"Devil—you are a devil straight from hell!"
In the villa's spacious living room—every corner, every detail was thrown into merciless clarity by the blazing crystal chandeliers that hung from the high ceiling—a middle-aged woman collapsed onto a vast sofa made of expensive Zambian bloodwood and screamed in despair.
At her feet, scattered across the Persian rug, lay several bodies—servants she had employed for many years, people she had known by name, whose families she had met. The cook who had worked for her family for a decade. The young maid who had just gotten engaged. The elderly gardener who had tended her roses.
And now, along with her beloved Afghan hound that had slept at the foot of her bed every night, they had all been reduced to corpses by this sudden, inexplicable intruder.
No blade had been used. No gun was fired.
The hunched, broad-shouldered old woman standing before her—hideous in appearance, with sharp, jagged teeth that protruded from her mouth at odd angles—had done nothing more than discharge a few beams of sickly green light from the bone-white staff she held, chilling and utterly forbidding, in her hand.
Then they had all simply fallen, their eyes going blank, their bodies hitting the floor like puppets with cut strings.
"God will surely punish you for this wickedness!" the woman on the sofa wailed, her voice was breaking.
"Oh? God, you say?" The hunchbacked witch let out a raspy, cruel laugh that sounded like metal scraping stone.
"God can't judge me, you laughable little wretch. If you want to keep that worthless little life of yours for even a few more minutes, you'd better bring out every last thing of value in this house—now. Jewelry, cash, everything."
The woman on the sofa slowly propped herself up with trembling arms, her gaze was lingering over the bodies sprawled across her floor. When she turned back to face the hunched figure, her grey-green eyes burned with fury that temporarily overcame her terror.
"How absurd. Does even a devil from hell need money?" She forced a bitter laugh. "I have nothing to give you. And even if God cannot judge you—the police will arrest you. They will find you."
"The police?" The witch seemed genuinely amused by this threat.
She parted her cracked lips, and her pointed teeth clicked together with a dry, rhythmic sound like knocking bones.
"Ah, you mean the Aurors—well, the Muggle sort. Oh, the Aurors in my world have more than enough on their hands right now, I assure you. Between dealing with Dumbledore and Watson and the Dark Lord's return, they'll be kept quite busy for years to come."
She spread her arms wide in a gesture of triumph, her eyes were half-lidded with pleasure, like a convict savoring the first breath of open air after a long sentence in prison.
"Magnificent. All of this freedom—a gift from the Dark Lord's return. No more lurking about in shadows, no more risking everything on those wretched, demeaning little errands just to survive. And Muggles like you have wealth beyond measure, ripe for the taking."
Aurors. Dumbledore. Watson. The Dark Lord.
Not a single word the witch had uttered made any sense to the woman. These terms meant nothing to her. She could only answer with the pure hatred burning in her eyes.
"Compared to the vermin I've already butchered tonight in other houses, I suppose you do show a little spine and courage,"
The witch's gaze dropped, and the grotesque furrows and wrinkles of her face made her twisted smile all the more monstrous and inhuman.
"But in sheer stupidity—you're no different from all those others who tried to resist even after watching everyone around them die."
She murmured softly as she raised her arm, savoring the way the woman's expression slowly petrified with dread and understanding.
"CRUCIO!"
A shrill shriek of laughter from the witch and a scream that tore through flesh and bone erupted simultaneously through the walls of the house, the sounds were so loud they startled a cluster of ravens flying above in the night sky, sending them scattering.
The bright green light flashed once more through the windows—and then silence fell, for just a single heartbeat. Then a violent explosion tore through the stillness of the wealthy neighborhood.
Roaring orange fire appeared first from the kitchen, consuming curtains and furniture. Within mere moments it had spread and consumed the entire villa, flames were beginning to shooting up through the roof.
A Muggle neighbor living on the other side of the quiet garden estate heard the commotion and stepped outside in his bathrobe. The house burned like a massive torch against the dark sky, flames were probably visible for miles.
He stood frozen for several seconds in shock before bolting back inside to call for help.
Twenty minutes later, fire engines with their sirens wailing and police cars with flashing lights came rolling into the normally quiet, tree-lined estate where nothing ever happened.
But the one who had set it all in motion was long gone by then.
Yorkshire, Upper Flagley
The moonlight shivered and rippled like disturbed water, sending faint ripples across the darkness. The hunchbacked witch appeared suddenly at the foot of a small hill on the outskirts of town, where sparse white birch trees grew in scattered clusters.
A night breeze stirred through the leaves with a sound like whispered warnings. At the hilltop, a lopsided structure—several wooden cabins stacked and joined together at awkward angles loomed through the trees, half-visible in the moonlight, half-swallowed by deep shadow.
The evening's heavy rain had left the narrow path up the hill treacherous and slippery with mud. The witch picked her way up carefully, cursing steadily under her breath about the weather and the isolation and everything else.
Before the crooked house, a small patch of ground had been cleared and planted with rare magical herbs that glowed faintly in the darkness.
The witch paused at the garden's edge and peered tensely over the plot, her eyes were darting about nervously—once, twice, checking for intruders—then let her gaze trail along the planted beds until it reached the crooked front door.
No footprints in the fresh mud besides her own. The trap-spells and alarm enchantments she had carefully laid remained undisturbed and active. The house stood completely dark with no lights visible. Her "little darlings kept inside had not stirred or raised any alarm.
The witch allowed herself a small exhale of relief and straightened her hunched back slightly, easing the tension in her shoulders.
Those of her kind accumulated enemies as a matter of course over the years. And while the Ministry of Magic was certainly dangerous with its Aurors, it was the personal retribution brought by old grudges and scores that needed settling—the vengeance of those they had wronged in the past—that truly kept her constantly on her guard.
She stepped to the door and pointed her wand down at her feet. The mud and rainwater clinging to her boots vanished instantly, banished by magic.
THUD—
She knocked the wand sharply against the door. The heavy iron chain looped through the door-ring stirred suddenly to life like a waking serpent, uncoiling itself with a soft metallic jangle.
CREAK
The aged hinges ground out a sharp, deeply unpleasant note as the door swung slowly open—and a wave of darkness, thick and deeply familiar like an old friend, washed over her like a warm welcome home.
SCRAPE—
She stepped inside over the threshold. The oil-gas lanterns dangling from the rotting ceiling by rusted chains ignited on their own in response to her presence, casting a dim, sickly amber glow across the cluttered interior.
On the wooden dining table downstairs, sitting in plain view, a chipped plate held a lump of deep-green, blood-slicked liver—origin unknown, perhaps from some magical creature she'd killed—already thoroughly colonized by fat white maggots that writhed across its surface.
The witch glanced at it as she passed through the room, clucked her tongue with a twinge of regret at the waste, then looked down at the bulging bundle hidden beneath her coarse robe—tonight's stolen treasures—and allowed herself a satisfied smile before climbing the rickety stairs to her second-floor laboratory.
"He-he-heh—my precious darlings, you must be absolutely famished after being left alone all evening. Oh, don't be frightened now. Mama's here to look after you properly."
The witch cackled softly to herself, her voice was high and unnatural in a way that would raise the hair on the back of anyone's neck who heard it.
The oil-gas lamps on the second floor lit up automatically in response to her arrival. Directly across from the top of the staircase stood an enormous fish tank, easily six feet tall and eight feet wide, its thick glass etched with intricate carved magical runes that glowed faintly.
But what swam inside it was not fish or any natural creature.
Several masses of pure black smoke drifted within the tank—shifting and dissolving and reforming like storm clouds in a high wind, formless and utterly unnameable, save for a few points of vivid scarlet light so bright they were impossible to look away from once noticed.
The witch trotted eagerly to the tank and pressed her twisted, wrinkled face close to the cold glass, her breath was fogging the surface.
Two seconds later, her expression curdled with confusion and alarm.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Her "darlings" would ordinarily shriek with apparent delight when they sensed her presence. But now they huddled pressed together in the far corner of the tank, cringing away—as if in terrible fear of something in the room.
There was someone else here.
The witch spun around. Her gaze snapped immediately to the shabby sofa on the other side of the cluttered room, and her teeth clenched the moment she saw who sat there calmly.
"Fawley—and Viper!" she shrieked.
Her voice shot up to a razor's edge of fury and fear. "Weren't you supposed to be dead?!"
"Where did that rumor come from?"
From behind a warped, spiraling mask that covered his entire face came an old, hoarse voice, lazily slow and amused.
FLICKER—FLICKER.
The oil-gas lamps guttered and dimmed as the witch's shriek sliced through the air.
"You've broken the code, Fawley—you've poisoned your own name out there in the underworld! I'll tell the entire wizarding criminal network what you've—"
"Don't screech like that, Wrenly," the masked figure interrupted calmly.
Viper rose slowly to his feet from the sofa.
"Have some dignity."
"We have no deep quarrel between us—none at all, Viper!" the witch protested desperately.
The moment he stood to his full height, the witch's whole demeanor shifted.
"Just minor friction over the years—hardly worth a second thought or remembering. The Dark Lord is back now and active. There're gold galleons to be had everywhere, opportunities for all of us. We'd be fools to kill each other over nothing when we could be getting rich!"
"Did we have some conflict in the past?"
Viper paused, tilting his masked head in thought as though trying to recall. After a brief silence, he abandoned the effort and gave a slight shake of his head.
"Never mind. I can't remember the details. This isn't about any of that old business anyway."
THUNK—
She'd known it then. He was here for revenge for something, even if he couldn't remember what.
Hatred flared behind the witch's eyes and vanished just as quickly. She wrenched herself backward two paces, rolled around with surprising agility, and brought her staff swinging down on the fish tank with all her considerable force.
CRACK!
A sound like a thunderclap shook the entire rickety old house, rattling every window—and then a terrible screaming, an inhuman roaring, erupted from within the shattered tank.
The black masses that had been confined in the tank swelled instantly to dozens of times their original size, howling through the room like a hurricane of malice.
"Kill them—kill them both!"
A frantic shriek rang out through the raging storm of darkness. The scarlet pinpoints flickering through the chaos stuttered for a moment—then erupted into complete frenzy.
The black cloud surged around the witch herself like a cocoon, enveloping her completely.
Within the violent vortex of darkness, something like thousands of iron shards seemed suspended in the air—grinding and stripping, layer by layer, peeling her flesh away from her bones.
In the space of only a dozen seconds, before the eyes of Viper and Fawley, what remained was a bare skeleton, gleaming white in the lamplight.
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