Sectumsempra.
One precise, well-practiced motion of the wand, honed by years of experience, and the heads of three Inferi rolled across London’s cobblestone streets.
The wizard, dressed in worn-out Muggle clothing with a dragon-hide jacket thrown over his shoulders, froze, listening.
The mournful wind carried trash down the streets and whistled through the shattered windows of long-abandoned shops.
Satisfied he hadn’t attracted the attention of any other undead, the man moved quickly and silently into the nearest shop, ducking behind the counter.
Carefully, he pulled an enchanted map from one of his many pockets and quickly pinpointed his location.
Following his will, the map’s image “zoomed” in on his position, clearly rendering the surrounding streets and buildings.
“Millbank Street.
Parliament’s nearby, and Whitehall’s just up ahead.
Finally.
Damn Brits and their idiotic city planning.”
He whispered a few more curses, ones he’d picked up as a child from his Russian mother.
Gilderoy Geysek, a native of Prague, let out a weary sigh.
Then, feeling the encroaching cold, he pressed himself against the counter and focused on Occlumency, completely suppressing his emotions.
“Woooooo.”
A Dementor flying down the street let out a disappointed wail, like a hound that had lost the scent.
It hovered uncertainly for a few minutes near the nearest buildings, this soul-eating creature searching for its prey, before slowly floating onward.
The bone-chilling cold that seemed capable of freezing the very soul began to recede.
The man waited fifteen minutes, then left his temporary hiding place.
Under the dim light, barely filtering through the overcast clouds, he moved through the streets of the dead city toward his goal.
Gilderoy had never particularly liked the lands of foggy Albion or its inhabitants.
He didn’t like the rainy, gloomy weather of the islands, nor the prideful, conservative British themselves.
During his last visit to this country for the Quidditch World Cup, he’d had to leave in a hurry thanks to those radical idiots who pompously called themselves Death Eaters.
At the time, Geysek despised these imitators of Grindelwald.
He considered their leader and followers to be mad fools who wouldn’t last long even if they seized power.
The second and third magical wars on the islands mainly concerned the islands themselves and their nearest neighbor, magical France.
The only thing that bothered the Czech during the Second Wizarding War, by which time he’d gained renown as a master of charms and ritualistics, was the breach of the Statute of Secrecy and the resulting problems.
Travel, magic, women, and his little hobby of writing memoirs, that was all that interested him in those years.
But in 1998, everything went to hell.
An epidemic erupted on the British Isles.
The streets began piling up with Muggle corpses, forcing all Muggle governments to effectively quarantine England for fear of the disease spreading, while the magical part of the country had sealed its borders back in 1997.
But the epidemic didn’t stop there.
Within months, wizards and Muggles alike were seeing Inferi wandering the streets of their cities.
That’s when the International Confederation of Wizards and other Ministries of Magic finally stirred, quickly discovering the virus’s magical origin.
A ritual was rapidly devised to strip the virus of its magical properties, halting its spread across the globe.
Meanwhile, specialized squads of wizards began cleansing the infected, who turned into Inferi upon death.
Oh, that ritual was a masterpiece of ritualistics, and the wizard himself took pride in having participated in its creation.
On the day Gilderoy and dozens of other masters of ritualistics performed the ritual at Delphi, a Greek city famous for its seers and one of Europe’s most powerful magical sources, tensions between the Muggle governments of the USA and the USSR had reached a point of no return.
Dozens of atomic bombs were dropped on the world’s largest cities.
The image of his destroyed hometown, Prague, transformed the cheerful wizard barely past thirty, who loved to joke about the “dandyness” of his surname, into a grim man over fifty.
As the apocalypse reached its zenith, the veil between the world of the living and the dead grew thin.
Everything filled with the undead.
And the world went mad.
From the British Isles came the Death Eaters, insane fanatics who had transformed themselves into undead, worshipping their Master who had conquered Death.
Fanatics who had mastered necromancy.
After that, Gilderoy saw only death and despair.
Cults that worshipped death as life’s ultimate purpose.
Madly laughing wizards in white masks, equally mad allies ready to hurl a killing curse at your back as madness overwhelmed them.
Living people with empty eyes, sometimes indistinguishable from the dead.
Cursed places where death lurked in every shadow.
And so it continued for ten years.
With every step, the wizard felt the cold intensify until he finally saw what had become of central London.
The famous Whitehall, whose name was sometimes used as a metonym for the British government, lay in ruins.
From Westminster Palace to Trafalgar Square, all those famous buildings of government departments and ministries, monuments, and landmarks had been destroyed to their foundations.
Only piles of rubble remained as reminders of what once was.
But that wasn’t what made the wizard tense up.
The sight before him had become familiar over the years of wandering the world.
What actually made his hair stand on end was the spectacle unfolding above the chasm where Trafalgar Square once stood.
Hundreds of figures in tattered dark robes swirled like a vortex, descending into the abyss.
Such a concentration of Dementors drained the color from the world itself.
Gilderoy focused entirely on the meditative and mental techniques he knew for controlling mind and emotions.
The creeping feelings of despondency and despair receded but didn’t disappear.
Like hyenas, they lurked at the edge of his consciousness, waiting for the slightest sign of weakness to pounce.
Exhaling a cloud of vapor, the wizard pulled out a compass.
But this compass’s needle, unlike others, didn’t point north.
He turned the artifact in his hands; one given to him for this mission; and confirmed the direction indicated by the needle.
Then, he slowly retreated to the nearest relatively intact building.
Moving carefully to avoid making noise, he checked the entrance and the room beyond.
The first lesson surviving wizards had learned since the Cataclysm began was not to blindly trust detection spells.
In the early months of the Cataclysm, it had been common for a wizard using a simple “Revelio” to suddenly find a horde of undead, drawn by the magic, bearing down on them.
The only thing worse was a wizard who, confident in the absence of enemies thanks to his spells, walked straight into the lair of Alghouls.
Hearing the quiet crunch of debris under his feet, the man carefully entered the room.
Finding a relatively clean corner, he pulled out chalk.
Soon, a circle was drawn on the floor, enclosing a triangle within it.
The magical formation was framed by ancient runes.
Sitting in the center of the formation, Geysek activated it.
A dome rose up, enclosing the Czech.
He then pulled food and a notebook from a bag attached to his belt.
Shoveling the bland-tasting food into his mouth, he began recording everything he’d seen today.
Unfortunately, the enchanted communication devices and artifacts had stopped working after entering the current London.
The veil between the afterlife and the living world had been nearly torn apart.
The proximity of the Dominion of Death sometimes affected magic and artifacts in the most unpredictable ways.
“Daddy, save me!”
A voice full of agony came from a twelve-year-old boy leaning against a wall, trying to push his intestines back into his torn abdomen.
If only he had been here five minutes earlier…
Crack.
With an expressionless face, he looked at the broken quill and pulled out a new one.
He didn’t risk using repair charms.
The cost of failure for the remaining survivors would be too high.
Several hours later, Gilderoy Geysek, wearing a specially enchanted Invisibility Cloak over his clothes one that could hide him for only six hours walked down the stone stairs leading into the British Ministry of Magic.
The Concealment and Muggle-Repelling Charms had long since been dispelled, making it relatively easy to find.
Soon, the man reached one of the Ministry’s departments.
The offices meant for dozens of Ministry workers were empty.
There were no ghosts, no Dementors, no Death Eaters, whose presence the wizard had feared.
There was only complete silence.
Looking at the scattered desks and papers strewn across the floor, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.
*”Minister Scrimgeour ordered the Ministry entrances sealed.
An attack from You-Know-Who is expected soon.”*
“And he was right.
Avada Kedavra!”
Spinning around, Gilderoy pointed his wand at the darkness of the stairs he’d just descended.
The faint amber glow of his eyes, enhanced by the Cat’s Eye potion he’d drunk, could see nothing through the gloom.
Exhaling a puff of white breath, he pulled the compass out with his free hand.
The needle spun wildly, stopping for no more than a second at a time.
Shaking his hand again, he confirmed the artifact that had guided him here was now malfunctioning.
He cursed under his breath and put the compass away.
The darkness grew thicker.
He moved on, relying only on intuition and instinct.
He wanted to complete his task before nightfall.
He had no desire to know what happened in this necropolis after dark.
The empty rooms and corridors created an oppressive feeling.
The marble stone walls, meant to convey solemnity and grandeur, now seemed more like the walls of a crypt.
Soon, however, the man could go no further because of a collapsed corridor.
Turning around, Gilderoy headed in the other direction.
After some time, he determined that roughly a third of the floor had collapsed downward on one side.
The wizard proceeded down one of the staircases he found.
Throughout his journey, he encountered no one.
Silence reigned everywhere, broken only by the rustle of his boots on stone debris and the occasional unintelligible whisper.
Whisper of the past.
It was a rather unpleasant property of some cursed places, which became broken reservoirs of memory.
“Visitors” to such places could be immersed in events of the past or hear them.
And given that it was usually precisely because of these events that such places became cursed…
“Hahahaha.
Cruciatus!
Cruciatus!
Cruciatus!”
*A woman’s laughter, tinged with madness, echoed against the background of piercing screams.*
Feeling the bone-chilling cold, the wizard stopped on the ninth underground level near a doorway whose doors lay fallen to the side.
A dusty sign lay nearby on the floor, with barely distinguishable lettering.
“Department of Mysteries.”
Entering the hall, paved with cracked black tiles, Gilderoy saw twelve doors, only one of which was slightly ajar.
Silver-white light shone from behind the black door.
Gripping his wand tightly, Geysek peered inside.
A gust of wind hit the man’s face.
Like a Greek amphitheater, stone tiers descended to a platform on which stood an ancient arch radiating silver-white light.
Dozens of Dementors descended through the broken ceiling and disappeared into it.
The empty space within the arch, from which the light emanated, trembled.
“Avada Kedavra.”
A hissing voice came from behind.
Razor-sharp instincts, honed over years of survival, made the man lunge forward and to the side before the killing curse was even fully spoken.
A broad green beam of the curse blasted stone fragments from the floor.
From thin air, a figure slowly appeared…
no, a creature.
With pale, cracked skin more suited to a corpse, a bald head without a single hair, and wearing a black robe, it studied him with crimson eyes.
A dark brown wand with unusual thickenings was pointed down.
“Bow your head before the Master of Death.”
The hissing voice was full of arrogance and madness.
Glancing at the arch, Gilderoy pulled out his notebook.
“Portus.”
Spatial force began to twist his body as usual, but somewhere in the middle of the process, it stopped.
“Fool, no one leaves this place without my permission.”
With indifferent eyes, the wizard looked at his arm, missing up to the elbow; the result of the failed Portkey activation; and waved his wand.
The vanished arm returned to its place, but now without a sleeve and notebook.
“Who are you?”
The pale lips twisted into a snarl.
Hands with the unusual wand and a ring with a black stone spread wide.
“Lord of Fates and Death, Voldemort.
Bow your head before your master.”
Resisting the mental pressure of the enemy’s Legilimency, Gilderoy raised his eyes to the descending Dementors.
Golden flames flickered at the tip of his wand.
“Centum aurea luminaria armis.”
Cough.
Drops of blood fell to the floor.
Gilderoy raised his hand with difficulty, wiping his mouth and smearing the red liquid across his face.
*”Hahaha.
Fool, death cannot take me.
In a few hours, I will recover and rip out your soul.”*
“Incendio.”
A stream of flame incinerated the dark lord’s skull as it dissolved into dark mist.
Looking at the empty sky and the distant dots of approaching Death Eaters, Gilderoy staggered toward the exit.
His body, exhausted from the battle, barely followed the commands of his equally exhausted mind, but iron will and pride prevented one of the world’s strongest wizards from simply collapsing on the floor, awaiting his fate.
Suddenly, he noticed a strange silvery fabric where he’d incinerated that undead’s body.
He looked doubtfully at the unknown artifact lying before him and decided not to touch it.
A crack echoed through the air.
Something in his chest faltered.
The crack repeated.
The wizard’s head, against his will, began to turn toward the arch.
The first thing his widened eyes noticed was an anthracite-colored clawed paw gripping the stone column of the arch.
A feeling of unreality pierced Gilderoy Geysek.
Something grotesque, monstrous, *alien* was looking at him.
A scream lodged in his throat as the wizard looked into those white abysses of eyes.
His body, losing control, fell onto the silvery fabric.
Consciousness was consumed by darkness.
*Knock, knock.*
“Ooh, damn it!”
Feeling a headache, I open my eyes and look at the ceiling.
The knocking came again.
Knocking in the damn necropolis that London had become.
I jump up, reflexively grabbing the wand I feel nearby, ready to use Protego or battle apparition.
And I freeze.
With an extremely displeased look, a gray owl stood on the windowsill outside.
It squinted and hooted, staring at the wizard.
Alive and unmutated.
Though the entire population of magical owls had perished in the first years of the Cataclysm, unable to survive the abrupt changes in the magical background.
And those few specimens that *did* survive…
Meeting them posed no small threat to a person’s life.
Finally coming to my senses, I quickly cast protective charms on myself and, with some caution, open the window with a spell.
It’s better not to ignore these beasts; they might attract nearby undead or monsters.
The feathered creature flies inside, and I nearly unleash incinerating charms from my hands until I notice something…
With disdain, the owl circled the strange wizard, dropped a rolled-up newspaper on the table ;knocking over an inkwell in the process; and flew off with a proud look.
The wizard himself continued to stare at the London that was living its own life.
His blue eyes anxiously drank in the sight before him.
*Drip.*
Shaking his head, the man glanced at the ink dripping onto the floor.
A wave of his wand restored order, and his trembling hands picked up the newspaper.
At the top of the front page, clearly written, were the words:
“The Daily Prophet.”
He shifted his gaze and saw the date.
*September 30, 1985.*
“What the…”