lomonaaeren

Chapter Eleven.

Title: Ceremonies of Strife (12/50)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: R
Warnings: Violence, Dark magic, angst, profanity, sex (slash and het), character deaths (not the main characters).
Summary: Sequel to Soldier’s Welcome. As Harry and Draco head in to their second year of Auror training, they are resolved to try and balance the relationship between them with their personal difficulties. That might be a bit harder than they think when the difficulties include necromancy, Azkaban escapees, unicorn ghosts, the risen dead, a secret order of assassins…and the second war, guided by Nihil.
Author’s Notes: This is the second part of what I’m calling the Running to Paradise Trilogy, focused on Harry and Draco’s Auror training. A reader on AFF called SP777 suggested the idea for this series to me. I’d advise you to read Soldier’s Welcome first before you try to read this one, as this story doesn’t spend a lot of time recapitulating the first one.

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twelve—The Lowering Gloom

Draco leaned forwards. Pushkin, who had been assigned to investigate the beasts Nemo had left behind on the chance that he could learn something from them, had said he might sit in on the dissection. Harry had shuddered when Draco asked him if he wanted to come and said that he would prefer to spend extra time studying for Concealment.

Draco didn’t mind. He was used to cutting things up for potions, after all, and he hardly imagined that the beasts, or slices of their flesh, could smell more disgusting than some of the ingredients he’d dealt with.

So far, Pushkin had examined two skeletons, one of the small bat-like creatures that had circled over Draco’s head in the corridor—which had dissolved into a foul-smelling black goo the moment Pushkin had prodded it—and a drop from the puddle of meltwater that was all that was left of the ice-breathing dragon. If any of it had told him anything, he was an expert at keeping it to himself. Instead, he simply nodded after each investigation concluded and then moved onto the next one with admirable calm.

Of course, Draco would have found it more admirable if he’d chosen to share the information.

Now he was beginning on one of the tentacles that had ensnared Harry. The beast had fallen motionless the moment Nemo was captured and had never moved again that Draco knew of, even when its master was murdered. To appearances, the beast was nothing but tentacles hooked to a smooth, round body. It was Pushkin’s theory that they might move if he inflicted enough pain on them.

Draco applauded the theory, and had carefully estimated the distance between himself and the door of the small Potions lab as his part of the practice.

Pushkin grunted softly and bore down on the tentacle—its color like a mixture of bile, vomit, and urine—with a sharp knife. Draco tensed. Nothing happened. The knife cut in smoothly, and a slow trickle of thick red blood worked its way out.

Pushkin paused. “Fascinating,” he said.

“Sir?” Draco asked, alert as always for something that would let him understand the creature better than Pushkin wanted him to. Knowledge was sometimes a paltry kind of power compared to spells, but he would take what he could get when he could get it.

“This is not exactly blood,” Pushkin said. “Nemo has twisted most of the ordinary processes of life as we understand them. I had thought he was crossbreeding creatures, but no magical creature could have blood like this. It would kill its parent when it formed in the womb, and then die itself.”

“Is it not really a creature?” Draco asked, voicing something he’d wondered about. “It doesn’t have a head or a mouth. Perhaps it’s some sort of organic machine?”

He wondered, based on the look that Pushkin gave him, if he was about to be scolded for so Mugglish a notion, but Pushkin simply shook his head and said, “It is alive. That is all I need to know that it is a creature. But I will keep your suggestion in mind.” He turned back and cut into the thing again.

Draco shifted uneasily, and wondered if Nemo had left any magical traps behind to ensnare those who might look too closely into his experimental breeding. Even if Pushkin was right and it wasn’t quite experimental breeding, that didn’t preclude the traps.

Pushkin finally sliced a section of the tentacle free, smeared on its end with that blood that flowed too slowly, and laid it on a table. Other than the creature, Draco, and Pushkin himself, the table was the only large object in the room. Pushkin had a trunk of small knives, pipes, mirrors, and other things that crouched at his feet like an obedient dog.

Draco made himself watch closely, and ignore the smell, as Pushkin cast a quiet spell on the tentacle. Whatever it was, Draco didn’t recognize it. It made a sharp yellowish-green light beam from the severed end of the tentacle.

“Yes,” Pushkin said. “I thought so.”

“What did you think?” Draco asked patiently, trying not to scream. He had once thought that it was hard getting information out of Dearborn or Portillo Lopez. Compared to Pushkin, they were models of clarity.

“This is a spell used to tell the lineage of crossbred magical creatures,” Pushkin said, as if such a thing were as ordinary as a spell to clean the dishes. “It is especially useful in cases when the breeding has carried the animal so far from its parents that its similarities to them are superficial. But it did not work this time. As far as the spell is concerned, this beast came from nothing that exists.”

Draco swallowed. Pushkin had put a tiny emphasis on the word nothing that made Draco remember his claim at the Fellowship meeting: that Nihil, Nemo, and Nusquam wanted nothing more than to reduce the world to dust floating in an abyss.

“But you can’t create something from nothing,” he said.

Pushkin gave him a quick glance like a whip. “I am aware of that, Trainee Malfoy,” he said. “But that is what Nemo appears to have done.”

“Couldn’t he have just found something sufficiently unusual that the spell doesn’t record it?” Draco asked hopefully. The thought of the abyss that they wanted, that this thing might have emerged from, made his forehead sting as if the cold-dragon had breathed on him again.

“This spell is meant to give pointers to the kind of magical creature,” Pushkin said, “such as what it might eat or what region of the world it emerged from. That way, even if it is not a familiar breed, the researcher had some solid information to begin from. But according to this spell, its parents ate nothing, they came from nowhere, and no one bred them.”

Draco glared at Pushkin’s back. He couldn’t believe that the English echo of the names of the Terrible Trio wasn’t deliberate. “Do you think it’s related to the magic that allows them to travel beyond death?” he asked.

Pushkin gave a sudden clucking noise, and snatched up one of his mirrors to examine the bloody end of the tentacle. Draco held his breath, proud that he had apparently given Pushkin a clue, and waiting to be told what the clue was.

“Interesting,” Pushkin said at last.

“What?” Draco asked, his heart beating so hard that it felt as if he were swaying on his feet.

“I had a thought,” Pushkin said, “but it is not true, and the investigation reveals no way that it could be true.” He paused, then added, “Rather like most of my thoughts on Nemo’s murder, which may never be solved.”

Draco sat down and sighed.

*

Harry gave a quick glance at the circle in the center of the floor, checking to make sure that it perfectly matched the circle sketched in the book. Then he walked around it to be sure, and especially studied the curlicues. The circle was studded with them, and with smaller circles, and with crosses and stars. They all had to be right, and they had been horribly hard to draw.

He focused his mind tightly and exclusively on the difficulty for a minute, so he would be thinking about that and not about—other things.

Then he went back, picked up the necromancy book, and began to read again. He had already memorized the instructions because he’d read them so many times, of course. But he needed to read them one more time to convince himself to go through with this.

Necromancy corresponds to sacrifice, because sacrifice is the strongest magical expression of desires. Someone who yields his life, or his limbs, or the heart of his beloved, is a wizard whose will is strong enough to control the living dead.

Harry swallowed and read on. The first paragraph was the most disturbing, he thought.

So he’d thought more than once, and then always changed that evaluation when he read the next one.

This ritual calls for one of the smaller sacrifices, one that can be healed afterwards. This is the Calling. The spirits that one wishes to summon back should be made to float near the surface of the Sea, so that they may hear future Calls more clearly and manifest themselves in the bodies that the necromancer has chosen for them.

The book continually called the place where the dead were the Sea. Harry wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a mere poetic image or not. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to know.

But he knew what he had to do.

He laid the book down. He hesitated, then shut it and placed it aside, out of the way. He had thought to keep it open so he could look at it for instructions during the ritual, but he had read the directions too many times, trying to make them sound nicer or less dark in his head. It wouldn’t do. He just had to go ahead and perform the bloody ritual, and hope for the best, the way he’d been doing for the past week, since he resumed his interrupted study.

He stepped up to the edge of the circle, stopped with his boots right next to the line, and then backed away from it for a count of three heartbeats. The book had said not to worry about a more precise amount of time or space; tuning the ritual to his own heartbeats was one of the things that would make it his instead of something copied from a dozen other practitioners.

Already Harry thought he could feel a subtle difference in the air. There was a white spark dancing around the edges of the circle, or there was when he didn’t turn his head to look for it. There was a dark shimmer near the floor even before he cast the spells that the ritual required at head and foot of the circle, raising fire out of the solid stone.

The fires were blue for the most part, but the hottest flame near their heart alternated between blue and black. Harry wondered what Hermione would say about that, and then firmly put the notion aside. He hadn’t come this far to turn back now.

Portillo Lopez’s warning sounded in his head then, about how he would go so far that finally there would be no turning back, but he forgot that one as impatiently. He was here, that was the point. He had to move forwards and go on acting.

He stood in place for some time; the book had said that he could take as long to relax as he needed to after the fires were lit. Then he moved his head to the side and whispered the incantation the book had given. Harry didn’t know what the language was, except that it wasn’t Latin. The words felt hard and heavy in his mouth, sharp, like they might cut his tongue.

When his left hand grew heavier, Harry knew it had worked. He still let a count of ten heartbeats, and then ten more, pass before he looked down to see.

He held a knife, as heavy and ugly as the words, with a dull grey hilt and a greyer blade. The blade looked as sharp as a cleaver. Harry didn’t turn it over, because you weren’t supposed to. He lifted it, his gaze fixed on the circle.

Another incantation, three words in the same language, or at least it sounded like, all clack and hiss, the way Harry thought Parseltongue would probably sound to someone who didn’t speak it. Then he brought the knife down.

He cried out despite himself as he chopped off the tip of the smallest finger on his right hand, but he had chosen Catherine Arrowshot’s old room—which had never received another occupant—for that reason. It was far away from the rest of the barracks. No one was going to hear him here.

The blood flew in a perfect arch, drawn towards the circle by a magic Harry wouldn’t pretend to understand. The fire that was further away from him ate it. The nearer fire ate the tip of his finger.

Harry sank to his knees, his teeth clenched. The pain was debilitating, and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to go on with the ritual until he did something to deal with it, although he’d meant to only heal the wound so he wouldn’t lose too much blood. But the book hadn’t said there was any problem with delaying a portion of the ritual after he’d made the sacrifice, so that was what he’d do.

He touched his wand to his bleeding finger and whispered a Numbing Charm, then a minor Healing Charm that would make the wound close. That didn’t do anything about the blood on his palm, of course, or the memory of the pain, which was almost worse than the real thing. But Harry wiped his hand off on the floor and focused his attention on the circle, then whispered the next word. This one wasn’t the strange language of the other incantations, or Latin either. It was a single word in English. “Come.”

The silence in the room grew heavy. Another spark appeared to dart around the circle, this time creating lines of light between the fires and a momentary shimmer that made Harry think a gate of some kind was opening in the circle. He flinched and hoped it wasn’t. He didn’t have the protections up that the book said he would need against an angry spirit who hadn’t been summoned back to take a body.

The sensation and the sight vanished, and Harry saw the image of a grey river flowing through the circle instead. It traveled through a blasted black landscape, set here and there with brilliant white flowers. Harry felt a tiny shiver of longing work its way up his spine. It was strange, with how ugly that country looked, but it conveyed a sensation of rest and peace to him.

A figure walked up to the other side of the stream, and stooped down to gather some of the flowing water in two almost shapeless hands. They might have been paws, for all Harry cared. His gaze was fixed on the figure’s face.

Tangled brown hair streaked with grey, and tiredness in the face. He looked worse than Harry would have liked him to look after death, but there he was. Remus Lupin.

“Your life was the most unfair,” Harry whispered into the heavy magic he could feel gathering in the air, making the silence as thick as sugar. “You suffered because Greyback decided to bite you, and then you died too early and you never got to know your son, not really. I’m going to bring you back first.”

The darkness behind Remus stirred and surged, as if it had heard that promise. Then another figure came forwards to stand at his side.

Harry shut his eyes. It was Sirius, the way he had looked when he fell through the veil, the way Harry had seen him when he summoned his spirit in Grimmauld Place. He looked care-worn, defiant, strange, sad.

“Or maybe your life was the hardest,” Harry muttered. “In prison for a crime you didn’t do, and then only free for two years before you died, most of which you had to spend in a place you hated. It isn’t right.”

And that was the real reason he was doing this, he thought, the reason Portillo Lopez would never understand. Yes, he wanted to bring the dead back because he wanted to see them again, but really, the injustice was the worst thing. Everyone mourned Dumbledore, and some people had even started saying that Snape should have had a better life, but no one mentioned Sirius or Remus.

Or the other figure who came to stand next to Remus now, her hair colored grey and purple, her eyes wide with yearning.

“Tonks,” Harry whispered. “I promise, I’m going to bring you back, too. Teddy needs his mum.”

The darkness gave one final sigh. Not even death could dim the color of Fred’s hair. And Harry thought the yearning in his eyes was probably worse than the yearning in the eyes of all the rest, because he’d died younger.

“Your family still talks about you,” Harry told him. “It’s awful. But they’re starting to act and think like getting over your death is for the best.” He smiled painfully. “Except George. He still misses you more than he loves life. That will help him, to see you again.”

They stood there, looking at him, and the emptiness behind them finally began to take form in Harry’s eyes. It did look like a sea, with endless black waves rolling in to the blank shore across which the river crawled. That was what the book meant, and Harry thought more spirits would have come out of it if he had Called.

But these were enough for right now, and he sat there looking at them until the fires burned down and the vision vanished. Then he set about using the healing spells the book had suggested for correcting the sacrifice and making it look as if he had never lost part of a finger.

The yearning in their eyes wasn’t something the book had talked about, and certainly not something Portillo Lopez had thought was important.

They want to come back so badly. If necromancers are always taking them unwilling from death, why is that?

*

“Better,” Weston said grudgingly, twitching one shoulder as though it hurt her arm to give this praise to Draco. “But you need improvement.”

Draco nodded shortly. He was doing his best to ignore the comments that Weston and Lowell gave him now, and simply work at the stupid exercise they had set up for him and Harry, the line of dummies they were supposed to destroy. He had avoided sending most of his spells in Harry’s direction this time, but they wouldn’t be satisfied until it was perfect, he suspected.

And that’s what he wanted. To be perfect. To be the best. Since he and Harry had started the Partnership Trust class, sometimes he thought he could feel the compatible magic stirring between them like a beast slowly waking up from a nap.

But it wasn’t strong enough yet to suit Draco’s needs.

He sighed and started to cast a spell that would dry the sweat on his forehead, since Lowell and Weston regularly let them out of their private training after three trials, but Lowell stepped towards him and signaled with one hand that he should wait. Draco raised his eyebrows and did so.

“There is something about your performance in the last few sessions that bothers me,” Lowell said, shifting his eyes to Harry. “When was the last time that you spoke in any great detail about your compatible magic?”

Draco looked blankly at Harry, to find blank eyes looking back at him. He couldn’t remember it. They had trained with compatible magic over the Christmas holidays when Harry was staying with Draco, but since then…

“I don’t know, sir,” Harry said, and Draco shrugged and nodded right behind him.

“You have a barrier,” Lowell said, in the same grim tone that Draco thought Portillo Lopez would use to announce a mortal wound. But Harry just shook his head, and Draco didn’t know what Lowell was talking about any more than he did.

“What does that mean?” Draco asked. “A barrier preventing or blocking what, and where does it come from?”

“A barrier across the flow of compatible magic between you.” Lowell was staring at the air between them, eyes squinted, as though he could actually see both the magic and the barrier. “It’s preventing you from drawing as effectively on your awareness of each other as you should. You should be further advanced in your training by now, but you’re still stumbling through beginner’s steps. That would be acceptable only if you had recently learned about your compatible magic, not worked together for over a year.”

Draco clenched his hands. He could have had more power, and something was keeping him from it? He wanted to destroy it, right now. “What is the barrier formed from?” he asked, and was glad to hear that his voice came out cold and strong. “Alien magic?”

“No,” Lowell said. He reached out a hand, and Weston was simply there, moving gracefully forwards to stand under his touch. Draco felt a spasm of envy, but tried not to feel it, and waited as they closed their eyes.

Lowell opened his almost at once, his glare furious, but it was Weston who spoke. “The barrier is formed of a lack of trust,” she murmured. “You have not spoken to each other about your compatible magic in too long. You are both hiding important secrets—at least, secrets that are important to you and to your feelings. You must exchange thoughts and information, ideas. The magic follows the flow of your thoughts, the flow of communication. No wonder you are not yet advancing.”

Draco glanced at Harry, only to find him looking back with a bleak expression. Come to think of it, Draco thought, they hadn’t spoken to each other about important things in a really long time. They always seemed to be busy with homework or something else equally important, like Draco’s expeditions to watch Pushkin dissect Nemo’s creatures. Harry spent time with his friends or went off and studied to make sure that he could keep up in the classes. A few times they’d wanked each other off, but it was a means of releasing tension more than anything else. The last time they’d done it, Draco had been grateful when Harry rolled over and started snoring.

“Did you stop for a specific reason?” Lowell was looking back and forth between them.

“Or for a reason that seemed good at the time, but really is not?” Weston grimaced in a way that told Draco that she was familiar with the sensation.

“Not—no,” Harry said. “We just stopped talking. It just happened.” He extended one hand towards Draco, and Draco clasped it. Harry winced. Draco tried to relax the grip of his fingers. He was frustrated with the situation, not with Harry, and he wanted to show that.

“Then go away and get reacquainted,” Weston said bluntly. “It’s the only way to make sure that you function together, both as people who share compatible magic and as ordinary partners. I wish we’d known this before,” she added in a distracted tone, as she turned away. “It would have saved us some time, and we would have used exercises that you responded to instead of failed at.”

Draco ground his teeth, and then turned away with Harry. He wanted to make sure they weren’t interrupted while they had their talk, and he wanted to start it as soon as possible. Staying behind to argue with their instructors would be counterproductive.

“Are you all right?” Harry asked quietly as they made their way back through the corridors. “You look angry.”

“I am,” Draco said. He wanted to hold the words back, but he’d been doing that too much already, and that had resulted in the barrier. He tried to look at Harry, tried to answer as honestly as he could, and it still hurt, it was still hard and awkward.

Harry gave him a strained smile. “Then why don’t we go in,” he suggested as he opened the door of their rooms, “and you can tell me all about it.”