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- Seko Maxima
One precise, well-practiced movement of the wand and the heads of three inferi rolled along the stone pavement of London. Dressed in shabby Muggle clothes with a dragon skin jacket thrown over them, the wizard froze, listening to the sounds. A mournful wind carried trash along the streets and whistled through the broken windows of long-abandoned shops. Making sure that he had not attracted the attention of other undead, the man quickly and silently entered the nearest shop, hiding behind the counter. Carefully taking an enchanted map from one of his many pockets, he quickly determined his location. Following the owner's wish, the image on the map "approached" the point of location, clearly outlining the surrounding streets and houses.
- Millbank Street. And nearby is the Parliament and even higher is Whitehall Street. Finally. Damn the British with their fucking urban architecture.
Whispering a few more unprintable expressions he had heard from his Russian mother as a child, Gilderoy Geysek, a native of Prague, sighed wearily. Then, feeling the growing cold, he pressed himself against the counter and concentrated on Occlumency, completely suppressing his emotions.
- Wow!
The dementor, flying down the street like a hound that had lost its trail, howled in disappointment. After twirling around the nearest buildings for a few minutes in confusion, the soul eater slowly flew on. The cold, which seemed to be able to freeze the soul itself, began to diminish. The man, having waited fifteen minutes, left the temporary shelter. Under the dim light, barely penetrating the gloomy clouds, he moved along the street of the dead city towards his goal.
Gilderoy never particularly liked the lands of Foggy Albion and its inhabitants. He did not like the rainy and cloudy weather of the islands, nor the arrogant and conservative British themselves. And during his last visit to this country during the Quidditch World Cup, he had to leave them urgently because of the damn radical idiots who pompously called themselves Death Eaters. At that time, Geysek despised these imitators of Grindelwald, considering their leader and his followers to be crazy idiots who, even if they seized power, would not last long. The second and third wizarding wars on the islands mainly concerned the islands themselves and their closest neighbor - wizarding France. The only thing that worried the Czech, who had already gained fame as a master of charms and rituals during the second wizarding war, was the violation of the Statute of Secrecy and the problems that followed. Traveling, magic, girls and a small hobby of writing his memoirs - that's all that interested him in those years. However, in 1998, everything went to hell. An epidemic broke out on the British Isles. The streets began to be filled with corpses of Muggles, because of which all Muggle governments actually isolated England, fearing the spread of the disease, and the magical part of the country closed the borders back in 1997. Only this did not stop the epidemic, and a few months later, wizards and Muggles saw wandering infernals on the streets of their cities. That's when the MCM and other ministries of magic began to stir, which quickly found out about the magical origin of the virus. A ritual was quickly composed that would deprive the virus of magical properties, which would stop its spread throughout the world, and special squads of wizards began to cleanse the infected, who after death turned into infernals. Oh, this ritual was a masterpiece of ritualism and a contribution to which the wizard himself was proud. On the day that Gilderoy and dozens of other masters of ritualism performed the ritual in Delphi, a Greek city famous for its seers and one of the most powerful magical sources in Europe, tensions between the Muggle governments of the USA and the USSR reached the point of no return. Dozens of atomic bombs were dropped on the largest cities of the world. The image of his hometown, Prague, in ruins turned the cheerful wizard in his early thirties, who liked to joke about the "dandyism" of his last name, into a sullen man in his fifties. As the apotheosis of the coming end of the world, the veil between the world of the living and the dead thinned. Everything was filled with the undead. And the world went mad.
From the British Isles came the Death Eaters – mad fanatics who turned themselves into undead and praised their Master who had defeated Death. Fanatics who had studied necromancy. After that, Gilderoy saw only death and despair. Sects praising death as the goal of all life, madly laughing wizards in white masks, also madly laughing companions who are ready to cast a killing curse in your back because of the rolling madness, living people with indifferent eyes who are not always distinguishable from the dead, cursed places where death lurks in every shadow. And so on for ten years.
With every step the wizard took the cold grew stronger, until he finally saw in the distance what had become of central London. The famous Whitehall Street, the name of which was sometimes used as a common noun for the British government, lay in ruins. From Westminster Palace to Trafalgar Square, all these famous buildings of departments and ministries, monuments and landmarks were destroyed to the ground. Only piles of stones reminded of the past. But this was not what made the wizard tense up. The view that opened up to him had become familiar to the man after years of wandering around the world. But what really made his hair stand on end was the action taking place above the abyss where Trafalgar Square used to be. Hundreds of figures in dark, torn robes were descending into the abyss, swirling like a whirlwind. The world seemed to have turned grey from so many soul eaters, and Gilderoy concentrated entirely on the meditative and mental techniques known to him, designed to control the mind and emotions. The feelings of despondency and despair rolling over his consciousness diminished, but did not disappear. Like hyenas, they froze somewhere on the edge, ready to pounce on his consciousness in case of the slightest weakness. Exhaling steam, the wizard took out a compass. But the arrow of this compass, unlike the others, did not point north. Turning the artifact given to him for this mission in his hands, the man made sure of the direction indicated by the arrow. Then he slowly walked away to the nearest relatively intact building. Trying not to cause noise, he examined the entrance to the building and the room behind it. The first thing the surviving wizards learned from the beginning of the cataclysm was not to blindly trust search spells. In the first months of the cataclysm, it was not uncommon for a wizard who used a banal "revelio" to soon be attacked by a crowd of undead who sensed the magic. The only thing worse than that was when a wizard, having made sure of the absence of enemies with the help of spells, boldly entered the lair of the same alghouls.
Hearing the quiet crunch of the trash under his feet, the man carefully entered the room. Having found a more or less clean corner, he took out a piece of chalk. Soon a circle with a triangle inside was drawn on the floor. The magical formation was framed by ancient runes. Having crouched in the center of the formation, Geysek activated it. The resulting dome enclosed the Czech. The wizard himself took food and a notebook from a bag attached to his belt. Shoving the seemingly tasteless food into his mouth, he began to write down everything he had seen today. Unfortunately, the things and artifacts enchanted for communication no longer worked after entering present-day London. The veil between the otherworldly and living worlds was almost torn. The close proximity of the Death Realm sometimes affected the magic and artifacts he created in the most unpredictable way.
/ Dad, save me!
The voice, full of agony, came from a twelve-year-old boy leaning against the wall, trying to put back the organs that were falling out of his torn stomach and starting to rot. If only he had been here five minutes earlier, then…/
Crackling.
The man looked at the broken feather calmly and took out a new one. He did not risk using a charm to fix it. The failure of his mission would cost too much to the remaining survivors.
Several hours later, Gilderoy Geysek, with a specially charmed invisibility cloak thrown over his clothes that could hide him for only six hours, walked up the stone stairs he had found, leading to the British Ministry of Magic. The concealment and Muggle-repelling charms had long since been dispelled, allowing it to be found without relative difficulty. Soon the man came out to one of the departments of the ministry. The premises intended for the work of dozens of ministry employees were empty. There were no ghosts, no dementors, no Death Eaters, whose presence the wizard feared. There was complete silence. Looking at the scattered tables and sheets of paper scattered on the floor, he could not get rid of the feeling of someone else's gaze on him.
/ -Minister Scrimgeour has ordered the entrances to the Ministry to be sealed. An attack by you-know-who is expected soon.
- And he was right. Avada Kedavra! /
Turning around, Gilderoy pointed his wand at the darkness of the stairs he had just descended. His eyes, dimly glowing with an amber light due to the cat's eye potion he had drunk, could not see anything through the darkness. Exhaling a cloud of white steam, the man pulled out the compass with his free hand. The needle spun madly, stopping in place for no longer than a second. Shaking his hand again, he was completely convinced of the malfunction of the artifact that had guided him before. Cursing under his breath, the man put it back. The darkness became thicker. The man went on, relying only on intuition and feelings. He wanted to complete his task before nightfall. He did not want to know what was happening in this necropolis at night. Empty rooms and corridors created an oppressive feeling. The marble stone of the walls, which was supposed to create an impression of solemnity and grandeur, now looked more like the walls of a crypt. However, soon the man could not go further due to a collapsed corridor. Gilderoy turned around and went the other way. After a while, he determined that about a third of the floor on one side had collapsed. The wizard headed down one of the stairs he had found. He didn't meet anyone during the entire journey. Silence reigned everywhere, interrupted by the rustling of boots on stone chips and the occasional inaudible whisper. Whispers of the past. A rather lousy property of some cursed places, which become such broken pools of memory. "Visitors" to such places can immerse themselves in past events or hear them. And if you consider that most often it is because of these events that such places became cursed...
/ - Hahahaha . Cruciatus ! Cruciatus ! Cruciatus !
A woman's laughter with a hint of madness was heard against the background of shrill screams. /
Feeling the cold penetrating his bones, the wizard stopped on the ninth underground level near a doorway with fallen doors. A dusty tablet lying nearby on the floor had a barely legible inscription.
"Department of Mysteries"
Entering the hall of cracked black tiles, Gilderoy saw twelve doors, only one of which was slightly open. A silvery-white light shone from behind the black door. Clutching his wand tightly, Geysek peered inside.
A gust of wind blew into the man's face. Like a Greek amphitheater, the stone tiers descended to a platform on which stood an ancient arch glowing with silver-white light. Dozens of Dementors descended through the broken ceiling and disappeared into it. The empty space of the arch, from where the light came, trembled.
- Avada Kedavra
A hissing voice came from behind him. Heightened instincts made the man throw himself forward and to the side even before the curse was cast. A wide green beam of curse knocked stone chips out of the floor. A man... no, a creature slowly appeared from thin air. With pale cracked skin more befitting a corpse, a bald head without a single hair in a black robe, it studied him with its scarlet eyes. A dark brown stick with unusual thickenings pointed downwards.
- Bow your head before the Lord of Death.
The hissing voice was full of arrogance and madness. Glancing at the arch, Gilderoy took out a notebook.
- Portus
The spatial force began to twist the body as usual, but somewhere in the middle of the process it stopped.
- Fool, no one will leave this place without my permission.
Looking with indifferent eyes at the arm missing up to the elbow, as a result of the unsuccessful activation of the portal charm, Geysek waved his wand. The missing arm returned to its place, but without the sleeve and notebook.
- Who are you?
Pale lips twisted into a grin. Hands with an unusual magic wand and a ring with a black stone spread out to the sides.
- Lord of fate and death - Voldemort. Bow your head before your master.
Resisting the mental pressure of his enemy's Legilimency, Gilderoy looked up at the soul eaters descending upon him. A golden flame flared at the tip of his wand.
- Centum aurea luminaria armis (parade of a hundred golden lights)
---
- Kha
Drops of blood fell to the floor. With difficulty, Gilderoy raised his hand and wiped his mouth, smearing red liquid across his face.
- Ha-ha-ha. Fool, death cannot take me. In a few hours I will recover and disembowel your soul.
- Incendio
A stream of flame incinerated the dark lord's skull, which was disintegrating into a dark mist. Looking at the empty sky and the distant dots of approaching Death Eaters, Gilderoy hobbled towards the exit. His body, exhausted by the battle, barely carried out the commands of his equally exhausted mind, but his steel will and pride did not allow one of the most powerful wizards in the world to simply fall to the floor, awaiting his fate. Suddenly, he noticed a strange silvery cloth on the spot where he had incinerated the body of this true undead. Looking doubtfully at the unknown artifact lying before him, the wizard did not dare to take it. There was a crack.
Something in my chest fluttered.
The crackling sound was repeated.
The wizard's head began to turn toward the arch, despite himself. The first thing the man's wide eyes noticed was an anthracite-colored claw clinging to the stone column of the arch. A sense of unreality pierced Gilderoy Geysec. Something grotesque, monstrous, alien was looking at him. A scream died in his throat as the wizard looked into the white pools of eyes.
The body, out of control, fell onto the silver fabric. Darkness clouded the consciousness.
Knock-knock.
- Ooh, bitch!
Feeling a headache, I open my eyes and look at the ceiling. There was another knock. A knock in the damn necropolis that London had become. I jump up, reflexively snatching up the magic wand I felt nearby, ready to use protego or combat apparation. And I fall into a stupor. A grey owl was standing on the windowsill outside with an extremely displeased look. Squinting and hooting discontentedly, it stared at the wizard. Alive and not mutated. Although the entire population of magical owls perished in the first years of the cataclysm, not surviving the abrupt change in the magical background. And those individuals who did survive... An encounter with them carried a significant threat to human life. Finally, coming to my senses, I quickly cast a protective spell on myself and with some trepidation open the window with a spell. These beasts are best not to be ignored, as they can attract nearby undead or monsters. The feathered creature flies in, and the incinerating spell is about to be cast on my hand, until I notice something...
The owl flew around the strange wizard with disdain, threw the folded newspaper on the table, knocking over the inkwell standing on it, and flew away with a proud look. The wizard himself continued to look at London living its own life. Blue eyes excitedly absorbed the view that opened up.
Cap.
The man shook his head and looked down at the ink dripping onto the floor. A wave of his wand brought everything back to order, and his trembling hands picked up the newspaper, which had the following clearly written at the top of the first page:
"Daily Prophet"
Gilderoy looked up and saw the date.
September 30, 1985
- What the…