Chapter 30: Basilisk Hunt. Part 2. Evolution
The Chamber of Secrets opened into a dim, fairly spacious room lit in a greenish swamp-light, with rows of snake statues standing either side of a stone path. Severus looked around with mild interest, one hand resting on the sword's hilt.
Even with the perception-enhancing spell running, he could not pinpoint the basilisk's exact location. The feeling of being watched pricked at him, just faintly.
Hidden in the snake's mouth.
The moment the words surfaced in his memory, he stopped, turned, walked back to the start of the path, and began checking the statues' mouths one by one.
After nearly ten minutes he reached the last with quiet disappointment and found himself standing in front of a carved stone face: a man with a long beard and matching long hair, set into a massive rock and ringed by a thin sheet of water. The mouth was unnaturally wide, which was suspicious enough that Severus stayed ten metres back.
"That is where it nests."
"Be careful."
"Oh. So you have forgiven me already?"
"If you die, who feeds me and talks to me?"
"A compelling argument." Under Nagini's puzzled look, a fireball formed in his hand.
BOOM.
Less than a second later a furious hiss tore through the air, nearly enough to knock Nagini senseless. Severus felt nothing except a faint, rising interest. The basilisk did not make him wait: it shot from the wreckage like an arrow, jaws wide, and crossed the distance between them in a heartbeat. But he had already cast a speeding charm on himself and, with a light gust of wind, stepped aside without any particular effort, finally getting a proper look at it.
Fifteen metres long. Poisonous green, as thick as a load-bearing pillar. Its yellow eyes with their vertical pupils radiated something physically crushing, and its fangs dripped venom that melted the stone floor where it landed. Any reasonable person would have felt real horror.
"Is that all?" Severus stared directly into its eyes, a trace of irritation in his voice. "Of all the. Are you mocking me? And this is a basilisk? At this rate, a chicken could be called a phoenix."
Even the creature seemed thrown. It blinked at him, clearly trying to work out why he was not turning to stone and why he appeared to be insulting it. A basilisk was intelligent. It understood perfectly well when it was being disrespected, and that understanding reignited its fury. With a roar that was more hiss than anything else, it lunged again. Again he moved aside without much trouble. Then, before he had time to reset, its tail whipped toward his face.
He did not try to block it. Blocking that tail would have been idiotic: he would have been sent flying like a piece of parchment in a gale. Instead, he redirected it. He braced on his right leg and dipped the sword just enough for the tail to ride along the flat of the blade and slam into the stone floor beneath him, forcing him back a couple of metres.
The snake went still again. Severus did not waste it: he leapt onto its body and carved several deep wounds into the tough hide. Blood poured freely. The basilisk writhed with fury, twisting sharply to strike him, but he was already off its back, leaving one more wound as he cleared it.
He landed on the stone and stood there, studying it.
Tough hide. It traded size for this: armour and poison instead of raw muscle. The speed went up, the brute strength went down, but that venom makes up for it almost entirely. I made a mistake at the start, judging by appearance. He looked up at the enormous snake bearing down on him and smiled slightly, and the runes on the blade lit up. "All right. I have measured us both well enough. Consider this my apology for underestimating you."
The jaws snapped shut on the precise spot where he had been standing. The basilisk blinked in confusion.
Hesssss?
Then it hissed in pain as countless wounds opened across its body simultaneously, and it began to writhe and thrash while blood spread further and further across the floor.
From a distance, Severus watched the sword slowly begin to come apart.
"Two seconds, and I used the simplest runework. Unfortunate. I am going to be looking for a decent sword for a long time." He pressed one hand to his lower back with a quiet grimace. "And my back is going to ache for a week." He watched the basilisk's movements grow slower, its hissing quieter. "I am sorry for the pain. But I need you alive."
Ten minutes later the creature finally stopped moving, barely clinging on from blood loss.
"I have never enjoyed hurting animals," Severus said, reaching out to touch the basilisk's forehead and pressing a small seal there. "Stop hiding. Treatment time." He tapped Nagini on the head as she peered from under his collar, then withdrew his hand from the basilisk.
"With only a sword, you defeated something like that." Nagini stared at him. "Are you actually human?"
"Of course I am. The difference is that unlike most wizards, who only develop their magic, I have also trained my body and learned the sword. When you are human again, I can teach you."
She had been about to agree, but then she thought about the training she had watched him go through and the sheer weight of what he put himself through, and her enthusiasm evaporated. Before she could answer, his next action made her freeze entirely, and then horror came into her eyes and she buried herself under his clothes as blood ran freely down the indifferent basilisk's face.
"Why are you doing that?!"
"For you. You will have to eat them."
"I am not eating its eyes."
"You will."
"I will not."
"You will."
"I will not!"
"You will, you will," Severus sang, in a tone that was somehow far too gentle, and Nagini shuddered harder. She stared out at his smiling, blood-smeared face with genuine horror.
"NOOO."
An hour later, two snakes lay on the floor. The first had been reduced to a skeleton over the course of that hour, while the second looked like an overinflated balloon, eyes squeezed tightly shut, a star-shaped pattern gleaming on her forehead.
"Rest in peace, basilisk. I will not forget what you gave." Severus pressed his palms together for a moment. Then he tossed the skeleton into his wallet and turned to Nagini. "The evolution is nearly complete. That is the good news." He stepped closer, cut his finger, and let blood fall onto the seal.
In the next moment she was swallowed by bright light, accompanied by a sound like something cracking under pressure. It lasted a minute, and when the light faded, a ten-metre snake lay before him, half the basilisk's thickness. Her colouring had changed too: the greenish-brown was gone, replaced by pale green with hints of brighter yellow and green running through it.
"You should no longer be in danger of memory loss, though your snake instincts have also intensified. I just hope I can still locate the last three ingredients." He extended his hand with a warm smile, and she lowered her head into it, which surprised him. "Congratulations. Successful evolution."
"Thank you. But I have only gotten larger, and there is this strange feeling." She paused. "Why can I sense your emotions?"
Basilisks could live several thousand years with ease, and through the absorbed bloodline Nagini's lifespan had increased by the same order of magnitude. Her voice was gentler now, and sounded younger, as though years had been quietly returned to her.
"Do you know what a familiar is?"
"I have never heard the term."
"A familiar is a creature that enters into a contract with a wizard. A connection forms between them as a result."
"A connection?"
"I can understand you without the artefact, feel your emotions, and know where you are even if you went to the other side of the world. You can do the same." He felt her confusion through the link clearly and smiled. "Do not worry. You can cancel it at any time."
Only then did a wave of discontent come through.
"I see. Convenient for you, naturally, since you will not have to risk carrying that artefact around." She narrowed her eyes. "But why can I not feel your emotions?"
"I closed my mind."
"So you can read mine, but I cannot read yours?!"
"It is not that I do not trust you. I am simply not accustomed to showing my emotions to other people. Over the past three months you should have understood that I have never performed anything with you, and I am not going to start." Before his eyes, Nagini shrank back to her usual size.
"All right." The honesty of it made her feel oddly exposed, and she slipped quickly into his sleeve to hide, as though she had forgotten about the link entirely.
"Good. Now there is only." He looked up at the half-ruined stone face the basilisk had crawled out of and began clearing the debris.
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