Chapter Text
Fog, thick and damp as a dying breath, clung to the pavement of Diagon Alley. It didn't just hide—it devoured light, sound, hope. The spring of 1998 had come into this world not with flowers, but with the smell of old blood and future ashes, and this fog was its shroud.
Mordred drained her tankard of ale, and the warmth, raw and honest, burned her throat. It was a cheap imitation of what they served in the halls of Camelot, but in this cursed, dying time, little was enough. She wiped the foam from her lips with the back of her gauntlet. The ring of metal on metal was the only music in the silence.
"Mordred, by Merlin's beard, we have to go," Ron whispered. His voice was as thin as a cobweb, and just as easily torn with fear. He hunched his shoulders, as if expecting a blow from the sky. "Hermione... she'll burn me alive if she finds out. We were supposed to be looking for..."
“Shut up, Master.” Her voice was like a sword scraping against stone. Sharp, devoid of warmth. She passed the shattered window of Flourish and Blotts, where the charred pages of books fluttered like black butterflies in the draft. “For two years I’ve listened to your whining. For two years I’ve endured this world where honor is an empty phrase and magic is a coward’s plaything. If I want a beer, I drink a beer. Have you learned that?”
Ron Weasley, sixth son of a pureblood family, friend of the Chosen One, swallowed and nodded. Two years ago, in desperation and stupidity, he had performed the ritual, and fate had answered his prayer with the cruelest of taunts. He had asked for a protector. He had received one. Mordred. The Knight of Betrayal. An unhealed wound in the side of the Camelot legend. And, without a doubt, the biggest thorn in his ginger arse.
“Yes… I got it,” he muttered, hobbling after her.
They emerged from the Leaky Cauldron with a new mug, Mordred carrying it like a scepter, her gait the gait of an exiled queen walking through her ruined domain.
"You know," she said, and there was something like thoughtfulness in her voice, "even this shit has its pearls. Beer, for example. It's honest. It promises nothing but bitterness and oblivion for a couple of hours.
She raised the mug to her lips, but froze. Her body tensed like a bowstring, instincts honed on battlefields this world did not remember screaming at her. Ron saw it, and his hand flew to his wand, hidden in his sleeve. His magic was weak, pathetic compared to hers, but it was all he had.
Three men emerged from the mist like pus from a wound. Black robes, cheap silver masks covering the pimply faces of failures. Not Death Eaters - those had bearing, there was purpose in their cruelty. These were simply carrion, descending upon the corpse of the world.
"Purses. And wands," one croaked, his voice shaking with a mixture of adrenaline and fear. He pointed his wand at Ron. Big mistake.
Mordred laughed. Not a laugh, but a roar. A loud, harsh, contemptuous laugh that rattled the remaining glass and sent a chill down Ron's spine. There was the fury of the ages in that laugh, a thirst for battle that no amount of ale could quench.
“Oh, the heavens have heard my prayers,” she purred. With a lazy grace, she tossed the mug into the air. The beer splashed out, but did not fall. It hung above the mug in a golden, trembling dome, a side effect of the colossal magical energy that always swirled around the Servant. “Bet, Master. Can I break their bones before my beer falls?”
Ron paled. He had seen Mordred angry. He had seen her in battle. But Mordred, who looked forward to violence as a delicacy, was a natural phenomenon. A hurricane trapped in a girl's body.
- Mordred, no need, they...
- I said, shut up. This is going to be fun.
The first bandit didn't have time to cast a spell. She didn't move - she just appeared before him, a blur of scarlet and silver. Clarent, her cursed sword, hadn't even left its sheath. A mailed fist slammed into his solar plexus. The sound was dull, wet, like a butcher's hammer hitting a carcass. The man doubled over, his lungs wheezing out all the air.
"I could chop off your heads," she said quietly, her voice more dangerous than any scream. She watched him fall to his knees, choking on pain. "But that would be merciful. And I'm not in the mood for mercy today."
The beer still hung in the air, its drops frozen like amber stars.
The second was quicker. " Stupefy! " A red beam streaked through the darkness. Mordred didn't even move. Her magic resistance was a wall against which the magic of this world crashed like sea foam against rocks. The spell simply dissipated upon touching her aura.
“Nothing,” she breathed out, and there was a note of boredom in her voice.
Clarent left its scabbard with a hiss that promised only one thing: pain. This sword was not noble, like Excalibur. It was a traitor's weapon, born of resentment and hatred. In her hands, it did not sing. It howled.
"Mordred!" Ron shouted, seeing the third one coming up behind her.
She knew. Of course she knew.
"Don't worry, Master," she said over her shoulder without turning around. "I remember about the beer."
Scarlet flames, dark and evil, enveloped Clarent's blade. This was not magic. This was concentrated hatred given form. The power that had burned Camelot.
She spun, her movement a perfect arc of death. The third bandit raised his shield in horror, " Protego! " but his magic crumbled to dust at the touch of a blade. Clarent didn't break the shield. He cancelled it .
“What… what are you?” the man croaked, stepping back and tripping over his own cowardice.
Mordred's smile widened, revealing fangs that seemed unnaturally sharp in the crimson light of the sword.
— I am Mordred. Knight. Heir. And your last disappointment.
The beer, obeying the laws of this world, began to fall.
The second one tried to apparate, but her hand, quick as thought, grabbed him by the throat, squeezing with a crunch.
"Oh, no. You're not going anywhere," she whispered in his ear, her breath cold as a grave. "The fun's just begun."
Ron watched, paralyzed by a mixture of horror and twisted fascination. She didn't kill. She took them apart. Broken bones with surgical precision. Each blow was calculated to inflict maximum pain without taking life. This wasn't a fight. This was a performance. An anatomy lesson from a butcher.
As the last of them collapsed to the pavement, a whining, broken mass of flesh, Mordred turned to Ron, a smile on her face, almost innocent except for the maddened fire in her green eyes.
- See, Master? I'm getting better. Before, I would have just burned their souls.
The mug of beer had completed its flight. Mordred, without looking, raised her hand and caught it. Not a drop was spilled.
"Like that samurai movie we watched," she winked at Ron. "Remember? The one where the guy chopped up three people and caught the sake cup."
Ron nodded silently, his throat dry.
- Yes... I remember... but, Mordred, we really have to go. Tomorrow... it all starts.
She took a long sip and looked up at the sky, where the cold, distant stars peeked through the ragged clouds. For a moment, her face lost its cruelty, and Ron saw only endless weariness.
- You know, Master... In that life, I fought for the throne. For my father's recognition. For the right given to me by blood. And I turned my kingdom to ashes and lost.
Her gaze slid over the three broken bodies on the ground, and then to him. To Ron. The boy who was afraid of spiders but was willing to die for his friends. Who was her Master not by right of strength, but by some absurd accident.
"This time," she finished her beer, "I won't fight for what's owed to me. But for what I've chosen to protect. Maybe..." her voice faltered, "...maybe this time that will be enough.
Ron was silent. In this rare, fragile moment, she spoke not as a Servant, not as a Knight of Treason. She spoke as a girl who had spent her entire life and afterlife searching for something worth dying for.
"Okay, enough of the snot," she shook herself abruptly, the mask of cruelty returning to its place. "Tomorrow will be a real massacre. And this is just... a warm-up."
She threw the empty mug at the wall. The glass shattered with a cheerful ringing sound.
- Let's go, Master. Let's show this Voldemort of yours and his mongrels what real rage is.
And they set off through the fog, away from the desecrated alley. Ron walked beside her, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel afraid of her. He felt something else. Something like hope.
***
When Ron and Mordred returned, they were met with silence. Not peaceful, but heavy, like a gravestone. It pressed on their ears, making them deaf with unspoken grief. Their temporary refuge, a house on the edge of Diagon Alley that had once belonged to distant Pruett relatives, was a wound in the city. It groaned with every gust of wind, but it held on, stubborn as an old warrior who refuses to fall, even when his soul has been taken out.
Ron stepped inside, the smell of burning, dampness, and fear assailing his nostrils. Mordred followed him in, the clatter of her armor on the creaking floorboards a blasphemy in this temple of silence. She dropped her armor to the floor with a clank that made everyone wince. Shed it like a useless skin, and stood in a simple tunic, frail and tired.
The heart of this dying house was the kitchen. Molly Weasley, her soul barely hanging on to her body in the face of the horrific news but unbroken, stood at the stove. Her hands, covered in a network of old scars, moved with mechanical precision, slicing potatoes. Each strike of the knife on the board was like a heartbeat - thump, thump, we are still alive, we are still breathing. She hummed an old lullaby under her breath, her voice shaking but not breaking. This was her war. A war against despair, waged with a cauldron and a knife.
Nearby, clumsily and angrily, Jeanne Alter peeled an onion. Her fingers, made to grip a spear and carry fire, were no match for the thin husks. She hissed curses in a dead language, and her dark eyes watered.
"Damn poison," she muttered, throwing a peeled onion into the bowl. "Why are you eating this? I'd burn it all like trash!"
Molly turned her face towards her, and there was such a deep, all-forgiving sadness in her eyes that Jeanne froze for a moment.
“Food is not just food, my child,” Molly said softly, her voice like a warm blanket on an icy night. “It is memory. That we are still human. That we sat at this table yesterday. And that we will sit at it tomorrow.”
Her gaze darted to the two empty chairs, and such pain was reflected on her face that Jeanne looked away. She, the Witch of France, who burned cities, could not bear to see her mother's grief. She snorted, but her movements became more careful. She said nothing, but there was something resigned in the way she picked up the next onion.
The common room was a purgatory. Each inhabited their own circle of hell, but they were all trapped in the same room. Ron and Hermione sat on the sagging sofa, their shoulders touching, sharing what little warmth they had left. Hermione held a thick tome in her lap, but her eyes were empty. Her fingers had been frozen on the same page for an hour. She had not read. She prayed in the language of logic, but her god was silent. Nikola Tesla, her Servant, sat cross-legged on the floor. Some Muggle device, an old radio, sparkled in his hands. He muttered to himself, his voice a low hum of a generator: "Interference... Too much interference on the airwaves... The voices can't get through..." It wasn't radio waves he was trying to catch. He was trying to catch hope.
Mordred, seeing Ron, merely nodded and collapsed on the floor in the corner, curled up on her cloak. Clarent lay nearby, within reach. Her face in sleep was almost serene, but her brows were drawn together, as if she were still in the dream world, fighting her eternal battle with her father's ghost. Ron looked at her, and in his heart there was a stirring of desire to go over and cover her with a blanket. He did not. She would have killed him for such tenderness. But the desire itself was a small candle that he carried in his soul.
Arturia sat by the black-draped window, her golden hair dull in the light of a single candle. Excalibur rested in her lap, cold and heavy as the tombstone of an entire kingdom. She was not asleep. She was dozing, half-sitting, but her peace was the peace of a graveyard. Her presence was an anchor for everyone in the room, but Ron could see her eyelashes trembling. Even anchors could sink.
In the darkest corner, Kiritsugu sat like a spider. The smoke from his cigarette rose to the ceiling, weaving into the ghostly figures of his victims. His Servant, Hassan-ibn-Sabbah, was a shadow against the wall. He was invisible, but his presence was felt like the cold of a crypt. Gudako and Mash sat at the table, silently sorting through Ritsuka's letters. Every word written by his hand was a relic. Their grief was silent, but all the more unbearable for that.
And Tom Riddle. He stood by the door, his shadow long and sharp across the floor. He was their greatest weapon and their greatest weakness. He looked at them all, his face an impenetrable mask. He was among them, but not of them. The stone that the builders had rejected, and no one knew whether it would become the cornerstone or crush them all.
And in the center of it all, in a chair by the extinguished fireplace, sat Harry.
He clutched an empty, cold mug in his hands. His gaze was fixed on a crack in the wooden table, thin and sinuous, like a scar. He saw no one. He heard neither the clatter of the knife, nor the whispers, nor the quiet crying coming from the corner where Gudako sat. For him, all this was just background. The noise of time, which was carrying him back.
Back to the day when it wasn't the table that cracked, but his world. Summer 1991. Diagon Alley, sunlit. And a boy with platinum hair and winter-sky eyes standing in Madam Malkin's. A boy whose arrogance was just a thin shell of fear.
Harry squeezed the mug so hard that another crack appeared on its surface. The cold porcelain burned his fingers, but he did not feel it. He felt only the cold of Draco Malfoy's gaze, which had looked at him seven years ago. A gaze that had already held the shadow of the coming war.
Harry watched the crack in the table as it spread, becoming a map of his own soul, a map riddled with the fissures of regret. The room full of living, breathing people was gone. The clatter of Molly's knife became the wheels of the Hogwarts Express. Hermione's whispers became the rustle of robes in Madam Malkin's. He had fallen into the past, and it had accepted him like cold water accepting a drowning man.
Summer 1991. Diagon Alley.
The world was new, bright to the point of pain, and he, Harry, was Adam in this magical Eden, not yet having tasted of the tree of knowledge of evil. And then he saw him. A boy with hair the color of moonlight and a face as sharp and fragile as a shard of ice. Draco Malfoy.
Harry had seen only arrogance then. He had heard only pride. " You're not one of those Muggle-borns, are you? " the words thrown like a stone. But now, from the depths of his nineteen-year-old hell, Harry saw something different. He saw not confidence, but a desperate attempt to fit in. He saw not contempt, but the fear of being rejected by the world that was the only one for Draco. He saw a boy standing on a scaffold, as if on a pedestal, while other hands shaped his destiny, dressing him in a robe with a crest that was both pride and a curse. Harry did not know then that they were both prisoners. Harry of the cupboard under the stairs, Draco of the gilded cage of his name. And that day in the shop, it was not enemies who met. Two lonelinesses met.
Harry watched the crack in the table as it spread, becoming a map of his own soul, a map riddled with the fissures of regret. The room full of living, breathing people was gone. The clatter of Molly's knife became the wheels of the Hogwarts Express. Hermione's whispers became the rustle of robes in Madam Malkin's. He had fallen into the past, and it had accepted him the way the cold earth accepts a seed that will never grow.
September 1996. Hogwarts Express.
The memory struck not with pain, but with a missed opportunity that was worse than any wound. The compartment door creaked open. Draco. Alone. Without his retinue, without the mask of contempt. His face was ashen, with shadows under his eyes. He stood in the doorway, and behind him the corridor of the train seemed like a tunnel to hell.
" Potter... we could... start over ."
And a hand. An outstretched, trembling hand.
Then, in that moment, something inside Harry shifted. Years of hostility, taunts, pain—all of it faded into the background in the face of a boy with naked terror in his eyes. Harry didn’t see Malfoy. He saw a soul on the brink of an abyss. And he, Harry, reached out his hand in response.
Their palms met, a brief, cold, almost lifeless touch. It was not the handshake of friends. It was the silent agreement of two soldiers in the trenches who had been shooting at each other only yesterday. It was not peace. It was a desperate, fragile hope. A question hanging in the stuffy air of the train car.
" Why now? " Harry asked.
" He's like a snake, Potter. He eats everything ," Draco breathed, and there was no hatred of Voldemort in his voice, but the primal fear of a victim before a boa constrictor.
They spoke for a while, but the words were empty. Neither of them knew what to do with this hope. How to water this tiny, stunted plant that had grown on the scorched earth of their feud? The handshake ended. Draco left. And Harry sat there, feeling the cold of his palm on his skin. He had not known then that this was the first and last chance.
November 1996. Room of Requirement.
The memory became sharper, more merciless. The torches on the walls cast dancing shadows. Dumbledore's Army. A handful of children playing at war, not yet knowing that war had long been playing with them.
And once again Draco appeared in the doorway. Broken. Crushed. His face was the face of a man who had looked into an abyss, and the abyss had looked back.
He didn't come to ask. He came to confess.
" He... Voldemort... gave me a task... The Vanishing Cabinet... And... to kill Dumbledore ."
Words falling into the silence like stones into a well. Each word is a scream.
" I don't want this! " came from his lips, and it wasn't Malfoy's voice, but the howl of a cornered animal. " You think I have a choice? He'll kill my mother! My father! Me! "
Blood seeped from his palms where his nails had dug into the skin. He stood there in the middle of the room, naked in his fear, and he did not beg for forgiveness. He begged for salvation.
And what did you do, Harry? What did you all do?
Ritsuka, wise, cold Ritsuka, said, " You came here. That's a choice ." Ron clenched his fists, ready to fight. Hermione looked at him with pity, but pity was no help. And he, Harry...
He remained silent.
He looked at this boy, his enemy, who had offered them his soul on a platter, and he was silent. He could have taken a step. He could have said, " Stay. We will protect you. We will find a way ." He could have stood between him and the Darkness.
But he didn't. There was old hurt, distrust, weariness in him. He let Ritsuka say the right but empty words. He let Neville throw down his bold challenge. He let Draco turn around and go back to his hell. Under supervision, maybe, but without his, Harry's, support.
He, Harry Potter, the Chosen One, the Savior, had watched as a lost sheep had crawled bleeding into his fold, and he had not opened the gate for it. He had simply watched as it had staggered back into the jaws of the wolves.
June 1997. Astronomical Tower.
The highest point of Hogwarts. The sky, strewn with cold, indifferent stars. And Dumbledore. The great, wise, all-powerful Dumbledore, looking at the boy with the wand.
On Draco.
And Harry, hiding below, saw in Draco's eyes not the malice of a killer. He saw an echo of that despair from the Room of Requirement. He saw the boy carrying out the sentence passed upon him that day when Harry and the others remained silent. Draco's hand shook. He could not. He had made his choice again and again not to kill.
And then Snape came. And the green beam of "Avada Kedavra" became a point in history that Harry could rewrite.
Harry's eyes snapped open. The mug in his hand shattered, the sharp edge digging into his palm. Blood, thick and dark, dripped onto the table, mixing with the spilled tea. He stared at it, mesmerized.
“Harry, are you okay?” Ron’s voice was quiet, lacking its usual carefree tone. He sat opposite him, idly rolling his only chess piece, a battered black knight, in his fingers, which he always carried with him for good luck.
Harry shook his head silently, trying to stop the bleeding with the sleeve of his robe.
“I keep thinking…” Ron began, looking not at Harry but at the knight in his hand. “About Malfoy. It’s weird, isn’t it? He was so predictable all these years. He did nasty things, he said nasty things. And then… he stopped. He just went quiet. Like a piece that had been removed from the board. But that doesn’t happen in chess. Pieces that are removed never come back. And he… he’s out there somewhere.”
Hermione looked up from her book and sighed.
- He made his choice, Ron. He's with them.
“Are you sure?” Ron looked up, and there was that strange, penetrating depth in his eyes that made him a genius at the chessboard. “He’s a Slytherin through and through. And what’s the most important thing to a Slytherin? Self-preservation. They’ll do anything to survive. But what if the surest way to survive is to do something so outrageous, so… un-Slytherin, that the enemy just doesn’t expect it? To make a move that goes against your very nature.”
He turned the horse over in his fingers.
- This piece. It is the most cunning. It does not move straight. It jumps over others. It strikes where it is not expected. Everyone watches the king, the queen... and sometimes the knight wins the game. With a blow from the shadows.
Mordred, dozing in the corner, snorted contemptuously.
- It takes courage to strike. And this ferret is a coward.
“Maybe a coward,” Ron agreed. “But sometimes even a coward can do one brave thing. One brave thing. When the price of inaction is death. His own. Or his mother’s.”
There was silence in the room, broken only by the crackling of the candle.
“We caught Potterwatch yesterday,” Hermione said quietly, as if changing the subject. “Lee Jordan was talking about… Neville. He said that Neville was leading the resistance at Hogwarts. That the Death Eaters were afraid of him. Of him alone. They couldn’t break him. Can you imagine? Neville.”
Harry froze. Neville. The boy who was afraid of his own shadow. The boy who could have been the Chosen One. He wasn’t safe here. He was out there, in the heart of the enemy stronghold. And he wasn’t hiding. He was fighting.
And suddenly it all came together in Harry's head. Not into a clear plan, but into a bitter, searing insight.
Ron was right. This war was a game of chess. And he, Harry, was the king, the one being targeted. All eyes. All hopes and curses. The whole game was centered around him. But what if that was the real mistake? What if it was a distraction? While all eyes were on the king, the real threat – or the real salvation – was coming from the other side.
Neville. The Hogwarts Fighter. The boy who became a man, not because of a prophecy, but against all odds. He was there, in the heart of darkness. And he didn't break.
Draco. Where was he now? Ron had said, "a move that goes against your very nature." What could be more un-Slytherin than sacrificing yourself? Or... than saving someone other than yourself?
Harry looked at his bleeding palm. He didn't know how this war would end. He didn't see a way to win. But he suddenly felt - not with his mind, but with something deeper, in the very core of his being - that his job was not to deliver the final blow. His job was... different.
He is not a sword. He is bait. A target. The one on whom all of Voldemort's hatred is focused. And while the Dark Lord looks at him, he does not see the others. He does not see the boy with the knife, sharpening it in the dungeons of Hogwarts. He does not see the broken blond, who seeks a way to cheat death itself.
His path is to go straight towards this hatred. To take it all upon himself.
And he realized that his personal war wasn't just with Voldemort. It was for that outstretched hand on the train. For that confession in the Room of Requirement. He couldn't just let that soul disappear. Saving Draco had become something personal for him. Not an act of mercy, but an attempt to fix what he had broken inside himself. To repay a debt.
He stood up, walked over to Molly, and took a clean towel from her to bandage his arm. There was no longer confusion in his eyes. There was a goal. Heavy as a rock, and as unclear as a road in the fog, but there it was.
He had to give them a chance. All of them. Even if the price of that chance was himself.
Silence fell over the Order's sanctuary, heavy and thick as unfallen snow. Harry, bandaging his arm, sat silently in his seat. Everyone in this room was locked in their own personal Gethsemane, waiting for the dawn to bring not light, but steel and fire.
And at that very moment, miles away, in the desolate, desecrated heart of England, another young man was praying too. But his prayer was not directed to the heavens. It was a cry into the abyss.
The church was crucified on the hills under the leaden shroud of night. The spring of 1998 came into this world not with flowers, but with the smell of decay and sacrilege. The broken stained glass windows, like wounds in the body of a saint, bled darkness. Only the moonlight, cold and dispassionate, like a surgeon's gaze, dared to penetrate, washing the altar desecrated with dried blood and runes carved over the erased faces of the apostles. Here, in this place abandoned by God, a new prophet prayed.
Thorfinn Rowley, a young man with the face of an old parchment map on which only paths to defeat were written, stood in the center of the summoning circle. His Death Eater robes, torn to shreds, soaked in the blood of others and his own, fluttered like the skin of a frightened animal. The wind, howling in the empty eye sockets of the windows, sang the last rites of this world.
In his icy fingers he clutched the only relic of his faith, the black chess knight. Moriarty's gift. His mentor, his architect of hope, burned in the flames of the battle for the Witchcraft, leaving behind not just an emptiness but a vacuum that sucked away the remains of Thorfinn's childish soul.
"A game, boy," the ghost of the professor whispered in his memory, "the world is but a great chess game. Don't be a pawn. Be the one who moves it."
Moriarty taught him to see greatness in intrigue, but he died protecting Thorfinn from Voldemort's mindless hybrids. Intellect fell to brute force. The greatest lesson and the greatest betrayal.
That was why Thorfinn was not whispering words of appeal to a new schemer. He was praying for a wall. For a shield. For something unbreakable that could stand between him and the icy silence of the sky. His voice, cracked and hoarse, was the prayer of a desperate lamb, addressed not to the Shepherd, but to the Abyss itself.
- Hear me... Protect me...
The summoning circle exploded in scarlet, but not with thunder, but with silence. An absolute, deathly silence, so dense that it seemed that sound itself had died in this temple. The air became viscous, like resin. The runes on the floor hissed, emitting smoke with the smell of burnt bones, and from this soundless flame, straight from the split altar, a figure arose.
She was fragile, almost ephemeral, but in her hands rested a shield. Enormous, black, it did not reflect light, but absorbed it, and at its center pulsed a crimson glow, like the heart of a dying god encased in metal.
Thorfinn recoiled, his wand shaking like a seismograph before the end of the world.
- Who… who are you?
A girl stood before him. Her jet-black hair, tangled and damp as if she had just been pulled from a river of blood, fell across her armour of the same grave-coloured hue. The armour was riddled with a network of cracks, and from each one the same scarlet, sick light oozed. But her face… it was almost angelic. Soft features, a slight, understanding smile, like the Mush Kyrielight he had seen in Muggle photographs from newspapers and in the reports he had been given to deliver. The contrast between her face and the hellish radiance of the armour was blasphemous.
"I am a Servant of the Shield-Bearer class. My name is Tachi. And I am your shield, Master," her voice was a confessor's whisper, promising forgiveness for sins you have not yet committed.
"A Shieldbearer?" Thorfinn muttered, his mind frantically clinging to a saving thought. "But Potter... his friends also have a Servant of that class..."
His gaze darted to her eyes. They were red. Not just red, they were the color of dried blood, the embers of a soul burned to ashes. Tachi slowly lowered her head, and the movement was too smooth, too predatory, like a snake pretending to be a dead branch.
“I am here to protect you ,” she repeated, and her slender fingers touched the surface of the shield. The metal made a low, vibrating hum, and sparks ran across the floor. The tension in Thorfinn’s chest began to recede. She seemed simple. Clear. She was his wall. He took an uncertain step forward.
- Will you serve me?
“Always, Master,” Tachi nodded, and her smile grew wider, but her eyes… there was nothing in them except the cold of eternal winter.
And then her smile faltered, twisting for just a moment into a predatory grin that Thorfinn barely had time to notice. He froze. His heart skipped a beat, then began to pound with the fury of a trapped bird. She asked a question, and her voice dropped an octave, drained of all warmth.
— Master, tell me... where is Kiritsugu Emiya now?
Cold. A sticky, all-pervading cold that promised no death, only endless torment. Thorfinn blinked, trying to comprehend.
"Why... why does this matter to you?" he forced out, and Tachi took a step toward him. Her tombstone shield hummed louder, pulsing like a living, hungry beast.
Thorfinn raised his wand, his instincts screaming at him in danger, overriding his mind.
- And anyway... Are you like Moriarty or something? I-I won't allow it! You must obey! Imperio! - he shouted, putting all his will, all his fear into the spell.
A golden beam of command and enslavement shot from the end of the wand and struck her.
And drowned.
He simply disappeared into her red eyes, without leaving even a ripple. Tachi didn't flinch. She only raised an eyebrow mockingly.
"You think it will work on me?" Her voice was thick with sarcasm, as ancient as betrayal itself. "I was created by a will greater than your childish magic."
She stepped again, and her movement was inhumanly fast, a blur that her vision could not process. The predator made its lunge.
"Kiritsugu Emiya," she hissed, her voice shaking with centuries of pent-up hatred, "taught me that salvation is a lie. That the only way to protect something is to destroy everything else. He burned my world to save his. A fair exchange, no?"
Thorfinn stumbled back. The wall he had called upon turned out to be a guillotine.
"I... I can find him! I'll help!" he blurted out, his voice breaking into a pitiful squeak.
Tachi stopped, tilted her head to the side, her face once again taking on an expression of tragic, vulnerable beauty.
— Really, Master? You will help me? — Her gloved hand trembled, as if she were holding back tears. And then her smile became cruel, blinding in its depravity. — You already helped. You summoned me.
The shield flared a blinding crimson. She did not strike. She merely thrust it forward. And Thorfinn's spell, absorbed and strengthened by her hatred, burst forth. Not as a golden beam, but as a black spear woven from his own will.
It pierced him right through.
The pain was absolute. He felt his ribs crumble to pieces, his lungs instantly filling with hot blood. The scream caught in his throat, turning into a gurgling wheeze. His body collapsed onto the stone floor like a sack of bones. The chess knight, his little relic, rolled from his weakened hand and came to a stop at her feet.
Tachi stepped on the figurine and the black wood cracked with a crunching sound.
She leaned slowly over the dying Thorfinn, her face so close that he could see his distorted reflection in her ruby eyes.
"Tell your Dark Lord," she whispered into his ear as the life left his body. "Emiya is my prey. And I will not tolerate competition."
The church exploded from within. Scarlet flames erupted from its shield, consuming everything—the walls, the altar, the boy’s body. The stained glass windows melted and fell in a shower of multi-colored glass, mixing with the ash.
Through the roar of fire and the crack of collapsing beams, the howl of hybrids came from the plains where the war was fought.
Tachi stepped from the pyre into the night, unharmed and terrifying. Her shield glowed like a beacon of the Apocalypse. Her red eyes burned with an unquenchable fire of vengeance.
"Kiritsugu," she said into the void. "I'm coming."