I should start by looking around, I decided. I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, but figuring out where here even was seemed like a good first step. With any luck I might stumble across some wizard’s potion garden and get some directions, or maybe just something to eat.

Now that I was no longer utterly parched, the gnawing in my stomach was starting to get to me and, unlike water, conjuring food wasn’t an option. If I could find so much as a slice of bread or just…something, I could transfigure it into something more appetizing and duplicate it until I was full, but it was impossible to create food from nothing.

Well, best to start with the most obvious option. I swished my wand, drawing the outline of an upside down keyhole in the air, then raised my wand towards the sky. “Homenum Revelio.”

A barely perceptible wave rippled out from the tip of my wand and rapidly spread out through the swamp around me. I felt a soft ping come back to me as the spell washed over my body, and then…nothing. I waited for a few seconds until I felt the spell peter out after traveling several hundred meters, then lowered my wand and clicked my tongue. Unfortunately it seemed like I was the only person around.

No matter. I hadn’t really expected to find anyone, but it would have been silly not to at least try. It was time to poke around and see if I could find anything. First though, I was feeling rather exposed here. There was an uncomfortable prickle on the back of my neck and I couldn’t shake the sense that this was not a place I wanted to be. It vaguely reminded me of some of the rooms hidden behind thick wards beneath Grimauld Place, the ones that the Ministry could never know about and that I was never allowed into without supervision.

I was suddenly starting to remember the plethora of dangerous magical creatures I’d learned about that lived in swamps like this, and that it was entirely possible that there were Aurors searching for me right this moment. My eyes darted around, suddenly noticing just how exposed I was on my little hill and how anything could be lurking in the dark, murky water around me.

I started by twirling my wand around my body like I was wrapping a scarf and quickly vanished from view as my well-practiced disillusionment charm rendered me all but invisible. Though it ultimately hadn’t been good enough to get me into the restricted section at the Hogwarts library, I’d found a lot of uses for the spell over the years. I was no expert––the book I’d learned the spell from spoke of wizards who could become completely invisible using the spell to the point that even the magic concealing them couldn’t be detected––but as long as I didn’t move too quickly I was basically invisible.

I followed it up with a supersensory charm––very useful for avoiding patrolling prefects and professors––and then a bubble-head charm for good measure to block out the stench. I sighed in relief as the humid, nasty-smelling air turned cool and refreshing. Okay, hopefully this way I’d be able to spot anything coming for me before it spotted me.

I took a single step forward and my foot slipped. I flailed wildly for a second, but managed to regain my balance without falling for a third time. After a few moments thought, I cast a water-repelling charm on my shoes and the hem of my robe. The mud around my feet rippled unpleasantly, but when I tried to take a step forward I found much firmer footing than before, the ground drying just enough to give me some reasonable traction.

Hopefully this would also stop me from accidentally stepping into water deep enough to swallow me. Theoretically I would be able to see the water rippling away from me before I made a misstep, even if it was hidden under dead leaves and other detritus. I just needed to watch my footing.

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I’d barely been looking around for ten minutes when I stumbled across the first body. A putrid, swollen white hand extended out from the water, the flesh looking slimy and bloated and marked with obvious signs of decay. I nearly tripped over my own feet in my haste to back away from it, my wand coming up and the incantation for a powerful fire spell on my tongue.

I stopped myself before I could bathe the corpse with white-hot fire and slowly raised my wand to my face to do something I should have done right from the start. “Magio Revelio,” I whispered, tracing the outline of an eye on my forehead with the tip of my wand. I blinked rapidly as a thin film appeared over my eyes, making the colors of the world around me spin for several moments before clearing up.

First I focused on the corpse and nearly sagged in relief when I realized that it was just that, a corpse. There was some amount of dark magic accumulated in the body, but not nearly enough to reanimate it. Two summers ago I’d had a very…unpleasant encounter with an Inferius at one of my family’s summer manors in the south of France. One of my ancestors had apparently left one in the small lake behind the manor and it had attacked me when my cousin Dorea and I had decided to go swimming.

If not for Dorea’s quick thinking in tossing me my wand from where I’d left it by the shore, things could have ended very poorly. That had also been my very first time casting Fiendfyre, and only the fact that I had done so both very poorly and out in the middle of a lake had stopped the cursed fire from consuming me, my cousin, and probably a good portion of Montpellier before dad, Uncle Cygnus, and I had wrestled it under control.

I took several slow, deep breaths to calm my racing heart, then began to look around while my magic sight spell was still active. After a moment I paused, blinked several times, and recast the spell, only to confirm what I’d already seen the first time around.

Everything around me was absolutely steeped in dark magic. It was in the ground, in the water, in the trees, and some of it even drifted through the air. A black, noxious aura lurked just beneath the surface of the water, coloring everything in sight in shades of black and gray.

I swallowed heavily and took another step back from the corpse. Okay, uh. Maybe I was wrong. That wasn’t enough magic to turn a corpse into an Inferius, but with so much magic in the ground and water it was entirely possible for it to stand up and start shambling around all on its own without the help of a wizard.

I hurried away from the corpse, carefully picking my way through the marshy landscape. I didn’t get far before I noticed another corpse that I skirted around, then another, and another. They were in the water, lurking just beneath the surface. After the third I started to see a pattern in the magic within the bodies and realized that there were yet more unseen corpses hidden in the deeper parts of the swamp that I was avoiding, the dark magic inside them a slightly different ‘shade’ than the ambient energy around them.

I found another small island much like the one where I’d first appeared and stopped. I dried out the ground, erected a shield charm around the island, transfigured a chair for myself, and then sat down heavily. Where the bloody hell was I? I’d heard of places like this, where dark magic had saturated everything until it became self-sustaining. There were a few in Britain, carefully contained and protected by families like my own so as to avoid having them destroyed by the Ministry, but this place didn’t seem nearly so…curated, plus I could feel no wards over this area like I would have expected.

This place was interesting. Something about it called to me and there was something wrong with all the bodies in the water, but I was also getting really hungry. Water and magic were keeping me going for now, but finding something to eat was becoming a bigger priority by the minute.