Chapter 34: The Gloomy Forbidden Forest, Silver-White Unicorn Blood (Patreon)

Thursday night, eleven o'clock.

Thick white fog welled up from the depths of the Black Lake and wrapped the steps outside the entrance hall in a hazy shroud.

At the entrance hall, Argus Filch held up a swaying, dim oil lamp. A gleeful sneer sat on his gaunt, malevolent face, and his voice rasped like two rusty sheets of iron grinding together. "Follow me, brats. After tonight, I'd wager some of you will never dare set foot out of your dormitory in the middle of the night again... The Forbidden Forest doesn't give a toss about pure-blood status. There are werewolves in there, and swarms of poisonous spiders."

At the back of the line, Draconia's face had drained of all color.

The young lady had wrapped her dark green windproof cloak tightly around herself and was picking her way around the muddy puddles in her long boots.

She kept her chin lifted as high as she could, clinging to her usual arrogance, but her fingers, clamped around Raven's sleeve and refusing to let go, gave away the fear inside her completely.

"Capet... my father said there really are man-eating monsters in the Forbidden Forest." Draconia kept her voice low, her breath trembling slightly.

"Don't listen to that Squib's nonsense." Raven turned his hand and squeezed her icy fingertips, his tone calm and easy. "Outside the full moon, a werewolf is just an ordinary down-on-his-luck wizard. As for the other creatures... they usually know better than humans how to stay away from trouble."

Feeling the steady warmth of his palm, Draconia's shaky breathing quietly eased, but her fingers still clung to his sleeve, and she wouldn't give up an inch of distance.

"All right, Filch, hand 'em over to me."

Hagrid's huge frame strode out of the thick fog.

A massive crossbow hung across his shoulder and a quiver of bolts at his waist, and he held the boarhound Fang on a lead. In his gruff, booming voice he sent Filch packing back to the castle.

"Listen up, you lot. Tonight's task won't be an easy one."

Hagrid raised his lantern, his face unusually grave in the yellowish firelight. "There's a unicorn badly hurt deep in the Forest. Since last week I've been findin' spots of silver blood around... Somebody, or somethin' foul, is huntin' them."

He paused, then split them into two groups. "Hermione and I'll take the left path. Raven, Harry, you take Malfoy and Fang down the right. And remember, if you run into danger, shoot red sparks into the sky."

The two parties split at the fork, swallowed by the fog.

The path on the right was dreadfully dark.

Enormous beeches and ancient oaks blotted out the sky, and underfoot lay a thick carpet of rotting leaves and thorny brambles. The air reeked of damp earth, and now and then the shrill cry of some unknown owl split the night.

Draconia pressed close against Raven's side. The pure silver teardrop pendant at her chest gave off a faint pale-blue glow, silently driving the damp, cold wind back from a two-yard radius around her.

Harry walked ahead, wand in hand, his expression serious.

"Look ahead," Raven said suddenly, his voice low.

The three of them stopped. By the pendant's weak light, they saw several drops of silvery liquid beading on the dark blades of grass ahead, flowing like mercury and shimmering with the soft luster of mother-of-pearl.

Unicorn blood.

"It's lost a lot of blood..." Harry crouched and touched the soil, his voice heavy.

Deep in Raven's eyes, [Circuit Sight] silently activated.

In the darkness no ordinary person could pierce, strands of deathly black mist coiled faintly above the silver blood. It was a corrupted magic, thick with rot and resentment.

"Stay close to me. Don't go more than three steps away," Raven said, tightening his grip on his ebony wand, his voice dropping. Draconia instinctively clutched his arm tighter, and even Harry could feel the oppressive air, almost congealed around them.

They followed the winding trail of blood through a dense thicket. The ground leveled out ahead of them, opening onto a bare clearing ringed by dead trees.

In the center of the clearing, on a heap of fallen leaves, lay a vast, spotless white body.

It was a full-grown unicorn. Its slender legs lay stiff on the ground, and its graceful spiral horn, as if carved from pearl, had fallen into the mud. Silver blood still seeped from its long neck, soaking a wide patch of yellowed moss.

It was dead.

"Whimper..." Fang suddenly let out a terrified howl, tucked his tail between his legs, and bolted into the bushes like a mad thing.

"Fang!" Harry started to call, but the lightning-bolt scar on his forehead, long since healed, suddenly erupted with an agony that tore through him, without warning!

"Aaagh!!" Harry cried out, clamping both hands to his forehead. The pain dropped him to his knees in the leaves, and his face went paper white in an instant.

"Harry?!" Draconia gasped.

The next second, though, the sound died in the young lady's throat, caught as if by an invisible hand.

From the deepest shadows of the dead trees, a figure in a tattered black cloak was crawling out, slithering silently along the ground like an enormous venomous snake.

The dark shape crept up beside the dead unicorn. Hood hanging low, it bent in the moonlight and pressed its face hard against the bleeding wound at the animal's throat. From deep in its throat came a spine-chilling sound of sucking and swallowing!

"Glug... glug..."

A thick stench of blood and rotting corpses spread through the air.

Draconia stood frozen, her legs gone weak, barely able to breathe. In her eleven years of life, this was the first time she had come face to face with such unnatural, life-defying evil.

Perhaps it heard them, for the hooded shape drinking the silver blood slowly stopped swallowing.

It straightened its upper body. Unicorn blood, silver-white, dripped one drop at a time from the ragged edge of its cloak and landed on the dead leaves with a soft patter.

The figure raised its head. Beneath the hood was nothing but a bottomless void. Then, with a chill of killing intent locking onto them, it surged along the ground like a silent black wind of death, straight at Harry and Draconia, who lay crumpled and paralyzed with fear!

"Capet...!!" Draconia cried out in despair.

But a tall, straight figure in black had already, in that very instant, stepped sideways without a flicker of hesitation. Like a towering, insurmountable peak, he planted himself firmly in front of her.

Raven raised his right hand slightly, and the night-black ebony wand let out a low resonance in the dim Forbidden Forest.

Facing the death-shadow howling toward him, the boy showed not a shred of fear in his eyes, only a killing calm, cold to the extreme:

"Voldemort... how much longer did you think you could hide in Hogwarts's shadow?"