Blood-Soaked Succession Chapter 33 (Patreon)

Chapter 33:

XXX

Hermione found James, Lily, Peter and the few others who still possessed bodies inside the main chamber of Azkaban.

The prison opened before her like the hollow interior of a vast triangular tower. Rows of cells climbed along all three walls with narrow staircases and iron walkways connecting one level to the next. Or they had before the last time they invaded this place. Several entire sections had collapsed during the previous battle while one corner simply ceased to exist where the chronomancy spell from earlier had cut through the island. Open sky showed through the enormous wound, along with the dark ocean hundreds of feet below.

The remaining battle had concentrated around the center of the chamber.

James fired a curse as Hermione entered. It struck a translucent barrier surrounding three grey-robed figures and stopped dead. The red light hung motionless against the surface for a fraction of a second before it flat out sublimated. There was a bright flash and magic mist wafted up, away from the barrier. Along with half a dozen other spells.

Peter intoned the words for the killing curse and green light crossed the chamber and struck exactly the same barrier. Hermione expected that one to make a difference. Everything she'd ever learned about the Unforgivables insisted magical shields couldn't stop them.

The Killing Curse flattened against the translucent surface. Its green became almost white before the entire spell popped into glowing vapour and drifted harmlessly away.

Hermione slowed as she approached.

Three Unspeakables stood inside the bubble. Two remained several paces behind the third, whose face was covered with an elaborate clockwork mask. It was of a similar make to the plain white ones Hermione and Ron wore, except with some artistic design thrown in.

The Head of Time, presumably.

Another volley struck the barrier from three directions. Red, purple and green flashes collected across its surface before each one faded into brightly coloured mist.

None of the Unspeakables bothered defending themselves, though all had their wands raised.

Hermione stopped beside Lily and tapped her on the shoulder.

"Any thoughts?"

Lily glanced towards her without lowering her wand.

"Probably some kind of time magic."

Hermione stared at her.

After several months of knowing Lily Potter, she'd learned the woman well enough to recognize that she wasn't being a smartass.

That really was all she had.

"Brilliant."

"You're welcome."

The three figures inside the barrier moved.

Hermione raised her wand, but none pointed theirs towards the attackers. Instead they began tracing some complicated pattern through the air together. Their movements remained synchronized as three wand tips crossed, separated and circled one another before pointing towards the edge of their protection.

The bubble distorted. One section pinched inward around their wands until the translucent surface narrowed into a single seem.

Hermione's eyes widened.

"Move!" Moody yelled.

The seem shot outward. For less than a second, the bubble became a wall that crossed the chamber like a cannonball.

Stone vanished wherever it passed. Cells, stairs, iron railings and several hundred tonnes of ancient masonry simply ceased to exist as the wall continued through the outer edge of the prison and disappeared towards the ocean.

Hermione hit the floor.

The island shook beneath her.

A deafening crack rolled through Azkaban as another enormous trench opened from the prison's centre all the way to the coastline. Seawater began pouring into the fresh wound while chunks of unsupported cliff broke loose and disappeared into the darkness below. And the prison itself? A newly carved section of it fell away into the ocean with a crash.

Hermione slowly pushed herself onto her elbows and stared through what had once been several dozen prison cells.

A second enormous slice had been taken out of Azkaban.

Behind her, the three Unspeakables were already beginning another sequence of wand movements.

-

The "gentlemen" stepped forward before Hermione and Lily could do much more than stare at the new canyon carved through Azkaban.

James, Peter, Moody and the others formed a loose wall between them and the three Unspeakables, resuming the barrage. Curses flashed and exploded into brilliant clouds against the translucent barrier while another section of the prison collapsed somewhere behind them.

"You two, no fight!" James shouted without looking back. "Plan! Now!"

Hermione grabbed Lily by the shoulder and pulled her close until their heads were almost touching. Even then they had to yell over the spells, explosions and groaning stone surrounding them.

"We know the wall projectile de-ages things and dissipates them that way," Hermione said. "But is that what the shield is doing?"

"No!" Lily watched another curse flare brilliantly against the bubble before dissolving into mist. "Looks like aging to me! If it were de-aging the spells, they should revert towards whatever state they had before being cast. They'd grow progressively weaker and transparent until they disappeared."

Hermione nodded. That tracked with what she'd seen outside.

"But either way, the magical residue should still get through!" Lily added.

That was a very good point.

Hermione risked another look around James's shoulder. The remains of three spells drifted across the bubble as glowing mist, but none passed through. The residue accumulated against its surface before being pushed harmlessly back into the chamber.

A temporal distortion alone couldn't account for that.

Even ignoring the residue, the amount of acceleration required to make a spell dissipate against nothing but air would be absurd. Thousands of times normal time at minimum, perhaps considerably more. Physical matter would require something vastly beyond even that.

Two of the Unspeakables had also maintained almost identical wand positions since the battle began.

"What if there are two barriers?" Hermione yelled. "The temporal field and a normal Protego layered together. Or some other reflective charm."

Lily looked again.

"That would do it! What's the big honcho doing, then?"

Hermione focused on the third man.

Unlike his underlings, the Head of Time wasn't maintaining the bubble continuously. Most of the time he simply stood behind them, but every so often his wand snapped towards something approaching the barrier.

James conjured a lance of ice and hurled it across the chamber. The Head moved and a second shield flashed into existence immediately before the ice reached the temporal field.

Hermione made a mental note to ask James where he'd learned that spell.

Peter tried something stranger. A chunk of fallen masonry twisted beneath his wand and became a bleating goat, which barely had time to understand its unfortunate circumstances before Peter commanded it to ram into the barrier.

Again, the Head raised his wand. Again, another shield but the goat disappeared against the temporal barrier, returning to stone and that stone becoming mush. Mush that too was repelled from the shield.

Hermione frowned.

Their layered defense already stopped every magical attack she could conceive of, yet something about physical objects required the Head himself to intervene. What did a temporal distortion and Protego together fail to stop?

A loose stone lay beside Hermione's foot.

She pointed her wand at it and the rock shot across the chamber. It struck the bubble and for a fraction of a second the stone seemed to soften. Its edges collapsed inward before the entire thing flashed into a molten spray and disappeared. She could see the wave of heat rise from the impact.

Her eyes widened.

Of course!

She turned towards the others.

"Banish everything at them!" Hermione screamed. "We'll cook them!"

None of them bothered to ask why, they simply trusted in her judgement.

Half the ruined chamber turned into ammunition. Broken stones ripped themselves from the floor and flew towards the bubble. Sections of iron railing followed. Bedframes, doors, shattered furniture and loose pieces of masonry crossed the room in an increasingly ridiculous barrage.

Every impact ended the same way. Matter struck the temporal field and violently reverted. Solids became molten sprays before breaking down farther, each transformation dumping tremendous amounts of heat into the air around the barrier. The chamber began warming immediately. And if this larger space was warming up that much, what must the air in that smaller enclosed space be like?

She could also taste the telltale metallic scent of ionizing radiation. It must have been severe for her to feeli it.

Radiation wasn't going to accomplish much. Wizards had developed charms against sunlight centuries ago, and sufficiently powerful variants could deal with far nastier forms of radiation. She cast one of those on herself now, and repeated the process for all of her allies with living bodies.

Heat was another matter.

The Head of Time suddenly had a job.

His wand moved continuously as cooling and shielding charms layered themselves around the three men. Steam began gathering inside the bubble while the two underlings struggled to maintain the temporal field beneath the constant impacts.

"Keep going!" Moody ordered.

A mattress sailed past her. Then an entire toilet. Someone ripped an iron staircase loose from the wall and sent that after it.

Within a minute the Head Unspeakable abandoned whatever dignity his position normally required. His grey robes came off first, followed quickly by the jacket underneath, revealing an utterly ordinary middle-aged man with a slightly chubby frame and a rather pronounced bald spot. He was still masked though.

Sweat poured down his neck as his wand continued whipping frantically between cooling charms and heat dissipation charms.

Hermione stared at him for a moment.

After everything she'd imagined beneath those ominous grey robes, the Head Unspeakable of Time looked remarkably like someone's overworked accountant. More importantly, he looked hot. Very hot.

She made to continue her contribution to their demise when when the floor moved beneath Hermione's feet.

She stumbled sideways into Lily as an immense tremor rolled through the prison. The barrage against the temporal barrier stopped while loose stones bounced across the floor and several already weakened staircases tore free from the walls.

Then something groaned. It came from beneath them.

The sound was too deep to belong to any person or creature she knew, less a voice than an immense vibration passing through several hundred metres of stone. It rose through her feet and rattled her teeth before gradually fading into something disturbingly close to a pained moan.

Nobody cast another spell.

Hermione looked towards one of the enormous gashes the Unspeakables had carved through the island to see black mist wafting up from the depths. At first she mistook it for smoke. Then a long shape curled through the cloud and wrapped itself around the broken edge of the prison floor. It resembled a vine until its end separated into five impossibly long fingers.

Hands crawled through the mist while black vines coiled around shattered stones and dragged themselves upwards. One seized an iron walkway and crushed it with enough force to fold the railing around its fingers.

"Oh," Hermione whispered.

Across the chamber, the Head of Time stared into the growing darkness for considerably less time than she did before raising his wand to his throat for a sonorus.

"All personnel retreat!" he bellowed. "Abandon the island!"

The temporal barrier vanished and the three men fled through the door they had backed themselves up against during the battle.

James, Lily, Moody, Peter and everyone else turned towards Hermione.

Right. She was in command.

"Oh yeah, no. What he said."

They ran.

Whatever rivalry existed between the two forces ended there. The Unspeakables fled towards the northern approaches while Hermione led everyone who still possessed legs towards the southern shore. The shades followed through walls and collapsed floors, several disappearing ahead to scout while the living and possessed dead scrambled through the increasingly unstable prison.

A black hand erupted through the floor behind them.

James shoved Lily aside before its fingers closed around her leg, then blasted the wrist apart with a curse. The severed hand dissolved into smoke only for two more tendrils to emerge from the hole.

"Faster!"

A staircase collapsed beneath Peter. He transformed into a rat the size of a wolf before hitting the floor below and disappeared through the rubble while Hermione vaulted the widening gap behind him. The entire prison seemed to be coming apart now. Walls buckled inward. Cell doors tore themselves from their hinges. Black mist poured through every crack while hands, vines and shapes Hermione couldn't identify lashed at anything attempting to escape.

The island groaned again and this time it sounded angry. They reached the southern courtyard moments before half the prison behind them collapsed.

Hermione spotted the Durmstrang transport on the beach below and nearly laughed from relief.

Then she noticed the other one.

The Unspeakables' earlier chronomancy had cut directly through the middle of the ship. Its two halves lay nearly fifty metres apart along the shoreline, the exposed interior perfectly smooth where several metres of vessel had simply ceased to exist.

"One ship!" Hermione yelled. "Everyone aboard!"

Several dozen survivors poured down the slope.

Those with bodies climbed, jumped or were physically thrown aboard while the shades simply passed through the hull. Hermione lost count somewhere in the chaos. James and Lily made it. Peter appeared from beneath a pile of debris in human form again and sprinted the remaining distance. Moody limped aboard with one arm hanging uselessly beside him while Lucius and Sirius drifted straight through the side of the ship without bothering with the ramp.

Hermione was among the last aboard.

The ship pulled away from the beach just as something enormous erupted from beneath it. A mass of black tendrils tore through the shoreline where they'd been standing seconds earlier, sending tonnes of stone and sand into the air.

The force of it launched the ship into the waves, and the magical propellers kept them going out to sea.

They simply watched as Azkaban disappeared.

Black mist swallowed the prison from below while countless tendrils wrapped around its remaining towers. Some appeared to attack the fortress. Others attacked one another. Great hands clawed into the cliffs and tore loose entire sections of rock before dragging them into the darkness beneath. The island folded gradually inward as though some immense creature were devouring its own body.

One of the remaining towers toppled into the sea. Then another. The triangular prison collapsed into the writhing mass beneath it and disappeared.

Within minutes there was almost nothing left. The last fragments of shoreline slipped beneath the waves while black tendrils thrashed above the surface, growing smaller and fewer until the final hand disappeared beneath the ocean and Azkaban was no more.

Silence settled across the deck.

Hermione continued staring at the empty patch of sea until she noticed everyone else staring at her and Lily.

She shared a glance with the older woman.

Apparently they were expected to explain this.

Hermione sighed.

"When the Ministry first took Azkaban from Ekrizdis, there was considerable debate over what should be done with the island. Some wanted the fortress destroyed entirely."

She gestured towards the empty ocean behind them.

"They didn't."

"Why?" James asked.

"Because the experts examining the place warned them that if they attempted to destroy the island, it might fight back." Lily explained. "I read about it in Azkaban: A History."

Several people turned slowly towards the sea.

Hermione joined them.

"Nobody ever elaborated on what that meant."

A long silence followed.

"Apparently THAT," said Sirius.

Regulus floated near the stern with his arms folded, watching the last traces of black mist disappear beneath the waves.

"I mean... If we can't have it, at least they can't. I'd say destroying Azkaban was still a mission success."

Hermione stared at him.

He raised both hands and made a weighing motion with them like a set of scales.

"Lemons, lemonade?"

XXX

Harry continued beating the Head Unspeakable of Death into progressively less recognizable shapes for several more minutes.

By the time he finally stopped, they'd migrated through another wall and halfway down the adjoining corridor. The Unspeakable's left leg bent sideways beneath the knee, his right arm dangled uselessly from a dislocated shoulder and Harry was reasonably certain he'd rotated his head backwards at least twice more.

Harry stepped away and leaned against the wall.

"Go ahead."

The Unspeakable, currently folded over the remains of a hospital bed, raised one crooked arm.

"Thank you."

He began putting himself back together.

Harry watched patiently while the man twisted his head forward with several metallic clicks, forced his shoulder into place against the wall and straightened his damaged leg by stamping it repeatedly against the floor. Somewhere farther through the hospital, spells continued exploding between the remaining Aurors and Harry's forces.

The Unspeakable finished correcting his spine and stood as straight as his battered mechanical frame presently allowed.

"Are you done stalling for time yet?" he asked. "Or have you realized you never needed to in the first place?"

"The latter."

Harry remained against the wall.

"You're not a fighter. Near as I can tell, you've done absolutely nothing wrong except obey whatever oath you took to your job. Although I admit I find operating out of a hospital rather macabre."

"In the new palliative care unit?" the Unspeakable asked incredulously. "Where terminal patients are sent to die in comfort?"

Harry frowned.

"Where better to observe natural death from every conceivable cause? We have access to patients suffering from dozens of otherwise fatal illnesses and injuries while the Healers make their final days as comfortable as possible. We observe without interfering. It's by far the most ethical way we've operated in decades."

Harry considered that.

"Fair enough."

A magically amplified voice suddenly thundered through the hospital.

"MISSION SUCCESS! RETREAT!"

Cho.

Harry looked towards the nearest hole in the wall.

"Well, that's me."

He pushed himself away from the wall and gave the Unspeakable a small wave.

"Pleasure meeting you."

Harry had taken three steps before the man called after him.

"Wait."

Harry stopped.

The Head of Death remained standing among the wreckage, one arm still visibly longer than the other from however badly Harry had bent the metal underneath.

"Yes?"

"That's it?"

Harry waited for him to elaborate.

"You aren't going to attempt to kill me?"

"Already tried."

"Kidnap me?"

Harry shook his head.

"Interrogate me?"

"About what?"

The hooded figure stared at him.

Harry stared back. He felt the same presence attempt to touch his mind from earlier and was almost distracted by how that was possible. It wasn't death, and also not any of the three people with him at Nurmengard. Voldemort? He blocked it harder.

For some reason, this answer seemed to bother the Unspeakable more than anything Harry had done to him physically.

"I'm the Head Unspeakable of the Department of Death."

"Yes."

"There are questions only I can answer."

"I'm sure."

"About death."

"I gathered."

The man spread his arms.

"You don't even seem interested in what I am! That usually warrants several questions on its own."

"Oh, that."

Harry looked him over again.

"You're a mechanical homunculus with an artificial mind imparted into it. Probably something similar to a portrait imprint."

The Unspeakable's arms lowered.

Harry didn't mention his other suspicion. A mechanical body designed to contain a human mind sounded suspiciously close to a phylactery. Perhaps even a Horcrux with considerably more engineering involved.

He had no intention of letting Voldemort learn that Harry understood either concept.

"As for who you are..."

Harry studied the man's hood. Another tiny puff of steam escaped somewhere beneath it with a quiet hiss. The parts of his body exposed resembled pieces of a sneakoscope.

"The construction style narrows things considerably. Clockwork skeleton. Steam exhaust. Lots of brass under there, I'm guessing... Edgar Stroulger."

Even with the enchanted hood hiding every trace of his face, Harry could tell the man was gawking at him.

It hadn't actually been that difficult.

Harry possessed a surprisingly short list of famous witches and wizards who appeared to be alive despite being very definitely dead. He'd discovered most of them almost by accident while going through Ron's collection of Chocolate Frog cards and attempting to summon their souls with the Resurrection Stone.

Some failures had obvious explanations. Herpo the Foul, for example, had created a Horcrux. Harry couldn't call back a soul that had never properly left. The Peverell brothers and Hogwarts founders probably hadn't even had their real names preserved. People had been considerably more careful about hiding them in those days. Because of magic like... well, like the resurrection stone.

Edgar Stroulger had been different. His failure to return when sommoned had raised an eyebrow.

Meeting a mechanical man whose design looked suspiciously appropriate for the period in which Stroulger had lived had lowered it again.

The Unspeakable finally found his voice.

"How in the world did you—"

"Goodbye, Mr Stroulger."

Harry turned and walked towards the nearest hole in the wall.

Behind him, the Head Unspeakable of Death remained standing silently among the wreckage.

Harry smiled to himself.

Apparently he'd finally managed to hurt the immortal.