Lightning and War

Pulled Through Space

Shara nodded. Tom turned to face the wizard on the ground. He stopped thrashing and stared at Tom with widening eyes.

“Legilimens,” Tom hissed in Parseltongue.

In seconds, he was back in the wizard’s mind and confronting that static. Tom reached out and spoke to it in Parseltongue, not English. “Let me inside.”

The secret’s magic swirled around him, as loud as Muggle drills in his head. It didn’t matter. Tom ripped effortlessly through the barriers, protected as they were by soul magic and a secret originally spoken in English. Snakes had no souls, and Parseltongue was an older language than English.

Then he was within the secret, reading it out of the crumbling, flaking remains of his victim’s mind, which resembled a parchment burning up in a fireplace more than they did anything else.

The dungeons of the Order of the Phoenix can be found at the last cottage at the end of Gryffindor Street in Godric’s Hollow.

Tom whirled himself out of the man’s mind and spared only a glance at the face of what was now a drooling idiot. “I know where Harry is. Come with me.”

Shara and Philip immediately stepped forwards, while Abraxas came tearing out of the Manor. His face was unnaturally calm. “I’m the one who worried so much about what my parents would say if someone damaged the Manor that I let Potter go into danger,” he said, when Tom glanced at him. “Please let me come, my lord.”

Tom tilted his head. “You are prepared to make up for your mistake?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Tom finally nodded. “Tell me one thing before we leave. Did they also capture Jonquil Potter?”

Abraxas shook his head. “She didn’t get to the battle in time. But she was making so much noise that I Stunned her and locked her in our cellars.”

Tom chuckled. It was less than he would have given her, but at least she would be out of his way for now. “Then come,” he said, and turned to walk again to the edge of the Apparition wards. His mouth filled with anticipation like a snake’s filling with venom.

He looked forward to taking down the Order of the Phoenix. And he looked forward with the same sort of anticipation to talking to Harry.

*

Harry opened his eyes and then flinched away from the brilliance of the light that tried to stab him through the skull. He looked blearily around the room where he appeared to be held. He was experienced enough with being restrained to already know magical ropes were binding him to a chair.

This looked like a cellar, which immediately reminded Harry of the cellars of Malfoy Manor in his own world where he’d been imprisoned during the war. He breathed slowly through the memory, and then looked at the wall immediately in front of him, which was stone and dirt with a low wooden door set into it.

The door opened as he watched it, and a tall man ducked through. He had scraggly grey hair that hung to his shoulders, and weary eyes that looked as green as Harry’s. On his cheek was a brand in the shape of a rising phoenix.

Harry said nothing. The wizard was the one who sat down in another, conjured chair in front of Harry and shook his head. “I wanted the Order people I sent to capture Tom Gaunt. Who are you?”

Harry still said nothing. There was really nothing he wanted to communicate to this wizard, and it wasn’t like he was going to beg for his life or freedom.

The man spent a minute muttering something under his breath that could have been incantations or just swear words, and then sat up. “Well, I suppose that as long as we have you, you can still tell us something about your lord. Imperio!”