Harry Potter : Chapter 19: Ritualistic Interlude II

In the end, to avoid death through the Horcrux method was to violate the natural order in the most abject and complete way possible. With the initial purpose, that set you apart from the rest of the world, which kept turning towards an eventual and unavoidable 'end'.

With the choices of the elements of the ritual, which had to be made with the same abject violence that defined the initial purpose. With the methods used to obtain the elements necessary for the ritual.

...

With that information, the ritual Voldemort used to turn from homunculus into wizard was rather straightforward. Riddle avoided death through the violence inherent in the creation of a Horcrux. A bone stolen from a father that he had killed. Flesh given from the equivalent of a slave. Blood forced from a defeated enemy.

Yeah, I can see how the ritual to actually be resurrected used 'violence' as a bridge between the Horcrux and life.

Among the other things, ritualism had made me think if there was some truth about the purist movement officially promoted by Voldemort. Oh not in your everyday magic, that was obvious, but rituals carried on throughout the generations? I could see how that kind of magic was capable of growing.

Magic carried through the generations, Parseltongue was proof on its own, but was it possible that Merope's use of love potions to violate Tom Riddle Senior influenced the pregnancy? They say we are the choices we make. 

I frowned as the thought resounded loudly in my mind. For wizardkind, I'm starting to think that it has a more literal meaning than it has for muggles.

So it was possible that Tom Riddle was born evil. Or at least with a lack of Love. What effects that could have, especially if enhanced by the kind of childhood and schooling canon Riddle received... well, I had seen the final result.

I winced as I heard a wet coughing echo across the house, stealing me from my magical research while my eyes landed on the sunset that I could spy from my window. I really have no excuse to keep procrastinating, everything has been ready for a week. Waiting means risking this opportunity...

The reunion with Hagrid's father went as blandly as the previous summer had gone, at least for me. He had picked me up at the station, like any responsible parent would do, and we boarded the crowded Nighbus to the Leaky Cauldron, where we floo'ed back in my charming house.

Receiving an Acromantula's egg had been weird, once again displaying that a wizard willing to stick his dick in a giant wasn't all that sane, while the illness of the man that I had spied in the previous summer had grown so much that it couldn't be ignored.

After a steading breath, I rose from my seat and left my room, slowly moving across the house while trying to pretend that I didn't know what was about to happen. No, what I was about to do.

Hagrid's father was a little man to my eyes, and as feverish and shaken by his wet, bloody cough as he was, he appeared as frail as a spider's web. I ignored the stench of human waste that greeted me when I entered his room, kneeling down when the man's eyes, bright with fever, found mine.

"I'm... not long for this world..." a wet spluttering cough interrupted the man from speaking, but that didn't stop him from going ahead after a few seconds of intense pain.

"...I know... that we've grown distant s-since you started H-Hogwarts... and m-m-aybe it's for the best, it'll hurt less once I'm gone..."

"Da'..." I spoke to the man that very much wasn't my father while I lifted him from his bed, slowly moving across the house as I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to take a step after another.

"...would you help me?"

The dying wizard had explained to me that there was nothing to do about his condition just after giving me the Acromantula egg at the beginning of the summer, I swallowed a wave of bile that threatened to slip from my lips, while at the same time I licked my lips in what I knew was insane anticipation. Am I actually going to do this?

The dying wizard nodded lightly in my arms even as a part of me suddenly hoped that he would become lucid enough to refuse me. Another part of me, I knew, was howling with mad laughter, because had I wanted this man to be lucid enough to refuse me, I could have brewed something to that effect.

"I'll ...always h-h-help you..."

The frail wizard in my arms shuddered when we left the hut and started walking in the twilight, my feet striding across the tall, already damp grass without making a sound as I circled my residence and reached the area I had previously readied for this moment.

While I prepared the area, I had compartmentalized my thoughts as much as possible, trying to see what I was about to do as something remote, something academic that ould never see the light of the day...

But it was undeniable that I felt some horrible sense of kinship with Riddle as I spoke to my father: "Would you die for me, Da'?"

I swallowed another load of bile when I felt the man nod against my chest.

I briefly hesitated, unconsciously holding the feverish man tighter to my chest while I let my eyes roam over the preparations for my ritual: at the west of the hut, I had cleared out an area from which I could see the horizon, and I had dug a circular hole in the dirt.

At the bottom of which I had lit bluebell flames that were, like in all potions and brews I had attempted thus far, symbolizing both the power that would fuel the change and the change itself.

If one of my brews that focused sunlight was a paragraph that described a particular concept, the potion that used it was enriched by its presence, earning a depth and a direction that it would have otherwise lacked.

A ritual shaped around a potion, very much like Voldemort's resurrection, was a Metamorphosis. From homunculus to living body, and now, from living body to... what I was hoping to obtain.

I lowered my father on the ground before staring in the crystal clear potion that filled the pit that would take the place of an iron cauldron for the Metamorphosis I wanted to obtain.

At the bottom, bluebell flames danced eagerly, as if aware of their purpose: I had lit them at dawn, and for the whole day, they had worked the magic that I tried to infused them with in my brew.

"Wand of the father, knowingly broken. Will birth the tree."

I took my father's wand and I snapped it cleanly, lowering it in the pit until its broken sides dug between the bluebell flames into the ground underneath.

"Blood of the son, willingly spilled. Will shape the magic."

I cut my palm open without flinching, spilling 7 fat drops of my blood in the transparent concoction, which turned from crystal clear water lit by the bluebell flames into a rich, murky brown, that somehow let me still see the light coming from the bottom of the pit. Now I could feel the sheer potential of what I was building.

I was hating myself even as I lowered the dying man into a firepit filled with the potion that I spent the previous month brewing. It was a collection of minor things that went to describe the effect that I wanted to obtain with the ritual.

The potion gave structure to the magic that I wanted the ritual to accomplish, and I had activated it with my blood.

"Father, will you die for me?" I asked loudly at the man in the pit, who was staring me with wide eyes incapable of understanding.

Nevertheless, like the loving father that he was, he croacked: "...Yes..."

"Absolute sacrifice, obtained through deceit. Will empower the ward."

Hagrid Senior... exhaled, his lungs stopped drawing in the air, and he... died.

I took a shuddering breath while I saw his eyes turn into crystal-like orbs that shattered into black smoke without spilling a single drop of blood, a tearing sound of ripped flesh thundered in my ears as roots pierced from my father's body, and I took a step away from the circle of stones. And with the last ray of the sun, just as we entered the twilight, a tree sprouted from the ground.

Twin yet joined trunks sprouted from the two halves of my father Ashen wand, the core of dragon heartstring powering them one last time as they drank the purpose I had imbued my potion with, while the willing sacrifice of my father breathed true life in the ritual.

The ash tree that grew, with its trunk made like a double helix, soon stretching itself towards the sky, as high as an ash tree could go, while he sprouted fresh leaves.

Only that they weren't leaves. Instead of green, they were of a purple-black colour, and looked almost shadowy while the tree took the direction that my half-giant blood gave him and soon surpassed 30 meters of height.

And in the twilight, the shadow of the newborn tree grew like a fan spread over the surroundings, swallowing me along with the rest of the property, and from a second to the next, I disappeared in the shadows along with my house.

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So, this chapter was a filler of sorts, with the next, we go on in the second year, and we'll see the effects that the first bombings of London (summer '41) had on Tom.

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