CHAPTER 140: EGG

After emerging from the herb garden, Sylas cast a dozen Cleaning Charms in quick succession, then indulged in a long, fragrant bath. Only then did the last traces of the foul stench fade, both from his skin and, as he told himself, from his soul.

Freshly changed into clean robes, he made his way back to the potions room.

This time, the task before him was different.

Unlike the growth potion he had brewed earlier, today he was preparing something far darker, an artefact of the forbidden arts.

He switched to a silver cauldron and poured in water drawn from a river deep within Mirkwood, one long tainted by lingering Dark Magic. Into this, he dropped a whole crocodile heart, covering the cauldron and setting the brew to simmer over a low flame for seven days.

At midnight on the seventh day, under the pale glow of moonlight, Sylas cracked ten fertilised eggs into the mixture and stirred with his wand, forty-two turns clockwise, seven turns counterclockwise. The brew was then strained through a sieve of pure gold, removing every trace of flocculent residue, before being returned to the cauldron.

Next came seven drops of giant bat’s heart-blood, followed by the powdered fangs of seven serpents. Thirteen counterclockwise turns brought the liquid to a rolling boil, its colour shifting to a ghostly shade of pale purple.

Sylas mashed the pulp of ripe Mandrake fruit, letting its rich, heady scent fill the air, and tipped it into the cauldron. Nine slow clockwise turns followed, the potion now simmering for nine hours on the gentlest of flames.

When the heat was removed, he added ten drops of giant spider venom, stirring counterclockwise ten times before setting the cauldron where the moonlight could fall upon it. By dawn, the mixture had deepened to a rich, ominous purple.

Into this, Sylas stirred the brains of three toads, three turns clockwise, three counterclockwise, until the texture became smooth.

At last, on the night of the new moon, he added seven drops of dragon’s blood. The moment the thick crimson liquid touched the surface, the potion boiled of its own accord, no flame beneath it, shifting hue until it gleamed a deep, blood-red.

Thus, the Dark Magic creation known as the Fertility Draught was born.

As its name implied, it could grant the ability to conceive a child to any being, regardless of race or gender. But its gift was poisoned. The child would consume everything the mother possessed, life, magic, even her soul, and the instant it left the womb, she would die.

This was why it was reviled as a work of the darkest sorcery. One life traded for another was a bargain only the cruel or desperate would strike.

Even then, drinking the potion was not enough. To take effect, it required a precise alignment of the stars and a ritual steeped in ancient, unholy rites.

That alignment was drawing near.

When the castle was half-complete, a shadow moved within one of its towers at nightfall. An owl swept into the sky, wings carrying it westward over the rolling lands, across Bree, and on toward the Barrow-downs.

There, in the desolate mounds where countless dead had been laid to rest, it alighted upon a hill. Moonlight spilled across its feathers, and in the next heartbeat, the owl rippled and transformed, revealing Sylas in human form.

He surveyed the surroundings, shrouded in chill mist, steeped in the stench of death. The air was heavy with the lingering malice of ages past, the residue of the Witch-king of Angmar’s dominion. The ground itself seemed to whisper with resentment and despair, an unholy choir perfect for the kind of ritual Sylas intended to perform.

Lifting his gaze, he found the bright spark of Helluin rising in the darkening sky, a star of dazzling blue wrought in the Elder Days by Varda Elentári, Queen of the Stars, as a gift for her firstborn children. It was the first light the Elves had ever seen, shimmering above the still waters of Lake Cuiviénen on the night they awoke.

Therefore, this star holds special significance for the Elves. It witnessed their awakening and embodies their love of starlight and their reverence for Varda.

To the Elves, it is a beacon of hope and guidance. In another world, however, it is known by a different name: Sirius.

Sylas had long noticed that while many things in this world carried unfamiliar names, many others closely mirrored those from his previous life.

For example, Middle-earth today was a sphere, with cycles of day and night, seasons, and celestial movements much like Earth.

Its spherical form dated back to the end of the Second Age, after the downfall of Númenor. Before that, in the Elder Days, Arda had been a flat world, with Middle-earth at its center and the great encircling ocean at its edges.

Far to the west lay Aman, the Undying Lands, home of the Valar. In those days, Valinor could be reached by any ship brave enough to cross the Great Sea.

That ended when Ar-Pharazôn, the last King of Númenor, was deceived and corrupted by Sauron. In arrogance and defiance, he led a mighty fleet to assault Aman and challenge the Valar themselves.

Such blasphemy provoked the wrath of the Valar, and Manwë, their king, called upon Eru Ilúvatar. Ilúvatar reshaped the very world, bending the flat lands into a sphere. Númenor was swallowed by the sea, lost forever. Aman was hidden from mortal sight, reachable only by the Straight Road. Any ship attempting to sail west by mortal means would find itself turned aside and returning from the east.

In this way, Arda became much like the Earth Sylas had once known. The stars above, though named in the Elvish tongue, remained the same as those seen in his past life, and even in the magical world he had once inhabited.

The constellation Sylas awaited was Sirius. When Helluin, Sirius’s name in the tongue of the Elves, rose to its highest point, blazing bright at the zenith, he chose a wide clearing beneath its light.

There, he used dragon’s blood to draw a great magic circle upon the ground, inscribing it with the runes of dark sorcery.

Once the circle was complete, Sylas reached into his enchanted satchel and withdrew a live rooster, no more than seven years old. Into its body he injected the Fertility Draught he had so carefully brewed.

He set the creature at the exact center of the seven-pointed star formation.

As Helluin blazed above, Sylas raised his wand and began to chant an incantation. Power pulsed in the air. The dragon-blood lines of the formation ignited, burning with a crimson flame, and a heavy, unnatural wind began to stir.

From all around, the tainted, lingering evil of the Barrow-downs was pulled toward the star-shaped sigil, feeding its power. The pull strengthened, drawing the very malice that clung to the land, coiling into a vast vortex of black energy.

The disturbance roused foul spirits that had slumbered for centuries in the shadowed barrows. As they felt the dark force draining from them, their howls of fear and rage echoed through the night.

The dragon-blood flames twisted under the influence of that ancient malevolence, deepening to a vivid blood-red. They flared higher, radiating not only blistering heat but an oppressive, and poisonous aura.

As Sirius reached its highest point in the sky, radiating its brightest light, Sylas poured the long-prepared components of seven dark creatures, giant spider venom, ogre heart, orc liver, warg fangs, giant bat wings, earthworm teeth, and the skull of an ogre into the seven blazing points of the star-shaped flames.

The fire devoured the remains of the creatures, flaring upward in a crimson column and drawing in every trace of malice from within dozens of miles of the Barrow-downs.

The seven-pointed star then called upon the light of Helluin in the heavens. Starlight cascaded from above like falling meteors, each spark sinking into the burning formation.

At the center, the rooster grew agitated, clucking frantically and struggling against its invisible bonds.

A moment later, both the astral radiance and the gathered darkness found their vessel, pouring relentlessly into the bird’s body. Its frame convulsed as magic warped its flesh, reshaping bone and sinew.

The rooster’s cries grew thin and piercing as the energy within it mounted. Deep inside, the egg cells began to twist and develop unnaturally.

When every drop of Sirius’s light and every wisp of shadow had been drawn into the creature, the blood-red flames of the star formation guttered and died, vanishing in an instant as if their fuel had been spent.

Silence fell over the clearing.

Only the rooster remained, standing at the center of the blackened sigil, unburned yet eerily still.

Sylas waited patiently at the edge of the formation.

A quarter of an hour later, the bird lifted its head and gave a single, hoarse crow, then laid a black egg that pulsed with a malevolent aura.

With the egg’s birth, the rooster collapsed, its life spent.

Sylas crossed the scorched pattern and came to its center. He gazed at the fallen creature for a long moment before kneeling to lift the egg into his hands. It was slightly smaller than a hen’s egg, yet its surface seemed to drink in the starlight.

Power surged within it, a fusion of darkness and Sirius’s celestial fire, bound together in a foreboding curse.

Sirius, once a symbol of light, protection, and guidance, had, through this ritual, been twisted into the seed of a pure evil.

This egg, when nurtured through a precise and perilous incubation, would give rise to one of the most feared beasts in the magical world: the basilisk.

A basilisk’s gaze could kill instantly; even a glance reflected in a mirror would petrify the victim.

Its venom was among the deadliest substances known, with only the tears of a phoenix able to heal its wound.

It also possessed formidable resistance to magic, shrugging off most spells as though they were nothing.

Furthermore, a basilisk can live for a very long time, and the longer it lives, the larger its body becomes and the greater its magical power grows. Its only true weakness is its fear of a rooster’s crow.

Perhaps because it is born from a rooster, a basilisk will panic at the sound, and prolonged exposure can kill it. As a basilisk ages, however, its resistance to the sound increases, and a creature that has lived for thousands of years will no longer fear it.

Despite this vulnerability, the basilisk remains the most dangerous Dark creature in the magical world. Many Dark wizards have tried to raise one for their own purposes, but since it only obeys commands in Parseltongue, the wizard who breeds it is often the first victim of its fangs.

For this reason, the Ministry of Magic has strictly forbidden the breeding of basilisks, to prevent the spread of these uncontrollable and extremely dangerous Dark creatures.

Sylas carefully stored the black egg and, with a flick of his wand, buried the dead rooster. He then erased every trace of the seven-pointed star formation.

Looking around, he saw that the ritual had purged the evil from the entire Barrow-downs, cleansing even the millennia-old resentment and despair that had lingered there.

The wights slumbering deep in the ancient barrows had been drained of their remaining power, leaving them too weak to rise for a very long time.

Barring some unforeseen event, their reawakening would be far in the future.

Satisfied with his work, Sylas transformed into his Animagus form and flew toward Weathertop.

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Stones PLZzz

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