Year Six - Chapter Eight

I quietly put on the thick, bulky stone armor designed for a Hogwarts' Lake Diving, and felt the familiar snapping of the leather and the cloth shifting around to accommodate me. The stones thinned, and their weight came less. The belts I strapped to my chest and filled with daggers of basilisk origin. The long sword carved from the two longer fangs strapped to my back like some kind of Witcher-Wannabe, I then proceeded to settle the Mantaguards over the already existing armor.

They scuttled nicely into place, and the Draghuls soon began to walk by my side.

I wasn't expecting any encounter with magical threats, but just in case the worst happened and the Nundu arrived, I had the underwater breathing apparatus already prepped.

Heck, this entire thing made me feel like a Witcher, if with far more armor than needed, far bulkier allies, and without the quite charming ladies of Geralt himself. I rolled my eyes as I quietly turned on the Lumos-powered night lights of my armor, the Draghuls' own eyes blazing with greenish fire, enough to show the way.

The silence of the forest was bitterly drowned by the drumming of my heart. This wasn't exactly like the Basilisk situation. The Basilisk was a real, active threat. The Acromantula colony was, at most, a potential nuisance. Aragog wasn't even dead yet. He still had the ability to control his brood.

This was a bad idea. This was an extremely bad idea. If it weren't for the fact I had Shadowdrake as tall as a horse by my side, and its normal size would easily dwarf the Acromantulas themselves, I would have turned back and gone back to bed.

Yet, I couldn't. I had said I would burn the Forbidden Forest down, and in the name of the Gods of War I would.

"I, I am the one, the one, who lost control, control, but in the end I'll be the last man standing," I sang along, gathering my courage, and came to a halt as the first webbing appeared on the trees.

"Battle stations," I whispered, and the Draghuls' wings snapped open, their sizes enlarging ever so slightly. Flaming breaths left their jaws, burning the webs and trailing paths of fire in the very air, some threads too thin for the naked eye to see in the night, even with lumos to illuminate the surroundings. But fire made everything better, and as I heard the tumbling down of large forms, and the scurrying of multiple limbs on the ground, the first wave arrived with bared fangs and beady, hungry eyes.

A Draghul launched itself straight into the gaping maws of an Acromantula, spewing fire into its guts and pushing the monster off-course, the two tumbling a bit as the sharpened teeth bit into the chitin, the claws ripped into the eyes, and blood and greenish liquid spewed everywhere. More arrived, dozens at the time came for relentless assaults on a position that the Draghuls easily held, never tiring, not even once. Shadowdrake remained by my side, eagerly in wait for its time to shine.

Its tail whipped to the side silently, coiling around two hairy legs of an Acromantula that had circled around us. Then, with a sharp snap the tail broke the legs, and then slammed mercilessly down once more straight against the monster's head.

There was cruelty in the way Shadowdrake acted, but it was a cruelty that strangely suited the situation.

They were my children, and what father would deny his children a chance for fresh meat? Was that not Aragog's philosophy? Was this not me returning the favor in spades, doing my best to avoid a risk for the students at Hogwarts?

I was doing this for the children, for the snotty first years that couldn't even find their way to the next classroom. I was doing this for the future of the Wizarding society, for a better tomorrow where stupidity died in the flames of righteous education.

"Gubrath Ingle!" I roared with bellowing precision, the Draghuls roaring with me as a brilliant fire left the tip of my wand, snaking like a thin whip over my head, my wand moving into lazy circles as a veritable firestorm erupted around my location. The flames burned, they burned and spread equally without the hunger of Fiendfyre, and without the need to consume that kind of dark magic had. They spread in a raging inferno, which burned and shriveled through the Acromantulas without a pause.

The large spiders clicked and clacked their pincers, thin sprays of green striking at my Draghuls and at myself without effect. I had sealed the outside from the inside, and while I had expected a Nundu, avoiding the spitting poisonous streams was still a good enough thing.

I lifted my wand in an upward swing, "Avifors," and from the eternal fire of Gubraithan sprouted birds, which were then flung as Heat-Seeking missiles against their prey.

The Draghuls roared as they rushed forth, happy and eager to prove themselves. They bit, chewed and burned. They ripped, rent and froze. Shadowdrake's tail slithered across the ground, its wings opening restlessly.

"Shadowdrake," I spoke, and the dragon's head snapped towards me, eyes burning and ready to hunt like its brethren. "Let none survive."

Shadowdrake yipped, with the same happiness of a dog being told he could get the tasty treat, and then dashed off. The claws and the wings grew, and as the dragon took to jumping from tree to tree, while leaving deep, unsettling gashes behind, I began to walk forward. Amidst the carnage, the Draghuls that had no target regrouped by my side. Their snouts were covered in blood. Their bodies gleamed from the fire's hot passage over them, but stone could not burn as easily as the flesh of giant spiders, and thus they were relatively unscathed.

By the time I reached the heart of the Acromantula's colony, the webbing was a thing of the past. Only flames spread, licking at the bark of the trees and upon the corpses of the spiders, some with cracking limbs, being finely cooked to a slow roast.

"The eggs too," I said, looking at the Draghuls by my side. "Find all the Acromantulas' eggs, and destroy them all."

They trudged off, mouths ablaze, and I stood there in the middle of the carnage I had wrought, witnessing Shadowdrake happily feasting -though it didn't need to eat- on the carcass of Aragog, its white eyes betraying its blindness, and its origin.

"Sorry," I said in the end, taking a deep breath. "You were too dangerous to let live."

An arrow, of all things, made itself known by landing on the ground in front of my feet.

I turned, belatedly wondering who could ever throw an arrow, and dimly realized that the fires had caught the attention of the centaurs. With a bellowing roar, Shadowdrake stopped munching on Aragog and widened its wings, growing to full size and shattering a few trees in the meantime.

Not a centaur ran away, even as I had to yell over the sound of the Draghul to get it to calm down.

It did. Like a corgi lolling its tongue out, it quietly shrank back into a far more manageable size, the rest of the Draghuls rejoining me.

One of the centaurs slowly trotted forward, coming to a halt a few meters away from me. "You bring fire and death in our forest, wizard," the centaur snarled.

"Sorry," I said. "But the giant spiders had to go. I'll douse out the fire in a moment. I didn't hurt anyone, did I? You all fine?"

The centaur in question remained standing, as if unsure if he should attempt his luck in trampling me down, or perhaps reconsidering due to the vast amount of firepower I had at my disposal standing protectively behind me. Wisdom seemed to win.

"The forest will heal from the scars of today," the centaur said in the end. "Tread lightly," he added, "for terrifying is the roar of a waking dragon, yet until it spreads its wings and flies, it is no different than a snake cast in the mud."

Cryptic words of warning given, the centaur turned and trotted away with the rest of its herd.

Had they been expecting me?

I could have used a 'thank you' for ridding them of the Giant Spider Problem.

Seriously, Magical Creatures of the Wizarding World...

...is plain old English too hard to use when giving pointers to hopeful saviors of the world?