ishafel

Crack fic! Now in November.

Summary: Not all the things we call upon in the dark are things we mean to summon.

The whole of the long dark winter, they researched spells in a thousand different vast and echoing libraries. Spells to stop time, spells to raise the dead and spells to lay them, spells to make a man young again, spells to make a man immortal-- they searched at Oxford and Avalon and the Sorbonne, the tombs of the Pharoahs, the Vatican and the Templar holdings in Tangiers, Beijing and-- by Time Turner-- Alexandria before the burning.

They found less than a dozen spells worth trying, less than a dozen that might do what Lord Voldemort wanted. The ones they did find had to be translated, from Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew and a dozen unpronounceable and fragmented dead languages. The ingredients they called for were obscure, obsolete, and often illegal. There were only three spells, in the end, that were workable.

It was spring before they were ready to try. The first spell, the one to reverse time, did nothing but scorch the floor of the chapel at the old Riddle house. The second brought an eyeless, shambling horror from the crypts below Blackhall, which Rudolphus and Bellatrix dispatched.

The third they cast outdoors, in the garden of Malfoy Manor, on Beltane evening. It required extensive and arcane wards, strong enough to cage a dragon, but there was nothing otherwise dark about it. Four of them stood at the quarters, and the other three stood inside that circle, and when they had finished, smoke came up and blotted out the stars.

It cleared quickly, and they could see that there was something inside the innermost circle. The spell, meant to summon immortality, had instead summoned that most rara of avises: it had brought them an Immortal.

He did not look in any way extraordinary. He was a tall man, light-skinned, thin, with a nose like a Snape, dressed in jeans and a black sweater and holding a sword. “Fuck,” Rabastan said gloomily from the North. “His Imperial Darkness is not going to appreciate this.”

The others felt that perhaps this was an understatement. “You translated,” Bellatrix shrieked at Narcissa. “You must have got it wrong somehow, you stupid cow! I knew it was a mistake, letting someone unMarked in on this.”

The look on Lucius Malfoy's face would have quelled a small invading army, but did nothing to silence his sister-in-law. “Avada Kedavra,” she shrieked, before any of them could stop her, and the man fell and died.

“It wasn't wrong,” Narcissa said in the silence afterward. “And you know it. Whatever that was, it was what the spell was meant to summon.”

Snape was on his knees beside the body, careless of his dark robes. “He isn't dead.” He moved his hand, and this time they all saw the flicker of tiny lightning above the man's chest. Regulus had drifted from the East toward the South, where Lucius stood. Now he turned and went back. Severus and Bellatrix and Narcissa moved to the limits of the outer circle. And the man in the grass rolled, in one smooth movement, from his back to his knees to his feet, the broadsword gleaming in his hand.

“Is it a Muggle?” Regulus asked incredulously. “Only I didn't think a Muggle could do that?”

The man turned to face him. “Beltane,” he said. “And this is England, am I right?” He looked at the trees coming in to flower, at the buildings whose lights dimmed the stars. “London?”

Lucius inclined his head like an Emperor giving audience. “What are you?”

“What am I?” the man demanded. “What are you? Let me guess-- some offshoot of the Hellfire Club, resurrected once again. Or perhaps you're more in Crowley's tradition? Children of the Golden Dawn? Were you sacrificing me? Because I'm bloody well sick of being sacrificed.”

His accent was British, posh. His aura was blue and gold, shot through with crimson. He was, indisputably, human, with as little magic as anyone had ever had. And yet, he had taken a Killing Curse in the chest, and was on his feet and arguing.

“Banish him,” Rudolphus said suddenly. “Banish him, Bella.”

Lucius and Narcissa began to fumble through the papers, searching for the one that held the ritual would dismiss the thing in the circle, whatever it was. Bellatrix stood her ground, staring at him.

“Banish me?” The man sounded astonished-- and amused. “I don't think I've ever been banished before. Is it painful?”

“Excruciating,” Bellatrix said, with more hope than certainty.

“Well, then.” The man looked around at them, neatly uniform in their black ritual robes, but without their masks. “This has certainly been an entertaining interlude, but I think I'll show myself out. Don't let's do this again.”

The first circle held spirits, and the second, power. He stepped across them both as if they were lines in sand. To a human, that was all they would be. They all watched as he loped across the garden and let himself out the gate.

“Well,” Lucius said when he was gone, “it's probably best if we spare the Dark Lord the story of this humiliation.”

“It's probably best if we get smashed and forget it ever happened,” Rabastan added, making a doorway to let the three in the circle through.

“We could have an orgy,” Regulus suggested, but Bellatrix and Narcissa were arguing about the translation again, and no one heard.