Limitless

Giants and a Phoenix

Three enormous giants stood before me, there were some more a little way away but they weren't the immediate threat. I looked up at them, craning my neck to get them all into view, two males and one female.

There was a considerable size difference between the males and the females but that made her no less fierce, if anything it tended to make them even more violent.

They were on their way to yet another rural muggle village nestled between the mountains. I had been tracking them for weeks, always arriving just after they departed, mangled bodies, destroyed homes and manic muggles left in their wake.

I managed to make up ground after the second week and catch them en route to the next village on their path. I had received some intel weeks before about Death Eaters persuading the giants to go on a rampage and kill as many muggles as they could. This was the sort of thing Death Eaters did. Even though they thought giants were below them, hardly less than a thought and certainly worth less, they were useful and if something could be used, one could be sure that Lord Voldemort would use it. He had been amassing armies all over Europe and I had been investigating to find out exactly who were willing to take up arms with him and those who were willing to stand against him.

The information I received was usually as substantial as smoke, fragments of whispers, but still I followed up the lead and, sure enough, found the troop, 8 of them in total. I didn't mean to get in the middle of it all, giants were a handful even if there were several wizards to one giant but here I was looking up at three of them as though I was a suicidal maniac. 

Their hair was filthy and matted to their scalps, their skins were leathery, dirt creased, bruised and blood smeared. But that's the way giants were, brutal, even with each other. I had to obliviate the muggles left behind in each village so they wouldn't go around telling anyone what they had seen and cause hysteria in the muggle populace. It was probably for the best. No one should have to live through what they did; no one should have to remember what they had seen.

I had survived, and I was living proof that surviving wasn't always the easiest thing. But this was my job now, my life. And I supposed that in some ways I was better off than the rest of my family.

It felt like years ago that Lord Voldemort forced me to kill that muggle boy and changed my life irrevocably, sending me to Hogwarts, where I met him... However, the memory of watching my brother Alec die and accidentally killing my brother Gabe was fresh in my mind, their faces and those of my mother and father, Felix's lifeless body and even Sasha's, who I hadn't seen but I was sure was incinerated by the fire like everyone else, they were there every night when I closed my eyes. I had learned to live with it but it was harder to live without those I had left behind.

In the past two and a bit years I had learnt many things but mostly on my own; I was nothing if not lonely. Dumbledore had kept his word and taught me the things he thought I needed to know, advanced magic, some of it verging on what would be considered Dark Magic. I read book after book, practiced hand-to-hand combat, absorbing everything I could, educating myself as much as I could, preparing myself for whatever lay ahead of me. I didn't care about much anymore; I used the necessary means to achieve the desired result. I knew it was the outlook of a zealot and if anything, wasn't Voldemort just a zealot albeit an evil one. 

The elemental difference between Voldemort and I was that I stood solidly on the side good, even if the things I was required to do sometimes made me no better than a Death Eater.