Beyond the Tapestry - Chapter 5

So as you may have noticed, I'm really bad at working on what I'm supposed to be working on! November was supposed to be all about WWDtS, I had a vote for it and everything, but I've had...minimal success with that project 😭.

Still, I haven't done no writing and I do want to give you guys something! This is the project that has captured my limited writing attention this past month or so. Not sure its going to go anywhere yet, but I've really enjoyed working on it so far.

Beyond the Tapestry is sort of a non-quest revamp of Harvesting the Multiverse, a story I wrote a lot of at the start of this year. That story has developed a lot of cracks and ended up being terribly unbalanced, but I did really enjoy the initial concept and wanted to iterate on it. Its a Harry Potter/Magic: the Gathering/Multicross fic following an OC Black character (as in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black). The magic system is heavily revamped and based loosely on elements I've loved in other stories, and I've also changed a lot of the mechanics found it HtM to fix some of the problems that I ran into there.

Anyway, I think that's more than enough Author's Note. This is chapter 5/6 that will be coming out in 15 minute increments. Let me know what you think!

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Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. 

It was getting late, the sun hidden behind the horizon though night had not yet fallen in full. After consoling her sister, Dorea had done her best to enjoy the party that had been ongoing for the better part of the last week with no sign of stopping or slowing while keeping away from her betrothed. She’d been mostly successful in both tasks––Charlus had caught sight of her once as she danced with a buxom greek witch, but she’d lost him in the crowd––but as the night progressed, she’d started to notice that not everything was going smoothly.

Specifically, her arm had started to hurt. Her left arm. The one she’d barely used at all in today’s duel. And, when she focused, she realized that her right arm was bothering her too. More so then it had been after she’d thrashed Lambert. She’d used barely any magic and hadn’t really strained it much during the duel. It should be healing, not getting worse. 

Thinking she must be mistaken, she’d made her excuses and found a private corner to meditate in briefly, and what she’d found disturbed her greatly. She recognized the damage in her arms. It was the same damage she’d done to herself with her reckless blood magic use the day before. The damage she’d thought she’d dealt with last night. 

Dorea swept into her room, sealed the door behind her, and dropped to her knees beside her trunk. A drop of blood went on the trunk’s third lock and she quickly retrieved the journal she’d referenced the night before. She flipped back to the pages describing the ritual she’d performed and scanned the notes. Nothing. 

Dorea moved to her bed and lay back against her pillows, the journal open on her lap. She started at the first page, moving quickly through her foremother's writings. She’d read all of it before, but it had been a while and she needed the refresher. 

Half an hour later, she closed it with a snap. The pain in her arms had intensified while she read, not yet back to where it had been the night before but getting there. At least the dark magic toxicity was mostly cleared up, but that was a small mercy. 

Dorea had miscalculated. Badly. She should have realized what happened immediately, but she was not all that familiar with soul subsumption. It was one of those things that was incredibly illegal back home. The kind of illegal that even most Noble Houses actually took notice of. 

She’d only done it to a muggle and not a mage so it was only use of illegal magics in the third degree, like using the curse of annihilation on a non-mage being or using legilimency on a Lord of the Wizengamot, but that would still earn her a three-year sentence in Azkaban if convicted. 

The problem was that she’d completely forgotten one of the fundamental ways that most forms of subsumption tended to work. Namely, that the initial boost was always much higher than the permanent gains. It took some time for a mage to ‘digest’, for lack of a better word, their gains, and during that time the effects of the subsumption were at their peak. As soon as that ended however and the new bits were fully integrated, those effects rapidly tapered off. 

She’d even experienced the effect for herself before. She––like most Blacks––practiced routine lifeforce subsumption using various small game animals, rodents, and the occasional farmed chicken or duck as the sacrifice. In the short term, it dealt with all sorts of physical injuries, minor maladies, and pains. In the long term, it slightly increased their average lifespan and general health. 

There were few things that compared with that first half hour after each subsumption. Dorea always felt giddy, full of boundless energy, and impossibly motivated. However, the effect rapidly dropped off until she felt basically like she had before, if perhaps slightly more cheerful and well rested. 

The same thing was happening here, it had just taken longer to digest a nearly full muggle soul than it did the life force of a rabbit. In another hour or so, she’d probably be feeling almost as bad as she had last night. Not quite as bad––she’d had some time to recover and some of the benefits would be permanent––but she’d once again be in no state to duel. 

Dorea felt like such a fool. She should have seen this coming, should have planned for it! Instead, she was even tighter on time than she had been the night before, though at least this time she had the benefit of experience. 

Dorea gnawed on her lower lip, trying to think. Pain, fear, and stress were making it hard to focus. 

She needed to repeat the ritual. That wasn’t in question. It had worked wonders once and Dorea thought she’d be able to avoid some of the minor mistakes she’d made the night before this time. Whether or not Sirius truly planned to honor their arrangement, none of it would matter if she lost tomorrow. She needed to be in top form to have any chance against Grindelwald.

The real question was if she should try to reach for more. 

After all, the ritual she’d used was not designed just to make soul subsumption––something that was fully manageable without any sort of fancy preparation if you knew what you were doing––possible, but to go beyond that. The runes were there to stabilize the movement of the soul so that you could attempt to steal delicate soul-based magical traits that would usually crumble in the process of subsumption. The fact that it made the base subsumption easier by helping contain the captured soul while it was being subsumed was just a secondary benefit. 

You didn’t need to be a mage to be a carrier for some lesser abilities. A muggle couldn’t be a metamorphmagus or a parselmouth, but they could have things like various magical affinities, magesight, and the like. Gifts that were completely useless to them, but might be inherited by a future muggleborn descendent. No one was quite sure where those gifts originated from initially––the leading consensus was that anyone born like that had a squib somewhere in their ancestry––but they did exist. 

It was unlikely that a newly gained minor gift would make the difference tomorrow, but not impossible. And if she was going in for a knut, she might as well go in for a galleon, right?

“Tipsey,” Dorea called. The elf appeared at the foot of her bed and Dorea pointed towards her trunk. “I need my scrying mirror, and then stick around. I’ll need you to do some scouting like you did yesterday.”

“Tipsey understands, Mistress Dorea.” 

Dorea did not have the Sight, nor even magesight, but she was rather sensitive to the currents of magic nonetheless. That made her an adequate diviner, even if she’d never progress past Seeing the present and snippets of the past. 

Her scrying mirror was something she’d made herself and presented as part of her NEWT in both Runes and Divination. It was a circular sheet of polished silver, a handspan across and twice as thick as her fingernail. The back was covered in a dense pattern of runes carved to exactly half the mirror’s thickness and then filled in with alchemically produced diamond grown directly into the grooves.

It was far from a perfect divining tool, but it was well suited for her talents. She’d never gotten the hang of using a crystal ball or any of the indirect methods like tea leaves and cards, but she could do scrying. She could scry well enough that she’d gotten an O on that NEWT despite utterly failing three quarters of the practical portion of the exam. 

Dorea took the mirror in both hands and then closed her eyes. She inhaled, magic flowing into her lungs and making her chest ache like she’d been running outside in winter. She focused on her search, blocking out extraneous thoughts and clearing her mind of emotion. Then she leaned forward and exhaled, blowing a cloud of icy mist over the pristine silver surface. 

When she opened her eyes, the mirror was cold under her fingers and covered in fog interspersed with tiny droplets of condensation. 

She let her eyes become unfocused, her heartbeat slow. She picked a droplet at random and peered into its depths, her view twisting and expanding as she gazed deeper and deeper, past the surface of the water, through the silver, and into somewhere else.

Her view was not clear. Indistinct shadows clung to the edges of her vision and blurred her gaze. A woman, her face tired and a badly concealed bruise over her eyes. Behind her a table, three young children and a man. 

A family. Unacceptable.

She turned to the next droplet. The image was clearer in some ways but hazier in others. A woman, a smile on her lips as she twirled across the dance floor.  Her dress was splendid, a vivid green and tan tight around her cinched waist and its skirts long and billowing. A man, his eyes hungry.

Too influential, too many people. Unacceptable.

She wasn’t sure how long she scried for. Her eyes shifted from droplet to droplet, scene to scene, currents of magic bringing far away moments to her slowly darkening room. Most of what she saw could be discarded immediately, but sometimes she stumbled across something promising. When she did, she’d focus in on that moment, pushing more magic into the mirror and expanding her view. Sometimes she’d move on right away, others she’d direct Tipsey to examine in more detail while she continued to hold the image in her mind’s eye.

Most of the time, the elf would return quickly with bad news. Eventually however—

“Tipsey be thinking this one be good.”

It took Dorea longer than it should have to process Tipsey’s words. She continued to stare into the mirror for several long seconds, her eyes painfully dry and sparks dancing amidst the shadows at the corners of her vision. 

The muggle sat in a chair beside its bed, a single candle burning inside a lamp casting flickering shadows across the walls. It was brushing its hair, its eyes closed and its face relaxed as it went through the motions. The house around it was cold and lifeless, and the muggle was garbed in nothing but a nightdress, its color indistinct in the darkness.

With a gasp, Dorea tore her eyes away and let the mirror from her fingers. It was heavy enough to hurt when it landed on her thighs, but she was already in too much pain and blinking rapidly to moisten her tortured eyes to care. 

It was dark in her room, darker than it had been in her visions. A thin beam of light shone from under the curtain over her window and the mirror in her lap glowed softly, but night had fallen in full while she labored. She could see Tipsey only by her eyes, huge and luminescent by the edge of her bed.

“You said it looks good?” she asked breathlessly. Her heart, calm and slow throughout her efforts, was suddenly racing in her chest and she felt like she’d spent an hour doing evasion drills with Darius. 

“Yes, Mistress Dorea,” Tipsey confirmed. 

Finally! Dorea wasn’t sure how long she’d spent searching, but it must have been at least an hour or two. It had felt like longer. She’d never tried scrying continuously for so long, but Professor Olivander’s words about overdoing things suddenly made a lot more sense. She hadn’t even know you could overchannel through your eyes, but the stinging pins-and-needles pain was unmistakable. It wasn’t nearly as severe as her arms, but the places in pain were much more sensitive so it all balanced out in the end.

She snatched up the bag she’d never bothered emptying out the night before, made sure her athame was in its sheath on her arm, drew her wand, and reached out to Tipsey. “Take me there,” she ordered. 

Long, spindly fingers closed around her extended wrist. With a sharp pop and a painful wrench, they appeared in the muggle’s bedroom. Dorea didn’t give it a moment to react, instincts born of thousands of hours of dueling practice and defense against hostile magics classes guiding her wand. A jet of red light struck the muggle as it tried to rise and it crumpled into its chair, hair brush tumbling from limp fingers and bouncing across the floorboards.

Dorea collapsed back onto the bed Tipsey had thankfully deposited her on, her teeth clenched and her eyes squeezed shut against the scream bubbling up in her throat. She felt more then heard Tipsey’s snap, a hiss of slightly oily, herby elven magic brush across her skin and coat the walls of the room in silence.

“Argha!” The mangled sound tore out of her mouth and left a splitting headache in its wake. “Merlin and Morgana,” she mumbled.

“Mistress?” Tipsey whispered the question, but her words still grated at Dorea’s ears.”

“I’m…” Dorea eventually settled on a word, “alive. Get the room…ready.”

Doria barely remembered the next several hours. She forced her protesting body through the motions and her sluggish mind into the shapes the ritual required with raw force of will and stubborn, resolute resolve. She was…Dorea Andromeda…Black. She would not be bested…by her own body. She would not be bested by…a bloody Swiss peasant. She was…not going to marry…Charlus…Potter.

And then it was done. She looked down at her own mangled corpse, naked and cold with a jagged gash extending from its collarbone down across its breasts and a blade buried at an angle in its heart. There were tears in all her eyes and bruises on her skin. 

One of her hands was bunched up in the corpse’s hair, and there was blood all over the ground. She remembered the sensation of bone slamming against wood, her nails scrabbling against her skin, and desperate screaming. 

She blinked, spots dancing in front of her eyes. No, not spots. Faint trails of light danced in the blood on the floor and glistened in the symbols burnt into her—no not her, not her, the muggle’s flesh. 

She looked around, the air in the room hazy with multicolor fog. The walls shimmered like oil floating on the surface of a cauldron and a bar of crisp white and blue burnt like fire on the ground beside her.

She blinked again and the lights faded to nearly nothing. She stared down at the bar of fire and found her wand rocking back and forth on the floor, shimmering with an inner light she’d never noticed before.

It…worked? It worked! Of course it worked! How could she have possibly doubted herself? How could she have thought she would fail? Dorea leaned to the side, peering at her wand and the light within. Slowly, it coalesced into that same bar of fire, but translucent enough that she could see the wood beneath it. 

She blinked and all the lights vanished, but she was sure now she hadn’t just imagined it. The muggle had had magesight, visual magesight (the best kind!), and now she did too! She hadn’t been certain the muggle would have any gift, but of course she had! There was no way she would have failed at such a trivial task!

Dorea giggled, throwing her head back as a torrent of painless laughter poured endlessly from her lips and vanished against Tipsey’s sound barrier. The athame still clutched in her hand slid effortlessly from flesh drained of all vitality, blood slipping off from goblin silver like rain off a duck’s back.

Cassiopia Black who? Albus Dumbledore who? Gellert Grindelwald who? Why the hell was she worried about any of them! She was Dorea Andromeda Black! There was nothing, nothing, she couldn’t do!

Dorea laughed and laughed, blood splattered across her naked flesh and her eyes wide and wild. Sunlight crawled along her arms and burned in her eyes, her magic pressing against the outside world in time with her heartbeat. 

She was going to slaughter Grindelwald, crush him into the earth and burn away the stain he represented. She’d show everyone who was the greatest Black of their generation. And if Uncle Sirius, the Lord Black, still wanted her to marry Charlus Potter? She’d make him regret dealing with her in bad faith.