Chapter 209. The Ravine. Part 5. The Crystal.
A little over an hour later, a pained groan escaped the Vampire's lips. The man's face twisted as he tried to reach up to his temple. But almost immediately, he felt something strange on his wrists that prevented it, and he slowly opened his eyes.
"What in the..." The undead creature didn't finish. It saw the black shackles on its hands and, in the same moment, remembered everything that had happened before it lost consciousness. "I... I was defeated. By a pathetic human." It pressed the back of its head against the wall, closed its eyes, and bit its lower lip in quiet bitterness.
"Good morning, Sleeping Beauty." Severus's cheerful voice drew the bloodsucker's attention. "Sleep well?" No answer came except a cold stare. "My apologies. I broke your bed a little." The Vampire's eye twitched and its expression contorted. The shackles glowed briefly red as it tried to pull free, but after a few seconds they went black again, and the Vampire looked down at them with a trace of surprise. "Sturdy, aren't they?"
"What do you want from me?"
"Straight to the point. I like that." Severus dropped down to eye level with a brisk nod. "I want to know about your bed. You didn't make it yourself, did you?"
"What makes you think I'll answer anything?" The Vampire gave a contemptuous snort, looking Severus directly in the eyes. Severus's brow furrowed briefly, then smoothed, and he smiled.
"Well, that's fair enough. It means you don't actually know either. You came to this place when it was already empty, realized how safe it was, especially once the serious Vampire hunts began, and decided to stay. And the food conveniently dropped in on its own. Couldn't ask for more, really." He patted the stunned bloodsucker on the shoulder. The Vampire's eyes had gone wide as Galleons. Severus stood back up. "A shame you don't know anything."
"H-how? I didn't say a word!"
"Hm?" Severus met its gaze again. After a few seconds, he gave a quiet, measured shake of his head. "I see. You came here when you were barely twenty, and in your arrogance and vanity you never bothered to learn what humans were actually capable of."
"Shut your mouth! You're nothing but food!" the creature snapped. But as it watched a red fireball form in Severus's hand and felt the tremendous heat radiating from it, it swallowed hard and tried desperately to compose itself and hold onto whatever confidence it had left. Even a fool could have seen the panic behind the facade. "Wait! Stop! Just wait!"
"Hm? I already have everything I need from you, and a live parasite is of no use to me." The fireball drifted out of Severus's hand and floated slowly toward the Vampire pressed flat against the wall, watching it with something approaching horror.
"STOP!" The shackles on its wrists and ankles blazed a brilliant red as the creature struggled with everything it had. But no matter how hard it tried, they held. Realizing that, it dropped to its stomach and began pulling itself along the wall like a caterpillar, and the fireball followed. "Please! Stop! Don't kill me! I didn't do anything to you! You came down here yourself!"
"Do you even hear yourself? Or are you trying to appeal to my conscience?" Severus raised an eyebrow and followed the crawling creature at an unhurried pace.
"I-I-I'LL TELL YOU WHERE THE CORE OF THIS PLACE IS!" It screamed at the top of its voice when that damned fireball was barely two centimeters from its feet, and the unbearable, searing heat was like walking barefoot across live coals, a pain the creature simply could not endure.
"Hm?" The flame stopped. The creature scrambled a full meter forward. "Now you have my attention. I'm listening."
"F-first swear that you'll let me live!" Once again, it looked directly into his eyes. A slightly crooked smile appeared on Severus's face.
He genuinely didn't know how to respond to a Vampire this naive and foolish, one that still hadn't worked out how he had read its thoughts.
"I almost feel sorry for killing something this helpless. Almost. But I still can't leave a parasite walking around." The flame resumed its slow drift toward the trembling creature, which had not anticipated this development at all. "Thank you for the valuable information. I won't make you suffer."
"I know a way out of here. Wh-what...?" But the undead creature didn't even have time to feel anything before crimson fire engulfed it. In an instant, not so much as ash remained.
Capturing the Vampire alive for a proper interrogation would not have been difficult, but it would have been pointless. The creature had come to this ravine before it was even twenty years old, and beyond that, it had held no rank at all: just an ordinary low-grade Vampire who had been extraordinarily lucky to stumble into this place while fleeing a pursuit. It knew very little, and after more than a thousand years, it had forgotten most of what it had once known.
Useless as a source of information and dangerous as a servant. Binding magical beasts was one thing. A creature with a human mind that despised him with every fiber of its being was another matter entirely. If the suppression seal failed even once by some miracle, it could simply flee, causing untold damage in the process, and that would be the least of the problems.
To prevent every potential complication at the source, Severus had chosen to handle it this way. The bloodsucker might have reached peak Magister rank within a few decades and fought on equal terms with lesser Devils on the basis of raw physicality alone, but the trouble it would have brought him would have far outweighed any benefit.
A few seconds later, Nagini reappeared around his neck. She had watched the entire confrontation from the front row.
"When I saw that it managed to cut you, I was frightened," she said plainly, looking at the scratch on his cheek that was already closing over, then pressed herself against his neck and stayed there, radiating a strange mixture of joy and relief, with a small thread of worry still running through it. "But still, that wound needs to be properly treated, and we should check whether his claws carried any venom."
"Don't worry. I already checked, and the scratch will close on its own." He stroked her head with a warm smile. "But I'm very glad my Lamia worries about me this much." A gust of wind rose around them. "Enough sentimentality, though. We move on. We need to finish everything here by evening and get back to the hotel."
"Are you sure? Maybe rest a little first? That wasn't exactly an easy fight."
"I'm fine. He barely made me break a sweat. Now let's go. No reason to linger." In the next moment he was off at tremendous speed, no longer paying much attention to the crystals on the walls. What lay ahead promised a considerably richer find.
The flight didn't take long, barely ten minutes, covering roughly thirty kilometers. When they stopped, they were near the very end of the ravine, about three kilometers from its terminus. The spot looked almost identical to the rest of the chasm, except that the walls here had begun to narrow slowly inward.
Severus identified the location almost immediately: a particular section of the wall behind which magic was actively circulating. Even if the Vampire had "told" him nothing, he would have found it on his own. For any wizard unable to use magic in this place, it would have been impossible.
The bloodsucker had crawled through every meter of the ravine over the centuries, checking every stone, which was the only reason it had stumbled across this place at all.
Severus already knew what waited behind that wall. He approached without hesitation, touched one of the crystals in the stone face, and pressed it. It yielded easily, sinking down, and almost immediately the wall shuddered and began to lower, opening before him a small branch of the ravine. At the far end of it sat an enormous red crystal, and the floor and walls surrounding it were covered in the same substance all the way back to the entrance.
The sight was not something anyone could look at with indifference, and Severus was no exception. The dark silhouette suspended inside the largest crystal, limbless, horned, with a gaping hole in its chest, did not particularly surprise him. He had seen this method used many times in his own world: a way to prevent a wizard from dying and extend life indefinitely, a kind of pseudo-immortality, comparable in principle to a Horcrux. In one case, the soul and body were both frozen in time, though the soul still degraded regardless. In the other, only the soul was involved, severed into fragments.
What did genuinely surprise him was the sheer volume of magic contained in these crystals, roughly a hundred times more than in anything he had collected earlier. That alone made it immediately clear just how powerful the wizard sealed within must have been.
Severus had no concern about "waking" the figure. As long as the enchantment held, it was simply impossible. The crystal itself was extraordinarily hard. The young Vampire had been unable to leave so much as a scratch on it back when it first explored this place, and had simply walked away.
Severus also understood why the Vampire had thought of this as the ravine's "core." Nearly all of the magic and life force drained from the ravine fed into this place. Only a small fraction reached the bloodsucker, which, like most magical beasts, was acutely sensitive to such flows. Beyond that, the undead creature had also become a kind of warden and slave to this place, finishing off anyone who somehow survived the fall.
Why had he concluded that? Three reasons. First: the creature's own thoughts. It had never once considered leaving, despite more than a thousand years here and full knowledge of where the exit was. Anyone else in those circumstances would have lost their mind long ago. Second: the creature understood on some level that something was wrong with that thinking, yet it could never follow the thought to its conclusion, as though something blocked it. The first reason flowed directly from the second, and the coffin was the cause. During his examination of the sarcophagus, Severus had found, hidden beneath the ordinary rune-array responsible for channeling life force and magic, suppression and mind-weakening enchantments positioned directly beneath where the Vampire rested its head.
Third: the distribution of the magic and life force itself. If all of it had been flowing to the bloodsucker alone, then even given its relatively poor natural talent, nine hundred years of continuous absorption should have been more than sufficient to bring a Vampire to Archmage rank, despite how difficult it was for their kind to develop their core. Yet after nearly thirteen hundred years in this place, it had only reached the peak of Magister rank. The conclusion was not difficult to reach. The overwhelming majority of the energy was sustaining the figure in the crystal, and it was quite possible the person was still alive.
But Severus had no intention of waking it. Only a fool would, and he was in no hurry to die. He still intended to live for quite a long time. Perhaps in the future, once he had developed his core to Archmage rank, he might reconsider. For now, it would be simply suicide.
So he simply turned and walked toward the exit.
"Severus, that crystal is enormous. It must hold a tremendous amount of magic. Why aren't you taking it?" Nagini asked, puzzled. The illusion concealing the silhouette inside kept her from seeing what he had seen.
"No need. I've already collected more than enough." He answered with a calm smile, then stepped out of the passage as the wall began to lower slowly behind him. In the last instant, inside the crystal, two red points of light flared to life and watched his retreating back. But he was already gone.
------------------------------------------
Chapters on Patreon progress: Currently at;
1. Harry Potter: Satan? Nah, Just My Family Crest = CHAPTER 379
2.Harry Potter: Beyond Good and Evil in the Wizarding World = CHAPTER 394
3.Harry Potter: Reborn as Draco Black = CHAPTER 198
support me on Patreon for instant access to the 120+ advance chapters: patreon.com/redofic