The Fall of Dumbledore: The White King

Imitations of The Forbidden

In the days following Cedric Diggory's victory in the Triwizard Tournament, a subtle yet seismic shift seemed to take place in Hades and Draco's connection. Ever since that fateful night by the shores of the Black Lake, an intoxicating new energy pulsed between the two Slytherin young lords.

It began with the little things - lingering looks held just a beat too long, casual touches and brushes charged with nameless tensions. Even the slightest interaction now carried subliminal codes of unvoiced desire and delicious temptation. Whatever veils and propriety had once constrained their bond lay in tattered remnants.

Hades, for his part, seemed to revel in the escalating frisson like a jungle cat scenting blood on the evening breeze. There was something undeniably predatory in the way he held Draco's stare, lips quirking in the slightest of smirks if he caught the blond quickly looking away. Each heated exchange became a dizzying tango of dominance and submission playing out on unseen spiritual vectors.

And Draco, entranced beyond all reason by this point, could only continue falling deeper under Hades' rapturous spell.

For the aristocratic Malfoy heir, every waking moment felt like stumbling through a beguiling fever dream. Colors bled more vibrantly at the corners of his vision, scents and flavors overwhelmed his senses with heady bouquets of decadence. The entire world had been hyper-saturated into some lavish, hothouse delirium.

Even mundane tasks like studying or dressing held erotic portents when Hades was involved. Draco often found himself flushed and light-headed just from watching the subtle grace with which those long pale fingers turned pages or retied cravats. The scorching undertone of such simple movements was absolutely searing in its lurid suggestiveness.

If the others noticed this dizzying spiral of escalating tension, no one dared comment. Pansy shot the two young lords meaningful looks from across the common room occasionally, one perfectly groomed eyebrow arched knowingly. But the unspoken message was abundantly clear - don't ask questions you didn't want the soul-shriveling answers to.

Besides, what went on behind closed draperies in the secluded alcoves was hardly her prerogative. She simply accepted that Hades and Draco existed on an entirely removed hierarchical plane these days that she could scarcely begin to comprehend let alone critique.

As they strode the corridors of Hogwarts, the other students parted before them like a marshaling ensemble ushered down the aisle of an unholy cathedral service, anointing each footfall with fearful admiration. The rest of the school carried on with their petty banalities, willfully blind to the higher mysteries and thresholds being broached.

Of course, all the while the end-of-term testing and grading loomed over everyone like a dark pall. One by one the subject exams ticked off in Draco's peripheral - Transfiguration, Charms, Astronomy, and the rest, each growing successively more meaningless compared to the intoxicating shadows blossoming between him and Hades.

Only during the most esoteric theory portions did the blond feel his full concentration reassert itself like his consciousness tugged back to earth by the gravity of familiar and tangible truths.

He dug deep, channeling all the ancestral rigors of pure-blood academia that had been bred into his bones. These portions dealt with hallowed matters of importance - advanced runes and arithmancy, metaphysical quantum theory, and other impenetrable mysteries. Draco excelled in spades, of course, achieving top marks easily.

Yet even as his mind untangled these labyrinthine complexities on parchment, he could feel the beguiling phantom presence of Hades hovering nearby like a lambent specter. The lingering aura of his friend's charismatic darkness seeped through the very quill scratches, superimposing its metaphysical inferences onto the neat arrays of sigils and ciphers.

During the practicum, the distractions were even more visceral. How was one meant to concentrate on the delicate articulations of spell casting when their palms still burned from the memory of supple flesh pressed against flesh the previous evening? In quiet corners and alcoves, the two young men had explored their growing infatuation through trembling caresses and deep, shuddering breaths mingling feverishly in the shadows.

At the same time, Draco also became keenly aware of the undeniable shift in Hades' demeanor over that scant few days as well. The final embers of boyish softness had at last burned away, leaving behind something magnificent and terribly remote in its chiseled majesty. This was no longer the promising yet still flawed young noble from the beginning of the year.

Something rapacious and eternal had awakened in his friend, some vastness and grandeur that lay beyond mortal nomenclature. A darker nature whose gravitational pull seemed to bend the very rules of reality around its penumbra.

It was both intoxicating and deeply unsettling in the same heady drought. With every fleeting touch and teasing glance now, Draco felt himself spiraling into the abyss of charismatic obsession, hurtling towards a singularity of sensual annihilation. Like staring into an eclipse with no fear of immolation.

Yet still, the dance continued, by now having taken on the cadence of some inexorable death rite too impossibly vast to be denied any longer.

Then, inevitably, their passions reached a fever pitch in the wake of the final practicum evaluation. Draco's flesh still flushed hot, recalling the memory of being pinned against bookshelves, squirming breathlessly as Hades claimed his mouth in a ravenous kiss that consumed him whole. The sensations detonated every synapse in kaleidoscopic eruptions of ruin.

When at last their forms separated in a crash of torn robes, the Malfoy heir found himself confronted with the full thermonuclear force of his friend's eldritch grandeur. Gone were the last vestiges of soft humanity or civility that might have tempered those razor cheekbones and lambent green eyes.

This was the obsidian prince of shadows made immaculate, carved from the eternal night, and rendered in the cruelest beauties of divinity. A young godling no mere mortal could ever hope to possess and yet somehow Draco knew himself utterly forfeit to the dark exaltation of those smoldering lips all the same.

They did not speak as propriety and deference shredded away like so much gossamer in the sheer gravitic weight of that final, inevitable surrender to blasphemous rapture. The rest of the world fell away, reduced to glittering ashes in Hades' penumbra. Reality itself had been cauterized asunder into something alien and unrecognizably profane.

When their tangled forms finally crashed together one last time in a blur of torn garments and mingling ecstatic cries, Draco's entire existence reduced itself to a single point of perfect, blissful agony. Every cell blazed with the searing revelation of having broken through the finite boundaries into something greater.

And for one eternal moment, everything was a complete rapturous ruin.