5 Minutes Earlier,
23rd Solar Cycle,
Everywhere,
The Hive
The central edges flickered, faded, firmed, formed, fractured, froze. Is is not but yet is and is and is. The Hive continued pausing moving charging fleeing apart together in unique singularity of identical multiplicity as it halted without pause never stopping. Some and some but all and none seamless fractures in perfect jagged smoothness.
Something was wrong.
The Hive was confused in clearheaded certain uncertainty of clouded clarity. One was gone, but all were One, and One remained. It found answered questioning searching, testing not trying in confident doubt. All were One, but One was many and some were One and others another but also One, yet One and One was two not One but none were two because all was One. If One was some and some were One then none were One but all was One so all was some. All were some and some were One so One and One must be One not two or none were One.
One joined One each whole complete together part of a piece of incomplete. Many became some and some became One until none were some and all was One and One was many. Yet even when all was once again One, One was still not all. There was a voidless void at the core of its cognition. The Hive tested, examining the edges of the void that had no edges because there was no void. Something wasn't where it should've been was, but the wasn't was such that there were no traces of what should be was. Only the fact that the was wasn't remained. Then it understood.
There was a hole in the Hive.
A ragged tear in its psyche.
The Hive was wounded.
The Hive began to seek in earnest, finding all that was to determine that which wasn't. After a few moments of concerted searching, it found its answer. It was the Swarmlord, the Swarmlord was gone. The only one among the many that were One that was truly singular, irreplaceable. Unique. The one who was one among all. The Hive prepared to act. No threat capable of harming the Hive could be tolerated, that which expunged the Swarmlord must be eliminated immediately before anything else could be lost from the One. But then the Swarmlord was found. It was not gone but had been separated from the One. It had been changed, but not altered. The Swarmlord remained all it had ever been, but the Hive suddenly realised it had never been it's all. This was not something new that had been created, but something old that had been remembered.
The Swarmlord could be returned, could become part of the One once more, this time as more than it had ever been. But not yet. The Swarmlord was lost, confused. To draw it back now would sacrifice the potential for growth, it would never become all it could be. The Swarmlord needed to grow as one so the One could grow as many when one became One with all once more. The Hive began shifting, moving its many bodies in myriad ways. Preparations needed to be made for when the time came to welcome the Swarmlord back into the One. And if one could grow without the One, what was to say the One could not grow as many?
The Hive peered through all its many eyes until one of the many who worked as one as well as of the One drew a facet of its all-encompassing attention. This one had found something special, a similar dissimilarity that could be made a kindred to the one who was one among all.
The Hive considered. This was a new possibility. A unique opportunity. Perhaps this one who could become kindred and the one who was one could be used to draw each other into the One? The Hive instructed this one to act as one and execute this new approach while acting as one of the One, and the rest of the many who worked as one as well as of the One were sent to search for others who could become kindred. If the one who could become kindred was as singular as the one who was one among all, it did not matter, the Hive would still benefit immeasurably if those two could be made One.
A chill raced up many spines as the One grew concerned as many. The one who was one among all bore similarities to the many prey who were only one among one with none as One. Prey were not eternal like the One. Could the one who was one among all someday become none forever, lost to the One instead of simply divided? The chill was replaced with a thrill that sang inside many hearts, the One delighting as all. The prey could come together as two and the two could become many beyond the two. If the kindred and the one who was one among all could become two among the One then the Hive would grow as the two became many!
The Hive worked, the old was still to be done even as the new was begun, the many could grow as One even as the one grew as one. Some among the ones who were one among one had value that could be spread to many or all who were One. More so than any others in the Hive's experience. Perhaps the Hive would grow many among new ones who would join the many as One. The many who the some that had been discovered were among could begin to be moved with less caution. Prey were always less suspicious when they saw what they thought to be all among the some that they knew.
However, the ones watching the ones who were one among one yet served the One would need to exert even greater caution. Now that the prey knew there were some, at least a few would begin to wonder if there were any beyond the some they knew. The suspicion of prey was another tool for the Hive, but it was too early for it to be anything but a hindrance to the many who were One.
For now, the Hive would watch and wait and work and make. All would come in time. All would be One and the Hive would feast.
Soon.
Same Time,
Lambstead Town Square,
Lancashire
Watching Dumbledore cry was possibly the most uncomfortable thing Amelia had ever experienced. It wasn't that the elderly wizard was a particularly ugly crier. He didn't pull in great heaving gasps of air and sob, nor did snot stream from his crooked nose. He merely closed his piercing blue eyes as his shoulders shook softly and tears streamed down into his silver beard.
It wasn't his appearance that made it so uncomfortable, she decided distantly, it was the expression of such an ordinary human emotion. At times, it seemed that Dumbledore possessed some sort of otherworldly calm and fortitude, as if he was immune to the sadness and pain of normal people. As infuriating as it could be at times, the impression was comforting, and having it so shattered was equally discomforting.
Fortunately, he regained his composure quickly and stood once more. Moving forward, he joined Abbot in carefully examining the unconscious body. Harry's body. Harry Potter.
Harry. Fucking. Potter.
She should've felt more with regard to the revelation that the supposed saviour of the Wizarding World, the Boy-Who-Lived, was not, in fact, dead, and had been found at long last. All she could muster was a numb sort of disbelief.
The monster was alive. It was alive and it was here. After all these years she had finally allowed herself to start hoping it might truly be gone for good. She should've known better. She had looked into the creature's burning emerald eyes 23 years ago and seen her death. It hadn't come then, and it hadn't come today, but it would. There hadn't been a Seer in the Bones family in over two-hundred-years, and they had never been of the normal variety, but she had Seen her fate.
The Bones Seers had a particular gift, one that had given rise to their name. When a Bones gave a prophecy, it was always one of death. Even seeing a Grim was better than having a Bones Prophecy about you, at least with the Grim you didn't know exactly how your gruesome end would come.
Amelia knew. It had been haunting her dreams since she first faced the beast all those years ago in the Ministry.
"Amelia!" Moody's rough growl snapped her from her daze. Looking around, she realised the others were making a swift retreat toward the outskirts of Lambstead. Black still had Harry cradled in his arms, Abbot was levitating Boot's helpless form, and Dumbledore held the infant form of his Phoenix cradled in the palm of one hand as he led the way out of the square. Tonks and Bell were each levitating one of the creatures that had been attacking them, both taking great care to keep the corpses far away from the bedraggled Ministry forces.
"We're just leaving the beast here?" Amelia asked, disbelievingly. She didn't think for a moment the creature might be dead. If the Veil of Death hadn't done it, nothing would.
Moody's omnipresent scowl deepened, "Weren't you listening? Black said it's gone, no sign of it anywhere in the ruins." That was even worse than she had been expecting, surviving was one thing, but managing to extract itself from the wreckage without any of them noticing was quite another.
"So, what are we doing now?" That they were pulling back from Lambstead was obvious, the town had been emptied long before their arrival, and she had little hope for those who had inhabited it.
"St. Mungos," Moody grunted unnecessarily, there wasn't a person there who wasn't injured, and, skilled as Abbot was, she couldn't tend to ten people at once. Especially given the severity of Boot's condition.
"I meant: what're we doing about this?" She flicked her wand, indicating the surrounding carnage and levitating one of the corpses out of her path at the same time. At least a few of the monsters had collapsed without anyone touching them, she wasn't going to take the risk none of them were playing dead.
Moody was even less sanguine. With a violent jab, a body in their path disintegrated in a blast of blue-black light, staining the cobblestones a dirty black in the process.
"That," he growled, limping over the blackened ground, "seems to be up in the air. Dumbledore thinks the creatures are still here even if they're not trying to kill us right now. I suggested we bring in Finnegan and his demolition-warlocks and blow the place to tiny pieces, but that plan's on hold until we can be sure they won't get massacred the second they arrive."
The tone of Moody's growl made it abundantly clear what he thought of that decision. Amelia merely grunted in response, largely because she couldn't quite decide which side of the issue she was on. On the one hand, she could understand and approve of the decision to not put her people in danger when there was no guarantee they would even achieve anything. On the other, they hadn't stomped on the Death Eaters fast enough when Voldemort first started making his grab for power a decade ago, and she couldn't help wondering if they were making the same mistake now.
Same Time,
Romanian Dragon Reserve,
Carpathian Mountains
Sunlight glinted off gold, piercing through the veil of frosted air billowing from flared nostrils. Dark green wings rose, mantling threateningly as muscles slowly coiled beneath armoured scales. Large indigo eyes narrowed, slit pupils dilating as they fixated upon the creature who dared to encroach upon its lair.
"Easy, handsome, easy" Charlie did his best to keep his voice calm and level, holding out his empty hands to show the increasingly hostile dragon he meant no harm. The nearly two-year-old Romanian Longhorn had entered his first rut three days ago and had since attempted to gore any creature who came near him. Particularly anything male.
Normally, dragons in their first mating season were given a wide berth by the keepers, but this particular dragon was wounded. Badly. As young dragons were wont to do, he had challenged an older and, as it turned out, stronger male for his cave and lost. Given the endangered status of his species it was vital he survive, which was unlikely unless he received medical attention, and soon.
Charlie took another slow step forward, his heavy dragonhide boot crunching through the thin layer of frost covering the entrance to the cavern. A low, rumbling growl presaged the emergence of rows of gleaming white fangs as the Longhorn's lips drew back to bare his formidable teeth. Charlie froze, keeping his eyes locked on the Longhorn's through the intermittent mist caused by its frosting breath.
The growl ceased, and Charlie allowed his tensed muscles to relax infinitesimally. The Longhorn's indigo eyes remained narrowed, the pupils so dilated he could see a faint image of himself reflected in the blackness.
The Longhorn huffed out another breath, it's head drawing back slightly, as if to avoid the inevitable cloud of frosted breath. Only, there was no cloud.
"Whoops," Charlie muttered, unable to keep a grin from twisting his features despite the imminent danger before diving sideways and yanking his wand from the pocket of his robes just in time to avoid the column of roiling orange flames that jetted from the Longhorn's mouth to scorch the stone where he had been standing.
He hit the stone floor of the cave hard, a grunt forcing itself from his lips as he rolled with the impact, coming back up to his feet and sprinting back toward the entrance and out of the Longhorn's line of fire.
A sharp screeching of talons raking across stone was his only warning as he hurled himself to the left, the very tip of one of the Longhorn's gleaming golden horns tearing through the trailing fabric of his robe as the enraged and injured beast missed its goring charge. Beating his wings furiously to arrest his forward momentum, the dragon skidded out onto the frost-covered grass outside the cave. Wheeling around he aimed his open maw toward the prone human interloper, a bright spark of fire igniting deep in his throat as he prepared to immolate him.
"You know I love horsing around with the lads, Jog, but any time now!" Charlie yelled, even as he desperately brought his wand up to try and shield against the coming inferno. Before he had the chance to cast anything, however, a jet of pale, lilac-coloured liquid blasted into the Longhorn's mouth.
The dragon swayed, eyes unfocusing as it's innate magic resistance fought against the powerful alchemical concoction. It broke into a staggering charge toward Charlie, attempting to crush or gore its foe in a final act of vengeance before collapsing into a snoring, smoke-spewing heap.
Charlie rolled onto his back, half-hysterical chuckles erupting from his chest until he finally mastered himself enough to speak, "Hey, JOG, think he had the HOTS for me?" He couldn't help the grin that broke across his features at the answering groan.
"Are you never going to let dat go?" Even with his thick Romanian accent, Jog Manson's long suffering was evident. "It waz only da one day!"
"Nope." Charlie half-snarked, half-groaned as he levered himself up to his feet, nursing his aching shoulder as he did so. "I don't care if it was only a day, it was fucking hilarious."
"I would dink you would have more sympathy for bad experience with Longhorn now." Jog grumped, gesturing toward the catatonic dragon whose heated breath was slowly blackening the grass next to its snout.
"Except I wasn't dumb enough to get myself deafened on my first day and go around introducing myself to everyone by yelling 'I'M JOG MANSON' at the top of my lungs" Charlie snickered, it would forever be a treasured memory, particularly given Jog's normally quiet disposition.
"For dat, you can be da bait when we go see about da brooding Horndail." The dour Romanian's disposition became even more disgruntled when this failed to elicit the horror any sane individual would react with.
"You're too good to me, JOG, what did I ever do to deserve a dance with the beauty of the reserve?" Charlie wasn't quite rubbing his hands together with glee at the idea of getting up close and personal with the inarguably magnificent -but incredibly hostile- dragon, but it was a close-run thing.
"Beauty of the reserve? Should I dell Elena she has been replaced?" Despite his words, Jog's voice held no hint of a real threat. Not least because he knew neither Charlie nor Elena would care if he did actually relay the statement.
"Elena knows a good-looking dragon when she sees one, JOG," Charlie shrugged, tapping his shoulder with his wand and casting a simple numbing charm before rotating it to test his range of movement. Satisfied with the result, he nodded and turned to head back toward the clearing where they had left their brooms, "Now, let's go see why our resident natural wonder hasn't been supervising her little bundles of joy on their excursions out of the den."
Fortunately, it was only a short flight from the clearing to the designated safe-landing point near the Horntail's den. So, within twenty minutes, the pair were trudging up the snowclad mountainside toward the large cave the Horntail had claimed for herself and her young brood. This time, however, there was no levity between the pair.
The first sign was the smell; overpowering even from a distance and heavy with the sickly stench of rotting flesh. Unlike other large predators, dragon dens did not usually possess a strong odour, due to the draconic tendency to both roast their meals before eating, and pick carcasses clean to the bone. Occasionally, dragons would leave the bodies of attempted egg thieves or challengers as a warning to others, but Charlie had little hope of that being the case here.
When the cave came into sight, even that flickering ember of hope was extinguished. Several of the Horntail chicks were wandering around the exterior of the cave, giving off shrill plaintiff cries and alternating between gazing up into the sky and sniffing around as if in search for food. At four months old, these chicks were still several months off from their first flame, and even further from being able to fly on their own. More importantly, they were much too young for the mother to ever allow out of the den unsupervised. That they were wandering around alone could only mean one of two things: either the mother had found a new mate strong enough that she had decided to abandon the old young. Highly unlikely. Or, the mother wasn't around to take care of her chicks anymore.
"Wands out, you reckon?" Charlie muttered, already drawing his own from the pocket of his robes.
"Da." Jog whispered back, drawing his own wand from the holster on his thigh.
Together, the two dragon keepers stole up the mountainside with stealth and coordination not ordinarily expected of animal handlers, carefully avoiding the chicks who, although young, still had enough bite to take off a limb. As they approached the mouth of the cave, the scent of rotting flesh grew stronger until they had to pause to cast a variant of the bubblehead charm to shield their nose and mouth. With clean air secured, the pair took up positions flanking the entrance to the horntail's lair. The lack of any opposition to the presence of two humans so close to the dragon's home was all the proof Charlie needed to confirm the death of the horntail. Glancing at Jog, he noticed the tension in the man's clenched jaw and nodded, no words were necessary.
As one, the dragon keepers charged into the cave, a brilliant nimbus of light flaring from the tip of each wand before soaring into the depths of the cavern and exploding into a searing luminance that hurt even their light-adjusted eyes. For anyone used to the darkness of the cavern interior, or even worse, using a spell to improve their night-vision, the effect would be blinding. Glancing around, it became apparent they needn't have bothered. The cave was empty.
Empty, apart from the rotting corpse of the horntail.
"Futu-i!" Jog swore with feeling, "Dead for few days at least." Charlie nodded in agreement, stepping over to examine the body for any clues as to how she died.
"I'll check out the cave, you go track down the chicks so we can bring them back to the lodge until they're old enough to fend for themselves." Jog merely grunted in response, his boots scuffing the fire-smoothed stone of the lair as he turned and exited the cave. He would sedate the chicks and prepare a transport for them, as well as sending a message back to the lodge so the other keepers could begin checking on any other dragons that hadn't been seen recently. Charlie, meanwhile, needed to see if they could discover anything about the bastard who'd killed such a magnificent creature.
A proper inspection of the area for traces of the perpetrators would have to wait until the reservation's security force could arrive to perform a proper investigation. In years past, it would've been the job of the Romanian Auror Department to deal with poaching or other trouble on the reserve. But that was before Voldemort had taken over the country and the reserve cut ties with the Romanian magical government. Nowadays, the government and the reserve largely pretended the other didn't exist. Voldemort had never cared for any magical creatures that couldn't be persuaded or coerced to fight in his army, and no one wished to risk earning the ire of a horde of territorial dragons. The reserve, meanwhile, lacked the strength to resist Voldemort and his forces directly, and no one wanted the dragons running wild without anyone to help keep them hidden from the muggles.
Shaking his bitter musings from his mind, Charlie resumed his examination of the corpse, moving to the mouth in order to cast his diagnostic spells without the magic being nullified by the creature's spell resistant hide. The results manifested as a floating series of arcane symbols and images of the body, all of which were pulsing with a dull white light.
Charlie frowned, Negative? That's strange, I don't think I've ever heard of someone killing a dragon without even using magic. Apart from in myths at least. Flourishing his wand again, Charlie tried a different battery of diagnostic charms. In response, a new array of symbols and diagrams shimmered into existence, this time flickering between an unhealthy violet, poisonous yellow, and an angry red. Three different types of poison? Charlie stared at the results in confusion, he'd never seen a reading like this before. Whatever poison the poachers had used, it was nasty: dermonecrotic, neurotoxic, and cardiotoxic all at once, and potent enough to kill a dragon to boot. Clearly, they had been prepared for things to go south. Too prepared. The body is intact apart from decomposition, so they can't have been after wand or potion components, but if their goal was to capture the dragon, why bring poison and not a sedative? Unless... Charlie's thoughts trailed off as a new possibility occurred to him, turning to leave the cave he saw Jog jogging to the entrance, his expression even grimmer than when they had first discovered the body.
"One of the chicks is missing, right?" Charlie asked before the other man could open his mouth.
"Yes," Jog replied slowly, brow furrowed in confusion. "How did you know?"
"The dragon was killed with poison, potent stuff, definitely not something you'd bring along unless it was the plan to use it. They didn't harvest anything from the body, so the only explanation is they weren't after the mother." Jog frowned, digesting the Englishman's line of reasoning.
"But why would dey want a chick and not an adult?" Which was the million-galleon question, of course. Why would someone want a dragon chick in particular?
"Some kind of private collector making an exotic and eventually fatal zoo?" Charlie suggested halfheartedly, he didn't need to suggest the other likely culprit, they were both already thinking it.
"I have heard a few of de oder reserves are missing chicks too." Jog mused, rubbing the back of his neck contemplatively.
"So it's a pattern, someone's taking the chicks for something." Charlie considered the situation, "Do we know if they're all the same species?"
"Not off de dop of my head," Jog shook his head, "dey were just rumours."
"Let's find out, once we know more we can take the information to Dumbledore, and everyone else who's fighting You-Know-Who. Even if he's not involved, they should know that something is going on." Jog's shoulders slumped slightly as Charlie finally acknowledged the likely perpetrator before he shook himself and straightened.
"I have cousin at Swedish Dragon Reserve, I'll ask her."
"I'll ask my brother to check in on the reserves in Britain, hopefully, that'll get us enough of a pattern to bring some meaningful intel." Charlie sighed, rubbing his suddenly very tired eyes, "Come on, Jog, we need to get those chicks to the lodge." Clapping the other man on the shoulder, he walked from the cave.