Young Justice: Gotham City
July 26th, 2010
The morning of the twenty-sixth was dark and gloomy, but the spells I’d learned in astronomy assured me that the clouds would mostly clear up by nightfall. A clear sky was not necessarily a requirement––the moon was full, whether or not its light shone down upon the earth––but it was a good omen and would bring extra stability to the magics I prepared to cast.
I rose with the sun and nearly immediately left my borrowed apartment. There was a lot to do, and I dearly hoped that this would be the last night I needed to spend behind such shabby protections. No one had tested my wards since that night––not that I’d caught at least––but if anything that only left me further on edge.
Just in case, I enchanted a ring with a poison-detection charm and hung it on the necklace I’d taken to wearing around the clock. It had taken a few hours of work, but if nothing else it was a good proof of concept for potential business ventures on this plane. I also put up fresh wards around my bed each night and avoided leaving anything valuable or interesting in the apartment.
My first task of the morning was acquiring sacrifices. In theory, I could have probably hunted down some wild animals or even just bought some cattle, but there was a power in action. Power that rituals were uniquely suited in harnessing.
A willing wizarding sacrifice would have been best, but that was at best a pipedream. I also had no unwilling wizards to sacrifice, and that sort of thing had a bad habit of backfiring even when it worked the way you wanted it to. Wizarding blood had a mind of its own and could horribly warp a ritual if drawn by force. There was a reason that none of our properties were warded that way anymore, not after the disastrous fate of Castle Black during the ninth century. Who would have thought that sacrificing forty-nine wizards captured in battle would backfire so spectacularly?
Muggle sacrifices, willing or unwilling, were also out of the question. I doubted it would be hard to find a few muggles no one would miss, but even the tiniest chance of drawing the ire of some of the members of the Justice League ensured it wasn’t something I even considered, and they had a very strong regard for the value of human lives.
Having finally actually fought Kent, and knowing that he was both weaker than he once had been as Doctor Fate and weaker than many of the current members of the League, I had absolutely no desire to come into conflict with them over anything serious. I now had a relatively foolproof method of getting away if worse came to worst, but if that happened I doubted I would ever be able to return to this Plane, or at least not for many, many decades to come.
That only left animal sacrifices, and those were so much weaker than the sacrifice of even the meagerest muggle. I needed to squeeze every bit of meaning I could out of the blood. An animal could not be a willing sacrifice, but there were ways of improving the sacrifice’s quality. In particular, large animals were better, as were animals with meaning intertwined with their lives. I didn’t have time to hand-raise a few cows from birth, nor was I keen on hunting down some small family’s pet.
That didn’t leave me with many options. First of all, the choice of animal was important. Large, but not too large, and with a powerful association with dark magic. Goats were the obvious answer. Secondly, they would need to be stolen. It wasn’t human, but stolen blood and livelihood would help to bridge the gap.
That was why, after briefly stopping in my in-progress pub-turned-home, I took a portkey to Wisconsin, where I’d already scouted out an appropriate farm. In short order, seven goats were stunned and portkeyed to the pub’s basement. I made sure that no one saw me, then used one final portkey to get back to Gotham. The entire process took less than half an hour, not counting the time it had taken to find an appropriate farm sufficiently far away from Gotham to avoid arousing suspicion.
The rest of the morning was spent working on my knife. Unfortunately my silver athame––goblin forged and passed down to me from my several-time great Aunt Hesper––had been taken by the Ministry––and I did not have a comparably ancient ritual blade lying around in this plane.
Instead, I’d purchased some garish silverware and jewelry from a number of pawn shops (and boy did Gotham have a lot of pawn shops), extracted the pure silver from the inferior metals around it using a thirteenth-century smelting spell, and then fashioned it into a makeshift blade with an equally makeshift yew handle taken from a badly damaged chisel.
It was…not a very good knife. I didn’t know any of the spells or runes that went into forging a proper ritual dagger, nor did I know how to forge a knife. But, I’d gotten it sharp enough to slice through skin and meat and charmed it unbreakable. Hopefully that would be good enough. I was settling for a lot of good enoughs, hopefully things would work out.
At eleven-forty-five, I set my work aside, changed into my robes, and apparated to Shadowcrest to get Zatanna. She was already waiting for me, dressed in tight-fitting black leather pants, a white shirt that left just a tiny bit of her belly exposed, and a loose-fitting denim jacket that was open at the front. She beamed at me as I walked up the steps to meet her by the door, her smile lighting up the gloomy morning, and it took more focus than it should have to keep my pace steady and kiss only her hand when she offered it to me.
“You look positively radiant,” I told her, recognizing the pants as something she’d purchased while we were out. Well, not purchased actually. They were one of the things she’d just silently stolen, the pants alone costing more than I’d spent on food the entire time I’d been in this world.
Zatanna squinted up at me, “Hmm. Elyts riah.” I felt phantom fingers run through my hair, then vanish a moment later. “There. You clean up pretty well yourself, Hydrys.”
I made a show of rolling my eyes, then wrapped an arm around Zatanna’s waist and immediately apparated. She stumbled as we reappeared in the Massachusetts summer heat, the sun beating down on us from a clear blue sky, and caught herself on my chest, then pouted at me adorably. “Hey!”
I ignored her joking complaint and headed inside. As he’d promised, Kent had a cake waiting for us. We spent about an hour sitting around the table in his kitchen drinking tea, enjoying the delightful six-layered chocolate cake Kent had purchased from a local bakery, and exchanging stories.
Then, Zatanna joined me for my lesson on Order magic. Her grasp of it was slightly better than my own, but Kent had never taught her any of the spells I was currently learning so we both got plenty out of it. That lasted well into the afternoon, after which Zatanna and I got an early dinner of ‘chinese food’ (I had my doubts about that claim) and headed back to the pub together.
I had thought long and hard about including Zatanna in the warding process. There were some parts that I was definitely going to leave her out of. As much as I trusted her friendship and good intentions, I solemnly believed that certain elements of my wards should remain a secret from everyone, just as I doubted any member of the Zatara family would ever reveal the intricacies of Shadowcrest’s defenses to an outsider.
The real question was how much I was actually willing to show off. Not only for reasons of secrecy, but also because I didn’t want to accidentally scare her off by showing her something she wasn’t willing to be associated with. I definitely wouldn’t have included her if there was actual human sacrifice involved, for instance, and, despite her own experiences with her mummy librarian, I was going to avoid showing off the inferi I planned to eventually incorporate into the building’s defenses.
Eventually, I’d decided that the pros outweigh the cons. Zatanna was an incredibly naturally powerful witch. Her presence and participation during certain steps, even if she herself didn’t know the magic I was casting, would simply be too valuable to ignore. I did my best to prepare her ahead of time, mentioning how everything I was doing was considered perfectly normal (among certain wizards at least) back home and that it was just the way we did things.
Ultimately though, I’d just have to wait and see. Zatanna was rather open minded, but with some people you could never truly know before that conviction was tested. I personally didn’t see what was wrong with a bit of sacrifice and blood magic, but the ritual I was about to use was worth fifteen to seventeen years in Azkaban so clearly some people thought it was a problem.
Around seven, I apparated Zatanna home. We’d discussed things ahead of time and, while she needed to spend the evening at home, she’d promised that she’d be able to slip away once her father was asleep and use the portkey I’d prepared for her to get back to the pub.
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I apparated back, reentered the building through the back door, and descended to the sub-basement to finish preparing. Unlike the floors above it, the second basement was a single, modestly-sized room. It was square and about twenty-five feet on a side, with the only access point a trap door with a ladder leading down in the back right corner.
From my reckoning, the space had started off life as a cistern, meant to collect and store rainwater for the building above. Since then, it had been used as both a cellar and, very likely, a storage space for illicit goods.
Now, it would be the hub for my home’s wards. I’d removed all the leftover rickety shelves and other furniture, cleared out the grime and water that had accumulated over two decades of disuse, and scoured every inch of the space with cleaning charms, fire, and then more cleaning charms. Then I’d leveled out the slightly crooked floor, squared off all four corners, and covered everything in several layers of fresh white paint.
At the center of the room lay the unfinished wardstone. It was a huge chunk of solid granite that I’d retrieved from a quarry in North Carolina and carved into a tall cylinder. It was six feet wide, nine feet tall, and weighed somewhere in the range of forty tons. The stone was mostly white, but speckled with black, gray, and gold bits from the mix of mica, quartz, and feldspar that made up the granite.
Without magic, there was absolutely no way I could have possibly gotten it into the room. It never would have fit through the trapdoor, nor any of the staircases. With magic, it had been as easy as could be. I’d carved a block straight out of the mountain, shrunk it down, charmed it feather-light, and then simply apparated home with it. Then it had just been a few hours of work to cut off all the extra bits and polish the stone to a nice mirror shine.
Eventually, every inch of the giant stone would be covered in runework, but before that it needed to be consecrated to turn it from just a big hunk of polished rock into a proper wardstone. For now, the only runes in the room were on the floor. A huge circle was laid out on the ground, extending fully around the stone and just touching the wall at the center of each face. Inside the larger circle, there were nine small circles, seven for the goats and one each for Zatanna and I. The rest of the space was covered in meticulously prepared runes––mostly elder futhark but with a spattering of Egyptian hieroglyphs and even plain old latin.
Instead of paint or blood, I’d used the scraps removed from around the wardstone to draw the runes and circles. The bits of stone had been ground down into uniform bits about the size of a grain of salt and then I’d used a few charms to ensure that every line I put down was perfectly uniform in height and width.
It took another three hours to finish putting the circle in order, then another two to move the re-stunned goats into place and check over every single line, rune, and grain. In several places, an errant foot or hoof had brushed the top of a symbol and each time I found one, I carefully vacuumed up the displaced stone and redrew the damaged section.
I had just finished changing into the clothing I would be wearing for the ritual when my wards alerted me that Zatanna had returned. Several minutes later, she hurried down into the basement wearing a rosy blush, an undyed linen robe, and nothing else, just like I was.
I looked up from double checking my notes, intending to greet her, but was instead struck momentarily speechless. Zatanna’s robe…didn’t fit her very well, so to speak. Or perhaps it fit her too well, depending on how you looked at things. It certainly wasn’t particularly long, nor did it do a good job hiding other very interesting portions of her anatomy.
I made a slightly choked noise, then tore my eyes away from Zatanna’s chest. “Sorry,” I apologize quickly, “you startled me. Hey Zatanna, thank you for coming. Did you manage to sneak out okay?”
Zatanna self consciously pulled the front of her robe more tightly around herself. “Hey Hydrys. Yeah, I think I made it out alright. Dad was really worn out tonight and he’s always a pretty deep sleeper. Pretty sure none of his wards noticed anything either.” She paused, once again trying to adjust her robe. “I uh, remember this not being…quite so…tight! It's been a while since I’ve worn it.”
“I…can see that,” I did my best to say diplomatically. The sleeves were noticeably too short, and it was pretty tight around her hips and shoulders as well. I was rather confident this robe had been purchased for a much younger Zatanna. Perhaps when she was twelve or thirteen, and not a grown and well developed woman of seventeen. “It should be fine. You won’t need to do much other than stand still and channel your magic.”
I stared, transfixed, as Zatanna continued to struggle, then very deliberately picked up the silver knife and turned around. “I’m going to go back down, I’m just about ready to start. Come down when you’re done. Please be careful, I just double checked the runes and I don’t want to have to go over everything again.”
“Okay Hydrys, I’ll be careful. Just give me a second.” I heard a rustle of cloth that I was pretty sure indicated that Zatanna had just untied the belt holding her robe shut and very quickly descended into the ward room before my treacherous eyes could do something rash.
Slipping my wand into the pocket of my own newly-purchased robe, I walked around the perimeter of the circle, making sure that everything was just right. I repositioned one of the goats, squinted, then turned another one slightly so its tail wasn’t quite so close to the edge of the stone circle.
When Zatanna finally came down, I was thankfully on the opposite side of the wardstone from her, removing any possible urge to peak as she clambered down the ladder. As much as Kent was probably right about the attitude of Zatanna and other modern women, I was not some Gryfinder scoundrel controlled only by his baser urges.
“Here, right?” she asked, stepping carefully into the empty circle furthest from the stone.
“Yeah, that’s the place. Make sure not to move around too much and keep your eyes on the stone. When I start chanting, just start slowly pouring your magic into the circle around you like we practiced.”
“Okay,” Zatanna said confidently. “I can do that.”
“I’m certain you can. I wouldn’t have invited you to help me if I was worried you’d mess something up.”
I exhaled and stepped into my own circle. In my left hand, I held my wand. In my right, the silver ritual dagger shone. A wave of my wand extinguished the balls of magical light illuminating the room, plunging the room into total darkness.
Taking a deep breath, I began the ritual. “Oh, blessed ancestors, wizards and witches of the House of Black, grace me with your wisdom.” Around the circle, a third of the candles I’d set up flared to life. “Oh, blessed land of power and mystery, grace me with your strength.” Another third of the candles ignited, and I felt the dark magic that filled the air and earth shiver in response. “Oh, blessed Magic, light of my soul and fire of my blood, look kindly upon my works this bright night!” The last of the candles caught fire, each candle flame flickering in time with my heartbeat and the trickle of magic pouring from the tip of my wand.
Then I began to chant, the mix of latin, old English, and the secret tongue of the celtic druids, rolling smoothly off my tongue. I stepped slowly out of my circle, placing my feet from memory to avoid touching any of the runes in the dim, flicking light. I could feel my magic joining with Zatanna's and beginning to circle around the stone, slowly drawing in the rich dark magic that permeated this city.
I moved with slow, measured steps until I reached the first goat. Crouching down, I continued to chant as I moved my silver blade into position, then on the last word of the chant, cut deep into its neck, spilling hot blood all over my hands and onto the floor. The circle around it flared with a deep, ruddy glow, a trickle of light extending along the floor and filling the nearby runes with power.
Without missing a beat, I started the chant again from the start and stood up, blood dripping unnaturally off the blade of my knife and leaving not a drop to stain the polished silver. I continued slowly onward to the next goat, once again timing things perfectly so that I sacrificed it at just the right moment.
It took me more than fifteen minutes to make my way fully around the circle. As I passed Zatanna, I wondered momentarily what I looked like to her. My hands, robes, and feet were all splattered with cooling blood, the flickering candles and the increasingly bright red glow of the runes casting strange shadows and just barely illuminating the dark room.
Then I pushed the thought from my mind. She was still in the circle where I’d told her to stand, still pouring magic into the ritual. That was as good a sign as any that everything was alright.
Eventually, I returned to the circle where I’d begun and stepped into it. My chanting stopped, my throat raw and dry from the continuous speaking and fatigue filling my muscles and slowing my thoughts from the amount of magic I’d so far expelled. I took a deep breath and slipped my wand back into a pocket on my robes, then extended my arms out on either side of me.
The room was filled with magic, rich and dark and so potent I could feel it like heavy fog on my skin and coating my lungs with every breath. Despite my exhaustion, I felt almost giddy from the magical overload, each mouthful of magic-charged air as heady as an entire bottle of firewhisky. Between my magic, Zatanna’s magic, the power of my seven sacrifices, and the enormous amount of energy my ritual was drawing from the earth, sea, and sky, there was a titanic amount of energy squeezed into the confines of my ritual circle.
“I am Hydrys Sirius Black. Seventeenth of my name. Scion of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Head Boy of Slytherin. Planeswalker. In my name, in the name of my forefathers, and by the power of my blood and magic, I claim this place. May it shelter me and mine in peace and in war, in good times and bad times, through light and darkness, day and night.”
Two motes of mana, one black and one white appeared inside me. Then, before a single drop of it could disappear, I sharply drew the silver knife across my left palm, flicking the tip of the blade to splatter my blood onto the wardstone. The mana I’d drawn went with it, sinking into the stone and illuminating the entire hunk of carved granite with silvery moonlight.
The rest of the magic in the room followed a heartbeat later, flooding through me in its haste to pour into the wardstone. The light illuminating it went from pale to blinding, and then with a flash of searing light, it was over. The candles flickered out, the stone runes dimmed, and we were once more plunged into darkness.
I collapsed onto my knees and began to laugh hysterically.
“Did it work?” asked Zatanna. Deep inside me, I could feel a new blueprint slotting into place.
“Yeah,” I barely managed to say between peels of giddy laughter, “yeah, it worked!”