There were a lot of things I could have done. I could have kept searching for wizards––there had to be a wizarding community in a city this big and so steeped in magic. I could have tried to see if the muggles knew anything useful. Perhaps I could have even tried to get in touch with Zatara through the theater so that I could meet with him a day sooner.

However, as it far too often was, the allure of new, powerful magic was simply too strong. I had an entire day and a half before I could try to go and meet Zatara at his performance. That was plenty of time to head back to Slaughter Swamp and keep poking around. That nexus of black magic I’d seen hidden in the depths was simply too fascinating to ignore for long.

It wasn’t like I was in that big of a rush. It was 2010 and I doubted that anyone would be searching for me more than seven decades after my trial. I assumed that everyone thought I was long dead, consumed by my own fiendfyre, and what was the point in keeping an eye out for a dead man?

Maybe my name was mentioned in some history books, but that was probably about it. Just in case, I’d introduce myself with my middle name, Sirius, instead of my full name. Most Blacks looked pretty alike and we’d been using that name for centuries. No one would expect Sirius Black to really be Hydrys Black.

That was why, after eating a slightly unappealing but palatable muggle breakfast provided by the hotel, I found myself apparating back to Slaughter Swamp, an apple and an odd, transparent yet flexible bottle of water stashed away in one of the expanded pockets on my robe.

With a sharp crack of displaced air, I reappeared on the small, muddy island where I had first found myself the previous day. I could still see the skid marks in the mud where I had hit the ground and slid and the branch I had transfigured into a goblet to drink from.

Though I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, my newly reapplied magic sight spell confirmed what I already knew––this spot was directly above the largest concentration of dark magic I’d seen in the entire swamp so far. I wasn’t sure if that meant that something about this swamp was connected to how I’d found myself in this place and displaced nearly a century into the future, but it did seem at least vaguely significant.

It also gave me a good place to start when examining the swamp’s magic. It was a nice, central location and I was sort of catching two Snidgets with one charm. I could both look into the magic of the swamp and whatever had brought me here simultaneously!

Over the next four hours, I blanketed the island and the waters around it with every detection and analysis charm I knew. I found a lot of dark magic, an entire plethora of gross but mostly mundane animals and insects, several magic-filled plants I couldn’t really identify, and a truly staggering number of muggle corpses. Just a mind-boggling number of corpses. Like, several entire Hogwarts classes worth of corpses.

Out of curiosity, I dredged up a number of the bodies. They seemed to all be muggles, many dressed in the remnants of tattered suits. I wasn’t exactly an Auror, but it looked to me like most of them had already been dead when they were dumped into the swamp. Perhaps this was some local burial custom? Or more likely, an easy, out-of-the-way place where criminals dumped their enemies. Many of the people I’d found hadn’t died easily, their rotting bodies covered in grevious wounds

I dumped the majority of them back into the water where I’d found them and left only a few on shore so I could study the way the dark magic was suffusing them. The bodies were completely saturated with dark magic, much more so than I would have expected from just sitting in the water. The magic inside them was darker and denser than the energy surrounding them, meaning that for some reason the corpses were accumulating energy rather than releasing it as I would have expected.

After eating my apple, I spent another two hours poking and scanning a few of the corpses, but I couldn’t figure out why they were doing what they were doing. They were muggles. Even though they were long dead, their bodies should still resist the touch of magic, not pull it into themselves.

Eventually, I decided that I wanted to try something a little bit…ill advised. I was getting frustrated by my lack of progress and I wanted to do something other than just look at the ground and prod a corpse with a transfigured knife.

Though I’d never had the opportunity to actually attempt the spells myself, after my nearly-disastrous run in with an Inferius, I’d spent some time studying the highly-illegal necromancy spell books my family possessed that detailed the strengths, weaknesses, and production methods for the powerful undead.

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Typically, only a wizard’s body could be turned into an Inferius. The first step of the process was to imbue the corpse you were trying to reanimate with a large amount of dark magic, and it was nearly impossible to do so to a muggle. However, here I had a corpse that was already packed to the gills with magic, thus letting me skip the most costly and time consuming part of the process.

I didn’t just jump right into things of course. Not properly preparing before casting powerful dark magic had already kicked me in the ass once this week, and I wasn’t going to make myself a wanted man in 2010 after I’d just escaped a life sentence in Azkaban.

First, I prepared the area where I was going to cast the spell itself. I used a few charms to dry out and flatten a circular patch of ground about five meters in diameter, then transfigured the dry dirt into a two-centimeter thick layer of black obsidian. It would only last for a few hours, maybe five or six if I was lucky, but that should be plenty of time and obsidian was one of the very best surfaces to use when doing dark magic.

Next, I warded the small island, focusing especially on a few spells that Dad taught me to use if I ever wanted to cast dark magic outside of one of our heavily warded properties. The spells were specifically designed to stop anyone outside them from sensing magic happening within the wards and could even fool the Trace, not that I needed to worry about that anymore.

Only once that was ready did I pick out a trio of bodies to work with. The first one I would try to turn into an Inferius normally, the second I would try to empower using the Black mana from the swamp, and the third was there in case I messed something up. I did my best to choose some of the better-preserved corpses, ones with all their limbs still attached and with no serious damage to the skeleton.

The first attempt actually went very well. I used a hovering charm to move the corpse into the center of the circle I’d made, then stood over it as I cast. It was a long, drawn-out process, consisting of several complex spells with intricate wand motions and wordy incantations. My wand moved smoothly through the air, years of spellcasting giving my movements confidence even though I’d never attempted this exact magic before in my life, and the garbled latin that most British spells used rolled off my tongue.

I finished the last spell with a jab and a sharp upwards flick. “Oririsio Inferius!” I commanded, black smoke pouring from the tip of my wand and flooding into the corpse’s open mouth.

For a moment, it seemed like I’d failed on the last step. Then, two things happened in rapid succession. First, the Inferius shuddered and sat up, its empty eye sockets filling with white smoke that coalesced into cloudy, dead eyes. A fraction of a second later, I felt something shift inside of me and new knowledge coalesced into something very much like a spell that settled next to where the bond between me and the swamp lay.

It took me a moment to unravel what I was feeling, and when I did my eyes widened in wonder. It seemed that in the future, I wouldn’t necessarily need a corpse at all to summon an Inferius. I could simply use two motes of Black mana and create one from nothing, though for some reason I was only limited to summoning four such Inferi at a time.

That was certainly very interesting. I wasn’t sure how useful it would really be––I could only currently draw upon one mote of Black mana at a time and I could create far more than four Inferi without having to use a single drop of the immensely potent power––but I was far more interested in the implications of such an ability.

Could I discover more uses for this powerful Black magic? I had the feeling that any creature I summoned like this would be both loyal and obedient to me. Perhaps someday I’d be able to summon up a quartet of dementors or lethifolds, or maybe even a loyal dragon? The very thought of it had me salivating in anticipation.

I took a deep breath and refocused on the situation at hand before I could get too distracted by possibilities. I directed the Inferius I had just created to move off to the side, thin wisps of gray mist dripping from its boney limbs and dissipating against the ground, then levitated the second corpse into position.

I drank the last of the water I’d brought with me, then got into position and began casting. My plan was to get to the very last step of the process and then draw upon the energy of Slaughter Swamp as I cast the final spell. However, when the time came to do so, something I hadn’t expected happened instead.

Instead of one mote of mana, two flowed into my wand and down into the Inferius. It seemed that the magic of this place was twice as potent when used for necromancy. At the same time, the magic of the swamp shuddered and responded, tendrils of darkness reaching up out of the depths towards me.

The corpse shuddered and writhed, swelling and bloating as dark shadows moved beneath the surface of its skin. I jumped backwards just in time as the forces within its body clashed against one another, their purposes almost aligned but just different enough that cooperation was impossible. The body shuddered one last time and then detonated, splattering corpse juice and grisly, rotten flesh in all directions.

Another bead of knowledge appeared within me, this one both far more powerful and simply more than the Inferius had been. This was no mere template, but a Legend, a horror story that had haunted this land for decades and would persist for generations to come. It was not something I could call on now, nor did I know how long it would take to find the power to do so, but someday…

This Solomon Grundy creature would make my enemies tremble in fear.