Harry Potter And The Descent Into Darkness

Chapter 15

Harry's shaking hand stretched out and offered the bloodied dagger to the small skeletal grip of the Dark Lord.

"On your knees, Potter," the cold hard voice of Voldemort ordered.

Harry instantly acquiesced to the order, and had to bite his lip to hold back the whimper from the pain the movement caused. It really wasn't anywhere even remotely as painful as the accellerant potion had been, and as Voldemort had watched the entire process of Harry carving into his own flesh, the Dark Lord's excitement had grown. With that excitement, had come a powerful welling of Voldemort's magic, and Harry had eagerly fed off that energy, letting the euphoria of it cloud his mind and dull his pain. Still, the sudden movement of falling to his knees had cleared his haze enough to remember that he was currently bleeding – a lot – and that the raw, open wounds were not pleasant in any way.

Harry felt the Dark Lord's magic surge in another wave of eager excitement and he grabbed hold of that feeling and wrapped it around himself like a blanket. The feeling of the Dark Lord's magic was so indescribably familiar and comfortable, not to mention the dark inebriation it induced. He wondered for a moment how Barty and Wormtail didn't seem to be effected by it at all. Did they not feel it? Maybe they couldn't?

A tiny startled noise escaped Harry's throat when the blade first pierced his back, between his shoulder blades, but he managed to squash any further sound. It hurt, but he wasn't going to disgrace himself by crying out. The cuts were shallow and the runes were not all the complicated. What little understanding he had gleaned about dark ritualistic magic like this told him that things should have been much more convoluted and complicated than they were. The relative simplicity of the ritual was truly a comment on just how much of a magical genius the Dark Lord was.

The arithmancy calculations and planning alone that would have been necessary to construct a ritual this optimized and efficient was incredible, and the fact that the Dark Lord had done it in under a week, truly spoke volumes. Harry was mildly surprised that the man had gone to so much trouble to minimize the suffering Harry was having to endure. A little less effort would have resulted in much more complicated runes, and a lot more of them, but the effect on the end product of the ceremony would have been unchanged. Voldemort's body would have been resurrected the same either way. The extra effort had gone in solely and entirely for Harry's benefit, and he knew it.

Still... he wasn't stupid enough to say anything about it aloud when others were present. Perhaps if he had the opportunity to speak to the Dark Lord without an audience he would thank him.

Harry breathed a quiet sigh of relief as he felt the last rune completed and the blade leave his skin for the last time.

He was now kneeling in a mess of his own blood. Not quite a pool of blood, but it was still a considerable amount of blood. He also noticed that all of the blood seemed to be magically drawn to a spot two feet in front of him where a crystal bowl sat on top of one of the runes on the floor. He supposed that was why he wasn't sitting in a pool of his own blood – the blood was being drawn to that point and getting magicked into the bowl. He decided that, if nothing else, he could slip into the hospital wing when he got back to school and nick a blood replenishment potion. Hopefully Madam Pomfrey would have some in stock.

Harry's mind was clouded by the combined forces of his loss of blood, light-headedness, and pain, and then all of that was compounded by his own intentional hold on the Dark Lord's magic in the air. Letting the magic wrap around and encase him helped numb the pain, but it also left him rather out of it. He could feel his body swaying precariously while he knelt on the floor in front of the large cauldron.

He was vaguely aware of some magical words being spoken, and of Wormtail dropping a few things into the cauldron, including the bowl of his blood. Next thing he knew the Dark Lord's magic suddenly pulled back and its absence snapped his mind to attention. Harry's head shot straight up and his eyes opened wide. He watched as Wormtail cut off his own hand, dropped it into the potion with a strangled whimper, and then as Barty carried the Dark Lord's tiny homunculus body into the circle, over the cauldron, and then dropped him inside it.