Legacy & War (Battle of Nippur)

[Tom Marvolo Riddle]

Agony is not meant to be shared by any verbal means; language, in general, just does not carry the necessary context through which pain can effectively be expressed. So describing such to anyone but myself is ultimately lost. Those who say words hurt are fools. Then again the incantation Avada Kedavra cost me a lot more than I had been willing to part with this day. Did that make me the fool? I can only guess. Suffice it to say blocking the Killing Curse did little to waylay injury, more than likely it was the ownership of my wand and the lack of desire of my assailant that protected me.

How much my injury was sustained from the curse and how much of it resulted from the subsequent beating, I cannot say. However, with this absent knowledge, I may only provide an uneducated guess at best, and one I am hesitant to offer.

My magic had been usurped in the most intolerable way, in an act of petulance and imitation that would have to be soon rectified.

Fuming, I pushed the rubble, the wood, the brick and mortar from my body, staining it with ink, ripping burnt peeling paper from where my skin had been. I focused on the nova of energy that was in my chest. Specters of agony were first, but other emotions that I barely had felt in a long span filled that place as well. It gave me what I needed to stand and then to walk in something more than a stagger as light barely filtered through the smoking hole in the wall and haze of the city… and my body?

All I could smell was burnt parchment.. My hair perhaps?

But that wasn’t important, what I saw was. A warpath of familiar signature marked with bodies strewn on either side, clean in the middle. The usurper had been busy after having purportedly disposed of me, a mistake in cognition he’d soon regret, I would insure it!

I moved.

Using the rising red and yellow star as a general guide and the clearing in the street, I made a progress that was in some ways startling. The Brute was cavalier enough to give me a trail to follow and I could see him now in the distance, the sight of him churning the mass within me to the point where the warm air of this desert was a chill.

My wand hand twitched as the yew shaft fell back into my grasp, my robes flowing off me like a ghostly apparition. I could feel my footsteps and heart thundering as I passed forward towards the back turned against me. Even amongst the smoke and blooming yellow clouds of dust, his silhouette was striking in the noonday radiance. A grin split my face as the thought of him convulsing crossed my mind.

A swift death would be too good for the simpleton.

Only the suffering of something far more prolonged would be a start. I would see this man so defiled that even hades would weep at the sight of him and that too would be only just a beginning. He would only find peace when the sight and sound of his wretchedly weak whimpering bored me. Only then would I end his misery. Then perhaps I would find him again, see how I could repeat the process in a novel way. For now, this was only the beginning.

I raised my wand, stepping around a still twitching corpse, eyes only just fading.

“Usurper," I said coolly, “You have to mean It. CRUCIO!”

My voice sounded like a swinging mallet and a ringing gong that unleashed fire and sweet magic burning through my veins, alighting down my hand with raw power and exiting out of my wand in a cruelly unassuming white lightning. As it connected to the half turned form of the man who had stolen my magic, rapture awakened my mind. True, uncompromising bliss as the man’s scream began working towards a crescendo that it had failed to reach last time.

Oh. Oh, how I missed this.

In a single instant I saw his muscles ripple as his nervous system fractured under my working. He seized, all that fleshy power gone in an instant. For several seconds he just stood there, jerking, before his legs gave out fully. Body hitting the ground with nearly a sound as it continued to quake as his throat locked up.

That wouldn’t do.

Twisting my wand ever so slightly I raised the power of the spell further and changed how it was attuned. With a flicker, a pulse of energy traveled down the jittering force of dark magic towards the body, when it hit, it renewed his screams to an all-time high.

Screams were payment for his transgressions.

Using a full crucio as my only attack. 800 words even. Included Round 1's injuries onto Tom.