A crescent moon climbed slowly into the center of the night sky like a silver sickle being drawn across black velvet, then drifted westward toward the distant horizon.
The night had passed its midpoint hours ago, yet the surging dark sea of shadows could claim no further ground over Malfoy Manor—for something far more malevolent than ordinary darkness had already taken root here, spreading through the grounds like a cancer.
Third floor, end of the hall.
A south-facing bedroom with tall windows.
Cliodna sat against the headboard in a simple white nightgown that left her shoulders bare, her posture was rigid and still. She turned her face to the side, gazing in complete silence at the wisps of cloud drifting past her window through the night sky, moving with the high winds she could not feel from inside.
During her days imprisoned in Azkaban, she had often become just like this—a frozen statue, barely breathing—staring through the cell's narrow slit of a window at the small patch of sky above.
She was out of Azkaban now. But Malfoy Manor was, in the end, nothing more than another prison with better accommodations and softer sheets. The walls were merely more elegant.
Yes. She was under house arrest, confined to this room.
She had always known that Voldemort was not a magnanimous man, not someone who forgave slights.
In those years when he had been reduced to near-nothing, less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost, he had been forced by necessity to tolerate her insolence and resistance. But once he reclaimed his physical body and power, the time for reckoning had inevitably come.
And Voldemort would not forget— the small act of sabotage she had performed at his most crucial resurrection ritual in that graveyard.
When she had been released from Azkaban during the breakout, she had prepared herself mentally for the worst possible outcome—that Voldemort would simply kill her immediately.
Being imprisoned again was, in the end, the best outcome she could have hoped for under the circumstances.
The loss of bodily freedom did not make her particularly angry. She had endured worse in Azkaban. It was the loss of direction—the loss of purpose and meaning—that truly frightened her.
Her people had already been arranged by her in the Forbidden Forest before her capture. The centaurs would look after them, provide shelter and protection, and Bryan Watson was not entirely unaware of the situation either.
With them there watching over, even if the Church somehow caught wind of something and sent investigators, they would not dare to press deep into the forest itself. The centaurs would not allow it.
The Druids would rest and slowly recover their strength there in the ancient forest. They would live well enough. Even without her, no great trouble would arise for them.
And the hatred toward the Church—
Cliodna slowly raised her left hand from where it rested on the blanket, spread her long fingers that seemed to glow faintly in the moonlight, and reached toward the faint starlight scattered like diamond dust across the black sky visible through her window.
She did not know precisely when it had happened, but the burning hatred in her heart had grown noticeably less fierce over these weeks and months.
The wizarding world was far more severed and isolated from the Muggle world than she had ever imagined before living among wizards. Most wizards here lived at a slow, leisurely pace, untouched by the frantic rushing of modern life.
And that slowness made one languid.
Languor brought a kind of surrender. It made one wish only to sink into stillness, to belong somewhere, and to stop wanting anything else or fighting against the current.
Perhaps... from here on, becoming a bird locked inside a gilded cage was not such a terrible choice after all.
Cliodna's slender fingers traced idle patterns through the air before her, as though she were brushing the surface of still water and watching the ripples spread.
HFF—
A gentle breath unfurled suddenly into wisps of white vapor in the dimness of the room, visible even in the warm summer night. A bitter, unnatural cold swept in from all sides like a wave, encircling the bedroom and dropping the temperature by twenty degrees in an instant.
"Entering a lady's chamber without permission or invitation is not the behavior of a gentleman—" Cliodna said calmly. Her hand drifted slowly down from the air. She turned her face toward the closed door looking unsurprised.
"Particularly for someone of your distinguished lineage, heir to the noble blood of Slytherin."
Voldemort stood beyond the doorway in the darkness of the hallway; his body was barely visible. His black robes seemed woven from smoke itself—the hem coiling with tendrils of dark vapor that moved independently.
In the room's only light, the thin glow of starlight and moonbeam filtering through the window, the red of his serpentine eyes burned with startling brightness like hot coals in shadow.
The two of them looked at each other across the dark space between them.
Voldemort's narrow nostrils flared slightly. He studied Cliodna with cold, flat eyes that showed no warmth or humanity, and the ghost of a killing impulse stirred in his gaze.
Because he had detected no fear. No reverence or submission. Not even a trace of the terror he was accustomed to stirring.
"You ought to be grateful to me—"
Voldemort said, his high voice was icy.
"Grateful for my generosity in choosing not to punish your little schemes and sabotage as they deserved."
Cliodna said nothing in response.
She had no interest in explaining herself or defending her actions. There was nothing to explain that would matter to him.
"I came to ask about one thing specifically," Voldemort continued.
Her silence—that quiet, resistant silence that refused to acknowledge his power—made his voice grow colder still, though his face remained expressionless. He restrained the killing urge rising in him like bile and raised his right arm, sweeping back the wide sleeve of his robe with a single gesture.
A peculiar staff appeared suddenly in the room from within his robes.
It was fashioned in the form of two serpents, vividly lifelike in every detail, coiled around each other in a snarling embrace. The wooden staff was wreathed in a nauseating grey-silver mist like the current of a deep-sea whirlpool, and if one stared at it too long, it felt as though one's very soul might be drawn down into those swirling depths and swallowed whole into nothingness.
Though the eyes of both serpents were tightly shut, something far more unsettling was apparent on closer inspection: the narrow slits of their nostrils rose and fell in the faintest rhythm, as though they breathed, as though they were somehow alive.
The instant Cliodna's gaze touched the Twin Serpent Staff, her eyes recoiled as though she had been shocked, and she looked instead directly into Voldemort's burning red eyes.
"I cannot control it,"
The fury in Voldemort's voice was barely leashed.
"Since the moment you placed it in my hands, I have been unable to cast a single spell with it. I had assumed initially that was a consequence of having no physical body at the time, that it required flesh to channel magic. But now, even with my body fully restored and my power returned, it still does not respond to me in any way."
He turned his wrathful gaze upon the legendary staff lying dormant and useless in his pale hand.
"If it chose to submit to me of its own will as you claimed, why does it refuse to answer my commands?"
"I believe you may have misunderstood something, Lord Voldemort—"
Cliodna spoke calmly.
"The Twin Serpent Staff never told me directly that it wished to submit to you. What I told you was that the impression I received from it—was that it required me to place it specifically in your hands.
In truth, I found that command equally puzzling at the time. In all the ancient texts of our Druidic tradition, the Staff belongs to a far older age—to Morgan le Fay, the great leader of the ancient Druids. It has never had any connection to wizardkind or wizard magic."
She paused, then continued.
"Perhaps only a Druid who holds the natural world in deep reverence can earn its recognition and awaken its power—only such a person would be worthy of wielding it."
"Reverence for the natural world?" Voldemort repeated mockingly.
Voldemort was amused by the statement. His mouth split into a mocking smile.
"I have never encountered anything as wicked as that thing in all my years of studying dark magic. Perhaps for many centuries now, your people have been worshipping in entirely the wrong direction."
This observation, Cliodna could not honestly refute.
In the many centuries before the Staff was recovered from the ruins of Avalon, countless generations of Druidic priests had generally believed that it was some dark and malevolent force—some demon or ancient evil—that had destroyed the Isle of Avalon completely, and that the Twin Serpent Staff had been sealed there specifically to suppress whatever terrible thing lurked within those ruins.
It was not until she had actually taken hold of it herself—until she had directly sensed the withering, world-devouring evil contained within the wood—that she had understood the terrible truth.
The Staff itself had been the one suppressed all along. It was the source of the corruption, not the guard against it.
Voldemort was not wrong in his assessment. It was, in every way, contrary to everything the Druids held sacred about nature and balance.
Seeing Cliodna fall silent again, unable to argue, Voldemort withdrew the Twin Serpent Staff back into his robes with a sharp movement.
He could sense that she was not lying to him. As for why he was unable to wield it despite possessing it—she genuinely did not know the answer.
If that was the case, there was nothing more to discuss with this woman.
"There is one thing I must warn you of—"
Just as Voldemort turned to leave the room, Cliodna spoke again—without looking at him this time.
She turned instead toward the window, her gaze settling on the grey mist that drifted through the vast grounds of the manor far below, moving without any wind to push it, coiling through the air like something alive, feeding parasitically on the faint vitality of every living thing it touched.
"If you allow the Twin Serpent Staff to remain within this estate indefinitely, I fear that in time, there will be no one left alive here. Your followers will all perish."
The vision rose unconsciously in her mind: Avalon as she had found it, with all its life stripped away completely, a landscape of absolute ruin and finality where nothing grew. Cliodna's voice was quiet and cold with certainty.
"That is my own concern, not yours,"
A flash of something passed through Voldemort's crimson eyes. He said this without any expression on his inhuman face, then passed straight through the solid wall like smoke and was gone into the night.
'His own concern...'
The room settled back into silence once Voldemort's presence departed. Cliodna's brow furrowed faintly, and she sat for a long time in the dark, thinking.
Dawn broke through the darkness hours later, and a new day arrived with golden light.
Compared to Malfoy Manor with its spreading corruption and death, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place had never in its entire existence shown such signs of vibrant life and energy.
Hermione came bounding enthusiastically up the creaking stairs and shoved open Harry and Ron's bedroom door without any ceremony at all, trampling carelessly across the newspaper-scattered floor to where the two boys sat bolt upright in their beds, clutching their sheets in alarm at the sudden intrusion, and announced with gleeful delight that made her eyes shine:
"Get up, Harry, Ron—Hogwarts has sent our summer homework!"
July had arrived.
The summer holiday had officially begun.
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