lomonaaeren

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Eighteen—For Our Lives

The press of magic against Tom’s face and skin felt like sticky spiderwebs. He fell back, coughing and choking. Then he braced himself and refused to retreat further. Theodosius’s magic would only entwine him immovably if he tried to run.

No, instead he wrapped his own power around his body, forming a shield layer that prevented the incoming magic from actually touching his skin.

There was a long pause. Tom watched the cracks spreading in the wards and wondered why Theodosius hadn’t expected even this much resistance from someone who could bring down his defenses.

Then the wards abruptly flickered and—vanished.

“Riddle!” Severus said sharply. He had been standing at the right angle to see something Tom hadn’t noticed, apparently. He pointed, and Tom sighted along his arm and saw the black-and-silver light of the wards vanishing like water down a straw in the direction of the house.

“He’s absorbed their magic,” Severus said, voice tight with fear.

“And left his house defenseless,” Tom said, ignoring his own concern over how much more powerful Theodosius might have become by absorbing those wards. “Come, Severus. We must move quickly.”

He could hear Severus swallow as they made their way forwards, but what else could they do? They had come this far. They must pursue the mission and defeat Theodosius, for the sake of Theodore and his sisters and the future of Fortius.

And because Tom dared not leave an enemy like Theodosius Nott alive, not now that they knew of each other.

I will kill him.

*

Severus kept one hand on the pouch that held his potions as they proceeded cautiously into the house. Part of him could not believe that he was still following instead of fleeing and doing his best to survive.

But he still had Theodore waiting at the school, to whom he would have to answer if this didn’t work. And Riddle might be overmatched by Theodosius—it had not escaped Severus’s notice how no answering blast of power had rolled out of Riddle when those invisible wings had unfolded from the direction of the manor—but he still had enough magic to kill someone he would view as a traitor before Severus could Apparate.

Severus closed one hand hard around the neck of a vial in the pouch as they came into an ebony-paneled entrance hall. The floor was glittering black marble, veined here and there with colors so dark that Severus wasn’t sure if they were more black or green or blue. Riddle paused and flicked his eyes around the empty room, and then waved his wand and cast a silent spell Severus had never seen. Transparent tendrils slunk away from him, aimed at the four corners of the room.

“What is that?” Severus asked, barely moving his lips.

The tendrils retracted into Riddle with a sharp snap. “It tells me if any passive magic is waiting, of the kind that might be left in a trap to trigger as someone passes it,” Riddle said, equally quietly. “There is none. In addition, no one and nothing sentient has been in this room for over a week.”

Severus wondered if that mattered, and what the limitations of the spell were. Perhaps Theodosius could stand just outside the room and use his wand to lay a detection spell or activate a trap.

But in the end, it didn’t matter. They made it across the marble-floored hall without incident, and into a sprawling corridor that appeared to twist and turn even before it went out of sight between the door-lined walls in front of them. Every door in sight was made of some pale wood, perhaps birch, while the walls remained that slick and gleaming ebony that had framed the entrance hall.

Riddle paused and tilted his head. Severus stared. He didn’t think it was his imagination that in the darkness, Riddle’s eyes were igniting like rubies.

“This way,” Riddle said, and set off towards what looked like a short corridor that dived between two of the doors on the right-hand side.

Severus followed, light on his feet, wand in his right hand and potion in his left. Nothing attacked them, though, or at least not visibly, all the way to the turn Riddle had identified. Severus also couldn’t sense any trace of the sticky magic that had brushed them like webs or the wings that had unfolded from further in the house. The only sound was that of their feet pressing against a deep, plush carpet.

They turned down the corridor Riddle had identified, and magic overpowered them in a silent rush.

Severus found himself on his knees, choking desperately as pure power constricted his windpipe. He forced down his panic with glassy walls of Occlumency, and forced himself to grope for one of the potions tucked near the bottom of the pouch.

When he grabbed it, he smashed it against the wall for lack of a finer solution and ignored the way that the glass shards cut into his hand. The silvery mist that poured out curled around his arm and his throat, and abruptly he could breathe again.

Severus turned and hastily splashed some of the silver potion onto Riddle, who was struggling silently with the same spell or effect and looked like he was losing. Severus tried not to think about that.

In any case, the potion did its work. Riddle drew a deep, rattling breath and opened his eyes. “What was that potion?” he breathed, glancing at Severus.

“It ensures complete liberty for someone to do whatever they want in a small space,” Severus said, floating the shattered pieces of the vial into the air and Vanishing them wordlessly. He didn’t want any evidence of the potion remaining that Theodosius could use to reverse-create it.

I am thinking as if I am going to die, Severus realized, and shook his head sharply.

“Ingenious.” Riddle didn’t seem to have Severus’s concern about remaining quiet, from the volume of his voice. Then again, they had proven conclusively that Theodosius knew they were coming. Riddle stood and looked around the corridor for a moment, then tilted his head again. His nostrils flared. “This way.”

Is he smelling the magic? Severus thought, but either way, he didn’t see how the answer could benefit him. He followed Riddle around another corner, and found that the man had halted at the top of a flight of stone stairs, all of them slightly dished in the middle as if worn by generations of footsteps.

Severus craned his neck. It didn’t seem as if the staircase should be so long that Severus couldn’t glimpse the bottom, but the steps descended into darkness.

“Ah,” Riddle said, and smiled a little. He started down the stairs.

Severus followed him, frowning. “Have you sensed something other than the magic?” he asked. The pulse of power through the house was so deep that even though he had trained his senses of smell and hearing to a fever pitch through years of intense brewing, he couldn’t get beyond the muffling effect of the magic.

“No,” Riddle said. “But I can tell that the bottom of the house has been extended with wizard space. It is interesting that Theodosius has taken refuge here, or perhaps that he prefers to wait for us here.”

Severus shuddered. So we are walking into the spider’s web.

But there was nothing he could do about that, for the reasons he had already decided. So Severus continued to follow Riddle, and tried to ignore the way that the other man was almost certainly taking the stairs more slowly than he would have normally.

*

Tom could sense more than the use of wizard space at the bottom of the stairs, but he saw no reason to share that with Severus. The man had shown quick thinking when Theodosius had tried to choke them with his magic, but he was on the edge of panic. Tom could hear his rapid breathing and see, out of the corner of his eye, Severus’s hands shaking.

And he had reason. Theodosius had made the bottom of this house a refuge for a long time, Tom thought. He would not be surprised if it was where the man did his leeching rituals, although Theodore’s memory had been blurred enough that there was no way to be sure.

The silent thunder of power was everywhere around them. Theodosius was watching them, Tom knew, perhaps through a ward, perhaps simply through the threads of his magic that wound around them in intangible coils.

Tom touched one of the heavy crystals in his robe pockets and wished for a moment that he had thought to test the thing before he brought it into a battle situation. But he was not a Seer, and they would have to make do with what they had.

“What is that?”

Tom tilted his head back. He had been keeping his eyes on the stairs, anticipating the threat to strike from beneath, but Severus had been watching above. Tom could make out the lazily circling shape now, too, a dark purple, or so it seemed in the faint light from their wands that was all they had to see by. They had descended deeply enough that they might as well have been out under the open sky for the distance that separated them from the creature.

Tom studied the leathery wings and was about to voice his opinion that it was a bat. Then he saw the curled tail, held high over the back, and smiled grimly.

“Wyvern,” he said softly, in the seconds before another one peeled away from the wall and the pair dived at him and Severus.

Severus ducked, already reaching for a potion. Tom drew one of the crystals from his pocket. They would have to take the chance on his untested weapon. They didn’t dare allow the wyverns to close, where they would have to battle them and worry about falling off the stairs at the same time.

Tom chucked the crystal as hard and as high as he could, to the point where it seemed to hang like a star in the air between the two diving wyverns. He held his breath as nothing happened for long moments.

Nothing continued to happen as the creatures began their stoop towards Tom and Severus, wings beating steadily, scorpion tails poised for a strike.

And then the crystal spun and hatched into a cloud of snarling creatures on bat-wings of their own, sleek black cats that raked their claws down the sides of the wyverns and latched onto their throats.

Tom breathed out slowly. It had worked.

He watched his creatures wreak havoc on the wyverns, while the rest of him calculated the crystals in his pockets and the odds they were facing and presented him with an equation that was much clearer than most of the Arithmantic ones he had ever tried to work. They were facing almost-certain doom.

“What are those?” Severus asked in a hushed voice, and brought Tom’s attention back to the battle above them. Scales and bits of bat-leather were drifting down from the wyverns. One was fighting, but the other looked dead, only still aloft because of the furious pressure of the cats beneath it.

“Small nundus.”

Severus made a choking sound. Tom gave him a fleeting smile. Most of the time, he would have enjoyed seeing his genius admired, but they had more important things to consider right now.

“You must tell me how you did that,” Severus said, and then his voice stopped and his expression closed as if it had been a stone door. Tom assumed that he had remembered how they might die, but also that it was not a good idea to order a stronger wizard around.

Tom let it go, simply shrugging with one shoulder and turning to lead the way down the stairs towards the congealed pulsing he could feel there. “If we survive.”

Severus didn’t say a single word for the rest of the journey down.

*

The bottom of the steps gave out into what seemed to be a polished cavern of black stone, gleaming with jagged crystals embedded in the walls here and there. There was a faint but steady light ahead of them which Severus had finally begun to see about ten stairs from the bottom. There was no reason he should not have seen it earlier; they were close enough long before then, and the staircase did not bend. Which meant that Theodosius Nott had enough spare magic to waste hiding the light and revealing it as a cheap dramatic gesture now.

Severus’s mind had long since settled on the image of his body lying here, unclaimed, while Minerva tried in vain to find out what had happened to him. He comforted himself—as best as he could—with the image of Theodore holding the Portkey to Fortius, and the conviction that he could fight hard enough to force Theodosius to kill him instead of harvesting his magic.

He had no intention of discovering what it was like to be the victim of a harvesting.

The light led them through the cavern, past rising and falling swells of stone in the walls, until they arrived at a place where the floor was cut off as neatly as if a huge blade had sliced it. Severus stared at the man lounging on a throne-like chair beyond the small drop, smiling up at them. The light came from small, bare flames that floated in the air and circled his head like bees around a flower.

It had been years since Severus had last seen Theodosius Nott, and then, he hadn’t stood out to Severus in particular. He was just one of Lucius’s adoring courtiers, and one of the most fervent supporters of pureblood supremacy. He remained pale, as he had always been, and his dark hair and eyes were the same as far as Severus could tell.

But his skin was flushed, plump, straining with magic, as if he was a frog stuffed with flies. Or a spider, Severus thought, and decided that was the more apt comparison, given the webbing that had hit them when they were still outside the house.

And the power that he could feel spreading around them now, eager, waiting, trembling with something like love as it strained towards them.

“I should have known that your school made a convenient place for children to disappear to so you could harvest them in private,” Theodosius said casually to Riddle. “That is the only explanation for how a half-blood like you ended up so powerful.”

This time, when Severus glanced at Riddle, he was sure that he wasn’t mistaken about the red glow in his eyes. But he remained still, staring at Theodosius, gaze flickering to take in the flames around him and the edge of the stone drop and the throne. Looking at everything, Severus supposed, studying, looking for a weakness.

There would be none.

“Nothing to say?” Theodosius rose slowly to his feet. The magic coiled around him; Severus could sense it even though he couldn’t see it, the spirals of it spreading out through the air. “Well, you can go silent to your death. I would prefer to keep and leech you, but I think it would be too chancy.”

That was one thing that had always made this man dangerous, Severus thought grimly. He was more intelligent than Lucius, in everything from how he expressed himself to preferring to let someone else assume the public position of power.

Theodosius raised one hand. The magic formed around his fingers for a second, and became the illusion of reaching claws. Severus shuddered as the man turned and swept his hand at them. He conjured a shield, expecting invisible claws to sweep through him any second, despite the shield.

“Legilimens!”

Severus heard the spell, but didn’t understand it for a long moment, not until he heard Theodosius shriek, and opened his eyes to see Riddle leaning forwards, straining, holding Theodosius’s mind inside his, and involved in a battle that Severus understood instinctively wouldn’t end until one of them died.

Severus reached for one of his potions.

*

Wrestling Theodosius Nott was the most exhausting thing Tom had ever done.

The man’s mind bucked and squirmed beneath his, and Tom felt as if he were trying to ride a dragon. He clung, however, because there was nothing else he could do. And he drove straight down, raking with his thought as with claws, making none of his usual efforts to leave his victim’s mind intact.

There must be weaknesses somewhere, even in as formidable a defense as Theodosius had mounted. There must be some way to drag him down to death and still leave Tom and Severus alive.

There had to be a way to escape. Tom did not intend for his revolution or Fortius or anything else to suffer because he had underestimated Theodosius.

For long moments, he carved a black ravine into Theodosius’s mind, and Theodosius snarled and fought, and there was nothing except crushing pressure and pain and his attempts to inflict it back on its originator. Then Tom seemed to reach some kind of bottom, and he caught a glimpse of Theodosius’s magic, at least as the man conceptualized it to himself.

Coursing black streams of silent water fed him from all directions. Some of them came from inside his own house, where Tom presumed the bastard had his daughters hidden. One stretched away into the distance, pointing to what was probably Hogwarts and Theodore. Two others had gone entirely still, dry riverbeds, which Tom thought meant the man had indeed drained his sisters to death at some point.

Theodosius’s mind screamed. Only because Tom was practiced at enduring pain and was a skilled Legilimens—and because Theodosius must not have devoted so much study to the Mind Arts—had he come this far.

Tom grasped for another answer, as to why the man had leeched instead of harvested, and thoughts whirled around him.

Safety—not noticing—not looking—not needing to explain the death—using—making it part of myself—

The last thought was blazing bright but buried beneath crushing darkness a second later, which Tom knew meant it was important, perhaps the weakness he had been looking for. He scrambled after it, while Theodosius swung and bore down on him like a dragon finally pouncing on prey that had been moving too fast for it.

The weight on him was terrible. Tom felt his memories breaking like bones underneath it, parting and whirling away, flakes of time and knowledge lost on the wind.

But he would win, he would live, and he grabbed and grasped after the answer he was seeking until it finally slammed into him.

Harvesting gave a wizard or witch a greater boost of power, but it required a ritual, some risk because someone might notice the victim missing or they might escape or someone might come to avenge them, and accepting the chance, small though it was, that the alien magic one was absorbing could clash with and even overpower the harvester’s native magic. Theodosius, always cautious, preferred to do the leeching, which left the victim alive and allowed him to use a variant ritual that drew on the magic of the solstice or equinox and ensured the power passed smoothly into him.

Leeching, however, was more risky than harvesting without that ritual. The leeched magic would remain connected to the mage it had come from because they were still alive and would require days of cautious use and wary meditation to settle into place in its new host.

Tom remembered the magic that Theodosius had siphoned from the wards, pulled in all at once. Of course, that didn’t matter because it was his own magic and didn’t require Theodosius to take it from another person or use a ritual to make it smoother.

Except…

Except that Tom had cracked the wards right before Theodosius absorbed them, and Tom’s magic had ridden with that absorbed power like the seed of a cancer.

Tom grinned like a nundu, and reached out, and found the trailing threads of the cracks in the wards that he had created, hidden beneath the immense weight of all of Theodosius’s other magic—the way Tom was—and pulled.

Theodosius screamed.

Tom had never heard a sound that he loved more. He pulled again, and grasped his magic, and called it back to him, forcing it back behind the shield that he had used for so many years to keep the purebloods from realizing how powerful he was.

The magic rushed to him, out from under the immense weight of Theodosius’s power, and Tom exploded out of his opponent’s mind and into the physical world again, still calling to his magic, still draining, still forcing it down to wrap around him—

There came the sound of a tortured squeal.

Tom turned and flung himself to the floor a moment before the noise of the explosion shook the room.

*

Severus had ensured that he had the potion whose fumes would stop its brewer’s heart clutched in one hand and was prepared to cast the vial to the floor the moment it seemed as though Theodosius’s attention was turning to him. When the blast came, he started and nearly dropped the vial without meaning to.

It was a muffled thump, but a shower of flesh and blood and broken bones. Severus stared as he watched all of them sprawl across the floor as if shredded from the body by a whole flock of Riddle’s flying nundus.

Riddle had rolled to the floor, and only had a little blood splattered on his boots, along with something that might have been a tooth caught in his hair. He lay there, breathing harshly, for some moments. Severus walked over and knelt next to him, unsure if he should offer help to rise or if Riddle would reject that indignantly as a sign of weakness.

“What happened?” Severus finally whispered, when he believed he could not go another minute without the answer to that question.

“He took in my magic when he siphoned the power of the wards,” Riddle said quietly. His voice was normal, at least, without the exhausted gasping that Severus had worried he might hear. He felt something inside him relax now that Riddle was back to sounding invincible. “Normally, that’s something he was careful not to do. You can leech magic from someone and leave them alive, but only with a ritual. If you don’t use that ritual…”

“It reacts rather like transfused blood of the wrong kind?”

“Ha. In a sense, yes.” Riddle rolled a bit to the side and brushed the tooth out of his hair. “But in this case, I called my magic back to me and under the shield I constructed to hide from purebloods. It tore itself free from him and shredded his magic on the way. And you saw how he looked when we came in here.”

Severus shuddered to remember. “As if his skin was straining.”

“Yes. Theodosius knew what he was doing when he took all the precautions around the leching rituals. He had so much magic by then that a new absorption from his children could have proven fatal to him without those precautions. This time, of course, he thought he was merely absorbing his own power.”

Severus shook his head in admiration. “And you saw that while you were using Legilimency on him?”

“I went specifically looking for a weakness, and forced him to divulge some of his thoughts to me. I did not know until I tried to call on some of my magic exactly what would defeat him.” Riddle sat up at last, and then turned his head and frowned down at his left arm.

Severus coughed. “I am afraid it is broken.” It took an effort not to add “my lord” at the end of the sentence, but he needed Riddle to stay focused on what they had come here for instead of fighting a battle over terminology.

“The physical expression of Theodosius’s magic pressing down on me,” Riddle murmured, and did not look other than annoyed. “Well.” He turned and nodded to Severus. “If you would conjure a sling for it?”

“I have a Painkilling Draught here as well,” Severus said, as he spun his wand to cast the requested spell.

“It would make my head fuzzy.”

Severus bowed his head at the trust the admission implied. “Will you permit me to cast a Numbing Charm on your arm, then?”

He looked up to find those red eyes examining him, and then the red glow dimmed and Riddle nodded. “Yes. You may.”

Riddle still watched closely as Severus cast the Numbing Charm, and hissed a little as the spike of cold went through his arm. But he relaxed after that and turned back to the stairs. “I am afraid we will have to walk up them again. I am too weary at the moment to Apparate, even if the wards preventing it are all gone.”

“I am not,” Severus said quietly, and offered his arm.

Riddle stared at him again. Severus waited. He knew that Riddle perhaps thought that his weakened state would bring forth an automatic assault, verbal if not physical, but he had come this far into the house with Severus behind him. They both deserved the confirmation that they were on the same side.

Then Riddle nodded, and grasped Severus’s arm, and allowed Severus to Apparate him back to the corridor above.

*

They found Sophia and Constance Nott huddled together in what looked like a bedroom outfitted as a dungeon cell on the first floor.

Tom stared in silence at the bare stone walls, the floor that was covered with a single solitary rug, the large bed that had threadbare sheets, and the trays stacked in the corner with the remains of old meals. Theodosius could easily have made it more comfortable for his children.

He had chosen not to.

It reminded Tom of Wool’s in a way that stole his breath.

Sophia shrank back when she saw them, and Tom wondered what she had thought of the wards disintegrating and the sound of her father dying—assuming that she would have been able to hear it up here, which wasn’t a guarantee. Tom halted, and stopped Severus with a hand on his arm, and nodded to her and to her younger sister, peering around her. Both of them had their brother’s brown hair, although Constance’s eyes were a piercing blue that might have come from her mother.

“Your father is dead,” Tom murmured. “Your brother told us of your existence and asked us to rescue you. I run a school called Fortius for students who have magic. Would you like to come with us?”

He felt Severus shift behind him, but ignored it. Presumably Severus had his own ideas about what was good for the girls to hear, but Tom was accustomed to dealing with children. And he judged that it would bring them some relief to hear that Theodosius was gone.

Sophia’s eyes closed, and she trembled for a long moment. Then she nodded. Constance gave a sound that might have been a sob, but Sophia gathered her close, and any other noise she might have made was muffled against her sister’s robes.

Tom relaxed with a long sigh. He had come closer to dying than he liked, and his arm and his magic would both take at least a few days to mend, but he had survived. And so had Severus.

And so had these children.

And so would Fortius.