Hello, AMagicWord. I'm happy to publish another Chapter of Blood of the Veil
If you want to Read 6 More Chapters Right Now. Search 'patreon.com/AMagicWord' on Websearch
The following 6 chapters are already available to Patrons.
Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, and Chapter 20 are already available for Patrons.
Darkness. Complete, absolute, and heavy as wet earth.
Harry could see nothing; it felt as if he was buried alive hundreds of meters deep, yet he could smell the place, which smelled rotten, as if someone had hidden a corpse here and had left it to rot.
A Veil dream. The recognition came quickly now — quicker than the first few times, when the disorientation had lasted longer. Harry wondered who it was this time, was it someone he had never dreamed of before...was it Sirius? Was he in his cell? No, that wasn't right, Sirius was in Azkaban for thirteen years, and from what Harry knew of that place, there were supposed to be dementors floating around when Sirius was still a prisoner, and Harry knew he would recognise the sound they make even underground. No, this was not Sirius. It was someone else...Harry wondered briefly why was it taking so long when he heard it...
Something scraped overhead; it sounded like something being dragged across the floor.
Light spilled down in a thin, dusty blade — yellow and guttering, the colour of tallow candles or cheap oil lamps. It cut through the darkness and carved the space into rough shapes. Walls of unmortared stone. A low ceiling close enough to touch, beams of dark wood bowed under the weight of whatever structure sat above. No windows. Not a single one. Just walls and stone and a narrow pair of stairs climbing steeply upward toward the source of that sickly light.
A cellar. Or a crypt.
Heavy breathing echoed down the stairs. A shape filled the stairwell — broad shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around a long bundle that bumped against each step with a dull, meaty thud. The man descended backward, dragging the bundle by one end, and with each step the thing he carried struck the stone edge and made a sound like a fist hitting a side of beef in a butcher's shop.
The bundle was wrapped in rough cloth. Undyed linen, stained dark in patches that might have been mud or might have been something else entirely. It was roughly the length and shape of a human body. The cloth had been wound hastily — loose in places, bunching at what would have been the knees, pulled tight across what would have been the chest.
The man reached the cellar floor and dropped the bundle's end. He straightened, pressing both hands into the small of his back, and turned into the lamplight.
Pale. A thick neck, heavy jaw, dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. His clothes were simple — rough-spun tunic, leather belt, boots caked in something black. His hands shook as he wiped them on his thighs, and his lips moved in a continuous mutter that gradually resolved into words.
"—mad, utterly mad, the whole bloody lot of it, Lord Lykan hath gone completely—"
The muttering didn't stop as he crossed to a long table set against the far wall.
The man lifted the bundle onto the table with a grunt that tore itself from somewhere deep in his chest. The effort left him bent over, hands braced on his knees, breathing hard. Then he straightened again and began unwinding the cloth.
Layer after layer peeled away. The linen made a wet, sucking sound where it stuck to skin. And then the body was bare.
A woman. Young — perhaps twenty-five, perhaps thirty. Dark hair matted against the table. Eyes closed, face slack, she was dead. No wound visible on the front of her torso, no bruising around the throat. It must have been magic.
The man stepped back from the body as if it contained a sickness and he was afraid he would catch it. His hands were shaking badly now. He wiped them on his tunic again, though they were already dry.
Footsteps above. The cellar stairs groaned under new weight, and a second man descended. This one wasn't as pale-looking. Taller than the first man, leaner, with a narrow face and sharp dark eyes. A short beard, neatly trimmed. Better clothes — not rich, exactly, but cleaner, better fitted, the belt fastened with a clasp of worked iron rather than plain leather.
"Is she prepared, Beneckid?"
The man. Beneckid nodded. The colour had drained from his face so completely that his skin looked like parchment left out in rain. "Aye. She lieth upon the table, as his lordship did bid." A swallow that moved his whole throat. "Aran, I — I understand not what Lord Lykan would do with this. With any of them." His eyes darted to the body and away again, as though the dead woman might sit up and catch him looking. "I like it not."
Aran didn't show sympathy; his expression turned to annoyance and anger.
"She is a bloody witch hunter, Beneckid." He spoke the words with venom. "Or was a bloody witch hunter, ere someone did return the favour." He crossed to the table and looked down at the body with an expression that held no sympathy at all. "Dost thou remember what they did to Herrald's son?"
Beneckid looked away from him.
"The boy was ten." Aran reminded him as he approached, before tapping Beneckid's forehead with his long finger. "Ten years of age. They dragged him from his mother's arms before the whole village and burned him alive, for he made a cup float across a table. A cup, Beneckid. A child's trick. And she—" He gestured at the body without looking at it. "She held the torch. So if thou art searching for someone to mourn, I would counsel thee to choose better."
Beneckid's mouth opened and closed. Whatever argument he'd been building collapsed behind his eyes. His shoulders dropped. "Aye. Aye, I know it." He rubbed his face with both hands, the rough scrape of callused palms against stubble loud in the enclosed space. "I wish only to return home and drink something strong. Something that shall make me forget the sound that thing made when I dragged it down those stairs."
He turned toward the steps, then stopped. Turned back.
"Aran."
"What."
"What dost thou think Lord Lykan would do with all these bodies?"
Aran rolled his eyes.
"That I labour for the man," he said with more annoyance, "doth not mean I know all his secrets. He doth not consult me. He doth not consult any soul. He giveth orders and I carry them out, same as thou."
Beneckid nodded, already turning away. "Right. Right, forget that I—"
"Immortality."
The word dropped into the cellar like a stone into a well.
Beneckid turned back slowly, looking baffled and concerned.
"Lord Lykan seeketh a path to immortality...at the least, 'tis what I heard tell in Little Magic, thou knowest how the folk are there, they know all things, and none knoweth how." He spoke quietly as if afraid that someone was listening to them. "That is what the bodies are for. He seeketh a way to live forever."
Beneckid stared at him as if Aran had spoken a different language.
"Immortality." A flat, dead repetition, as though the word had lost all meaning somewhere between hearing it and saying it. "That is not — Aran, that is not possible. Men die. All things die. Even magic cannot—"
Aran's chuckle cut him off, looking at Beneckid as if he was a child who needed explaining the simplest of things.
"The common folk do also believe that magic is cursed. Devil-given. An abomination against nature." His arms uncrossed and he looked at Beneckid directly. "And yet here we stand. Magic is real, Beneckid. Quite bloody real. So mayhap thou and I are not the best judges of what is possible and what is not."
A long silence. The lamplight guttered. Shadows swung across the dead woman's face and for one horrible instant she seemed to smile.
Beneckid's throat worked. "Even if — even if immortality were real. Even if such a thing did exist." His voice was the voice of a man grasping at the last shreds of a world that made sense. "What have dead bodies to do with it? She is dead, Aran. What use is a corpse to a man who would live forever?"
Aran shook his head slowly. "That I know not...And if I speak true to thee, Beneckid, I care not to know. As they do say, ignorance is a bliss, and so I choose to remain blissful and ask not questions that might give me ill dreams."
He crossed the cellar in three long strides and gripped Beneckid's shoulder.
"Cease thy thinking upon it." Aran said with a comforting voice. "Whatever Lord Lykan doth in this cellar after we take our leave, whatever he learneth from these bodies — 'tis no affair of ours. We are hands. We carry, we fetch, we do as we are bid, and we go home alive at the end of it. That is the arrangement. That hath always been the arrangement."
Beneckid's face crumpled slightly, and he glanced briefly at the body, with almost pity.
"Come." Aran's grip softened. He steered Beneckid toward the stairs. "Let us go and drink some of that strong stuff Lady Amilda hath. Thou might even find fortune this night."
"Aye." Beneckid's voice was hollow. He didn't look back at the table. "Aye, that soundeth about right."
Their boots scraped up the stairs. The light receded. The grinding of wood on wood as the cellar door was pulled shut, and then the darkness rushed back in like a tide filling a hollow in the sand, and the dead woman lay alone on her table in the black, and the cellar was silent, and the dream—
Harry's eyes snapped open.
The ceiling of the bedroom at Grimmauld Place hung above him. His shirt was soaked through. Cold sweat plastered the fabric to his chest and back, and the sheets beneath him were damp, twisted into knots around his legs from thrashing he didn't remember.
His heart hammered against his ribs. Fast. Too fast. He could still taste the rot.
Lord Lykan.
The name sat in his mind like a splinter buried just under the skin. It meant nothing to him. No recognition, no connection to anything he'd read in the Black library or the Hogwarts texts or the ancient books Dobby had stolen from forgotten shelves. Just a name. Just a man in a dream who wanted dead bodies delivered to his cellar because he believed — or knew — that the secret to immortality was hidden somewhere inside them.
Immortality.
Harry wondered what corpses had to do with immortality. A corpse had no life to give. It was dead — meat and bone and nothing else, the thing left behind after whatever mattered had already gone. And immortality was the opposite of that. The desire to cheat death. To never know its cold embrace. To look into the dark and say not yet, not ever.
So what had Lord Lykan seen in those empty shells that Harry couldn't?
Then he thought about the one person who was in a way...immortal right now.
Why had Voldemort made the Horcrux? Or Horcruxes?
Voldemort was one of the most powerful wizards alive. Perhaps the most powerful. Harry had watched Dumbledore duel him in the Ministry atrium. Dumbledore was old. Old was a disadvantage even for the best of duelists, and Dumbledore's blackened hand suggested that time was winning faster than anyone knew.
Voldemort had no such weakness. Despite being even less than death for fourteen years, he was still powerful.
So why the Horcrux? Why pay that price? Why tear your soul in pieces and live in agony?
No sane person would choose that. Not for power. Voldemort already had power.
Which meant it wasn't about power at all.
It was about fear.
Harry's eyes widened a little. One of the most powerful and darkest wizards in the history of magic...was afraid. Afraid of the one thing his magic couldn't curse or hex or dominate into submission. Afraid of the one opponent that had never lost a fight in the entire history of the world.
Death.
Voldemort was terrified of death. So terrified that he had looked at the price of a Horcrux — an existence of permanent agony — and decided it was still better than dying. That was the calculation. Not power against cost. Fear against cost. And fear had won. Fear of becoming nothing. Of being as ordinary and forgettable as every other corpse that had ever cooled on a table.
And Harry knew something about that nothing. He had stood in it. He had felt his sense of self dissolving in the space beyond the Veil, felt his emotions and memories peeling away like layers of skin, and for a few terrible seconds he had been no one — just a consciousness evaporating into the void. He had come back from it. He had clawed his way out with memories of the people he loved.
But Voldemort couldn't have done that. Voldemort had no one to remember. No love to anchor him. No face that would have pulled him back from the dark.
Maybe that was the real answer. Maybe it wasn't just fear of death. Maybe it was the knowledge — buried deep, in whatever shrivelled thing still functioned as Voldemort's core — that if he died, there would be nothing waiting for him on the other side. No love. No warmth. No voice calling him back. Just the void, and the silence, and the slow dissolution into nothing, forever.
Harry felt like he should pity him, but he did not...Voldemort was a monster, responsible for the destruction of thousands of lives, and Harry would make sure he paid the Price of Death... by starting with his so-called Death Eaters.
.
.
The mirror in the upstairs bedroom at Grimmauld Place was old enough that the glass had gone slightly green at the edges, giving everything it reflected the look of something seen through pond water. Harry stared at the figure staring back at him and felt, for the second time in his life, like he was wearing someone else's skin.
The first time had been the Yule Ball. Fourth year. He'd stood in front of a different mirror in a different life, tugging at dress robes and trying to flatten his hair and failing spectacularly at both while Ron complained about lace behind him. That had been — what? A year and a half ago? It felt like a decade. It felt like something that had happened to a different person entirely, someone younger and stupider who thought the worst thing that could happen at a formal event was stepping on Parvati Patil's feet.
The suit was black, tailored and sharp and so far removed from anything Harry had ever owned that it might as well have been armour. Sirius had given it to him two months before he died. Had it delivered by owl to Hogwarts in a long, flat box with a note scrawled in that careless handwriting Harry would never see again: For when they finally drag you to something important and you need to look like you belong there. Your dad had one just like it. Wore it to his wedding. Looked like a prat. You'll look better. — S.
Harry had shoved the box under his bed and forgotten about it. Hadn't opened it until now, a day after Tonks told him the Wizengamot gathering was confirmed, and he'd realised he owned nothing appropriate for standing in front of the most powerful legislative body in wizarding Britain and telling them to kill people.
It fit well. Too well, almost — as if Sirius had known exactly what Harry would grow into, or as if the suit had adjusted itself the way some magical clothing did. The jacket sat close across his shoulders, which were broader now than they'd been in June. The shirt was white, the tie dark, and the whole thing made him look older.
His eyes caught the light differently against the dark fabric. Greener. Sharper. More like his mother's than ever. Nymphadora had insisted on the suit the moment she'd heard about it, saying something about how his eyes were his best weapon and he needed to show them more. Harry still wasn't entirely sure what that meant. Make them bigger? Widen them dramatically when he walked into the chamber? Flutter his eyelashes at the Wizengamot like some deranged doll? She'd refused to elaborate, just waved her hand vaguely at his face and said trust me with absolute confidence.
"You look handsome."
Hermione's voice came from the doorway. Harry glanced at her reflection in the green-tinged mirror. She was leaning against the frame with her arms crossed, wearing an expression that was trying very hard to be casual and not quite managing it. Her eyes kept dropping to the suit and then back to his face, Harry had never seen her do that before.
"Thanks," Harry said. He turned from the mirror and adjusted his cuffs, and he wasn't quite good with it, and it was clear from the way Hermione looked amused, approaching and helping him with his cuffs. "Sirius had good taste. In suits, at least. His taste in wallpaper was criminal." He nodded toward the peeling walls of the bedroom, where some long-dead Black had chosen a pattern of interlocking serpents.
Hermione looked concerned once again. "Harry. Are you going to be all right in there?"
There it was. The real question, are you about to walk into the Wizengamot and do something you can't take back.
Harry met her eyes. "I'll be fine, Hermione."
"Will you?"
"I will be." He paused, and the truth came out, he had no reason to lie to her. Hermione was the one he trusted the most. "Once this war is over. Once it's finished, and the people responsible for all of it are no longer breathing, I'll sleep better at night. That's the truth. I know it's not the answer you want, but it's the one I've got."
Hermione's lips pressed together, but at the very least she didn't seem like she wanted to object on it, but Harry felt that her concern was for a different reason.
"Harry—"
"We tried prison, Hermione." Harry stopped her before she could say anything. "We tried it once. It didn't work. Bellatrix Lestrange and every one of her lot were captured a month after Voldemort's first defeat. Fourteen years ago. The Wizengamot sentenced them to life in Azkaban, and everyone told themselves the problem was solved. Justice served. Lock them away and forget about them."
He turned back to the mirror. His own eyes looked back at him.
"And now they're free again. Every single one of them. Out there right now, torturing and killing, because Azkaban was never a solution. It was a delay. A long, expensive, useless delay." His jaw tightened. "If they had been executed back then — if the Wizengamot had done what needed doing fourteen years ago instead of locking them in cells and hoping the problem would rot — Voldemort would have returned still. I know that. But he would have come back weaker. No inner circle waiting for him. No Bellatrix to lead his raids. No Lucius whispering in the Minister's ear for a decade. He'd have had to rebuild from nothing."
His voice dropped. The next words cost him something, and it showed.
"And Sirius might still be alive."
There was silence, and Harry was grateful that Hermione did not seem to disagree with him.
"A debt unpaid," Harry said quietly, "is a debt that grows. And this one's been growing for fourteen years. It's time to collect."
Hermione didn't argue. That, more than anything, told Harry how much she'd been thinking about this herself — how many hours she'd spent turning it over in that relentless mind of hers, examining it from every angle, and arriving at the same conclusion she didn't want to arrive at.
She crossed the space between them. Her hand found his, and her fingers threaded through his. He felt her warm flesh, and he wanted to feel more of her. His hands grasped her hand, wanting to touch her more.
"I understand what you mean," she said. "I do, Harry. And I — I want you to know something." A faint flush crept up her neck. "When the day comes to fight — really fight, not just training in the Room of Requirement or reading about it in books — I will be there. Right beside you." Her fingers tightened around his. "Always."
The words felt like a hug, a warm hug. He looked down at their joined hands. Looked up at her face. She was closer than she'd been a moment ago — or he was; he wasn't sure who had moved. Close enough that he could see the faint amber flecks in her brown eyes, the way her lips were slightly parted, the way her breath had gone shallow and quick.
His pulse was doing something completely unhelpful.
She tilted her chin up, just slightly. A question asked without words, and Harry leaned—
The door banged open.
"Right then, are we — oh."
Nymphadora Tonks stood in the doorway with her hip cocked against the frame and a grin spreading across her face like sunrise over a battlefield. Her hair was a sharp, professional black today — Wizengamot-appropriate — but the smugness radiating off her was anything but professional. Her eyes flicked from Harry to Hermione to their joined hands to the negligible distance between their faces, and the grin became something nuclear.
"Well, well," she said, drawing both words out to roughly twice their natural length.
Harry dropped Hermione's hand. Hermione stepped back. The flush on her neck climbed enthusiastically to her cheeks and set up permanent residence.
"We were just—" Hermione started.
"Discussing strategy," Harry finished with absolute confidence, and he wanted to slap himself. Who would believe that? Not even Dudley was that stupid.
"Strategy," Tonks repeated, nodding slowly with exaggeration. "Right. Looked very strategic from where I'm standing. Very... close-quarters strategy."
"Was there something you needed?" Harry said, knowing that trying to deny it was pointless, Tonks would just tease him endlessly, and she would forget why she even came here.
Tonks straightened. The smugness didn't leave her face. Harry suspected it had moved in permanently, but her face turned serious. She was using her 'Auror' face.
"Time's come, Harry." She gave him a quick once-over, taking in the suit, the tie. She nodded with approval, and Harry saw the same look; it was the look Hermione gave him when she entered the room, and now Tonks. "You ready to go drown a frog?"
The image of Umbridge in her horrible pink cardigan, that simpering smile, that high girlish voice saying I must not tell lies while blood seeped from the back of his hand.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm ready."
If you want to Read 6 More Chapters Right Now. Search 'patreon.com/AMagicWord' on Websearch