Something about this place…It felt like it was calling to me. Looking down, I could see the dark magic that filled the earth and water. It grew denser the further down I looked, until I couldn’t see anything past the veil of blackness clouding my vision.

I made and sterilized a new goblet and drank some more conjured water, the cool liquid helping me push past the uncomfortable pangs of hunger in my belly. Magic went a long way towards keeping me going, filling my limbs with energy and staving off illness and exhaustion, but it did nothing to stop me feeling the need to eat something. Water at least helped with that a little, putting something in my belly even if it wasn’t food.

With that temporarily taken care of, I stood up and pointed my wand at the ground, mentally dismissing my supersensory charm so I could properly focus. It was suddenly very quiet inside my shield charm, the soft buzz of the swamp falling away, and my muscles relaxed slightly as I was no longer hyper aware of every tiny movement and ripple in my peripheral vision.

Closing my eyes, I focused on the darkness, the slow-moving currents of magic as it flowed through the earth and pooled in stagnant water. It was beautiful, in a way, tranquil. I had felt larger concentrations of magic before––some parts of Hogwarts were so steeped in magic that even mudblood first years could feel it as a prickle on their skin––but most of the time, that magic was bound up into wards or infused into stone and metal.

At home too, we had a few rooms where dark magic was allowed to bloom, but they were all carefully hidden behind countless layers of boundary and nondetection wards that both stopped anyone from looking in and the magic from dispersing out. There the magic sat, filling the air like a thick fog, motionless unless acted upon by a wizard of Black blood.

Here it was free to move as it was naturally inclined to, soft and smooth instead of forged into sharp edges and patterns of purpose. It rippled and shifted as animals swam through the murky water and insects crawled beneath the soil. Tree roots formed mesmerizing patterns as darkness mingled with something colored with just a touch of green, flowing through and around roots in complex eddies and swirls.

I wanted, needed, to see more. I knelt down on the ground, the flash-dried mud crumbling slightly under my weight, and pressed the tip of my wand against the dry soil. A thin stream of my own magic flowed out into the ground, sinking down past the upper layers of magic towards the darker, denser energy that lay hidden beneath it.

It wound through dirt and rocks, past decaying plant matter and ancient bones. The magic around it grew thicker and…blacker, but my will kept it focused into a single thread moving ever downward. And then…

I touched something, and a spark inside me that I hadn’t even realized was there responded. Energy rushed into my body and I stumbled backwards, my wand leaving the ground and the strand snapping in an instant, but it was far too late for that to matter.

I was disoriented for several seconds, my mind spinning as new information suddenly flooded into me. I was connected to the world around me in a way I’d never experienced before. For a moment the swamp felt like an extension of my own body. I could feel the animals swimming in the water, the magic in the earth, and the countless decaying corpses scattered in the depths and rotting by the shores. I could feel the rich nexus of dark, Black, magic far, far beneath my feet, something powerful slowly coalescing in its heart.

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Then that moment passed and I was just me again, but the connection remained. I could feel this place, this… ‘Slaughter Swamp’, a voice whispered soundlessly in my ear. I was not its master, but I was connected to it and could draw upon its power.

Experimentally, I felt for our bond and quickly noticed a sort of…tether extending out from the center of my consciousness. I brushed my magic against it and it eagerly responded. A single mote of the Blackest, most potent magic I had ever felt in my entire life appeared inside me and immediately began to slowly dissipate out into the air.

At the same time, the tether faded slightly, still present but without the sense of power that it had carried just a moment before. I got the sense that it would recharge, but that doing so would take some time.

I’m slightly ashamed to say that I spent nearly thirty seconds just gaping at the mote of Black energy… ‘mana’, that same voice told me, that had appeared inside me. It felt impossibly potent and brimming with possibilities, and was nearly half gone by the time I managed to gather my wits.

My eyes snapped open and my wand rose into the air. I managed to stop myself from conjuring fiendfyre once more––I wasn’t that stupid––and my mind immediately went to another piece of dark magic I’d learned over the summer. “Fioleto Ill,” I cried out, slashing my wand sharply through the air and directing the rapidly fading mote of Black mana into my wand.

The streak of purple fire that I’d been expecting was instead a line so bright that it hurt my eyes to look at. It crossed the distance between me and the distant tree I was aiming at in a fraction of a second and dissipated against the wood. For a moment, I just stared at the tree in shock. Was that…

Then the center of the tree simply disintegrated and the entire thing slowly toppled over. The outer bark was the only thing my spell had left intact, turning several feet of the trunk into so much sawdust that hadn’t been able to support the rest of the tree’s weight.

My frown shifted into a smile. Sweet Merlin, that was incredible. I could still feel the lingering power of the spell in the air and the tips of my fingers, the yew wood of my wand tingling slightly against my skin.

I felt for the tether again, and got the sense that it would take about an hour for it to recharge. There was also something else there, some condition that would let me draw more power but in a far more limited way, but I had a feeling it would take some time to figure out how to do so.

I took several long, slow breaths, then righted my chair from where I had knocked it over in my haste and sat down again. This connection, the spark in my chest…They definitely had something to do with what had brought me here. I could just barely remember a sensation much like the one I’d felt when I connected to the land beneath my feet when I’d vanished from the courtroom.

Was this some manner of Black bloodline power that I had awakened? My family was known to produce seers and metamorphmagi, but it was not uncommon to hide elements of a family’s bloodline from everyone but the Lord and Heir.

Maybe, but that explanation rang hollow to my own ears. Something else was going on. Probably.

Hunger was really starting to get to me. I considered trying to catch and eat one of the many animals I could occasionally see or hear moving around me, but I didn’t really know how to hunt or cook. Plus, I wasn’t sure I was willing to trust meat with so much dark magic flowing through it. I might be a dark wizard myself, but even my family knew to keep the kitchens and larders free of anything that could taint the food.

I was also deeply curious about what it was that I’d felt at the core of this place. There was something there, something powerful hidden under many meters of swamp and thick curtains of dark magic. It would probably take some time to reach, days or even weeks of effort perhaps, but the allure of powerful magic had always called to me.

Decisions…