Harry thought about it. The silence was thick and oozing and unnatural. He could see his uncle was contorted in a silent scream, and it was all very distracting. It was hard to think when his heart felt like it was about to burst from his chest. But again, Harry could not escape the exciting notion of learning magic.
"How often will you feed me?" He asked. "Can I sleep on a bed? Do I have to kill people?"
The necromancer was taken aback by his questioning, a touch horrified at the implication – which was impressive as she regularly committed murder and wasn't horrified often. This was not the first of these conversations she'd had. Alabasandria had taught many apprentices, but usually they asked about pay and could she pretty please resurrect their dead loved ones, not about stuff like food.
There was more than Harry's magical compatibility at play here. It was a little-known fact that the Death Gods were very much not cruel. Hades and Anubis in particular were fond of children. She had been called forth to rescue as much as to teach, she noticed, observing the boy's too-small frame. Little Harry Potter was much too important and powerful to be left to waste away under his relatives 'care'.
She could only speculate about what she had done to deserve this, what error she'd made that the gods considered her the best choice to deal with a child. Sure there were not a lot of necromancers left to choose from, but the direction this night had taken was beyond baffling.
"Yes, I will feed you often. Whenever you are hungry. And I can easily expand my house so you have your own bedroom. And yes, you will have to kill people, but killing is not always the same thing as harming them. Admittedly, our meeting tonight paints a graphic image of my work. I mostly deal with those who died long ago. Tonight is a special ritual and the sacrifices must be fresh. We will use these bodies to bind ourselves as master and apprentice."
"Alright then," Harry finally agreed. Harry was six years old and did not really understand what he was getting himself into. He had been taught a skewed sense of morality – that violence was normal and food was the most valuable thing. He didn't want to hurt people, but he was also very abused and very hungry, so if the nice necromancer lady said she would feed him, then that was good enough for him. He wanted to learn magic, it didn't really matter to Harry what type of magic that was.
"Excellent. Let us finish up our business here, so that we may return home and feed you."
Harry grinned and eagerly followed after her. She waved the stick around and more shadows billowed out the end of it, the animal shapes bursting forth and surrounding the area. With another wave, the bodies all began to levitate, lining up neatly into a circle. Adams waved her wand around like a baton. The bodies began to ooze blood, draining into the center of the circle. Harry stumbled back towards the necromancer to avoid it, yet blood seeped into his shoes. She knelt down, saying an incantation that Harry didn't understand, old and whispery words bouncing off his ears and triggering the urge to run and flee and cry. A fancy cup appeared in her hands and she dipped it into the blood. She held it aloft like a casual call for a toast.
The wind picked up immediately, fierce, violent gales sweeping up into a blowing tornado around the circle of bodies. Harry felt his senses open like he'd just taken medicine for a cold, the sharp inhale of breath freeing him from muted feeling. It was freezing, frost gathering on his brow and he could feel nothing except pure terror. There was a hum in the back of his head, beating like a drum, dark and foreboding whispers. He could taste something wretched and iron, cloying and heavy on his tongue, but when he tried to spit it out, there was nothing there.
The necromancer, who did not appear affected by any of this, gathered the cup into both hands and held it high above her head, as though in offering to the moon.
She began to whisper and her voice carried and whistled along the wind. Echoing and harmonizing, as though the wind itself was speaking with her.
"I pledge myself, servant of Death, of the Old Ways, of the cycle of beginning and end - to the role of master, teacher, and guide for my apprentice, Harry Potter."
She took the goblet to her lips and without hesitation, drank deeply. Her eyes glowed brighter until it was painful to look in her vicinity. The glow cast its own shadows – thick and shiny like large puddles of ink. They moved through the current of wind, illuminating the bloody space with a nauseating hue of acid green on deep red. After a minute of drinking, she stopped and offered the cup over to Harry.
He really didn't want to touch it, let alone drink it.
"It's for your good health, apprentice." She assured him in an even tone which did nothing at all to assure Harry that drinking the blood of at least thirty people was a good thing. "Just repeat what I just said, switching the names around."
Harry started to realize he wasn't sure what he had gotten himself into. The fact that the forest was a scene from a horror movie and he had blood leaking into his shoes and socks made it all a bit gross and overwhelming. All of his senses were overloaded with blood and death and darkness and he was very, very scared.
"Um, I pledge myself, servant of Death, of the Old Ways, of, uh -"
"The cycle of beginning and end."
"The cycle of beginning and end - the role of apprentice and uh, student -" He faltered through the words. It felt a bit like it was too late to turn back, he thought to himself, as he swirled the fancy goblet of blood around. Maybe magic wasn't worth this… " - to my master Alabasandria Adams." He gave the cup another hesitant glance and firmly shut his eyes.
The frozen cold clung to his arms and stiffened them. The wind tucked underneath and lifted the cup to touch his closed lips. The wordless hum of drumbeat urged him.
As the blood licked him, a wave of power and peacefulness washed over him, buzzing around his ears and skull and down to his limbs. His whole body was encased in energy like he had drunk a thousand coffees. He gasped, and a trickle of the blood slipped past his lips. His mind was invaded by vague, abstract imagery swimming in a miasma of bright color and emotion - an overwhelming feeling of success and improvement. From somewhere, something assured him he had made the right decision.
His body guzzled down the blood without any input from his mind. It tasted sweet.
He felt something connect deep within himself, a rope wrapping around his soul to that of an impossibly ancient, freezing cold mass outside of his body. He was connected to the necromancer. He gasped, dropping to his knees. Ignoring the blood staining his jeans, he shuttered and gasped as he tried and failed to cope with the intense rise of power that settled within him. He realized with horror that his own eyes were burning their own harsh electric green hue across the blood-soaked ground, lighting up the forest like he was a living flashlight.
Alabasandria knelt beside him, sticking a finger into the blood and pressed it to his forehead.
"Wonderful," she grinned. "You'll do quite nicely." The wind and ink and whispers faded to a stop, leaving them in silence and darkness. She stood and began to calmly wave her wand to remove the ocean of blood from the ruined campground.
Harry coughed, the blood churning in his stomach. The rush of power and all of the intense emotions and adrenaline left him feeling nauseous and faint. In the corners of his vision, peering through the black expanse of trees, he saw, for a split second, a bone-white, skeletal face. Their mouthless jaw opened in a wide grin.
And then the poor kid promptly fell unconscious, landing face-first in the pool of blood.