The Fall of Dumbledore: The White King

Parting The Veil

The end-of-term leaving feast at Hogwarts was usually a joyous and raucous affair, filled with laughter, merriment, and farewells shouted over clattering platters. This year, however, the Great Hall buzzed with hushed apprehension, unease simmering just beneath the surface frivolity.

The disappearance of Fleur Delacour still weighed heavily on everyone's minds, but there was more to the palpable tension that evening. A profound and ominous aura radiated from Hades and Draco as they took their usual places at the Slytherin table. The two young lords projected an undeniable sense of having crossed an irrevocable threshold into unknown territories.

Once merely promising scions of illustrious wizarding houses—albeit with darker predilections—tonight they carried themselves as avatars of metaphysical inevitabilities. Each seemed attuned to cosmic crescendos as if reality itself was reaching an apocalyptic climax on the periphery.

Hades, in particular, smoldered with the weight of looming grandeur, crackling around him in invisible penumbras. His aristocratic visage was a chiseled mask of utter serenity, yet those fathomless emerald eyes betrayed scintillating glimmers of expansive power held in immaculate check. One could easily imagine planets and moons reeling in celestial arcs around that imperious, marble brow.

Draco, for his part, exuded a rapturous trauma, like a body still thrumming in the aftershock of a terrible revelation. His fair features were simultaneously radiant and fragile as if some nameless vastness had torn apart the delicate inner seams of his sanity's fabric.

He moved in Hades' penumbra now, beholden to and in pious service of the dark prince's exalted will. The blond wore the weight of such uncompromising surrender like a sacred mantle—cumbersome yet vitalizing beyond mortal reconciliation.

The pair of them might as well have been outer gods slumming among lowly mortals, for they commanded instant gravitas by their mere presence. Sideways glances and murmurs of gossip spread from every quarter of the Great Hall upon their entrance, but such pedantic chatter was of no consequence to entities whose trajectory had pierced the veil into far vaster cosmic arenas.

Even Albus Dumbledore couldn't resist stealing frequent curious glances toward the Slytherin table throughout the evening's festivities. The old wizard no doubt suspected some portentous animus brewing in their ranks. His owl-like azure gaze roved over Hades and Draco with flickering scrutiny, an underlying wariness belying his serene, grandfatherly facade.

Yet, just as quickly, the pair would turn their focus away from the doddering Headmaster, back toward their arcane speculations on deeper strata. The tedious mortal prattling around them faded into mere background static, drowned out by the vast eternal murmurs of unseen spheres. Their conversation spanned quantum philosophy, numerological encryption, and celestial prognostication—heady mysteries and cloistered esoterica light years beyond the regurgitated facts and figures mere students obsessed over.

By evening's end, it was abundantly clear that Hades and Draco had transcended the petty academic confines of Hogwarts entirely. Their presence at the leaving feast now seemed almost condescending, a brief obligatory nod to customs and traditions that no longer held any real sway over their true natures.

As the plates were finally cleared and the last farewells uttered, the two young lords swept out of the Great Hall with an ominous sense of finality, neither sparing so much as a backward glance. The old path of professors, exams, and schoolboy capers no longer held any relevance or worth. Only the road ahead, toward grander, more nefarious precipices, mattered from this point forward.

The scarlet steam engine billowed great plumes of smoke and vapor as it pulled out of the Hogsmeade station the following morning. For Hades and Draco, though, the Hogwarts Express ride back to London was not about returning home—it was a procession into war-torn battlefields and dark reckonings.

As the verdant landscapes of the Scottish countryside unfurled beyond the window, the blond Malfoy heir cast frequent sidelong glances at his dark companion. The atmosphere between them felt charged and electric, fraught with nameless tensions like a lodestone's poles crackling with invisible currents.

Throughout the endless journey, Hades sat utterly motionless save for the subtle rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. His piercing emerald stare seemed to bore straight through the walls of the compartment into planes of existence occluded from lesser mortal ken. It was as if the Dark Lord's protégé existed halfway within this world and the next during those long, wordless hours of transit.

Only upon finally disembarking at King's Cross Station in London did Hades rouse from his trance-like reverie. He pivoted with leonine grace to face his entranced companion.

"Are you prepared for what lies ahead, dragon?" His resonant voice was quiet but commanded the air between them with the weight of a sacred benediction. "We now walk among the vanguards of inevitability itself."

Draco could only nod mutely, bone-pale skin flushed with fervent zeal. Words seemed to shrivel within his chest, incapable of giving voice to the vast oceans of dark longing and profane rapture that now defined his entire existence. He would follow Hades into the very maw of nihility and ruin if that's what it took to remain forever in the young master's carnal, charismatic shadow.

Satisfied for now, the dark prince favored him with the barest hint of a superior smirk before pivoting on his heel to rejoin the anonymous press of travelers milling toward the exits. Draco hurried to keep pace, falling into position slightly behind Hades' left shoulder like a member of the young noble's elite personal vanguard. Reverence and exaltation both thrummed through his veins in equal, potent measure.

Neither spoke again as they were collected by the waiting Malfoy retinue and whisked away through a specially designated exit corridor. The opulent Malfoy family town car whirred away from the crowded station in silence, ferrying the two young dark lords into the heart of wizarding London itself.

Their final destination was an immense, palatial estate tucked away in a secluded vale, far from the prying eyes of Muggles or any unworthy ilk. Formidable cast-iron gateways and imposing perimeter walls formed the first line of its imposing defenses. Hades' senses prickled with the subtle layers of eldritch geometry and numerological warding schema stitched into the foundations themselves as the car proceeded along the meandering approach road.

At last, the grand chateau-style manor came into view, all fluted columns and sweeping archways of veined alabaster, flanked by well-tended topiaries and serene reflection ponds. An air of aristocratic decadence and exclusion hung about the entire estate like an opiate miasma, promising unknown raptures to any who trespassed its hushed, hallowed environs.

Of course, this was to be expected when one was granted an audience with the Dark Lord himself.

Upon debarking, Draco immediately took up position a respectful half-step behind Hades as the two ascended the marble staircase toward the gaping maw of the yawning oak doors. A shiver of equal parts exhilaration and dread went through the blond, knowing they were about to enter the very sanctum of Lord Voldemort—the dark messiah who would soon enough unleash sublime reckonings upon an unsuspecting world.

And waiting in the shadows of its proscenium would be all the sublime horrors that entailed.

"Let the reckoning begin anew," Hades intoned in a low murmur, like the rumblings of tectonic plates announcing an earthquake. Draco could feel the air thickening as if reality itself braced for the cataclysmic detonation of the Dark Prince's awakening at last...