Compromising
[I suppose I have to discuss the run-up to Yule of Seventy-Six, don't I? — L]
[I could just skip this part, it's not that important to the overall narrative. — A]
[No, it gives more context to what the hell happened to Thom, and you do still want me to cover what happened at Ancient House in the immediate aftermath, right? — L]
[Well, I wasn't there, and that actually is important to the overall narrative, so yes, Evans, obviously I want you to cover that part. — A]
[Well, it will absolutely break the narrative to explain all of the necessary background on legilimency and subsumation in the midst of the shock I was feeling at the time. And besides, you already put in that I was concerned about the ritual. — L]
[Well, then, I guess you're going to have to discuss it, aren't you? And you pulling Cissy's leg about two fancy dresses was too good to leave out. — A]
Please bear in mind, Dear Readers, that I have never claimed not to be a monster...but I like to think I'm a bit more mature and conscientious these days than I was at the age of sixteen. I'm not particularly proud of this little incident, regardless of how perfect a solution it seemed at the time to my ethical dilemma, but we all did things in our teens that we're not particularly proud of in hindsight, right?
Well, in any case, for the sake of the narrative:
Strange as it might seem to Bella and Mira, Lily had never spent much time in London — or Edinburgh, or any other large city. Not the busy, downtown shopping centres and such, at any rate. She'd been to the nicer parts of Birmingham a few times, but not since before she started school, really. (And "nicer" was a relative term.) They didn't tend to get out of Cokeworth much over the summer, but when they did, she and Sev almost always went to Knockturn.
Of the three of them, she might actually be the least comfortable, surrounded by hordes of stressed-out muggles all trying to finish their Christmas shopping on the last Saturday before the holiday, and that was only partially because she kept picking up their petty concerns and anxieties with legilimency. The rest of it was, well...this was all much more upscale than anywhere Lily normally frequented (or at least anywhere public). She couldn't help feeling a bit out of place, even knowing that she actually could afford things in these shops now, if she wanted them. (Imagine showing up to Christmas dinner wearing real diamonds — Petunia would just die. Not that Lily could go to her parents' for Christmas anymore, even if she wanted to.)
And knowing that none of them had given her a second look all afternoon, for that matter. Bella didn't own a single piece of clothing that could pass for muggle, so they were using glamours to look like they fit in.
Bella, of course, was never really uncomfortable anywhere, and this was the eleventh year Mira had helped her find an appropriate sacrifice. Generally they targeted selfish, cut-throat businessmen — ad men and financiers, mostly — who would appeal to the Dark. Mira would find one in a bar somewhere, spend a little while talking to him to be sure he was a good candidate, and then lure him away with the promise of sex, bringing him somewhere well away from anyone watching so Bella could easily snatch him (which meant she'd probably spent about eleven times more hours in this sort of environment than Lily).
This year, they weren't doing that.
Lily had taken Narcissa's advice, sleeping on the problem of whether participating in the Blacks' Yule ritual would annoy Persephone, and just asking the goddess directly whether she was allowed to do so. She hadn't said no, She'd just explained that the larger part of the reason She didn't approve of the Blacks' ritual wasn't just that they just killed their sacrifice early — people died early all the time, it was annoying but hardly unusual. It was that they destroyed the soul of the sacrifice, rendering it down into raw energy and preventing it from ever joining the Dead properly, the experiences of their lives entirely lost.
Even if She hadn't actually said no, it had still been fairly obvious that She didn't approve, and didn't want Lily to do it. And Lily had been on the verge of telling Bella as much — halfway through explaining the problem, in fact — but then Thom had suggested that if the problem was really that Death would be losing out on the memories and experiences of the sacrifice, she could sacrifice the person's memories to Death before giving the energy of their life and soul to the Family Magic.
And when Lily had taken that idea to Persephone, She'd called Thom a smug little shite, but admitted, albeit slightly reluctantly, that yes, that would be an acceptable compromise. Especially if Lily chose someone who was destined to die sometime between now and Yule anyway. She'd even given Lily a gift to help her find an appropriate candidate: an awareness when she looked at any given person of how much time they should have left among the living.
Most people she'd seen so far, their 'time' felt remote, probably decades away. (She couldn't really tell specifics beyond the order of magnitude.) Mira felt like that, and Sev and Aster. There was no guarantee they wouldn't die 'early', due to the decisions of another actor, but their natural deaths were years away, they weren't likely to die of misfortune or illness before then.
Bella's 'natural' death was so far away Lily could barely feel it touching her, though when she'd told the witch as much, she'd pointed out that the likelihood of her dying a natural death was miniscule. She was much more likely to be killed in battle or assassinated or something. Probably also not for a good long while, but even she would slip up eventually. Thom's 'natural' death, in contrast, was only maybe two or three years away, but given the measures he'd taken to make himself invulnerable to physical and magical harm and tie his soul to the mundane plane, he could live centuries or even millennia beyond his expected time of death. (Bella wasn't concerned about him dying, anyway.)
This year's sacrifice had to be someone who would naturally die within the next three days — destined to die through misfortune rather than of age or illness, because it would be insulting to the Family Magic to offer it a weak, sickly sacrifice — but other than that, it could be anyone. And in fact, it might be better if they found someone the Dark wouldn't like so much, because the Family Magic still hadn't forgiven the Dark for tearing itself away from the Family Magic when Sirius broke the Covenant over the summer. If Angel showed up to partake in the ritual, she'd probably be allowed, but the Family Magic apparently didn't want Bella going out of her way to please the Dark.
So Mira didn't really need to be here to lure away some randy banker. Bella had offered to let her off the hook, since they really just needed to wander around Oxford Street until Lily spotted a good sacrifice, but Mira liked window-shopping (most magical enclaves weren't really large enough for that sort of thing), and kept an eye on muggle trends in jewellery and fashion, looking for inspiration for the next outfit she commissioned.
Bella, on the other hand, had referred to excusing her from the excursion as letting her off the hook because she found shopping to be horribly tedious, and the idea of ready-made clothing terribly gauche. Obviously she could walk around London all day, but it was incredibly obvious, even without mind magic (Lily still couldn't read Bella at all), that she'd rather be doing just about anything else. "Any luck yet?"
No, actually. It was sort of weird, honestly. They'd been walking around for at least two hours now, and they had to have seen thousands of people, not one of whom Lily had had the sense should die before Yule.
"No, there was that one man who was probably going to die in a week or so, but he's the— Oh, wait!" she interrupted herself, as she spotted a young woman on the other side of the road, hugging her friends goodbye before slipping down the stairs to the tube station, laden with shopping bags. It was sort of hard to describe, but it was almost like there was a sort of invisible halo around people that Lily was aware of when she focused on a person, stronger and sort of...not-brighter the closer they were to dying, and that woman — she couldn't be more than twenty or so — was so close to her appointed time of death that, far from being concerned she wasn't meant to die soon enough, Lily was actually concerned she might trip and fall down the stairs or something, and break her neck before they could kidnap her. "There! The brunette in the green coat! Red hat! Come on!"
She took off herself before the words were completely out of her mouth, narrowly avoiding being run over by a taxi, which would, yes, be counterproductive to say the least, but she was seriously concerned the woman, who was now completely out of sight, might die before they reached her. (And it was fine, he hadn't actually hit her, just laid on the horn all put out with her for nearly getting herself killed.)
"Asphodel!" Mira called after her, clearly alarmed by the near miss. "Be careful!"
Lily didn't stop, she was sure she and Bella would follow her — or, more likely, Mira would follow her and Bella would just step out of her shadow to catch up.
Well, at least she didn't fall down the stairs, Lily thought, scanning the crowd. If she had, there would almost certainly be a commotion, instead of what seemed to be a completely normal sort of insanity, with hundreds of people moving in every direction. Bella and Mira managed to catch up just as Lily spotted the girl's hat again, bobbing through a turnstile, headed toward an escalator. "Come on," she said again, leading the older witches after her. "She's going to die in— I don't know, minutes! We have to catch up!"
Nikki was having a very good day. She'd gotten nearly all of her Christmas shopping done — she still needed to find something for her younger brother, but teenage boys were easy. She could probably write "Happy Christmas" on a sheet of lined paper, fold it in half with a five pound note inside, and he'd be chuffed. Mum would almost certainly have something to say on the subject of lazy gift-giving, how impersonal and unthoughtful it was to just give people money, but she hadn't seen anything today that really screamed Jason. It didn't really help that she had no idea what sort of music he was into these days or anything. Obviously she'd still try to find something for him, but if she didn't, it was hardly the end of the world.
She'd gotten to catch up with Kimmy and Lisa — she never got to see her old school friends now that they were off at uni most of the year — and found a new lipstick and a cute jumper to wear to the family Christmas party next weekend, and she should be home in plenty of time to call Nathan before dinner. She was still trying to convince her latest boyfriend to come over and meet her parents. Yes, maybe two weeks was a little soon to come to big family holiday parties, but he could make an appearance over New Year's, or at least stop in and say "hi" to Mum and Dad before taking her out to the cinema, or something.
Even the crowd at Oxford Circus couldn't dampen her holiday cheer — she caught herself humming the Carol of the Bells as she made her way down to Platform Four.
And the crowd on the platform was obnoxious, even on a scale of Oxford Circus. She managed to worm her way right up to the yellow line, to hopefully get a good seat — or any seat at all, she really just wanted to be able to tuck her bags under, out of the way — but there were far too many people jostling for a similar position — too many tourists, she corrected herself, as a large woman with an American accent gesticulated wildly, nearly hitting Nikki in the face. She didn't even notice, deep in conversation with her husband (or rather, thoroughly engrossed in talking at the poor beleaguered man).
And then it happened: she was glaring at the back of the American's bottle-blonde head, the train started pulling in. The crowd surged and someone behind her stumbled, knocking into her, a sharp elbow pushing her past the line. For a single, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching moment, she teetered on the edge of the tracks. She felt her balance go, saw the lights of the train coming closer, knew this was the end—
At the last possible instant, a woman's hand reached out, grabbing her wrist and pulling her back to safety, the bag with the cute jumper falling from her other hand, crushed beneath the wheels as the train whooshed to a stop, only inches from her face.
"Oh! Oh, God!" she stuttered, shaking, clinging to the arm of the woman — girl, really, she couldn't be any older than Jason, sixteen or seventeen — who had just saved her life. "Oh, God, you– you just— I thought I was—" She couldn't say it, it still felt too close, but she'd thought she was going to die, that she was already dead, with just a split-second left to live.
Another woman, clearly a companion of the one who had saved her, maybe a couple of years older, put an arm around her shoulders as the oblivious bystanders — none of them even seemed to have noticed that Nikki had almost died — made way for the off-loading passengers and flooded onto the train. "It's okay, love, you're safe. Here, why don't we buy you a cup of tea?"
Too shaken to object, she let her rescuer and a third girl, maybe her sister? lead them back up to street-level and into a nightmare.
One second, her rescuer was introducing herself — her sister and their friend went to the counter to order drinks, leaving Nikki and the dark-haired, dark-eyed, strangely intense "Bella" to take their seats at a little table tucked away in a neglected corner of an oddly underpopulated café — shaking her hand before they sat down. And the next she was jerked off balance again, and the entire world disappeared, as though Nikki was struck blind and deaf, but also as though the chair beneath her and the air in her lungs had also ceased to exist. If it weren't for Bella's hand in hers, she would have been certain she'd ceased to exist. As it was, she was just struck by uncomprehending terror.
When the world came back, they were no longer in the café, but instead in a parlour or sitting room or something, the furniture all heavy, dark wood and red velvet and silver, with an honest-to-God tapestry on the wall beside the fireplace, like they were in a mediaeval castle, and Nikki was screaming, demanding, somewhat incoherently, to know where they were, what Bella had just done, and why, and how.
Her voice cut out as abruptly as the entire world, only moments before. She tried to run, to back away, anything, but Bella pulled a foot-long wooden baton from her sleeve and flicked it at Nikki, and her body wouldn't move.
"We're at my home," Bella said calmly, as though nothing happening here was the least bit out of the ordinary, casually spinning the baton between her fingers as she spoke. "That was something called shadow-walking, and as for why, I think I'll let Princess explain when she catches up. For the moment," she added, "it will probably be less annoying for everyone if you just go to sleep."
Nikki tried to object — no way in hell was she going to sleep, she wanted answers, damn it! Was this— Had she just been kidnapped? And what the hell had she done to her? Why couldn't she move? Or maybe she'd actually been run over by the Bakerloo train, and this was just some weird dying dream or something... — but even if she'd been able to speak, before she could, her rescuer? kidnapper? flicked the stick in her direction again, this time with a blue light flying through the air to hit her in the head, and all of a sudden she couldn't so much as keep her eyes open. Her knees buckled, but she was unconscious before she hit the floor.
Lily let out a long, shuddering breath as she stole the last of Nicole Worth's memories, letting them pass through her consciousness and into an enchanted flask. The connection between them snapped, throwing Nicole back into unconsciousness — coming full circle, in a way.
She hadn't explained. It had seemed...kinder, to let Nicole sleep through the process of reliving and forgetting everything she'd ever done. (Not that she'd actually done so, but that had been Lily's thought process in not waking her up and explaining before she started.) It had taken...gods, she didn't even know how long. Hours. It was light out again — she'd started in the afternoon, so it had been at least all night — and Lily was starving.
But it was done, now. When Lily reached into the mind of the unconscious woman, there was only emptiness where her experiences — memories of things she'd done and seen and thought — had been, torn away from the network of background knowledge that gave them context. Lily had subsumed them, not just copying the memories into her own mind but stealing away the little bits of energy, of magic, which actually held them, surrounding them and forcing them to resonate with her mind rather than Nicole's, pulling them into herself and then giving them up, pushing that energy out into the world, forcing it to take a physical form, still carrying the thoughts and feelings and sensations which formed every conscious, recallable moment of the sacrifice's life.
Everything Nicole had been was now condensed into silvery-white mist that couldn't seem to decide whether it was a liquid or a vapour, swirling in its vessel. The only thing left to do was to invoke the goddess and pour it out to Her, to rejoin the magic of the Universe, bearing the impressions of Nicole's experiences, her life, across the Veil.
There was a brush of another mind against her own a half-second before a soft knock on the door — Thom, pretending to be polite.
Pretending to be polite seems a bit redundant...
What else would you call announcing your arrival when we both know you're going to come in anyway?
He did, opening the door without waiting for a response, as well as projecting his amusement — making the point he was still lurking, even though she couldn't feel him in her mind. She assumed he was examining how the subsumption and transformation process had gone, which was just—
Well.
It was a little bit scary how amazing it had been. By which she meant other people would probably be a little scared if she admitted how much she'd...enjoyed it.
Enjoyed wasn't the right word, though.
Not quite.
How powerful it felt — she'd felt — tearing Nicole's mind apart, selfishly, ruthlessly, viciously seizing the pieces she wanted — aware that she was destroying another person, acutely aware, witnessing the memories as she laid claim to them and dragged them away from the muggle woman, knowing her intimately as a person, recognising that she was a conscious being with her own rights and desires and that Lily tearing her apart like this, not just destroying her being, but taking away everything that made Nikki Nikki, slowly and methodically, was the greatest of violations, and Nicole, poor, sweet Nikki, was helpless to stop her. She didn't even know what was happening.
She'd woken up as soon as Lily started assaulting her memories. 'Woken up,' that was — she'd never opened her eyes, never understood what was happening. She'd thought she was dying, that she'd been hit by that train, and this was just what dying was, your life flashing before your eyes, except it wasn't a flash, it was a slow and agonising unmaking. It felt like a nightmare to her, reliving and forgetting her entire life, feeling Lily moving from her earliest childhood, slowly but inexorably dissolving her memories, making her less and less, fearing, knowing, that she would soon be nothing at all.
She'd been terrified, and it had hurt, a deep, visceral, existential pain that was...not entirely unpleasant to experience second-hand, even appealing, in a perverse, bittersweet way, like truly heartfelt poetry read directly to Lily's soul, her terror lending a sharp, sickening sense of urgency to the process.
It had been...almost intoxicating, not just the power trip and feeling her victim's pain and fear in the moment, but all the joys and sorrows of her life, the love— Knowing another person more intimately than she knew herself (she'd never really been one for introspection or dwelling on her own past), knowing what it truly meant to destroy a person, to obliterate everything she was and might have been, and deciding not to care.
No, that wasn't quite right, either: not deciding to care.
Deciding not to implied that caring was the default, that she had to choose not to feel bad about Nicole's pain and the harm she was inflicting, when that wasn't the case. She could have convinced herself to feel bad about it, that what she was doing was a bad thing, but, well... No, she really couldn't, actually.
Because beyond feeling powerful, it had felt right, reaching out and taking those memories, that energy, engulfing them and making them her own. It had felt right, inspiring those feelings and revelling in her ability to do so, positively basking in them. It had felt like something she was born to do.
She really hadn't realised, when Thom had taught her how to subsume a memory — by stealing one of hers and then letting her take it back — how incredibly good it felt to take not just one memory, and one which was rightfully hers to begin with, but one after the next, an entire lifetime's worth of new experiences flooding through her — or how incredibly frustrating it was that she hadn't been able to keep them. She didn't remember them now, any more than Nikki did.
She didn't begrudge Persephone the sacrifice, of course, she was doing this for Her, but that didn't mean she didn't desperately want to know what it felt like to take another person's experiences and keep them for herself, let them truly become a part of her, and more, what it felt like to keep going, not stop with their experiences, but steal their entire mind, follow all the tantalising loose ends which remained when the experiences were gone, swallowing up their background knowledge and hopes and dreams and everything, taking it all. She could, she was sure, and she wanted to...
And that, she suspected, most people would find terrifying, but Lily wasn't Aster. She might technically be able to convince herself that she should, as a matter of principle, feel bad about being a monster — she wasn't stupid, she knew that metaphages were considered monsters by most people, especially when they preyed on conscious beings — she just couldn't bring herself to do it.
All the same, it had felt naughty, refusing to do so, refusing to stop, even though she knew she was causing pain and distress for her own gratification and that of her goddess, and that was a "bad thing". She'd chosen to indulge herself, not simply doing this because it needed to be done, but gleefully disregarding Nicole's suffering, embracing the savage instinct to tear her still-conscious mind apart, like a pack of wolves eating their prey alive, positively delighting in it.
And now, looking at the little urn of memories swirling before her, it was just—
She felt empty. Hollowed out. Not in the same way as Nikki, exactly, a little raw, sort of, feeling off simply because she'd taken in and given up too much energy in much too short a space of time — almost like overchannelling, but not as...physical — but she still had all of her own memories.
It was more like... Like the world was a little brighter, a little more real through Nicole's eyes, even if, technically speaking, they hadn't been engaging with the real world in the present at all. And now it was done, she couldn't help feeling like she'd...lost something, like the world was just a little dimmer and colder and a little less right, now that she was no longer experiencing it through Nicole.
And she felt overwhelmed by the enormity of what she'd just done, because even though it wasn't enough and she desperately wanted to keep going, it was also— Seeing Nicole's memories, all twenty years, five months, and six days of her life, all the experiences which had defined her, reduced to less than a litre of swirling, fluid magic, she didn't know if she wanted to laugh or cry, though she felt certain she was on the verge of doing one or the other, or possibly both, and it was just—
She could feel Thom laughing at her. That emotion is called awe. And appealing as it might sound to take an entire soul for yourself, I doubt you would be able to contain another person's entire life experience at this point, much less their consciousness and all of the energy which is their metaphysical person. Not without severely over-extending yourself and potentially disrupting your own metaphysical integrity.
Which meant...?
His response was...not actually in Parsel, since he was communicating telepathically, but almost certainly a Parsel concept — the impression of a greedy little snake attempting to swallow an egg it could easily have fit inside. It obviously couldn't open its mouth wide enough, and if it could have, it still probably would've choked on it.
Something like the snake equivalent of your eyes are bigger than your stomach?
Pretty much. I seem to recall warning you that stealing copious amounts of information from another mind would be extraordinarily unpleasant. If you can't assimilate another person's understanding of French directly from their mind, what makes you think you could assimilate their entire mind?
Well, obviously she hadn't been thinking of it in those terms, that was what. Still, she couldn't help wondering, Can it actually be done, though? Without a ritual, I mean, just legilimency. She was familiar with the concept of subsumption rituals to increase one's channelling threshold and so on, but...
Yes, he thought back, with a smirk and a sort of you're adorable undertone which struck Lily as slightly obscene, given the topic. You would certainly have to work up to it.
She was distracted from wondering exactly how she would go about doing that (which was probably not something she should really want to learn anyway — if Persephone didn't want her to kill people and let the Family Magic eat them, She probably wouldn't want Lily to go around killing people so she could eat them) by Nicole waking up, startled by Thom's knock, and realising that she was in a bed she didn't recognise, with this weird girl sitting beside her with a freaky glowing mason jar and some creep hovering over them, smirking like a maniac.
She scrambled to sit up and scoot as far away from them as possible, though, since the bed was in the corner of the room, that wasn't actually synonymous with trying to escape. Or, not very effectively, anyway.
"Who are you people?!" she demanded, afraid and angry. "Where are we?!" and then, horror overcoming her anger as she realised that she didn't know who she was and the pain in her head registered, "What's wrong with me? Why don't I remember— Who am I? What happened?" she asked more desperately, tears starting to leak down her cheeks. "Please..."
"Hey, hey, calm down, you're safe," Lily assured her, throwing calming vibes at her almost reflexively (ignoring Thom's silent guffaw). "Your name is Nicole. I'm Asphodel."
"What happened?" she repeated, her panic, if not actually lessening, at least no longer increasing, given that Lily at least appeared to be non-threatening. "Where am I? Why don't I remember anything?"
Lily opened her mouth to say...she didn't actually know what, she hadn't really thought this far ahead, it hadn't actually occurred to her that she'd have to talk to Nikki after taking her memories, before killing her.
Before she could find something resembling an answer, Thom volunteered, "Asphodel stole your memories to sacrifice them to Death, so Death won't get stroppy over her sacrificing your life to another god the day after tomorrow."
For several long seconds, Nicole stared at them in uncomprehending horror, unable to form a single truly coherent thought, but tending toward a tangled mess of ideas like, maybe I'm still asleep, this has to be a nightmare, I'd like to wake up now.
"You're not asleep," Thom assured her.
Did he just read my mind? What do you mean I'm not asleep? I have to be asleep, that's impossible, how—
"Yes, I did, and I meant that, all impossibility aside, this is real. You're awake. And your current migraine is the result of Asphodel excising your life experience from your memories. Which she did because sacrificing your memories to Death and your life to her family god was a very neat compromise with no downsides for anyone. Except you, obviously, but you'll be dead in about fifty hours, so your opinion doesn't really matter," he informed her, sort of...somehow intensifying her fear, reflecting it back on her, or magnifying it, or something, drowning out what coherency she'd managed to regain under gibbering terror.
"Thom!"
The sadistic bastard shrugged at her, giving her a well-practised who, me? expression. ...And then immediately ruined any pretence of innocence by saying, "The Dark likes them to marinate in their fear a bit. Draw out the suffering beforehand, since they die quickly when you cut their throats. I can't say for certain, but I suspect the Dark will appreciate that literally all of this girl's memories — all the ones she will have left to her, when she dies — will be painted in shades of terrified horror." He grinned, to all appearances delighted. "Like eating a soul that has only ever known nightmares."
"The Dark isn't even aligned with the Family Magic anymore, Thom! I didn't do it this way for It! I don't even know if Angel's going to be there!"
I don't either, but I'm going to be there—
One of the most important consequences of Thom and Bella formalising their relationship was that Thom was now recognised by the Family Magic and allowed to participate in Family Rituals. He wasn't Lord Black or even technically a member of the House because he had his own followers, which was sort of like being the Head of another House, but he was considered Family in the same sense that, say, Lady Potter was still Family. They could participate in Family Rituals if they wanted to, but weren't members of the House, subject to the Family Magic outside of any rituals they voluntarily decided to attend.
Essentially, they were allied through marriage, but neither Thom nor Bella could really be subordinate to each other because they had their own people they had responsibilities to, which was (as far as Lily could tell) why the Family Magic had made him release her from her Vow of Fealty before allowing their alliance. Lady Black's first responsibility had to be to her House, but so did the Dark Lord's.
Yes, and if Angel doesn't come herself and participate directly, the Dark will almost certainly possess me to participate. It doesn't like the idea of being excluded, no matter how legitimate the Family Magic's exclusion of it might be. It has participated in the sacrifice literally every year it's existed as a personified entity, after all.
Okay, she guessed that sort of made sense. But... The Dark can just do that? Possess you, I mean? Even though you're not dedicated to It? Yes, she'd been possessed by Persephone before she technically dedicated herself, but at that point she suspected it was already inevitable that she was going to do so, so, from Death's perspective, she sort of already would have done.
There are parts of my soul which resonate with it strongly enough to facilitate direct resonance possession, with or without my cooperation. Especially when it's at the peak of its influence in this realm.
...How long has it been since anyone's called you disturbing?
I ran into Aster at brunch, so about three hours. Though she also called me Mister Sparkly Lamia Princess, so I remain unconvinced that she genuinely finds me disturbing at all.
"This is Thom," she said aloud, ostensibly introducing him to Nicole, but since she was still too scared and preoccupied trying to wrap her mind around the idea that she'd been kidnapped, her memories stolen, and was going to be murdered in a couple of days for Lily's words to really register, really just making the pointed comment in Thom's general direction that, "He might actually be the devil."
He knew exactly what she was doing, of course. "You're the one who stole her memories and is planning on killing her! I'm just stating facts! And the fact is, you're just as bad as I am."
"I am not. She was already fated to die, anyway!"
"You didn't have to let her wake up if you didn't want her to suffer. You could still knock her out again, or smother her fear, or even just Imperius her — Bella has been teaching you your Unforgivables, hasn't she?"
She had been, yes, along with shadow-walking and apparation and all sorts of neat magic. She didn't quite seem to have the knack for casting the Cruciatus, but the Imperius was so easy she'd actually thought she was doing it wrong at first. Aster had confirmed that she wasn't, after Lily tried it on her, but it still struck her as absurdly easy for a bloody Unforgivable Curse. Bella had kidnapped a couple of (relatively) small acromantulae for her to practise the Killing Curse, and while she could do it, it wasn't nearly as easy as the Imperius, and the arithmancy put them in the same initialisation range.
That would be because you don't actually need the spell to set an overriding compulsion on someone. You're just using the spell-form as a framework to compel them and dampen any native objections to your orders with legilimency.
Yeah, that was Aster's guess. Well, that it was a creepy mind-reader thing, at least. In any case, she hadn't thought of that, now had I? And yes, she could force Nicole back to sleep, with any number of spells or even with legilimency, but What do you mean, smother her fear?
Her mind-magic lessons so far had mostly centred on what a mind was and how it worked, generally speaking — more theoretical than practical. Which was probably just as well, she still couldn't find a specific memory in Aster's mind, so yes, she knew she probably wasn't ready to move on to more complicated shite yet anyway, but she was still curious.
He didn't actually roll his eyes at her, but he didn't actually need to to express his exasperation. You don't actually need to master legilimency skills one at a time. If you're waiting until you can reliably out-manoeuvre Asteria playing keep-away to explore any other aspects of the art, it will literally be years before you move beyond memory exploration.
In response to her slightly annoyed offence — she'd barely been practising for a month! — he added, Yes, and you're remarkably subtle for a legilimens who only came into the talent a month ago. But I've been teaching Asteria mind games for well over a decade, and Bella trained her to resist interrogation with mind magic as well as physical coercion. I think I can definitively say by this point that, no, it's not possible to just teach someone to be a legilimens, regardless of how gifted they are at practising magic in general and whether they have a natural bent for some other aspect of the Sight, and Druella hasn't spoken to me in years anyway, but I can equally definitively say that Aster is the most talented occlumens I've ever come across who doesn't have a talent for mind magic.
What, seriously? He'd said Aster was really good at occlumency, that was why it was safe to practise on her, she was good enough to keep Lily from accidentally hurting either of them, but she hadn't realised Aster was that good.
She is. Though it's difficult for me to assess exactly how good she is. I'm honestly a bit disappointed Professor McKinnon didn't just try to legilimise her directly. It would have been instructive to see how she fared against an experienced legilimens who isn't already intimately familiar with her mind and defensive techniques. Note: I'm not assuming that John would manage to thoroughly infiltrate her mind over the course of even a multiple-hours-long introductory consultation, much less easily, and he's been teaching Divination and Mind Arts since the Thirties. That it would likely take years for you to become familiar enough with Aster's mind to reliably locate a specific unaltered memory when she knows that that specifically is what you're after, is far less a comment on your skill than hers.
She 'pouted' at him, pushing annoyance and resentment in his direction. Since when am I not supposed to set high goals for myself?
More exasperation. I didn't say you should give up, just that you should also work on other skills simultaneously. For example—
Something shifted, and Lily quite suddenly found herself unable to control her own body. Gah! How did you do that? She could barely feel his presence in her mind, but he had to have done something.
When you're eavesdropping on someone, you can deliberately interpose your consciousness between the senses you're eavesdropping on and their consciousness, reversing your roles and taking control of those senses. It's not terribly difficult, but I would recommend practising this one on Severus rather than Asteria. She will almost certainly not be able to resist the instinct to fight back against your possession, even if she's expecting it, and having your hold on someone's mind forcibly disrupted is unpleasant. Once you have control of them, however—
Her attention shifted (without any conscious decision on her part, which was indescribably weird) to Nicole, who was still shaking and crying in the corner, begging them to let her go, even though Lily could feel she didn't actually have any hope that they would. Thom pressed forward, invading the girl's mind-space more obviously than he usually would, Lily thought, though that might have been because he was using her magic to do it, which was really bloody weird.
No, it's because I'm trying to be obvious enough for you to follow what I'm doing. There are basically two ways to prevent or alleviate an emotional response in the target. Throwing interfering emotions at them as you attempted to do earlier may occasionally help them regain control of themselves, but introducing an emotion is, technically speaking, a distinct exercise from reducing one.
The first method is to dampen the association between the stimulus and the reaction. If you do so completely enough as to entirely disassociate the stimulus and the reaction, it's referred to as severing the association. Unlike dampening, severing doesn't require constant attention to maintain, but it's still only temporary. Experiencing the same emotion in a circumstance similar enough to spark a memory of the event in question will re-establish the association of the emotion with the event. It also requires a good deal more force and is far more obvious, so I don't recommend it if you're trying to manipulate someone's emotions surreptitiously, which you generally will be. Most legilimens only ever dampen associations, in order to help the target focus or ignore certain reactions like pain, or to stop them from being loud and distracting to any empathic legilimens in their vicinity.
So, probably just Thom, then. Lily gathered that most legilimens weren't nearly as aware of the emotions of everyone around themselves as he was. He ignored that comment, instead turning 'inward' in Nicole's mind, to her perception of the current moment and the connections forming between the developing experience and all the background knowledge Lily hadn't taken which informed the poor girl's awareness that she was in trouble. Her fear was...sort of like a miasma, arising from the fundamental uncertainty of not knowing who she was or understanding what was happening, permeating every aspect of the experience and tainting it with sickening, stomach-twisting discomfort, frigid and tense. Or, as Thom felt it, his perception (probably intentionally) seeping into Lily's, a heady feeling of excitement, poised on the cusp of an undecided action that made it hard to think beyond the current moment, but certainly not a negative emotional experience.
In order to "dampen" it, he extended her presence through Nicole's immediate awareness and sort of...pressed down, filtering the fear out of her consciousness, though it was still there, just under the surface.
Any half-decent occlumens can do this for themselves, he noted, though it becomes more difficult to maintain as the 'pressure' of the suppressed emotion increases under continued exposure to the stimulus, or as the intensity of the stimulus increases. Most people can't suppress the pain of a broken bone, for instance, much less suppress it long enough and thoroughly enough to continue to fight with one— She caught a memory of Aster (Sirius, then, he'd only been about ten), duelling with Narcissa, taking a bone-breaking curse to his right humerus. Cissa had offered to let him yield. He'd thrown his knife at her, switched his wand to his off hand, and offered to let her yield, which was somehow both adorable and slightly horrifying, and very, very Aster.
The other method of controlling a target's undesirable emotions is to simply skim them off. Most legilimens refuse to do this because it's one of the more blatantly subsumptive applications of the talent and is likely to garner unkind comparisons to dementors from obnoxious little shites with more balls than sense, and no self-preservation instinct to speak of. (Sirius, age twelve or so, glowering down the table at Thom at some family function or other, entertaining himself by pointedly thinking insults about the Dark Lord.) Also because in so doing one necessarily takes the undesired emotions upon oneself. Given that such emotions are often conventionally unpleasant, most legilimens tend to be reluctant to do so.
Conventionally unpleasant, she repeated, somewhat amused by the understatement. Yes, Thom, fear is conventionally unpleasant. Bloody weirdo. She could see where Aster got the dementor comparison...
Were you or were you not appreciating and indeed even enjoying Miss Worth's existential horror at your dissolution of her memories and consequently her identity, earlier?
...Okay, but I'm already aware that I'm not a stunning example of emotional normality. Sev and I figured that out ages ago.
I believe you mean three months.
Three and a half, she shot back, then, realising that that was an exceedingly Aster-like thing to say, added, Shut up, de Mort. He gave absolutely no sign of it, but he thought she was funny, she knew he did. My point was that, yes, maybe I was, that doesn't make you less of a weirdo for thinking fear doesn't feel unpleasant.
Thom sighed at her. Table that for one minute. We were discussing methods of alleviating emotional distress. The second of which is— He carefully formed Lily's mental probe into a sort of...envelope around the fear they were still pinning to the 'floor' of Nicole's conscious mind, cutting it off from the rest of the ongoing experience and withdrawing, leaving Nikki much more legitimately calm. Though new fear did begin to form almost immediately, as it wasn't like her circumstances had improved in terms of uncertainty and amnesia.
Yes, continued exposure to the stimulus will continue to produce the emotional response. He reached out again and did something — something big, but too quick for Lily to follow — which resulted in Nicole falling immediately unconscious. Compelling her consciousness into a 'resting' state, so you can focus on this—
He released the enveloped fear, though it didn't dissipate, surrounded by Lily's mind as it now was.
Subsuming emotional energy is slightly different from subsuming conscious thoughts or background knowledge. You noticed in Nicole's mind that the fear wasn't exactly a perception, like information gathered from physical or magical senses, and it's not trapped in a twist of mental energy like a memory or a fact. It's a reaction, which, as you thought, permeates the mind-space as the consciousness experiences the event or relives the memory. Impressions of one's reaction to any given experience are captured in the memory of the event, and evoke a fresh emotional response when they're triggered, but the emotion, the instantaneous feeling itself, isn't preserved.
...Okay.
Recall I mentioned the other day that we would get to exactly what a consciousness is eventually?
Yes... Obviously a person wasn't just their memories. They were also...whatever part of them actually remembered the memories. The memories and experiences shaped their personality and conditioned their reactions, but even without her experiences, Nicole was still a conscious being, capable of thinking and learning and feeling. That wouldn't really change even if Lily were to take everything, all of her background knowledge, too.
Yes, exactly that. The consciousness is the part of a being which thinks and feels, which can look back on its own memories and engage in reflexive experiences. The soul of the person. Exactly how the energy of the soul and the energy of the mind differ is a matter for another lesson, but it's metaphorically akin to the difference between visible light and radio waves — a difference in frequency, not type.
Wait. Does that mean thoughts are the same as feelings? If it's the soul that thinks and feels...
Yes. More or less. Thoughts are generated by the juxtaposition of memories and ongoing experiences, feelings and other thoughts moving around within the mind/soul/magic of a person. Like feelings, they can be captured in a memory-impression, but also like feelings, most of them are transient, fleeting realisations which most people aren't entirely conscious of. Unconscious knowledge and memory is a fascinating subject, but entirely tangential to the topic at hand, he added, forestalling a question about exactly that — whether and how those thoughts one wasn't entirely conscious of interacted with the sort of foundation, background structure parts of the mind.
Now, as you know — or ought to know — it is the frequency of the thoughts and feelings of a mind which a legilimens resonates with to establish contact between the self and the other.
Yes, Lily knew that. That was pretty much the first thing he'd taught her about mind magic and how it actually worked.
That's also what you're picking up when people project thoughts and feelings outside of their mind-space. The distinction between those active thoughts/feelings/perceptions/reactions — experiences — and more static, archived memories is the difference between "soul"-energy and "mind"-energy. When you subsume a memory, as you did with Nicole's, you force it to resonate with you, adjusting the 'frequency' of the archival structure to match your own and integrating it into your own memories. Necessarily consciously examining it as you do so, of course, you can't fit it into your memory-structure without knowing what it is, but the reliving of the memory is essentially the same as reliving any of your own memories, even if you haven't actually experienced it before. The impression has already been captured, and while it may spark new thoughts or elicit new feelings when juxtaposed with other memories or viewed in a different state of mind, the formative experience has passed.
Right, I know that, we talked about that...
He let a hint of exasperation filter across to her, like don't be impatient, I'm getting there, though he didn't actually 'say' as much. Yes, well. When you subsume a feeling or an active thought, you're not co-opting a static structure, you're excising the small piece of the subject's soul which is immediately experiencing that reaction.
What.
Surrounding and withdrawing the energy of the feeling is to surround and withdraw the part of the person which is experiencing the feeling, Thom repeated, amused.
No, I got that, but...seriously, what?
His amusement only intensified. As soon as you engulf the feeling, it is effectively severed from the stimulus, the 'pattern' of the emotion sustained by your reflected experience of it. The feeling itself is instantaneous. Cutting off the subject's awareness of the part of their mind immediately experiencing the emotion effectively stops them from feeling it, but it also stops the part of their mind which you've engulfed from experiencing the stimulus eliciting the reaction. The fact that the stimulus still exists in the experience of the other means that the emotional response will build up again, as the response is elicited anew from the parts of their mind still in contact with the stimulus. But the 'fear' we took from poor Nikki is only still fear because we're imposing that expectation on it, reflecting what it was before we stole it. In order to subsume it, we stop imposing our will upon it—
He did, unravelling a...sort of thought, or maybe an expectation Lily hadn't realised she was holding around the stolen feeling, and doing it in such a way that she realised she'd actually been feeling and maintaining the fear she'd been associating with the stolen energy, which was bloody wild. (Seriously, mind magic was a trip.)
It immediately became clearer that while there was no inherent pattern or feeling to the foreign energy, it was foreign, a little blob of not-Lily, a single off-key note in the background of her mind. And almost as soon as she realised that, it started...sort of burning away?
Evanescing, Thom corrected her. It doesn't have enough substance to maintain a sense of self, so the energy becomes undifferentiated, and naturally dissipates into the background energy of your mind, instinctively assimilated.
That's it?
Yes.
Seriously, that's all there is to it? It just seemed...too easy, somehow...
Yes, Thom repeated, laughing silently at her surprise. If you take a larger chunk of energy, you may have to actively destroy any patterns it retains, and if you take too large a chunk of energy, it may retain enough sense of self to actively resist your attempts to do so — which incidentally causes serious trauma to the subject as well, even the least self-aware individuals will notice someone waltzing up and taking a bite out of their consciousness and memories — but just skimming an emotion off the surface of someone's mind? Yes, that's it. There are, however, caveats:
As I said before, on the subject of subsuming linguistic background knowledge, you can easily destabilise yourself if you attempt to integrate too much foreign energy into your mind/soul too quickly. And while skimming such a small amount of energy as this poses little danger to either subject or metaphage — the subject is more likely to notice the emotional adjustment than the energetic loss, though if you continue to do it to them over the course of several hours, they'll become emotionally numb and tired, not unlike being exposed to a dementor—
The memory that comment sparked elicited an annoyed, Yes, I'm aware Asteria thinks I have a thing for dementors. She conveniently ignores the fact that I enjoy vicariously experiencing strong 'positive' emotions just as much as 'negative' ones. Though in fairness, she's rarely had the opportunity to notice. Her childhood was largely miserable, so the emotions I've skimmed from her over the years have been disproportionately 'negative'.
You do realise it's sort of weird to admit that you've kind of been nibbling on my girlfriend's soul since she was a little kid, right? she pointed out, inexplicably uncomfortable and almost annoyed with him over it.
...You really think it's the fact that you're shagging her that would make the concept of soul cannibalism seem odd and discomfiting to a normal person?
That...was a point. Though, Honestly, I think the fact you've been doing it since she was a child is weirder. And that you're openly admitting it.
Children's emotions are much more visceral than adults'. I don't go out of my way to prey on them, but I really don't think anyone can blame me for stealing a bit of their pain and fury when they're feeling it right in front of me — and I would argue that doing so actually reduces their suffering, so it's hardly a violation. And I'm hardly shouting it from the rooftops. I'm admitting it to you, a baby metaphage still basking in the afterglow of destroying her first conscious mind, in the context of a lesson on how to subsume soul-energy.
...Well, fine then, it must be the fact that I'm shagging her that makes it weird.
Yes, and your retroactive jealousy and possessiveness over the soul of a child you hadn't even met at the time is absolutely adorable. He actually did think so, a warm, patronising, you remind me of me sort of feeling accompanying the thought.
Lily, feeling inexplicably embarrassed — or maybe not so inexplicably, it was a bit absurd to be jealous and annoyed over Thom stealing something which hadn't been hers at the time, and all the more so since he'd had to go and point it out that she definitely got her possessive tendencies from him — decided that another Shut up, de Mort, would be an appropriate response.
He let it go. As I was saying, skimming emotions isn't dangerous to the subject or the metaphage, but it is considered taboo in polite circles because it's blatant metaphagy — even though most mind-magic is considered sub-disciplinary to subsumption, most legilimens aren't naturally inclined toward conscious metaphagy. They just don't have the psychological predisposition for it. They have to work at it, and most of them find the idea of absorbing part of another person's soul as repulsive and disturbing as non-legilimens do. And even legilimens who don't find the idea of directly subsuming memories, rather than obliviating them or the like, to be inherently offensive, tend to find subsuming feelings unpleasant, given that, as with memories, you necessarily experience the feeling as you acquire it, and active feelings tend to have more immediacy when you isolate them than feelings evoked in you by the impressions inherent in memories you relive.
Of course, he added, with a bitter sort of amusement, there's a certain irony in the fact that as soon as you acquire a feeling, it fades. All the more quickly if it's not something you're naturally inclined to feel yourself, which I find incredibly frustrating because I find the immediate, visceral emotions of others to be positively intoxicating, and I'm not inclined to feel them myself. You can take a memory and make it your own, but a feeling only persists as long as you can maintain it — and even the most beautiful flower begins to fade the moment you pluck it from its stem.
...That was...almost sad, really. Lily could feel his frustration, she knew exactly what he was talking about — she didn't feel things nearly as strongly as Sev and Aster, either. But she really didn't want to. She found their feelings sort of...really overwhelming, a lot of the time.
You'll get used to it eventually, Thom assured her. I'm not sure that should count as assurance, it might be better if you weren't to become accustomed to experiencing vicarious emotions, but your emotional repertoire and experience of mind-magic is unnervingly similar to mine. I suspect you will inevitably begin to see the appeal in surrounding yourself with cultivated suffering or ecstasy.
Well, Lily didn't know about that. Ecstasy, maybe. She could only imagine Walpurgis was a hell of an experience for a mind-mage, but... You're still a bloody weirdo for enjoying suffering.
Ah, yes, that. He pulled her attention back to the memory of initially feeling Nicole's fear, just a few minutes ago (though it seemed like much longer — mental conversations always seemed to take much longer than they actually took, the speed of thought much quicker than the speed of speech). Tell me, which part of your perception of Nicole's fear and mine is different? he asked, playing them out sort of...'side-by-side'. (Lily had no idea how he was doing that. Some of the shite Thom did with mind-magic was just weird.)
...The part where you felt it as excitement, not fear?
Yes, he thought at her, his 'tone' heavy with exasperation. But why did you register what you were feeling directly from Nikki as fear, and what you were feeling second-hand through me as excitement?
Er...that was a good question, actually. They both made her stomach do that tense little flippy thing, both made her feel that tingly cold and made it hard to think, both sort of made her feel like she was standing on the edge of a cliff, with the ground crumbling out from beneath her, about to fall or fly—
You know you're not actually in danger, she realised. And Nikki is.
Close. The feeling you picked up from Nicole stems directly from her experience, the connotations of her circumstances triggering a reaction which is directly linked to the negative expectations those circumstances inform. The feeling you picked up from me is a reflection of the reaction, mirroring the physiological effects and reconstructing the feeling from there, absent the direct connection between the experience and the reaction, and the associated negative connotations.
...
Lily didn't think she got it.
Thom 'sighed' at her. Fear and exhilaration feel very similar, from a physiological perspective. The waves of cold breaking over you and the butterflies in your stomach, the tenseness and difficulty thinking clearly which follow on anticipating an imminent need to act without thinking— There's no difference. If you strip the negative associations away from the experience, from what you're actually feeling, most conventionally unpleasant emotions and the physical reactions they evoke are actually quite tolerable, even pleasurable. Like truly heartfelt poetry read directly to your soul, as you put it. Empathising with the emotional pain and angst and horror of the other from a remove can be incredibly sweet — rich and satisfying, fulfilling in a way actually experiencing it...theoretically isn't.
Theoretically? Lily repeated sceptically. He was a bloody empath, how could he not know how other people felt things?
He gave her the mental equivalent of a shrug, a sort of I don't know what you want me to say feeling. Even when I'm actually inhabiting the experience of someone feeling such things, I have trouble relating the actual reaction and the positive or negative connotations. It's all just stimulation to me.
Well...that was just bloody weird. Lily had no idea what to say to that.
This time he gave her an actual shrug. It's...well, not a common occlumency trick, but not entirely unknown. Though most people who do it intentionally use it to manage and transform physical pain, rather than emotional discomfort. "In any case, I was originally coming to tell you lunch is ready. Though if you'd like to actually make the sacrifice to Persephone first, I'm sure the elves will keep a plate warm for you."
"Gods, no. I'm starving." He laughed, prompting her to realise that yes, that could be interpreted as Lily being more concerned with her own lunch than the sacrifice she'd been working on preparing for her Lady for however many hours. "I can't do the ritual thinking the whole time, let's just get this over with so I can have lunch," she added, somewhat defensively, which only made him laugh harder. "Oh, shut up." Then a thought occurred to her. "Should I bring a plate up for Nikki, do you think?" She should probably at least bring her a water pitcher...
His eyes flicked over to the girl lying unconscious in the corner, where she'd collapsed when he knocked her out. "Well, on the one hand, it never hurts to be a hospitable kidnapper, but on the other, I rather doubt she'll willingly eat or drink anything you give her. It would be objectively more traumatising to possess her and force her to eat and I expect the Family Magic would prefer her as healthy as possible, but you're the one who's going to have to cut her throat in two days, which will probably be easier if she's lethargic from starvation and dehydration. Up to you, really."
Lily pulled a face at him. "D'you have to put it in the absolute worst-sounding way possible?"
"Do you really think human sacrifice is a line you can cross without acknowledging the reality and significance of what you're doing, with your eyes wide open?"
Well...no. No, she didn't. It was just... It was like worrying about lunch while making a sacrifice or having to remind everyone to use the loo before they joined the circle — having to take into account that the sacrifice was an actual living person with physical needs, and who probably wasn't going to want to be sacrificed, so it might be easier from a physical standpoint if Lily deprived her of food and water for a while, first. It just wasn't...right, somehow.
Ah, yes, the unfortunate realities of being a physical creature, rather than an ideal actor carrying out neatly prescribed actions, performing rituals with the absolute perfection of an arithmantic model. The gods do know we're mortals, you know...if we weren't, we wouldn't need rituals to communicate with them.
"I'll think about it."
[Evans, how long has it been since anyone's called you disturbing? — A]
[Piss off, Aster. But if you must know, Seth told me I'm a scary bitch at breakfast. I think he meant it as a compliment? I don't know, he's getting good enough at occlumency to keep his feelings contained now, and I sincerely do not want to go poking around in the mind of a horny teenager to find out. I mean, do you have any idea how much time fourteen-year-old boys spend thinking about sex and fantasising about people they actually know? Approximately all of it. And he's my godson. That's just weird.
[You should talk to him about that, actually. I'm not trying to tell you how to be a mum, we both know you're better at it than I am, but it really can't be healthy for him to be thinking about our sex life all the time. — L]
[That's fucking hilarious, Evans. In case you've forgotten, I was a fourteen-year-old boy, and we all know Seth takes after me more than Sev, so yes, I think I have some idea. Though if it's any consolation, I doubt he spends all that much time thinking about us specifically when you're not legilimising him. I may have suggested that making an invading legilimens uncomfortable is an easy way to dissuade casual legilimency. Except with de Mort, but this little excerpt only serves to reinforce my impression that de Mort's a fucking freak, and it is actually impossible to make him uncomfortable. — A]
[...I hate you. You know I've actually been growing legitimately concerned about Seth over here, and it's all been a stupid prank to make me stop legilimising him? You suck. Go choke on a dick. — L]
[Love you, too, Evans. — A]