Chapter Text
March 1998
The air in Great Britain was thick, heavy with the stench of a magical war approaching its imminent and inevitable climax. Twenty years had passed since the alchemist Corvus Thorne, under the orders of a Lord Voldemort obsessed with absolute domination, twisted the laws of nature and magic. The “purification” experiment had been a macabre success in its execution, but a silent torture for the souls of its subjects.
On the battlefields, and in the cold corridors of pure-blood mansions, the price of that experiment was about to be collected—with interest paid in blood.
…
March 29, 1998 — Forest of Dean
Chaos reigned in an ambush in the Forest of Dean. Green and red flashes illuminated the darkness, ricocheting off charred tree trunks. Bellatrix Lestrange laughed with the unhinged hysteria that defined her, casting Unforgivable Curses as if they were mere sparks, dancing through the massacre.
A few meters from her, moving with the silent, lethal precision of an automaton, stood Antares. His physique was a testament to Thorne’s twisted alchemy: his dark hair, tangled into curls identical to Bellatrix’s, clung to his forehead with sweat and blood. His expressionless face was a marble mask carved by twenty years of brutal discipline, lit by two discordant eyes. The right, an unfathomable black abyss like that of his adoptive mother; the left, an icy, piercing blue—an injected inheritance from Druella Black.
Voldemort never allowed him to forget his origin. Often, when the Dark Lord grew bored, Antares was summoned to the center of the hall. The Cruciatus Curse tore through his nerves while Bellatrix and Rodolphus watched, forced to remain impassive. Antares never screamed. His jaw clenched until it bled, his only goal was not to shame the Lestranges.
In the midst of the skirmish, a wounded and desperate Resistance wizard cast a cutting curse of devastating power, aiming directly at the exposed back of Bellatrix, who was mocking a fallen opponent.
Antares did not think. There was no tactical calculation—only the most primal and painful instinct housed within his ravaged chest.
He stepped in front of it.
The impact made no sound, but the dark magic tore through his chest, piercing organs and bone as if they were soaked parchment. He fell to his knees with a dull thud, coughing up a clot of black blood.
Bellatrix turned at the sound of the impact. Her laughter died in her throat, cut off abruptly.
For the first time in twenty years, Antares’s mask broke. The physical pain was nothing compared to the terror of seeing disappointment on the face of the woman he adored with a sick, desperate devotion. Bellatrix dropped to her knees in front of him, her trembling hands—already stained with the blood of others—hovering over the boy’s shattered chest, not daring to touch him.
Antares raised a trembling hand, smearing Bellatrix’s robes with blood, searching for a warmth he had never been given. His eyes—the black one and the blue—filled with tears that washed the grime from his cheeks.
—Mom… —His voice was a choked whisper, a scarlet bubbling in his throat.— I’m sorry I wasn’t born pure-blood… Maybe then… maybe you and Dad would have loved me…
His eyes lost their focus, the blue and the black turning dull. His hand fell onto the damp earth.
Antares Lestrange, the weapon forged in agony, died with a broken heart.
Bellatrix’s reaction was a cosmic horror. She remained frozen, staring at the boy’s corpse. The cognitive dissonance shattered what remained of her sanity. She hated Mudbloods—despised them with every fiber of her being—but Antares was hers. She had shaped him, she had taught him how to hold a wand, she had secretly tended the wounds left by Thorne’s experiments in the quiet of the night… without understanding why it bothered her that the boy had nightmares. She loved him with the possessiveness of a wild beast: a deformed, toxic, deeply repressed love.
When reality finally struck her, she did not cry like a normal mother. Bellatrix let out a guttural howl, a tearing, animal, deafening scream that froze the blood of everyone in the forest. She clutched Antares’s lifeless body, rocking back and forth, smearing her own face with his blood while cursing the entire world.
Rodolphus, a few steps away, lowered his wand. His stoic expression fractured. The emptiness he felt in his stomach was suffocating. He had taught the boy how to fly a broom, how to channel his magic. Deep within his purist soul, Rodolphus knew he had admired the boy’s endurance—his unbreakable loyalty. Too late, he realized that in their attempt to purify a Muggle child, they had ended up staining the only soul that had ever been genuinely loyal to them. They both loved him, but their fanaticism had kept them from understanding that love until they saw him dead because of the very ideology they served.
…
March 29, 1998 — Malfoy Manor
Miles away, the atmosphere in Malfoy Manor was suffocating, yet it did not compare to the prison in which Cassiopeia lived.
As a child, she had been a ray of light in the cold corridors of the Malfoy home. With her straight black hair broken by dazzling streaks of platinum blond and her immense gray eyes identical to Lucius’s, she used to run through the gardens with a small Draco trailing behind her. She had a small mole beneath the right corner of her lip that Narcissa used to kiss before bedtime. They loved her in measured drops, never able to do so without remembering the origin of the sweet girl who brought them drawings and flowers.
As she grew older, the weight of the secret of her origin and the pressure of the war withered her. The sweet child became a melancholic woman, withdrawn into herself, an expert at hiding her tears behind a perfect façade of ice.
In January 1998, Voldemort— in an act of pure humiliation toward Lucius after his failures — decided that the “purified” girl was finally ready to be useful.
He sold her.
An arranged marriage to one of the most sadistic and cruel Death Eaters in his ranks. Lucius, terrified for his own position, bowed his head and allowed them to take her away.
The following months were hell on earth. Locked inside a grim manor, Cassiopeia endured constant abuse. The forced pregnancy weakened both her magic and her body. The blows from her husband—furious at the “impure blood” carried by the vessel—were daily.
A week before her death, a terrified house-elf managed to deliver a parchment to Lucius, stained with blood and tears. It contained only two lines, written in trembling handwriting:
“Dad, please… get me out of this house… I can’t take it anymore…”
Lucius had kept the paper in the inner pocket of his robes, close to his chest, feeling how it burned against his skin. Cowardice immobilized him for days, torn between the Dark Lord’s command and his daughter’s life.
It was Draco who found her first.
The seventeen-year-old, driven by a mixture of rage and desperation after discovering the note in his father’s study, broke through the wards of the Death Eater’s house. Narcissa and a pale Lucius arrived only minutes later, guided by panic.
The sound that greeted them upon entering the main hall was the wet echo of a brutal blow, followed by a sepulchral silence.
The Death Eater stood there, panting, wand raised and knuckles bloodied. On the floor, upon a carpet slowly staining crimson, lay Cassiopeia. She had lost the baby hours earlier due to a previous beating, and her body had not survived the final assault.
Her long black hair streaked with platinum lay spread out like a broken fan. Her gray eyes—once full of life and affection for her younger brother—were fixed on the ceiling, empty. The small mole on her cheek was framed by a dark violet bruise.
For Lucius, it was the total collapse of his universe. The patriarch of the Malfoy family fell to his knees, his cane rolling uselessly across the wooden floor. His ideology, his loyalty to the Dark Lord, his pure-blood status… all of it turned to ashes in that instant. He looked at his daughter—the little girl he had taught to walk, the one who had his same gray eyes—and he knew that he was her true murderer. He had handed her over. His pride had been the executioner of his own child. Lucius did not scream; he broke inside, a silent, strangled sob aging him ten years in a single second, cursing his own cowardice as he clutched against his chest the crumpled parchment bearing the plea he had ignored.
Narcissa, always the embodiment of controlled elegance, threw herself over her daughter’s body with a scream that tore through her vocal cords. She embraced Cassiopeia’s bloodied corpse, kissing her cold forehead, cradling her as if she could bring her back to life, ignoring the Death Eater still standing in the room. For Narcissa, blood purity had ceased to matter the day Corvus Thorne placed that baby in her arms. The pain of losing the girl she had raised as her own drove her into momentary madness; she raised her wand and, with lethal and relentless fury, cast an Unforgivable Curse at Cassiopeia’s husband, beginning a duel to the death in the middle of the hall.
But the deepest transformation was Draco’s.
Draco Malfoy—the boy who had grown up believing in blood supremacy—remained standing in the doorway, trembling uncontrollably. He looked at his older sister. He remembered how Cassiopeia used to sing to him when he had nightmares, how she hid his mistakes from their strict father, how she had smiled sadly at him on the day of her forced wedding, telling him: “Be strong, little dragon.”
Draco fell to his knees beside Narcissa and took his sister’s lifeless hand. It was cold.
In that precise moment, as tears burned down his pale cheeks, Draco Malfoy ceased to be a Death Eater in his heart. His fear of Voldemort was replaced by a pure, crystalline, absolute hatred. His family had sacrificed their humanity for a monster who treated them like cattle. Cassiopeia’s death destroyed any illusion of greatness the Malfoys might have had about the war; it showed them that, in the end, Voldemort was not building a better world—he was only destroying everything they dared to love.
…
April 18, 1998.
The night was thick, suffocating. The very air seemed stagnant, heavy with the weight of a war that had devoured their souls long before claiming their lives. In Lestrange Manor, wrapped in a perpetual gloom, and in the majestic yet gloomy Malfoy Manor, the silence weighed more than any unforgivable curse. It was a dense, accusing silence that slipped through the cracks of the stone walls and strangled the throats of its inhabitants.
Bellatrix Lestrange lay awake in the darkness of her opulent bedroom. Her breathing was erratic. Her face was damp, streaked with hot tears she refused to wipe away, and her eyes were wide and unblinking, fixed on the nothingness of the vaulted ceiling. Rodolphus was not sleeping either; the tense outline of his back beneath the sheets betrayed him. Both pretended, in a tacit pact of broken pride, that the other did not hear the muffled sobs that tore through the night. They had lost Antares. Her mind replayed the torment in a relentless loop: they had despised him at first, they had shaped him in shadows, forcing him to fit into a mold of darkness that did not belong to him… and yet, despite their cruelty and negligence, when the boy died, something inside the two most feared Death Eaters in Great Britain died as well. An irreparable fracture at the center of their fanaticism.
Miles away, in the vastness of Wiltshire, the scene was a reflection of the same hell. Lucius Malfoy, stripped of all his arrogance and haughtiness, sat in the dimness of his study. In his hands he held a crumpled note, a stained piece of parchment that he could no longer read without his fingers trembling violently. The words were burned into his retinas: “Dad, please…”. Narcissa, rigid beside him on the dark leather sofa, stared into the void without blinking. In her shattered mind, she saw Cassiopeia’s blood again and again; a bright, scarlet pool staining the immaculate white marble of her home. The echo of her loss was a deafening buzz that would not let her breathe.
Then, in the midst of the shared guilt that connected the two Black sisters and their husbands across the distance, the temperature in the rooms dropped suddenly. There was no wind, but the candle flames flickered until they almost went out. Something whispered in the darkness.
—Would you like to recover what you lost?
The sound vibrated in their bones. It was not Voldemort’s high, cold voice, always laden with demands and threats. Nor was it a thought of their own, born from minds pushed to the limit of sanity. It was something vast, unfathomable, and ancient. A primordial magic that seeped through the cracks of time and pain. Something that did not ask for blind obedience or servitude… but desire. A bargain forged in desperation.
And the desire of the four of them, unanimous, fierce, and desperate, was a silent scream that shook the very foundations of fate itself.
…
Bellatrix woke with a violent gasp, half-sitting up as if emerging from the depths of a frozen lake. Her hands instinctively clutched the sheets, expecting to feel the dampness of earth or the viscous touch of blood that had stained her final days.
But no. It did not smell of earth or blood, nor of the stench of rot that followed the Dark Lord. It smelled of lavender. The fresh, clean perfume of her youth. She blinked, trying to focus her sight in the golden dimness of dawn. The heavy green velvet curtains surrounding the canopy were those of her old marital bedroom. The silk sheets beneath her fingers were intact, smooth, immaculate.
—Rodolphus… —she whispered.
He was sitting at the edge of the enormous bed, his back to her. His shoulders rose and fell with agitated breaths. He was staring at his hands, turning them, observing the firm skin free of the scars that years of imprisonment and war had carved into them, as if he did not recognize them. When he heard her, he turned his face toward her. He was not the gaunt, spectral man of 1998; he was the proud young aristocrat again, but with eyes that harbored ghosts far too old.
—I remember everything —he said, his voice breaking—. The forest. His gaze.
The weight of that confession made the room spin. Bellatrix tried to sit up completely, placing her hands on the mattress to rise from the bed… and then she felt it.
It was not the skeletal lightness of her body consumed by Azkaban and dark magic. It was a different weight, deep and anchored at her center. A firm curve that defied gravity.
She lowered her gaze slowly, fearing the illusion would break.
Her belly was rounded, unmistakably swollen and tense beneath the fine silk of her silver nightgown.
—No… —she breathed, and the terror turned into something deeper. It was not the fear of death or punishment; it was the abyssal, primordial terror of losing again what she loved.
Rodolphus approached slowly, his movements cautious, as if he feared waking from a cruel dream. He sat beside her and placed his hand, large and warm, over her abdomen. At that very instant, as if to dispel any doubt about the reality of his existence, from within, a firm kick answered against the palm of her husband.
Both of them froze. Breath trapped in their throats.
Rodolphus shifted his gaze toward the carved oak desk, where a small standing clock rested beside a leather planner.
—October 1977 —he murmured when he saw the calendar—. Bella… he will be born in January.
The name did not need to be spoken aloud; it resonated in the silence of the room, sacred and absolute.
Antares.
But this time he would not be a child torn from a filthy orphanage, after being born on January 18, 1978, full of resentment and confusion. He would not be a weapon shaped by dark alchemy and forbidden secrets. He would not be tortured or broken to “purify” the family’s blood or to please a mad master. He was there, growing inside her, real and alive.
—He is mine —Bellatrix said with an unfamiliar fierceness, gripping her husband’s hand over her belly—. No one will touch him. Not the Dark Lord. Not the war.
Her eyes, which so often had shone with the sadistic madness of a Death Eater, now burned with the relentless fire of a mother willing to devour anyone who posed a threat. Rodolphus did not recoil from the intensity of her gaze. Instead, he leaned toward her and rested his forehead against hers, closing his eyes as a silent tear traced a path down his rejuvenated cheek.
—I swear it. If I have to burn the world, I will.
And in that room bathed in the early light, for the first time in the history of the Lestrange lineage, fanaticism yielded to something far older and far more powerful than devotion to blood or to a leader: love.
Miles away, in the imposing Malfoy Manor, Lucius jolted upright, choking back a cry in his throat. His hands flew to his chest, searching frantically.
There was no note in his hands.
His ears rang, waiting for the echo of the curse, the dull thud of the body hitting the floor. But there were no screams. Only the rhythmic and peaceful sound of the wind brushing against the immense windows overlooking the gardens.
Narcissa, awakened by her husband’s sudden movement, shifted beside him among the thick black satin sheets. Suddenly she opened her eyes wide, losing her breath. She brought a trembling hand to her belly, confused, her gray eyes searching his with a mixture of panic and astonishment.
—Lucius… I feel magic.
He looked at her, pausing at her young face, free of the wrinkles of chronic worry and terror. Understanding passed between them like lightning, an electric spark connecting their minds and the memories of a timeline that had just collapsed. Lucius threw the sheets aside and rushed to the full-length silver-framed mirror that dominated the dressing room. He braced himself against the edges, staring at himself. His platinum-blond hair fell smooth and perfect over his shoulders. His skin did not carry the bluish tone of years of imprisonment. There were no shadows of Azkaban on his face. The humiliating defeat of a man who could not protect his family was gone.
—We’re in 1977 —he said hoarsely, almost choking on the words as he saw the date printed on the unopened morning Prophet resting on the side table.
Narcissa sat up in bed, ignoring the cold of the floor, and lowered her gaze to her flat abdomen. She stroked the fabric of her nightclothes, feeling the faint and unmistakable pulse of life and magic forming inside her.
—April… —she whispered—. She will be born in April.
Cassiopeia.
Tears overflowed from Narcissa’s eyes, tears of relief so deep it hurt. Her little girl, born on April 21, 1978, in the same orphanage as Antares. This time, her daughter would not be sold to the highest bidder nor promised to monsters. She would not be sacrificed to her parents’ fear and cowardice. She would not be used as a bargaining chip to appease the anger of a sadistic master.
Lucius stepped away from the mirror, stumbling until he reached the edge of the bed. His legs failed him. The proud and untouchable Lucius Malfoy fell to his knees before his wife, hiding his face in the folds of her nightgown, pressing his forehead against her lap in a gesture of absolute surrender. His shoulders trembled with restrained sobs.
—I was a coward —he said, his voice broken, muffled by the fabric and the unbearable weight of his future sins—. I won’t be one again. Let Voldemort kill me if he wants. But he will not have her.
Narcissa did not cry with him. Instead, an icy and deadly calm took hold of her features. She slid her pale hands through her husband’s blond hair until she found his face, lifting his chin with firm fingers and forcing him to look at her. In his wife’s eyes, Lucius did not find passive comfort, but a promise of war.
—Our daughter will be born loved. And whoever tries to take her from us will learn what it means to defy a Malfoy… and a Black.
Outside the walls of both mansions, the magical world still slept, wrapped in the tense calm before the imminent First Wizarding War. Aurors patrolled, the Order of the Phoenix gathered in secret, and Lord Voldemort laid out his plans for domination assuming that his pawns were arranged on the board.
But at the dawn of that October of 1977, without the Dark Lord knowing it or ever suspecting it, he had lost his most loyal servants, the fundamental pillars of his army.
Because they were no longer Death Eaters seeking glory and blood purity.
They were parents.
And parents cornered, blessed and cursed with the vivid and bloody memory of the future… are infinitely more dangerous than any monster dark magic could ever create.