Chapter 26: Praise the Omnissiah!

  Blaise Zabini

  Hogwarts, Great Britain

  When I joined my classmates in the Slytherin common room the following morning, it was to find a strange sort of hubbub. Strange in that it technically wasn’t much of a hubbub at all. Us snakes weren’t known to make a ruckus after all.

  Still, there was a small crowd of people milling about the fireplace. They were looking up at four hourglasses that occupied the mantle, each filled with gems of a different color. The setup was a scaled down copy of the display in the main hall that tallied the house points throughout the year.

  At the bottom was a series of point totals. While we’d not been looking, Slytherin had left the other houses in the dust with a full hundred points. We’d already been in the lead by a fair bit thanks to Snape’s favoritism, but this all but guaranteed the cup at the end of the year.

  More importantly, earning house points was the surefire way to acquire more prestige in the house. It was an easy way to secure the top spot in the monthly leaderboards, which in turn could mean tangible benefits, maybe even a pass to the forbidden section of the library. It was why Slytherins so often strutted about, showing off how “cunning” they were.

  Curious, then, that no one had claimed credit for the house’s sudden good fortune.

  I smiled and kept my head down. I could only assume Dumbledore had rewarded me in the only way he could while keeping me away from the spotlight. As meaningless as the house points were, the gesture was appreciated.

  X

  Hogwarts breakfasts were great. They were typical English fare, and probably not very healthy, but always well-made. Today, I had two savory scones, cheddar and chives, with a delicious helping of sausage gravy.

  I polished off my meal and guiltily reached for a bowl of charred tomatoes when Heath nudged me on the shoulder.

  “Hey, Zabini, is it just me or is Potter making doe-eyes at you?” he said, shooting me what was probably supposed to be a conspiratory smirk. Just what he thought we were conspiring together on, I had no fuckign clue.

  I gamely ignored him and filled my cup with another helping of orange juice. “No she’s not.”

  “She is,” he insisted, whispering harshly. “Look!”

  Sighing, I complied and immediately regretted it.

  Sure enough, Violet was doing her honest best to stare a hole into my head, though I wouldn’t call it “doe-eyes.” More, “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me anything?” eyes. Or maybe, “Bitch, I will find you,” eyes. There was gratitude there, fondness certainly, but also the kind of determination I typically associated with crackhead and military connoisseurs of Crayola flavors.

  She was going to shake me down as soon as possible. Given Heath lacked context, I could see why he thought the Girl Who Lived might have a crush. She really did have lovely eyes, big and expressive.

  I sighed. Whether or not Dumbledore respected my privacy would be moot if Violet kept staring at me like that. Sooner or later, people would connect the dots, especially when Sirius Black suddenly went on trial.

  Leave it to Violet to throw off my plans without even trying.

  “She does seem rather fixated on me, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah, what’d you do?”

  “I charmed her with my dashing good looks, a candlelit dinner, and a long, moonlit walk by the lake,” I replied sarcastically, flipping my hair like I was in a shampoo commercial. “I have no idea what she’s on about.”

  “Really? When did you have time for that?” Heath asked. How someone who grew up in pureblood society could be so oblivious, I had zero clue.

  “He’s pulling your leg, Parkinson,” Nott scoffed.

  “Oh…”

  I clapped the taller boy on the shoulder. “Seriously though, I did a few commissions for her and gave her a big discount.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Why else? She’s the poster girl for the light faction. If I can make her believe I’m on her side, I can have more influence with her lackeys later on.”

  “Oh, I get it. It’s an investment then.”

  “Yup. I didn’t think it’d be so effective though. I guess she thinks we’re closer than we really are,” I made a show of looking at her. “Then again, she is rather fetching, isn’t she?”

  I left it at that. Heath would likely take me at face value, but others at the table would draw conclusions on their own. Some might think I was manipulating Violet, nurturing her infatuation towards me for some future plan only I could see. Others might think I fancied Violet myself and was using business as an excuse to be kind to her without appearing vulnerable or easily led by emotions.

  It didn’t matter in the end. That was just the way the game was played in Slytherin: One person said one thing and half a dozen amateur politicians interpreted the words to mean half a dozen things.

  By the end of the day, the whole house will have forgotten what exactly I’d said. By the end of the week, the school-wide rumor mill will be so clogged with variations of the “truth” that anything else Violet did to capture my attention would itself inspire as many interpretations.

  X

  “Oh, good afternoon, Zabini,” I heard Clara call as I entered the art club. There were more people today; about half the easels were occupied.

  “Warren,” I nodded to her. “Any success with the paints?”

  “Pai-Oh! No, not really. I mean, I got some paint out of it, but it turns out, fire crab shells don’t have a lot of pigment. I would need loads more than a few fragments to make it worthwhile.”

  “I could have told you that, Warren,” Daphne scoffed. She’d entered behind me and taken her place nearby. “Fire crab are crystalline. While some of their vibrant color comes from their pigment, a good bit comes from the crystalline structure of the gem-like shells. The shells form prisms that refract light and reflect red.”

  “Huh, more you know. Where’d you learn that?”

  “It’s not something you’d pick up in a textbook. My lord father took me to a cauldron-maker two years ago. He showed my sister and I how fire crab shells are turned into cauldrons.”

  “That sounds really interesting.”

  “Indeed it was,” she agreed as she resumed painting, something she’d been working on off and on since early September.

  Daphne didn’t often come to the art club. She was there during club day, but she seemed to prefer to paint in seclusion rather than in a group. Or maybe her studies and schemes kept her away. Either way, she’d been working on the same piece for over a month now.

  It was a picture of a little, blonde girl. She was seated on a marble bench overlooking a small, tranquil pond. At her feet was a white kneazle with pronounced tufts of fur protruding from its brows. Judging by the young girl’s waifish, almost malnourished figure and the same, olive-green eyes as Daphne’s I could only assume this was her sister, Astoria.

  “It’s a gift,” Daphne said, answering our unasked question. Clara and I had been staring too long. “My sister’s birthday is coming up and I wish to show her that I am still thinking of her in Hogwarts.”

  “That’s sweet. I’m sure she’ll be thrilled,” I said honestly. “You’re a very considerate person, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, it really is wonderfully done,” Clara said. “You have a good grasp of perspective and shading.”

  “Thank you. She is my sister. She means a lot to me.”

  After several minutes, our club president turned to me. She looked like she was steeling herself for something. Then, she held out a familiar picture: my charcoal drawing of Arnold Schwarzeneggar as the Terminator.

  “So… Zabini,” she began. Her feet shuffled nervously. “I asked a few of my friends about this piece and… You know how you said you drew this by impulse?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Yes? I’d almost forgotten. I have many dreams, you know. I probably forget most of them.”

  “Yeah, well, my friend recognized it.”

  I nodded. That wasn’t entirely unexpected. The Terminator series was iconic for a reason. There was bound to be someone who’d seen it before.

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  Still, I remembered my bit and inserted a slight quiver into my response. “O-Oh? What is it exactly?”

  “It’s… It’s an urban legend, you know, a modern folktale of sorts. Muggles have a few of those stories,” she said haltingly. I was surprised to see that she looked as nervous as I was pretending to be. “There’s this one about a half-man, half-machine thing, a destroyer who is called the Terminator. I didn’t think the stories were real, but if you dreamt of one…”

  “I… Are you saying that this drawing is… real…?”

  “Maybe? I want to say no, this level of technology is beyond what muggles have, but you saw it. You’ve never been in the muggle world before, have you?”

  “N-No,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. Clara was going along with this nonsense. I expected her to laugh, make fun of me a bit, then try to explain what a movie was. Instead, here she was, feeding my nonsense.

  Next to me, Daphne had set aside her brush in favor of peering at my charcoal drawing. She took one look and scrunched up her pretty, button nose.

  “That is grotesque. Muggles really have stories about this?” she asked derisively.

  “Not stories, folktales,” Clara corrected. “Urban legends are stories someone swears is true. When enough people say it really happened, then…”

  “Then even hearsay gains some weight. You said muggles don’t have technology like this. It looks like the metal has been fused into this man’s face with a charm, or maybe alchemy.”

  “D-Do you think that’s what happened?” I asked, voice trembling but cackling inside. “What is impossible for muggles becomes very possible where magic is involved.”

  “Come off it, Zabini. The Statute of Secrecy–”

  “Says muggles aren’t to be told of magic. Wizards can perform magic in the muggle world after our age of majority. Besides, if the muggles in question turn out looking like this, then maybe the Statute is being upheld because there is no one who’s sane enough to tell the story.”

  “Oh, my god,” Clara gasped. It was a bit too exaggerated to be genuine, but I gave her points for effort. “Are you saying there might be a wizard making these things?”

  I nodded solemnly. We’d drawn a bit of a crowd now, the rest of our club having gathered around us. I couldn’t stop the act now; that disturbed look on Daphne’s face alone made this worthwhile. “Inferi. It’s very dark magic, the reanimation of the dead. It’s highly illegal, and for good reasons, even us dark families will tell you that. W-Warren, do you think this might be some wizard’s experiments to bypass those regulations?”

  “No one would dare, Zabini,” Daphne said. “Muggles might be expendable, but this is the kind of thing that merits a lifetime stay in Azkaban.”

  “I don’t know, Greengrass. I saw what I saw.” I pulled out my crystal ball. “It’s probably nothing, but I can’t shake a foreboding feeling whenever I think about this.”

  “I’ll leave you to your silliness then. Really, muggle inferi,” she muttered, shaking her head.

  I was dying inside. It took all my budding occlumency to not burst out laughing. Clara probably thought she was pranking me, not the other way around. She’d probably let me stew in my “ominous visions” for a few weeks before telling me, not knowing that I probably knew more about the muggle world than she did.

  Well, when provided with such a splendid opportunity, how could I not respond? Prank me, will she?

  My crystal ball shimmered as its enchantments responded to my magic. I didn’t need it for anything, but it was a wonderful source of legitimacy. Just the fact that I had it out served as a constant reminder of my credibility.

  I worked in silence for close to two hours, occasionally looking into my crystal ball intently. Joke was on them, I wasn’t seeing some horrible reality. Rather, I was digging into my own memory, a hobby I’d dabbled in in my past life. Specifically, Warhammer.

  I drew upon memories of the Fabricator General of the Adeptus Mechanicus. I sketched out tubes and wires that linked directly into the face of a gaunt, one-eyed man. The left half of his face had been replaced by many lenses, seemingly embedded into his face without rhyme or reason. His nose was stripped away, shaved down until the nasal cavity of his skull could be seen. His mouth had been replaced by a breathing apparatus.

  This was Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars who reigned during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. He resented the God-Emperor of Man and believed him to be a false god. Though he sided with the Heresy, he was a character who stood out in my mind in vivid detail.

  I tried to copy that dead-eyed stare in the artwork, but I couldn’t quite capture the look in my opinion. Still, his appearance was shocking enough to have the desired effect. He was clearly mechanical yet distinct from the Terminator, with an imposing, scheming air that contrasted nicely with the Terminator’s brute strength.

  On the bottom of the sketchpad, I wrote:

  Praise the Omnissiah! Praise the Machine God. Embrace the Glorious Evolution! Let the Red Planet rise!

  I leaned back with a satisfied grin, which I quickly replaced with a shuddering sigh. Taking the crude sketch off the easel, I handed it to Clara with trembling hands.

  “H-Here, this is what I saw in the crystal ball,” I said, completely honestly. “Can you ask around? See what this is?”

  Clara looked at the drawing, a little creeped out now. “O-Okay, what is the Omnissiah?”

  “The Machine God… I don’t know. I just know that this person worships it. Maybe he made the Terminator.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Hmm? Do you know something?”

  “Ah, n-no, of course not. The urban legend says that the Terminator is some kind of man and machine.”

  “This man, he worships machines,” I stressed, ignoring her little slip. Now, the question was, would any muggleborn in Hogwarts recognize a Warhammer character? I wasn’t sure, but the series was far less popular than Terminator. “All I know is that he is someone who thinks perfection can only be achieved by surpassing the human body.”

  “I… I’ll ask around.”

  “You do that, Warren. You do that.”

  My daily trolling quota met, I spent the rest of the day practicing my occlumency. With Wormtail in Dumbledore’s custody, I could now turn my attention on Quirrell and the stone.

  X

  “You’ve been avoiding me,” Violet hissed as she slid into the seat next to me.

  Today was Friday, which meant a double period of potions with the Gryffindors. By this point, no one questioned it when the Girl Who Lived chose to sit with a snake.

  “I don’t know what you’re–Oi,” I hissed, moving my foot out of the way. “Violence is not how civilized people show gratitude, Potter.”

  “Guess I’m a brute then. Now hold still!”

  “No, you’re going to kick my shin!”

  “Why are you avoiding me?”

  I couldn’t help it. I shot her the smuggest grin I could. “Your frustration is delectable, like a fine wine.”

  A dozen emotions flew across her face before she settled on a disbelieving laugh. “You’re such an ass.”

  “Lies and slander. Have you considered that I do not appreciate my affairs being made a public spectacle?”

  “I… But…”

  “But nothing, Potter. I act because I wish to. I don’t need acknowledgement for my actions, yours or the old goat’s.”

  “You–”

  She was cut off by the sound of the door slamming open. Professor Snape stormed into the dungeon as he always did, cloak billowing like Dracula himself. He glared out at the room menacingly, making even us snakes sit up straight. If nothing else, he really knew how to command a room.

  His gaze settled on us, me specifically. As always, I met his eyes coolly. To turn away would mean I had something to hide. Or, that I feared legilimency even if I wasn’t supposed to know he could do that. So I engaged him in a game of mind reading chicken.

  Did the heir of a pureblood house that could date itself to the fall of Rome know occlumency? Did he dare risk it anyway?

  No doubt he’d been briefed on what happened. Dumbledore didn’t hide much from his pet Death Eater. That said, I genuinely didn’t know how he felt about Pettigrew’s capture.

  On one hand, Snape loathed Voldemort, perhaps more than anyone else alive, because he saw Voldemort as the one who took Lily away from him. Pettigrew’s capture and probable death via dementor’s kiss might even make the man smile.

  On the other hand, Snape’s hatred for Sirius Black was probably only marginally less toxic than his grudge against Voldemort. Not only were the Marauders nowhere near as admirable as people said they were to Violet, it was Sirius who’d arranged for a young Severus to encounter Remus as a werewolf. Whatever Snape’s own role in that mess, I couldn’t deny that he had good reasons to hate Violet’s godfather.

  After what felt like an eternity but was probably a barely noticeable few seconds, he moved on. He waved at the board as a set of instructions appeared.

  “Oculus potion. Well? Get to it,” he snapped grumpily.

  The potion was the most difficult thing we’d brewed thus far. It was a fairly niche tonic, used to heal those afflicted by the conjunctivitis curse. It could soothe the eyes and reduce itchiness and swelling. It was also one of the only restorative draughts I knew of that did not require the use of dittany leaves.

  I took a thumb-sized chunk of unicorn horn and went about grinding it under my pestle. As usual, wands were prohibited in the classroom, which meant we had to grind these things down by hand. I doubted they were magically reactive like erumpent horn; Snape probably thought it “built character” or something.

  Then again, since when did he need an excuse to give students a hard time?

  I added the wormwood powder, stirred, and began to sprinkle in the ground unicorn horn. Slowly, the potion turned a muted orange, which according to the board, meant I was doing something right.

  Just as I was about to add the stewed mandrakes, I felt a sudden pressure on my sleeve, tipping the bowl in my hand. A lot more of the stewed mandrake went into my potion than necessary, about one and a half more.

  I looked up to try and catch the culprit, only to find Snape already swooping down on me.

  “Zabini,” he barked. “Do you find simple directions difficult to follow?”

  I scowled. I saw him stow his wand discreetly. I glanced pointedly at his own sleeve, then up at him. “Apologies, professor. My hand slipped. Can I proportionately increase the quantity of other ingredients to make up for it?”

  “No, you fool. They must be added sequentially. You’ve ruined the whole potion. I suppose being a seer is no substitute for true knowledge, is it? See me after class.”

  That made some of the class snicker, Theo, Tracey, and Lyra especially. It wasn’t often I was humbled. Next to me, Violet looked insulted on my behalf. I stepped on her toes before she could say anything.

  Snape was a right bastard, but he was also known for playing favorites. He didn’t punish Slytherins for anything unless he was forced to, and sometimes not even then. Dumb bullies like Marcus Flint were proof of that. I’d given him no cause to hate me, quite the opposite, so he must be trying to tell me something.

  “Of course, professor. I see enough to know how much I do not know,” I replied coolly. I could only assume this was his attempt to meet with me quietly.

  In which case, perfect.

  I didn’t give a damn about being told off in class. He hadn’t even given me a detention like he so loved doing to Gryffindors, just asked me to stay after class.

  Author’s Note

  Last chapter got too serious. Let’s change that with some Warhammer lore… There’s a brand new sentence for you guys.

  Yeah, even in a fic about magic, we praise the Omnissiah. Watch me turn this into yet another tinker fic.

  Animal fact? Sure. Pelican bills are not lunchboxes. They don’t store food in them for later. That said, they can carry up to three gallons of water in those beaks.

  Thank you for reading. To reach a wider audience, and because I enjoy a more forum-like setup to facilitate discussion, I like to crosspost to a wide variety of websites. You can find them all on my Link Tree: .