He then flushed angrily, taking a threatening step toward her.
"You DARE—?"
"I SURE DO!" Heri hollered, kicking her feet ineffectively. "Do you expect me to take you seriously when you've got a bloody baby on your hip? Think again, Rumpelstiltskin!"
An angry hissing rent the air, sending a chill up Heri's spine. The bundle in Blondie's arms writhed.
"Barty, silence the girl! And get on with it!"
O-kay, then. Definitely not a baby.
'Barty' pried her mouth open and shoved a wad of cloth in before he set the bundled hellspawn down and disappeared out of her view.
Heri shrieked angrily around the cloth, but it did a good job of muffling any noise she made. Oh, she was going to hurt him!
He then came back within Heri's range of vision, pushing a stone cauldron to the foot of the grave. It was full of what seemed to be water — Heri could hear it slopping around — and it was larger than any cauldron she had ever used; a great stone belly large enough for a full-grown man to sit in.
The Hell? Was he going to try to cook and eat her?
The thing inside the bundle of robes on the ground was stirring more persistently, as though it was trying to free itself. The dead-man-walking was busying himself at the bottom of the cauldron with a wand. Suddenly there were crackling flames beneath it.
The liquid in the cauldron began to heat at an incredible rate. The surface began not only to bubble but to send out fiery sparks, as though it were on fire. The steam was thickening, blurring the outline of Barty tending the fire.
The movements beneath the robes became more agitated. Heri heard the revolting voice of the not-baby again.
"Hurry!"
The surface of the water was alight with sparks now. It might have been encrusted with diamonds.
"It is ready, Master."
"Now . . ."
Barty pulled open the robes on the ground, revealing what was inside them, and Heri let out a screech that was strangled in the wad of material blocking her mouth.
It was as though someone had flipped over a stone and revealed the ugly and slimy parasitic creature that lived underneath — but worse, a hundred times worse. The thing Barty had been carrying had the rough shape of a crouched toddler, except there had never been anything less like a child. It was hairless and scaly-looking, a dark, raw, reddish black as if a pregnant reptile had died and its belly had split open from decay to reveal its rotting stillborn fetus. The arms and legs were thin and feeble, and its face — no child alive ever had a face like that — flat and snakelike, with gleaming red eyes.
She knew those wicked eyes.
Voldemort.
Abomination! Monstrosity! Heri couldn't help but writhe in utter disgust. It was an obscene crime against nature, the anathema of the sanctity of life, an unforgivable corruption of a child's body! She didn't want to think about what must have happened to the vessel for that horrible fiend to assume such a form.
Despite its gut-wrenching appearance and origins, Voldemort's vessel appeared to be entirely helpless; it raised its thin arms, put them around Barty's neck, and allowed Barty to lift it. How the man could even bear the touch was beyond her. Barty then carried it to the cauldron and lowered the creature in; there was a hiss, and it vanished below the surface; Heri heard its frail body hit the bottom with a soft thud.
Bart began adding other ingredients to the mangled-fetus soup, tossing in a dry femur bone and even his own hand as he chanted for the cauldron: "Bone of the father, unknowingly given, you will renew your son;/Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will revive your master;/Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will resurrect your foe."
At 'blood of the enemy', Barty took out a phial of fresh blood from his robe and uncorked it.
Heri stiffened in realisation. Vision going red with fury, she shot a tendril out to swat the phial to the ground before Barty could pour it in. Like Hell she was going to let any part of herself be used in some disgusting ritual, one to re-body Voldemort to boot! Seven more tendrils sprang out, undoing the ropes around her and pulling her up as the idiot cried out in horror at the loss of her blood.
"WHAT THE —?"
But Heri was already upon him, tendrils latching onto him and restraining his movement. He managed a Cutting Curse that sliced off an appendage that had gone for his wand hand, but that hand was soon captured as well, being broken in the process. She heaved him up and then brought him back down to smack his head against the ground, breaking his nose and knocking him unconscious.
Heri hissed at the pain of losing one of her tendrils, but beyond the shortened limb being sucked back in to be replaced with another, she suffered no setback from it. It stung in the way a banged and skinned knee would, but thankfully, they didn't have enough physicality to sustain greater damage.
She looked down to observed her severed limb. It was leaking a strange golden fluid and thrashing about in the way a lopped off octopus tentacle would, but already it was dissipating. As she watched, it disassembled into smoke and faded away.
Their use complete, the other tendrils were pulled back in.
Eyes flicking up again, Heri snarled at the cauldron. She dug into her hip pouch that had miraculously not been taken from her and pulled out her slingshot. She was taking no chances when it came to this necromantic bullocks. She unsheathed the venomous end and held it at the ready.
Holding back her bile, Heri gave the enormous cauldron a mighty shove, spilling the loathsome contents out onto the sodden mud. Bone, blood, dismembered hand, squalling homunculus and all came pouring out, staining the earth and fouling the air with vomit-inducing reek.
----------------
If you want advanced chapters ahead from here, you can find it at.
P@treon/Playerfanfic
🎁 Get 50% OFF with promo code: A33C7
expires on August 31, 2026.