and temperance—and, evidently, winning handily.

"Even you must have been left with something, Potter! Old Fleamont had only the one son, and from him was begot only the one son! Even if you were gotten off of some festering, Cumbrian bottom-feeder."

His frantic pacing was beginning to worry Harry, and the apprehension that this strange man may decide to hurt him worse than he'd already been injured was all that prevented Harry from defending his mother's honour, even if he wasn't entirely sure he understood what it was about her that had been insulted.

It had certainly sounded nasty, and that ought to have been enough. Unfortunately for him, any words he could have conjured to retaliate stalled at his lips when he considered the possibility that the wizard opposite him may well curse him within an inch of his life.

"The eldest! I am the eldest, and they've not even seen fit to issue me an allowance while they swan off to our properties in Baguio and Cordoba! What should they expect that I do in their absence?" The man threw his hands up as he posed this rhetorical question, as though awaiting an answer from some heavenly source. "If I have prospered, Potter, it is because I am more enterprising by half than any of my feckless progenitors! More enterprising and braver than the whole lot of them! They would have anyone believe that to avoid such methods is done out of deference to good morals, or, at the least, to good taste! Faugh! Do you know what it really is, boy?"

Harry swallowed and shook his head, thinking it best he play along.

"Cowardice! Repellant fear! Only the weakest poltroons are corrupted by a little well-earned power. I see it in your eyes, child. I see the rank terror. How can you have any wonder as to why I would never bother to flinch from you? That you're a mere boy has little to do with it." His captor smirked, his eyes boring into Harry's own in that same intense way that Severus' sometimes did. "You are too much afraid to try and take the upper hand. You're no different than anyone else, in that regard. Certainly, not worthy of being fêted as you so often are by our world.

"Riddle," the man spat, "fell to you because he was a fool. There's nothing extraordinary about you, whatsoever."

Then, in a fit of mirth, the madman snortled. "But don't let on to our guests this evening, if you don't mind. I plan to start the bidding at twenty-five-thousand galleons, and I intend to claim no less than a quarter-million by the end of the night for you alone. For that kind of gold, let them think you are possessed of great powers or some other such rot." He waved an errant hand dismissively in the air even as his face beamed out a beatific grin inspired by his greed.

Harry blinked rapidly, wishing he could dispel the feeling of fullness he felt in his head at hearing his fate so casually spelled out for him. "What riddle?" He asked, wondering if this was like one of Severus' puzzles.

"Riddle the man, little idiot. Not some stupid word game. A bit of a by-blow, like yourself; granted, you're at least not a bastard in the technical sense of the word." He stopped his pacing momentarily to stare off into space over Harry's head, a frown creasing his features. "The last of the family Gaunt: a half-breed with delusions about what purity means."

The wizard shrugged then and shook off his contemplative look. "It ought to have been clear to anyone that he was a nonstarter. No great sorcerer goes about whoring himself out for money from the likes of the Malfoys and the Blacks. I've worked with those minds who have successfully expanded our understanding of the world. Our knowledge of magic and power that brushes the feet of the gods themselves. Tom Riddle was a charlatan. That he should be destroyed by a baby is, to any wizard with an ounce of sense, an inevitability rather than a shock."

"You mean... erm... you're talking about that Lord—"

"Lord! And that he styled himself a lord! Imagine: he hates his muggle father so much, and yet his only claim to being landed is a mouldering pile in Little Hangleton!"

"You're not... you're not one of them, then? A... a Death Eater?" Harry blinked, feeling a bit non-plussed.

Severus had told him that he'd known Yax and Wulf from his days working under the Dark Lord's thumb.

The man pacing before him snorted. "Even 'Dark Lords' need backers. I'm merely one in a long line of better wizards than himself who turned him down for funding. There are plenty of us who thought Little Tom to be laughably transparent. It is a pity that Abraxas Malfoy lost his wits around the time that Riddle came with his hat held out for alms. And Lucius isn't exactly a chip off the old block where good judgement is concerned."

Harry scrounged around for another thing to ask about. Anything to keep the man talking so that Harry might avoid being moved to wherever it was that he was bound for.

"Severus knew Yax and Wulf from working for... for him."

"Ah." Abruptly the pacing stopped. "I see. You imagine you outwit me by fishing for more information. Incidentally, I'm inclined to tell you damn near whatever you'd like to know. I don't care for the dregs of Riddle's failed organisation, and neither does it matter to me what you know of it. I find you amusing, young Potter. Amusing in the same way that Tom was amusing: you're both patently pathetic.

"The entrance to my home is just as well protected as where you'll be spending your time until I can call upon interested parties. Ask your questions now, as I'll have little time for you once I've washed my hands of your presence."

Huffing, Harry pressed himself upward, impeded by the binding on his wrists. Finally, he managed a tailor-style sit on the floor, and he got his first decent look at the hall he'd landed in.

Dark, well-aged paneling covered every visible surface, and on the far wall—opposite where he sat—a wide staircase in the same dark wood hugged the perimeter of the room, leading to a balcony that presumably could be followed left or right into the separate wings of the grand house. A luxurious carpet runner held in place by polished brass rods pressed into the recess of each step ran down the stairs, and there didn't appear to be a single straight line in the entire hall; every piece of wood was carved into elaborate curlicues and representations of soft, inviting flora. He very much wished he could walk up to the bannister where the stairs began and run his fingertips over the grooves that some master-woodworker must have carved centuries before.

There were odd disturbances about his vision, and it took him a moment to realise that he wasn't still seeing stars, and it wasn't necessarily a consequence of having half of his glasses knocked out.

The portraits and sculptures—which occupied every spare nook and bit of wall—were moving. Some merely blinked as they took in the scene that Harry presented, and others looked as though they were bending over toward the edges of their frames to whisper to their neighbours.

Even the well-polished suits of armour shifted—as real men keeping watch might have done—restive upon their podiums as they flexed their gauntlets around the halberds and standards they held upright.

The hall was festooned with deep purple wall hangings and pendants featuring gold trimmings and tassels. The finer details eluded him, however, for his left eye refused to make out the figures painstakingly stitched onto the velvet without aid from his right.

It reminded him of the times his aunt had dragged himself and Dudley to some of the tours held in London. He recalled the rich woodwork of the pews in Westminister Abbey and the plush wall hangings in the halls of Parliament. This single location seemed to embody the ethos of the ancient Empire, as though it were very much naturally a part of its history and felt no compunction about flaunting the extravagant symbolism and artistry it was entitled to.

There was no apparent artifice in the way that the house had been appointed. Not like the homes of some muggles that Harry had been to, who liked to collect bits and bobs that hinted at the same level of opulence and craftsmanship when in truth they actually made the collector of such fripperies seem all the more common.

These were not things that he could properly articulate, of course, but merely impressions. His good eye managed to focus on the single word—rendered in rich, goldwork bullion—at the bottom of one of the mulberry-coloured hangings.

Princeps.

"What's... what's 'princeps' mean?" Harry finally asked, figuring he may as well take the man up on his offer.

A few steps away from him, the lord—if that was truly what he was—quirked an enigmatic smile. Just the merest twist of his full lips, at the corner. Barely enough to wrinkle or crease his cheek.

"What is it, or what does it mean?" He mused to himself, although it didn't sound as though he were inviting Harry to clarify. "It means, to us, 'foremost.' It is, to us, all that can be said to matter."

Harry must have appeared confused by this answer, for the man chuckled and withdrew his wand from an elaborate leather belt that was tucked beneath his doublet. The boy flinched, which turned out to be unnecessary, for apparently the only thing his captor meant to do with it was to cast a quick Tempus in the air.

"I daresay I didn't expect to be waiting fifteen minutes for the others to make it back here. I perhaps would have expected such a thing from Wulfric, but Caliban is generally punctual."

"Why do they work for you now? If they used to work for erm... for Riddle?"

"Potter, my boy, I'd consider this excellent wisdom to pass on to anyone I had it in mind to mentor (which is unfortunate for yourself, as you'll never be so lucky): if you know a man's weakness, and especially if that weakness is inaccessible because of the law as it stands, it is a small matter to gain his allegiance by facilitating access to whatever his vice may be."

"Huh?"

The lord held up one finger, as would have a teacher imparting a lecture to an eager student. "You must understand motivation. You must discern what it is that a man wants. What he needs, rather. What is the one thing that will drive him—in the darkest part of the night—to walk the shadowed alleyways and tread dark paths, merely to attain?"

Harry gulped, not liking the sound of that one bit.

"Wulfric and Caliban are simple men—needy men—driven by compulsions that would see them interred in the deepest caverns of Azkaban prison should they be caught indulging. Wulfric prefers to take advantage of some of our cheapest, most abundant imports while they remain alive—which a number of them do; after all, not all of our buyers are interested in Alchemy—while Caliban... Caliban is a gourmand." The silver-haired wizard grinned nastily then, showing off a mouth of even, white teeth.

Before Harry could ask what that meant, the lord gnashed his teeth together, biting imaginary meat off of what looked to be an invisible bone he pretended to hold in his hand. An assortment of heavy, gold rings glinted from his index and pinky fingers, underscoring the threat with promises of his power to facilitate such epicurean horrors.

The blood drained, seemingly all at once, from Harry's head and face, and he had to stop himself from swooning by leaning against his bound together hands, planted on the floor behind him.

"Have no fear, at least where those two are concerned." The boots resumed their circuit before him, seeming to always move a precise five paces to the left before switching course to the right. "You are beyond what either could afford, and neither has rendered enough service to me to hope to claim you as any sort of boon. Of course, whoever ponies up the final total at the end of the night may do with you as he pleases. My guarantee that you remain intact applies only while under my own jurisdiction here in my home."

Swallowing back bile at that pronouncement, Harry risked another glance around the hall. "Where is 'here?'"

"Again, you imagine you are being clever." A dark chuckle followed the observation. "I propose we see how clever you really are, before your brains are put to use in some sort of experimental curative for senility or some other such dross."

Turning away from Harry, his host—if he could be called such a thing—stared up at the heraldic tapestry that had caught Harry's attention earlier, his hands clasped behind his back as he rocked front to back from toe to heel.

"I perceive, from my brief perambulations around your young mind, that you have visited these parts before. It is a location which is, in truth, tied in with your own personal history as much as it is with my own.

"Seemingly from time immemorial my family has occupied this valley and has maintained the solemn duty of fording wary travelers and locals alike across a river often as tempestuous as she may be beautiful and serene. She is, in this particular location, uncommonly deep and wide, and would not have tolerated anyone attempting to cross her without magic as an aid. No mere float or ferryman would ever have dared passage, and by the time when the muggles' technology advanced such that they might have conceivably managed, no man would dare to make the journey without paying the toll for safe passage. It was a duty—and a privilege—that my family had upheld for many years, at least until the 1689 passage of the Statute. I believe that your Snape told you about that?"

The tone of voice with which he said 'your Snape' sounded for all the world as though he were referring to Harry's darling little pet.

Instead of nodding to confirm the wizard's suspicions, Harry scowled when he turned his head over his shoulder to check Harry's response.

"Mmm. It was nothing of consequence for us by that point—"

A loud banging and clamour echoed up from beneath them, interrupting whatever should have come next, and Harry stared wide-eyed at the floor for a moment, wondering if it might open up to swallow him.

"Ah, that will be them coming back. They know that they're not permitted to Apparate directly into the entry hall. For guests and family only, you see? Anyway, our reliance on the tolls paid by those seeking to ford the river was not a longstanding thing. In short order, our fealty was proffered in exchange for tenure and control of all the surrounding lands—including much of the river. It was our control over our lands—the tenants, the abundance of the fields (both in their bounty and in what they could sustain with regards to livestock), and the limestone quarries—which allowed us, in part, to establish ourselves as first amongst the old families. First before the Blacks, and Yaxleys, and Shacklebolts. First before anything that would presume to label itself one of a 'sacred number.'" He sniffed delicately.

"Did you know, Potter, that there is a commodity more precious than purity of blood? Hmm? It was our family that possessed that which the likes of the Gaunts could only salivate over, even with our shared history: the gift of primacy. Foremost. We are the foremost: from the courts at Caerleon where our sire, Arto-rig, held his seat.

"He was known as a bear of a man. A great, warrior king. Of course, it cannot be known, especially today, whether he was even a wizard or not, but from his seed was birthed magic, and it was that magic that sowed itself into the land upriver and became our family's birthright. Great magic, too, was worked in his kingdom. Practised by his vassals, his trusted entourage of knights. So too by his advisor, who, in later centuries, meandered north to Hogwarts after it was established, seeking knowledge for himself and to educate minds younger than his own.

"But I have jumped ahead of myself once more. You must excuse me, I am not the best storyteller."

Harry couldn't help but to agree, at least in principle. If he hadn't been terrified, he could have focused instead on how bored he was.

"In truth, literature and the art of storycraft have always interested me less than weaving my own self into the tapestry of our history." A small, wry smirk twisted his features. "With any luck there may be someone more gifted than myself who takes it upon himself to mention me in future accounts.

"Unfortunately, by this point, I anticipate it would require sweet Mater's death before I should be so lucky," he murmured. His silver eyebrows drew down over his amber eyes, giving him the far away appearance of a man deeply troubled. Worryingly, it didn't seem as though he were so perturbed over the potential death of his own mother, as he'd mentioned so casually, so much as being concerned over what might happen should the absent woman not meet some expedient end.

Becoming alert once more, he wagged a finger in the air, as though to remind himself that he'd been relating an exceedingly tiresome story to a captive listener with no choice but to closely attend his preoccupation with his own family's history.

"No less than three or four centuries passed without interruption to our lineage. Adjacent to the ferrying point, a town grew. Of course, plenty of daughters were born in that time, most marrying off into the town and occupying the vaunted position of rich wives to the merchants who traded—with our permission and fees levied, of course—up and down the river, from the coast of Wales, up to Cumbria. The first daughter of any significance, however, wouldn't be born until the middle of the tenth century.

"Lady Aedra of the Saeferne," he mused aloud, sounding almost reverent. "By all accounts, a beautiful and virtuous maiden in her youth, and later a doting mother and wife. With the blessing of her father, Lord Aelfric of the Saeferne, she took her only son with her downriver and to her late husband's ancestral home in Cornwall following his untimely passing. There, on the moor, she raised a wild and impetuous son, receiving some small payment from her doting father in deference to his love for her, and with likely no thoughts of returning."

He pointed to something stitched upon the lower left quadrant of the shield that he was examining, the poke of his finger causing the velvet fabric to ripple with movement.

"There came a great illness. It swept the valley, and much of the rest of the country besides. The thistle," he indicated on the image he pointed to, and which Harry was made to squint at, "was chosen to commemorate those three brothers to Aedra, and their own sons who also perished, which made it necessary for her to bring her young son back north once more. With his cousins and uncles deceased, the duty of the land fell to the boy, and his grandfather named him his heir."

The thistle was tangled into the mane of a lion, who stood to the left of the family's crest, and Harry was left to wonder at whether the poor beast was being choked by it.

"Our ancestor was sent on many errands on his grandfather's behalf. Although Aelfric had managed to hold on to his own life in the aftermath of illness, he was not well enough to travel. Extended diplomatic trips required stamina, even if one had access to magical means of travel, thus, young Grimbold undertook the responsibilities of his grandfather, venturing great distances and often representing the family in disputes such as one of the earlier and bloodier goblin uprisings. He earned recognition as a fierce, bold contender on the field of battle and when settling the dispute along with his closest friend and confidant in combat. One of the stipulations for sealing the peace agreement was the commission of a sword from the foremost of the goblins' silversmiths. The sword is said to have been of unparalleled beauty and was meant to have incorporated metal from Arto-rig's own blade—parts of which had been passed down through the ages—into the sword's edge and point."

Up through the centre of the shield, a sword bisected the crest in two. The artist who had rendered it had made sure to represent the fact that rubies had been set into the pommel, and perhaps a few smaller ones into the grip.

"When Grimbold returned home from the uprising, his new sword slung about his hips, his grandfather was so impressed that he insisted his grandson adopt a new name. Lord Aelfric anticipated that his death would come shortly, you see, and he wanted no confusion over who he meant to take over the lands and river. He chose a new name for the lad; one meaning 'God-Ruler...'

"'Godric,' he called him."