Chapter 112: Absurdity
Draco dropped his quill with a sharp clatter. He vaulted up from the heavy leather armchair, rushing toward her like a squire desperate to present a dragon's head to his queen. In his fist, he brandished a long roll of parchment, the surface completely blackened with densely packed, frantic handwriting.
"I wrote three urgent letters to my father overnight!" Draco declared, his chest puffing out. He jabbed a pale finger at the parchment, his fingernail scraping aggressively over the names of the Weasley family and a dozen other Gryffindors. His jaw locked in a vicious sneer.
"The filthy bastard who dared to lay a finger on your pet is undoubtedly some mudblood or blood traitor. They're just jealous of Slytherin's glory!" He shook the parchment, the paper rattling loudly in the quiet common room. "I've cataloged every single suspicious, inferior student in this entire miserable school!"
"My father sits on the Board of Governors, you know." Draco tilted his chin up, his fists clenching so tightly his knuckles turned stark white.
"I have strongly demanded that he intervene in the investigation immediately! Don't you worry, Tamara. Even if I have to use the full political weight of the House of Malfoy to force Dumbledore's hand, we will turn this entire castle upside down. I will drag that coward out from the shadows for you!"
Tamara's soft footsteps ceased.
The heavy silence of the Slytherin dungeon seemed to press inward. Beneath the flickering, emerald-tinged firelight, her dark eyes slowly narrowed into two dangerous slits.
'Bastard?'
In the span of a single heartbeat, the incantations for three dozen excruciatingly cruel Dark Arts curses flared across her mind. She stared at the young, arrogant heir standing before her. His pointed face was flushed with righteous indignation, utterly convinced he was playing the loyal champion. Deep within the frozen abyss of her soul, Tamara let out a soundless, glacial laugh.
The biological father of the greatest Dark Lord in history was a filthy, pathetic Muggle who couldn't even conjure a spark of magic.
'Quite good, Malfoy.'Lucius would likely weep blood if he knew. He probably never dreamed that his precious, pampered son—the heir he paraded around with such insufferable pride—was currently standing toe-to-toe with the Dark Lord, brazenly cursing her shameful half-blood lineage as a'bastard' right to her face.
If this were fifty years ago, or if she were still in possession of her original, terrifying prime, this ignorant little whelp would already be writhing on the stone floor. A silent Cruciatus Curse would have shattered his nervous system, leaving him choking on his own blood, entirely unable to even force out a scream.
A dangerous, bloody crimson glint flashed across Tamara's irises.
[Strong killing intent detected from the host. Preparing electric shock countdown—]
The System's overly cheerful, mechanical voice chimed abruptly inside her skull. Only then did Tamara realize her fingers had already slipped into her robes, her knuckles white as she gripped the smooth wood of her wand.
She forced her eyes shut. A slow, agonizingly difficult breath rattled past her teeth.
She couldn't kill him.
If she snapped this idiot's neck tonight, Lucius would bite back like a rabid hound. The ensuing Ministry investigation would shatter her carefully crafted, angelic disguise into a million irreparable pieces.
Her mind drifted to those foolish Gryffindors sneaking around the Restricted Section, eagerly stealing forbidden texts just to earn a smile from her. Then, she opened her eyes to look at the young master standing before her. To avenge a crime she had orchestrated, he had stayed awake all night drafting a suspect list, dragged his influential father into the mess, and managed to flawlessly insult her very existence in the process.
The Dark Lord, the supreme entity who had once crushed the entire wizarding world beneath her heel, suddenly felt a suffocating, unmatched wave of sheer, absurd powerlessness.
The entirety of Hogwarts was bending over backward, exhausting every conceivable resource, just to help her... catch herself.
Tamara closed her eyes again, letting out a long, slow exhale that carried away the murderous heat in her blood. When her lashes fluttered open, the crimson malice was gone. In its place rested a look of deep, holy sorrow.
"Draco." Her voice was soft, barely a whisper over the crackling hearth, yet it carried an unquestionable, heavy authority. "Never let narrow blood-purism blind your eyes."
Draco froze. The parchment in his hand crinkled as his grip stiffened awkwardly in mid-air. "But... Tamara, they're bast—"
"True strength stems from the depth of the soul and a deep reverence for magic itself. It does not sprout from the hollow vanity of so-called pure bloodlines."
Tamara interrupted him, her tone grand and sweeping. She fixed her gaze upon him—a stare so ancient and abyssal it seemed to pierce straight through the stone walls and into the void of the universe.
"Before the boundless mysteries of magic, all living beings stand equal. Arrogance rooted solely in the decaying glory of one's ancestors only serves to make a person foolish. It makes them weak."
Draco stood completely dumbfounded, his mouth slightly agape.
However, the fanatical pure-blood supremacy drilled into his skull since the cradle was not something that could simply evaporate from a single, poetic lecture. He stared blankly at the girl bathed in the dim, flickering firelight. The words she had just spoken sounded sickeningly similar to the pathetic 'greater love' drivel that Dumbledore constantly preached from his podium.
Yet, for some inexplicable reason, when those exact words spilled from Tamara's lips, they carried a hidden, suffocating weight. The icy pressure radiating from her dark, bottomless eyes made the fine hairs on the back of Draco's neck stand at attention.
A terrifying, primal intuition seized his chest.
His instincts screamed that if he dared to shake his head, if he dared to utter even one more syllable of the word 'bastard' right now, he would be violently and completely erased from the mortal plane before he could even blink.
It was the violent, uncontrollable tremor of a cornered rabbit locking eyes with an apex predator.
Draco swallowed hard, the sound loud in the quiet room. In the face of that absolute pressure, the desperate survival instinct of a small, frightened animal instantly trampled over whatever meager pure-blood pride the Malfoy family had instilled in him.
He didn't have the faintest clue what 'depth of the soul' actually meant, but his body moved on its own. He subconsciously bowed his noble, platinum-blonde head.
"I... I understand, Tamara," Draco stammered. His voice shook, laced with an irrepressible awe and a deep, primal fear he couldn't quite identify. "Your... your world of thought is just too noble. You're right. I shouldn't have called them that."
Right on cue, the System's insufferably perky voice exploded in her mind.
[Ding! Detected that the host is spreading an equal love that transcends class and bloodlines!]
[What a broad, beautiful mind! The sheer brilliance of your progressive thoughts illuminates the prejudiced and decaying corners of Slytherin House! Love +1 (Current Love: 25)]
Imaginary fireworks popped and whistled cheerfully inside her skull. Tamara looked down at the thoroughly terrified Malfoy heir trembling before her.
She let out another gnashing, venomous laugh in the dark confines of her mind.
"...Go to sleep, Draco."
Tamara turned on her heel, her robes billowing softly as she walked toward the girls' dormitories. She did not look back.
As she moved down the stone corridor, she passed a massive, dark stained-glass window overlooking the underwater depths. Her footsteps slowed, then stopped entirely.
The murky waters of the Black Lake pressed against the thick glass, radiating a bone-chilling cold that seeped through the stone walls. Through the deep, sluggish green ripples, she could look upward and faintly make out a jagged layer of frost creeping across the lake's surface.
Above that freezing barrier, illuminated by the pale, watery moonlight filtering through the depths, fine snowflakes were silently drifting down. They blanketed the sleeping magical world in white.
Without her even realizing it, the first snow of the year had already descended upon the Scottish Highlands.
Tamara gazed out at the dead, freezing silence beyond the glass. A rare, complicated shadow flickered across her dark eyes.
If she were still the former Dark Lord, her gaze would hold nothing but a feverish, burning obsession for absolute power and eternal immortality. To Lord Voldemort, time was not a season to be observed; it was merely a rebellious slave that would eventually be brought to heel and conquered.
She had never once stopped to sentimentally perceive the changing of the seasons or the quiet arrival of the first winter snow. Such things were the trivial distractions of mediocre mortals.
But now, this vibrant, painfully young body was subtly, insidiously influencing her soul.
It forced her to physically feel the piercing chill radiating from the bottom of the Black Lake. Worse still, during certain unguarded moments, it caused an inexplicable, quiet trace of melancholy to rise in her chest—an emotion that absolutely did not belong to the Dark Lord.
She had actually stopped walking just to watch a silent snowfall.
The realization made her skin crawl. It made her feel horribly alienated from her own mind, producing a sharp spike of panic that burned like a deep, personal humiliation.
Once upon a time, the great Dark Lord had not hesitated to butcher and tear her own soul into jagged fragments, all to purge herself of these exact, pathetic human weaknesses. She firmly believed she had long since carved away every last useless impurity known as humanity.
Yet here she was, trapped inside this body like a silent, warm-water cage.
Its abundant vitality, the fresh, steady thumping of its pulse, and the chaotic emotional fluctuations of a normal human girl were slowly corroding her iron will.
A wave of intense physical nausea and violent rejection churned in Tamara's stomach.
She stared fixedly at her own reflection in the dark glass. The face looking back at her was exquisite, pale, and sickeningly pitiable. Her dark eyes hardened, filling with a brittle, defensive coldness and extreme vigilance.
"Winter has arrived."
She refused to think about the impending holidays, a season filled with the mindless revelry of fools. Instead, she just stood there in the dim corridor, quietly watching the lake surface freeze over while feeling the relentless, warm pulse beating against her own ribs.
For more than half a century, she had wandered the razor's edge between life and death. Time had never been allowed to leave a real mark on her.
But now, trapped in this flesh, she would have to truly live through every passing spring, summer, autumn, and winter within the noisy stone walls of this castle.
"It's another new year."
"I only hope that this year, that group of oblivious idiots won't try to manifest their ridiculous kindness by burying me in a pile of cheap junk again."
[Akarin's Note:
Enjoying the story? Dropping a quick review, comment, or Power Stone means the world to me and keeps these daily updates flowing!
Want to read 50 chapters ahead or just want to help keep a shameless translator alive? (My livelihood actually depends on this, haha 😭). You can support me directly here:
(P.S. Just remove the brackets and replace the [.] with a regular dot . to use the links!)
✨ Patreon (50 Advanced Chapters): patreon[.]com/AkarinTL
☕ Ko-fi (Support / Sponsor): ko-fi[.]com/AkarinTL
🔗 All My Links: linktr[.]ee/AkarinTL
Thank you so much for reading and keeping this project alive!]