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Tom's short breaths softened, lengthening as his heart rate calmed. Shame trickled through him, as sharp and senseless as a winter wind in mid-summer. Such a foolish thing. He smothered the welling shame beneath utter calm. There is no shame in pleasure.
Amidst the burning incense and metallic tang of blood, a sweet scent wafted through the room. The others agree, I see.
Strands of light brown hair veiled her face when Andromeda raised her head. Heat sparked deep down, flickering around his calm shroud as she licked her lips.
No distractions. Fixing the sight of shattered stones strewn across the streets of London in his mind's eye, Tom swept the hair back out of her face. "That will do, my love."
Only when her footsteps faded did he look around. Bodies sprawled across the carpet, or else were draped over leather sofas stitched with patterns done in varied shades of green.
Beyond the tangled knots of flesh, flames rose up above a pair of blood-soaked robes resting in the brazier. A small smile tugged at the corners of his lips as blood sizzled, then faded like dawn shadows before the rising sun.
A gentle yank on his robes attracted his attention. "My lord," Bellatrix Lestrange whispered. "Is it finished?"
Tom reached down to where she knelt, running long fingers through her sweat-soaked curls. It was remarkable how alike she and her sister looked. It's a shame only one kept her wits.
Bellatrix was sharp, but not like a knife. A knife can be carefully directed. She was more like one of those muggle chainsaws — loud, brutal, and unruly. Useful, but still a shame.
The tugging on his robes grew more insistent. "My lord?"
Tom flicked his fingers through her hair and she shuddered, leaning into his touch. Across the room, the flames blackened, surging up inside the brazier and consuming the silken robes.
"Now it is done," he whispered. A final caress sent Bella rushing back, leaving a crimson handprint pressed into the carpet between Tom's feet. "Our offering has been accepted."
Magnus Rosier disentangled himself from a blonde-haired daughter of House Fawley. "So the plans go forward?" he asked.
"The Morrigan has spoken." All noise was snuffed out like a single spark beneath a steel-toed boot, all but the crackling of that heatless fire. "She has deemed our cause just, and so it begins."
"So we're really doing it?" Cantankerus
Nott asked. "We're really going against the order?"
Anger reared inside his chest, licking hot tongues up his throat. Its heat must have seeped into his stare, for Nott shrank back into his shadowed corner. So loud when his words are smoke, but so quiet when they might start fires.
"You understand why we must do this?" Scarcely a whisper left Tom's lips, but each word echoed through the room like he had shouted. "You understand what will happen if we do nothing?"
Walden Macnair squeezed a wench so hard against his chest, her face screwed up in pain. "The muggle filth will win," he spat.
"If we do nothing, magic itself will die." The knights faded back as Tom strode through their ranks and placed his back against the brazier.
Grim eyes watched him as he produced his wand and gave it a swish and flick. An unoccupied sofa rose some three feet off the ground and hovered there.
"Once there was no need for wands or gestures," Tom said. "Once the gods gave us favour and magic was a living thing that served all who believed."
Tom felt his lips curl into a foul shape. "Then the Romans came and burnt those bridges. Our gods retreated as we let invaders seize their temples and uproot their woods." Unrest slithered through his ranks, whispering like a gentle breeze through bare branches. "The taint spread then; filth who lacked the finery our ways demand."
Darren Mulciber spat a wine-tinged glob of saliva onto the carpet at his feet. "Muggles."
"Yes," Tom hissed. "Once they were godless swine who hid only in the deepest shadows, but soon they seized their chance and struck. They know nothing but decay, and it was always their curse to fear anyone above them."
Tom twirled his wand between long, pale fingers. "It was Merlin who popularized things like wands and gestures." Heads leant forward into the firelight. "I find our reverence of him strange. It's true he was a druid who fought for magic and its salvation — but he lost. These standardizations we still adhere to were not some laudable achievement; they were an admission of defeat."
"Fitting the order takes his name," Marcel Zabini jeered.
Tom nurtured the forlorn shadow of a smile. "Merlin meant well, for all his flaws."
"And the-the order?" one of the new witches asked.
Tom's smile sharpened until it could have sliced through stones. "The order cares only for power."
Many of those same heads that had leant forward at the mention of Merlin now shrank back. They fear the empire now as much as they ever have. That fear needed to be stripped away.
"They make Merlin's old mistakes," Tom continued. "Merlin failed, not because of numbers or a lack of strength, but because he wanted everyone to live in his perfect world.
"It was a naive error, but an honest one." The grip he held around his wand grew vice-like. "The order makes the same mistake, but they do so knowingly."
"Bastards!" someone called near the room's rear wall.
Tom waved a hand, dragging wry amusement through the searing pit of anger bubbling deep down and up into his voice. "Who can blame them? Would you want the old gods back if their return would mean your undoing?" The sharp smile stabbed back onto his lips. "Why dispose of all your slaves and grant your subjects power beyond imagination? That would hardly fit their greater good, now would it?"
Tom recalled the jeering of long dead orphans and conjured up his father's face. Beads of frost curled up from the fibres around his feet, then crept across the carpet. "We will cut away that filth and bring the old gods back. So has it been foretold and so will we make it!"
"SO WILL WE MAKE IT!" the crowd called back.
Tom rolled up his sleeve and pressed his pale forefinger against the black skull burned into his skin. Pain lanced up his arm — beautiful pain that writhed, tingling, in his neck and was mirrored on every face around him.
Tom stepped into total dark, then out onto a cobbled road lit by rows of street lamps.
Bitter winds whipped his robes around him and slashed across his skin, but he ignored them and focused on the low-roofed building nestled behind a wrought-iron gate looming up ahead. Two dozen shadows closed ranks around him, their hoods pulled up against the cold.
Tom raised his wand. "Let us ease the chill."
Crimson fire ate through the gate like boiling water through soft snow. A sharp, sulphurous scent joined spiralling smoke in drifting up out of the melted mound.
The flames lengthened and slithered around the wards, their cackling like a dementor's rasp as the facility's defences crumbled.
His druids hurried through the melted gates. Soon, the stab of shrill screams through still night air was sharper than the harshest wind. Already he could hear Bella's mad laughter ringing like high cords against the cacophonous din of noise.
A soft smile spread across his face as tension ebbed out of his shoulders. "And so it begins." Green light flickered along his wand's tip as he aimed it up into the cloudy darkness yawning overhead.
"Morsmordre."