Birth of a Nightmare Man

Chapter Twenty-Six

Immortality wasn't always a good thing. It was tedious, living for years and years and years. It sometimes made the Nightmare Lord angry. Sometimes it made him sad.

Other times, it drove him up the wall until he tried to do something about it.

Elise and Lucian had gotten used to his actions, whether they approved of them or not. The Dementors had as well, but they seemed to hate it even more when he ended up hurting himself.

And he had hurt himself a lot. There were days when Elise would hide all of the knives, hoping that would discourage him from carving up his own body; she had gotten an awful fright when she found him sorting through his own organs because:

"I was bored."

The word bored frightened his servants, because when the Nightmare Lord was bored he could, and would do anything to stop the feeling. The most peaceful one was when he went to sleep. At least he couldn't hurt himself while sleeping.

But since he could sleep away months during those periods, the lord didn't want to sleep like that while the four founders were around. He wanted to spend time with them, and that meant more violent solutions to starve off the boredom.

So he turned to poisons. He hadn't done that in a while. It was a way to get his mind off things, and between visits to Hogwarts he travelled to find poisons he hadn't encountered before.

In the meantime, Salazar managed to get a Basilisk. No joke. When the lord came to visit, Salazar couldn't shut up about the creature. Rowena and Helga were a bit concerned where he would keep it once it grew larger.

"I can instruct it not to go near students," Salazar reassured them. "But perhaps she should be off the grounds anyway."

"It's a girl?" Rowena asked.

Meanwhile the lord stared at the Basilisk. She was tiny, compared to a fully grown Basilisk.

"Have you have ever seen a Basilisk before?" Salazar asked him.

"Once," the lord replied. "I… I'm not sure that you want to know what happened."

"Merely saying that gets me curious."

"Oh… dear me." The lord looked at him. "I might have killed it…?"

"You killed a Basilisk?"

"I was twelve, I didn't know better!"

Salazar stared. "You killed a Basilisk when you were twelve?"

"How?" Godric wanted to know.

"Dumb luck?" the lord tried with. "Honestly. Yeah. Let's go with that, dumb luck. Sword through the mouth."

"Which means you had to get close to its mouth," Rowena said.

"Well, I didn't say I escaped unharmed." He pulled up his robes and showed them a circular scar on his arm. "A fang pierced me, but I was saved by some Phoenix tears."

"You fought a Basilisk… met a Phoenix… at the age of twelve."

"To be fair, it was just me getting myself into trouble," the lord said. "I was marvellous at that. A friend… former friend, was very clear about that."