Severus Snape.
Potions Master at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and, a dozen or so years ago, a Death Eater trusted absolutely by Voldemort.
Then, in the span of a single night, after the infant Harry Potter had struck Voldemort down and left him a fading rumour for over a decade, Snape had switched allegiances at a speed that still, even now, unsettled anyone who thought it through.
In all the years since, while Voldemort had stayed away from the wizarding world of Britain—Snape had remained as Dumbledore's right hand and kept close, always, at his side.
Cliodna watched Severus's face now as he passed her in the corridor outside the dining hall—expressionless, but not quite blank, like in a perfectly still pond.
The truly interesting part was this:
Severus Snape was also deeply trusted by Bryan Watson.
On one side, Voldemort—the most feared dark wizard in a century, a man who did not forgive weakness and rarely forgave loyalty either, once it had stopped being useful to him.
On the other side, Watson and Dumbledore—the golden, terrifying center of Britain's resistance to that same wizard.
Both factions seemed totally, calmly confident that they held Severus Snape's loyalty to themselves.
So which one, exactly, had made the mistake?
Cliodna already had her own answer to that question. It was a good part of the reason she was willing to greet him at all.
But Severus didn't seem inclined to register the goodwill she was offering him.
His eyes, when they passed briefly over her face, were hollow and indifferent. He said nothing. He only gave a single short nod and walked on past her toward the dining hall.
The instant the door swung open ahead of him and admitted them both into the light and noise beyond, a dozen gazes twisted at once toward the new arrivals gathered there in the doorway.
Most of what Cliodna felt land on her in that assessing wave was simple curiosity. But there was also open, unconcealed hatred.
That particular loathing wasn't coming from Voldemort at the head of the table in his high-backed chair. It came, instead, from a woman sitting near the front of the row to his right.
Bellatrix Lestrange.
A woman half-mad with her worship of the Dark Lord.
Cliodna understood perfectly well why the woman looked at her with such raw, burning hostility—the reason behind it was almost laughably petty, really, so she never bothered dignifying it with any response at all.
"Ah, my dear Severus. Always the last to arrive, aren't you? Do you enjoy the little touch of drama it makes—keeping us all waiting, wondering whether you'll come at all?"
At the head of the sumptuously set long table, laid with silver that caught and threw back every flicker of candlelight, Voldemort's slitted nostrils flared once, then twice, drawing in some scent only he could parse. His smile was lazy and cold.
Snickers of obliging laughter rippled down both sides of the table in response, a dozen voices were competing silently to applaud the Dark Lord's wit before the moment could pass unnoticed.
Severus crossed the room quickly and came to stand beside Voldemort's chair, throwing a wary glance sideways at Nagini, coiled in thick loops against the chair's other side.
He bent low, folding himself with ease, and pressed his lips briefly to the wide sleeve of Voldemort's robe in the old, ritual gesture of submission.
"Forgive me, my Lord. I was detained. Watson came back to Hogwarts without warning—he wanted to talk to me, told me—"
"Oh, Severus, that can wait."
Voldemort raised one hand, cutting him off before the sentence could properly finish, and gestured instead toward the empty seat on his right with an almost lazy flick of two fingers. "Sit. Dinner first—it would be a great discourtesy to Narcissa, after all the trouble she's clearly gone to today."
"The honour is mine, my Lord."
Narcissa Malfoy, seated midway down the table among the lesser ranks, rose at once and bowed low, her voice was thin and unsteady, carrying just enough tremor.
Severus's designated seat was second from Voldemort's right hand; the very first belonged already to a gentleman in an elegant, well-fitted pair of spectacles.
Severus and Adam Vogel's eyes met briefly as Severus passed behind his chair and then Severus walked on without a single word exchanged between them.
"You—sit here, Miss Cliodna—"
Voldemort's red gaze, slit-pupiled, swept the full length of the table and settled, finally, on Cliodna, who still stood near the door. He lifted one finger and pointed to the empty seat waiting on his left.
The arrangement clearly startled a good number of the Death Eaters, several of whom exchanged quick, uneasy glances down the table's length.
They had all assumed that the seat on Voldemort's left was meant, by rights, for Severus.
Cliodna could feel the hostility in the eyes now turned toward her thickening.
Bellatrix's face, in particular, had twisted into something feral and raw, as though she might, given even the smallest excuse, lunge across the length of the table and tear Cliodna apart with her bare hands.
But Cliodna paid the stares no mind at all. She crossed to the offered seat and settled into it.
"Well, then. I believe a toast is in order."
Voldemort's long, spidery fingers curled around the stem of the goblet set before him, the wine within it red as fresh blood, swirling gently with the small motion of his grip.
Up and down both sides of the table, everyone moved as though pulled straight by strings, obedient without hesitation to Voldemort's smallest signal.
Cliodna, mindful that she'd still need to discuss certain matters with Voldemort once this performance concluded, had no wish to provoke open hostility just yet. She kept her own expression carefully blank and lifted her glass along with everyone else at the table.
What truly brought Voldemort pleasure in a moment like this wasn't the rich, lingering taste of the wine, sliding down his throat—it was the submission of everyone gathered at his table.
The clink of crystal against crystal rang out through the lavish dining hall.
Firelight from the hearth along one wall threw the diners' shifting, elongated shadows across the pale marble behind them, veined through with dark natural patterns, so that the whole scene took on the look of a row of stiff-jointed corpses, propped up at table and made to go through the motions of feeding.
No one dared eat with any strong appetite in front of the most dangerous, most evil dark wizard in living memory—no one, that was, but Voldemort himself.
Everyone else kept furtive, sidelong watch on the Dark Lord seated at the table's head, and only lifted knife and fork once he had done so first, following his lead.
When Voldemort had finished the bloody steak on his plate and, with evident satisfaction lifted a white silk napkin to wipe a thin smear of blood from the corners of his mouth, everyone else set down their utensils in the same unison, watching him with eagerly.
Voldemort seemed to find the whole spectacle rather amusing.
"A pity, Narcissa—the wizards of noble blood seated at your table don't seem to share my own appreciation for your excellent cooking tonight. Or perhaps they simply think Voldemort's palate has fallen out of fashion, in recent years?"
By the sentence's end, whatever mockery had coloured his light, airy voice at the start had drained away, replaced by something considerably colder, something that made several people down the table's length go very still in their seats.
"We love it, my Lord!"
Bellatrix shot up to her feet at once, crying the words out with almost desperate conviction, and shovelled the remaining steak on her own plate hastily into her mouth in a single, frantic motion.
The other Death Eaters, feeling the weight of Voldemort's attention pressing down against their backs, scrambled at once to follow her example—even Severus, expression unmoved throughout, picked his fork back up and resumed eating.
Cliodna, for her own part, never touched the bloodied steak at all. She took only a few small, careful bites of the vegetables served alongside it, then stopped.
But the Death Eaters' hurried show of loyalty won them no praise from Voldemort in the end.
He only gave a short, cold laugh at the display, tossed his silk napkin carelessly onto the table beside his plate, and—one hand rising to stroke absently at the head of Nagini, who had by now climbed fully into his lap—surveyed everyone present with a look of pitiless calm.
"This is the first time we've all gathered together here since that shameful defeat of ours. So—my Death Eaters—what good news, precisely, do you have to bring me tonight?"
His blood-red eyes moved slowly down the length of the table, reflecting back face after guilty, frightened face in turn. Voldemort's narrow nostrils flared once more at the collective silence that answered him.
"Greengrass. Say something."
Every gaze at the table snapped at once toward a man well into his forties—haggard, his hair unkempt and thinning, his pupils shrunk to extremes with naked fear.
"My Lord—"
Greengrass scrambled up from his own chair in a sudden panic, shoving it back hard.
"I have made a great many attempts. Ah—some employees within the Ministry have indeed begun quietly working for us. But the higher-ranking officials—Bones is exceedingly cunning, my Lord. She has assigned a dedicated enforcer to shadow every single department head. We cannot get anywhere near them—"
"Oh! Ha ha!"
Voldemort's smile was completely callous.
"And this is what you have brought to tell me tonight? That you, Greengrass, are simply out of ideas?"
Thud!
Greengrass didn't dare offer a single further word in his own defence. He simply dropped to his knees on the spot, his whole body was shaking visibly now.
The other Death Eaters braced themselves at the table, certain that they were about to hear Greengrass begin screaming. But no scream came.
"Rosier. Yaxley?"
At the sound of Voldemort's flat, indifferent voice moving on to its next target, two more figures rose near the far end of the table, trembling with dread even as they got to their feet.
"We have achieved some results, my Lord!"
The wizard who spoke first had a cruel, dull-witted sort of face, and spoke now with straining urgency, words tumbling out faster than he'd perhaps intended.
"The Witch Weekly will run a piece tomorrow condemning Bryan Watson for pulling the Ministry's strings from behind the scenes—and for his heavy-handed policies more generally. They're also going to announce, in that very same article, that they're formally revoking the 'Most Charming Smile' award they once gave him!"
The Death Eaters around the table hunched their shoulders instinctively at the announcement, dreading being splattered with blood at any moment.
A fresh chill spread through the lavishly decorated hall at that, cold enough to nearly freeze the assembled Death Eaters where they sat.
"So, it seems—"
Voldemort's shadow, thrown by the hearth-light onto the wall behind him, spread out silently into something monstrous and grotesque, as though it were readying itself to choose its next victim from among the frightened faces at the table and devour them whole.
"Everything is exactly as Watson claims. Voldemort and his Death Eaters have already been utterly defeated. Is that it?"
Voldemort said it softly.
————————————
For More Chapters; [email protected]/FicFrenzy