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bait_backup2011-01-20 11:17 pm
spindleform.livejournal.com) wrote in bait_backup2011-01-20 11:17 pm
Entry tags:
Man's greatest treasure
*Inside the heavy cloak cocoon in the middle of the small and mostly unadorned tent, breath fogs the air against Regulus' face, slipping from his nose which is red from the cold in a slow, energy-conserving mist. The temperature has dropped even further since he had managed to fall asleep, threatening another snow that his little tent can't take, and now the heating charm which had served him well at lower climates is hardly noticeable to warm the dark winter air around him higher up in the mountainous inland he has grown so wary of. He had set up early just before complete nightfall and fastened himself tightly inside it's canvas walls, listening to the unnatural silence of the area and going over his plans to keep his determination kindled and his superstitions to keep him safe until his weighted eyes fell closed against their will and Regulus managed to dream. If he has not been so tired, sleep would have been hard to come by tonight, knowing how close he is camped to his goal.
He had been warned not to come here or anywhere near this area - or at least, that is the overwhelming message he had taken away from those he had tried to ask about it, disguising his interest as best he could as curiosity in the county's legends, but no matter what he heard and no matter the looks exchanged between the people he had been able to talk to, he had not come here just to turn around. The Grey Lady's ghost, Ravenclaw's daughter so forgotten by all the past historians on the hunt for the lost Diadem, had given him enough information to know that this would not be easy. Much like a whole person, a Horcrux cannot be simply summoned, and yet it is not enough to show up on any tracking or scanning spells as a life either, leaving Regulus with an entire country filled with trees a crown could be tucked in and only his paranoid and unpractised gut reaction to help him find the way. To make up for his inherent ill-preparedness for the task of finding all of Voldemort's Horcruxes, before setting out he had planned for the worst as he packed. He took as little as he could to not arouse suspicions as he left, but inside his bags brought nothing but warm clothes, his broom to avoid having to apparate or walk the entire journey, his notes, and supplies anticipating danger and injury and the fighting that he is so terribly ill-suited for. It is impossible to know just what he might find to try and stop him from reaching the Diadem, but from his past experience he knows not to take a moment of his trip lightly and keep a grave eye out for anything that might be waiting. This time Kreacher isn't there to save him. He had become more and more achingly aware of that fact as he had drawn closer to this tonight's camping spot, Kreacher's absence more acute than he had anticipated as he moved from city to town to village and out into the wooded northeast, past the point considered safe. He has been away from his house elf for quite long stretches at a time before, most of his student life was spent out of his company and care, but in such a strange country walking voluntarily right into a trap of his own making yet again makes him want to turn around and head straight back for England.
He has come this far, though. For the first couple days in the country he had hardly been able to ask anyone anything, arriving alone and muted by his native language. He had planned to not make himself known to anyone, to pass in and out of the country with no one to remember his face or what he was after in case anyone ever decided to ask them, but it became clear once he got there that exploring a county for a single item, however cursed, would be an impossible task without someone to point the way. The word 'visitor', similar enough to English to be understood, had served him well enough to explain his presence, but quietly interviewing rural Albanians about the places of their country they would never send anyone, even a tourist, had not been a simple task. He had to be careful who he spoke to, as well. After an exhaustively precarious journey across French, Italian, and Albanian borders and two bodies of water so large they terrified him to attempt and left him crumpled on the ground with splitting headaches and shaking limbs vowing never to apparate long distances without land underfoot again, Regulus couldn't bear to have his motives and location given away by accidentally talking to the wrong Albanian.
He had had to risk these things, though, the dangerous apparation and the lost in translation questions. Just getting out of England with the new throttlingly strict travel regulations was a risk, and he cannot be certain that he will return to his country with his cover story intact. On the coast of Italy, in the small town of Melendugno right before making the biggest jump of his journey across the sea, he had stopped to pen a quick letter to Barty, hoping to both establish that nothing is out of the ordinary and that he is safe and sound taking some time alone at the family's grim Summer home, as well as calm his fears of the impending apparation. The owl had flown off toward Brighton and Regulus had flown off toward the small rugged Albanian peninsula reaching tentatively out into the sea to catch him on the other side.
He had made it just barely to this new territory of Europe, pinched out of the air and landing with his feet still in the surf and fear up to his ears, and with as few stops as possible he had left the sea behind and found the place he had been looking for. The locals, none of whom would dare to build near it, had described the woods as filled with a powerful strength, a darkness that had rotted it and twisted it into something half alive and always awake. Their directions had been more caution of how to avoid it than instruction to reach it, but he had known when he had. The thinning spread of plants and trees he had been traveling through had stopped in their tracks, slashed through by a thick tangle of dark, tall trunks whose infantry stretched on from side to side. A stretch of bare earth separates the forest from the rest of all of Albania, as though someone had long ago burned around it and left the soil barren, looking almost like the shore where the tide perpetually flushes up onto the sand and leaves a strip of beach half-wet and devoid of any chance of permanence. There had still been some light lingering from the setting sun when he reached this end of the easy road, but even then it had seemed impenetrable, Regulus' wandlight seemingly having difficulty illuminating much beyond a foot. He had just leaned inside the edge of the forest and taken a look around before knowing that he must stop for the night and continue when he wouldn't be at the mercy of the long cold night.
So tonight his tent is just metres from it's edge, far enough to be outside it but near enough to witness the silence it casts into the country around it. His final thought before falling asleep as he tried to keep the blanket of anxiety off him had been that he had slept at Hogwarts, not far from the Forbidden Forest, for seven years of his life. However, once he has fallen asleep with no guard, something whispers though the magically charged forest that guards part of Voldemort's soul, and a plot is put forth into the night to show Regulus just how very different this place is to Scotland's mere monsters.
The ground is thick and hard under Regulus' unconscious back, but under the ground something stirs, pushing it's way with ancient persistence through the soil and the rock, reaching out toward the tiny tent and the tinier boy inside it. The silence gradually becomes filled with a slow straining sound, almost imperceptible from the sounds of settling branches that all forests have. Then there is a scrape, long and slow, and a tremble from the ground, and Regulus'd eyes snap open and his heart cowers into his throat as something big and strong pushes up the ground beneath him, rolling him and his bedding up into the air and down again like a wave or the hump of a giant snake. He throws the cloak off his face, sending his tired body into the shocking cold, and hears the scratching of a hundred fingertips against the canvas above him, sees their elongated hands reaching toward him as more and more come and the starlight is blocked out.
The tent is blacker than behind Regulus' eyelids, his wand rolls away from him as the earth rolls again and he dives onto his stomach to grab it. Something punches him from below, knocking the air from his lungs in a wheezy gaping sound, but he has his wand now. The fingers tear through the fabric in places, puncturing through the thick tent with impossible strength like poles of iron. The calm before the disaster has broken and so has all semblance to silence, filled with the deep crunching crackling sound of enormous bodies surrounding him that deafens his ears on a low and blood-chilling register he has never heard before. The noise grows louder and the giants come closer, one of the hands that has broken through the wall reaches Regulus and scrapes his scalp, wetting a finger to taste him, drawing blood. He cries, bewildered, his fragile nerves flashing to the most awful of places he can recall, adding this final night to his worst experiences, and he staggers upward with his wand pressed to his thin chest, preparing for fight or flight he isn't sure which. He rips the tent door open, expecting eyes looking at him, expecting a colony of something old and cursed and too strong for him to reach out and take him - but as he stops so does the noise, and the numbing stillness returns in the wake of Regulus' realisation.
Dawn comes, but it hardly makes a difference in here inside the forest, and that is indeed where he has found himself. Regulus packs his things and leaves his tent behind where it has been encircled, skewered into place by the wave of knotted ancient trees that had advanced upon him in the night. Their enormous bodies had dragged across the forest's shoreline, trapping anything foolish enough to come near inside it, thundering toward him with intelligent strategy, pulled along by their roots, reaching toward him with their branches. They have not moved since he had run out to face them, frozen under his gaze. He suspects that had he stayed inside he would have been crushed, his blood used for fertilizer for their starved roots, but he has no proof of this and doesn't wish to find out. He has tried to get out but a very effective wall of wood had stopped him, all the cracks large enough for him to just slip through to daylight seemed to throb invitingly, just daring him to stick an arm or a leg or a torso through them and see if they won't begin to move and squeeze again. And so he moves inward, bouldering clumsily over big trees so tightly pressed together that he frequently has to throw his large bag up and over in front of him or climb his back against on trunk and his feet on another opposite it until he can slip between them to the other side. Bark and dried blood from his scalp flake into his eyes, he is scratched, the soft palms of his musician's, mapmaker's, artist's hands are red and perforated with the pattern of trees pressed into them from climbing, and this is by far the most claustrophobic he has ever thought the world could seem.
He cannot gauge how far he has walked but after some time he begins to notice a change in the terrain and a whispering that runs through the progressively less stale air. When the trees had run forward down this huge hillside, swallowing him inside his tent and changing the border of the forest, they had to come from somewhere. More and more the deeper he goes the spaces between trees grows larger where the forest used to be thick but had abandoned their posts for the frontlines. Soon the gaps between them are huge, giving the forest an almost calculated checkerboard appearance the plays tricks on his eyes and tempts a icy and starving breeze to twine around between the trunks. He thinks he sees things, up in the buttressed canopy above him which stays somehow just as dark as dawn had been, but they are nothing but the flicker of shadows dancing as the trapped wind stirs everything it touches. His hair is brushed in all directions but he continues to hike up the slanted ground, the air stinging his lungs with each breath as though to unfortunately make up for the suffocating welcome he had received.
Twigs snap beneath his feet and he feels on alert at the noise, not wanting to upset any of the clearly wizened trees by breaking their carpet of feather-light sticks they've dropped from so high above in the sky like discarded down. He comes to realise just how well planned this secret is, how different trees make up different parts of the wood and, as strange yet true as it is, perform different tasks. He feels watched but impressed, as by a well executed Quidditch play, and though his scraped skin stings he feels he is reaching the very place that a true Ravenclaw might come to hide something so valuable. This is not a place of just books or tests or the various mundane things associated with the Ravenclaw students he had gone to school with, but it is a web of logic and magic that keeps things guarded as smartly and carefully as it plans it's patterns and tricks those threatening it with their own foolishness.
Regulus has been foolish again himself, and the sound of falling snow thumping to the ground startles him back to reality and fear. He had been so focused on the bite of the eerie breeze and searching his mind for any idea of how this forest had come to work so strangely and resourcefully, he only now realises that snow has finally fallen and that if the trees move again, he will be buried in it as it's knocked from their black branches. With shoulders raised toward his ears in caution and his wand out but lowered, he turns full circle to look intently at the surroundings, and sees it. Up ahead and to his left the spacious layout of the trees is interrupted, or so it seems. As he slowly approaches there is a shift of the wind and the branches above him and he realises that what he had mistaken for a knot of trees is the single enormous chest of just one. Nothing here is new, this forest is a collection of the wisest things, too old to be hesitant or weak-willed or small, but craning his neck backward, seeing it's twisted arms spiralling up to pierce the freezing grey clouds that have been coating the canopy with snow, his heart sinks. This is the heart of everything in this wood, the gnarled commander of this high altitude chess game. It is just where he would hide a horcrux, and it towers over everything with a weight Regulus can feel in his very bones and more history than all of Hogwarts.
The wind has been playing tricks on his ears for some time, filling it with voices and blocking out all of the silence he had experienced earlier, but now a particularly slicing lick of chilled wind hisses past him on an errand, running up the ancient old trunk with pressing news. Regulus holds his breath, not knowing what to do next, but that is all decided for him in seconds. Still looking upward at the endless world of black and white, knowing the Diadem is up among it somewhere, he feels dread numbing him from the toes up and takes several hurried steps backward just in time as an icicle the size of his forearm hails down and shatters. Bits of glass-like rubble sprinkle his shoes. Even though the sky seems quite still from his vantage point, there is the old deep creak of ancient wood filling the air so far above him he can't see what is causing it, and even so far away from that sound he feels like he was walked into the path of the Whomping Willow. Regulus cowers among giants, wishing he could have gone home along with his letter to Barty and that the thin chill would stop numbing his body and his thoughts. His heart feels slightly squeezed in the thinner air and he feels that for all his ancestry he lacks the qualities any of the founders would want in a wizard, for he certainly doesn't feel brave and his mind is too battered by the wind and the journey to be cunning or wise and even his dedication is wavering confronted with such heights. The sadness of this place is trapped in the very air, and Tom Riddle has twisted something old and purified by the sky into what he wants it to be, for though everything he sees shows him a Ravenclaw mind all he feels is bitter dread and insecurity flapping in his cloak.
Suddenly, the slow creaking above him stops, the central tree giving a hint of fast awakening sentience. Its roots, allowed to flourish for a thousand years and to stretch dozens of metres in every direction, churn the entire forest around it as it becomes aware of Regulus' intrusion. The forest floor trembles as it had last night and Regulus has nothing to cling to to keep balance, he is trapped on the ground. With a stroke of intuition Regulus realises his only way of escape and he shrugs his bag off his shoulders and overturns it, pawing out it's charmed-small contents out onto the rumbling earth. As he touches them, each object springs back to it's original size, drowning him in coats and papers until he finds the smooth handle of his broom. Leaving everything else behind, he propels himself upwards just as the ground too pushes itself up, a twisted root following his feet in their ascent. The trees around him sway, their canopies knotting fast above him, like the bars of a prison cell. Without his feet on the ground to steady him the very air becomes a tangled mass of winds, pushing branches to close in around him from every direction until he's forced to weave at their command, follow their path upward, circling the ancient, Horcrux laden tree. The more Regulus circles the more the bark becomes ever knotted and creviced, as if by wrinkles. A face, more ancient and horrible then can be imagined begins to form, eyes lined with dried pus-like sap, nose broken and knobbed and finally a mouth, wide, hungry and gaping. With a rush of horror, Regulus realizes where the twisting branches are leading him. His plan of escape is ruined as the wall of wood shunts him towards that great gash of a mouth until he’s swallowed, the great lips cracking and creaking as they close, clipping the tail of his broom.
Inside there is only darkness and Regulus clings to his broom waiting for the crunch of wooden teeth he's sure should come. What he feels instead is a claustrophobic den of sticks, sharp with splinters and smelling deviously fresh and alive and green, so unlike the undead appearance of the tree's outside. Getting to his feet gingerly, Regulus becomes aware of a regular rhythm of thumps as he lights his wand. He had at first mistaken it for his own heartbeat, for he can hear that as well, beating wildly in his ears, but when the hollow is illuminated he sees the true source of the sound. In front of him is the Diadem, the same as it had appeared in paintings and statures atop Ravenclaw's head. It is inset in a pillar of intertwined sinews, beating and osculating like a living heart, pumping the air and the veins of the tree full of the same rotten, curdled, hateful feeling that the Locket had seeped into his own body when he had worn it. Before he can change his mind he plunges his hand into the bubble of amber sap that encases the circlet. It tugs his arm in deeper, pulsating sickly, but he yanks it free. Potent, heady pine-scented fluid drizzles from his sleeve, sliding off the horcux and onto his shoes as the wind roars around the outside of the tree, trying to get inside to stop him.
Without it's lifeforce, Voldemort's clever curse to keep it alive, the tree spasms, tossing Reg off his feet and into the savage splinters of the wall. Shoving the Diadem up his arm onto his shoulder to keep from dropping it, he covers his face with his arm and points up, blasting a hole through the wood straight through to the outside. Chunks rain down on him but he keeps moving, getting on his broom and out into the gail. The wind is even stronger than it was before, sending him spinning sideways out of control as he tries to compensate for his broom's trimmed trigs. A giant gnarled limb swings just past him, missing him by a mere foot and crashing instead into the wrinkled old bark in an explosion of wooden ash. The giant seems to be ageing too rapidly to keep up with it's attack, disintegrating in patches, losing stability the horcrux had provided. But the entire tree hasn't fallen apart yet and the wave of air caused by the great swinging limb slams Regulus hard into an offshoot of the trunk. He hits it without a bit of his usual grace, slapped so hard his cheek bleeds and his face crumples in pain that shoots paralysingly from his knee that has been smashed between his broom and the tree. Regulus is not brave or valiant but he was a Seeker, and he knows that if you don't fly through an injury to get to safety no one will wait until you're feeling better to take another shot at you. He pushes off with his bad leg and, tears stinging his scraped face, bolts completely vertically into the sky.
He is blinded. Looking down at himself he sees his hands, his wand, his broom, his painfully dangling leg, and most importantly the Diadem still circling his shoulder with it's cruel weight, but the wind has stopped short and the entire world is thick grey nothingness as far as he can see. Battered and heavy and coated in ash and snowflakes like a ghost, Regulus doesn't wait to listen for a sign of what happened to the tree, just picks a direction and flies as far as he can in the cover of cloud.
In the acres beneath him the trees finally still for good, their dark canopy untwisting, their magic lost. Someday saplings will grow there again, mingling with the ancient and knotted trunks Regulus had climbed through, and the once feared wood will gradually mingle with the rest of the mountain. All that will remain is what's left of the horcrux's wooden body, turned to a pile of ash that slowly blows away in the breeze, it's burden and unnatural immortality lifted from it by a single terrified figure with his sights set on London.*
He had been warned not to come here or anywhere near this area - or at least, that is the overwhelming message he had taken away from those he had tried to ask about it, disguising his interest as best he could as curiosity in the county's legends, but no matter what he heard and no matter the looks exchanged between the people he had been able to talk to, he had not come here just to turn around. The Grey Lady's ghost, Ravenclaw's daughter so forgotten by all the past historians on the hunt for the lost Diadem, had given him enough information to know that this would not be easy. Much like a whole person, a Horcrux cannot be simply summoned, and yet it is not enough to show up on any tracking or scanning spells as a life either, leaving Regulus with an entire country filled with trees a crown could be tucked in and only his paranoid and unpractised gut reaction to help him find the way. To make up for his inherent ill-preparedness for the task of finding all of Voldemort's Horcruxes, before setting out he had planned for the worst as he packed. He took as little as he could to not arouse suspicions as he left, but inside his bags brought nothing but warm clothes, his broom to avoid having to apparate or walk the entire journey, his notes, and supplies anticipating danger and injury and the fighting that he is so terribly ill-suited for. It is impossible to know just what he might find to try and stop him from reaching the Diadem, but from his past experience he knows not to take a moment of his trip lightly and keep a grave eye out for anything that might be waiting. This time Kreacher isn't there to save him. He had become more and more achingly aware of that fact as he had drawn closer to this tonight's camping spot, Kreacher's absence more acute than he had anticipated as he moved from city to town to village and out into the wooded northeast, past the point considered safe. He has been away from his house elf for quite long stretches at a time before, most of his student life was spent out of his company and care, but in such a strange country walking voluntarily right into a trap of his own making yet again makes him want to turn around and head straight back for England.
He has come this far, though. For the first couple days in the country he had hardly been able to ask anyone anything, arriving alone and muted by his native language. He had planned to not make himself known to anyone, to pass in and out of the country with no one to remember his face or what he was after in case anyone ever decided to ask them, but it became clear once he got there that exploring a county for a single item, however cursed, would be an impossible task without someone to point the way. The word 'visitor', similar enough to English to be understood, had served him well enough to explain his presence, but quietly interviewing rural Albanians about the places of their country they would never send anyone, even a tourist, had not been a simple task. He had to be careful who he spoke to, as well. After an exhaustively precarious journey across French, Italian, and Albanian borders and two bodies of water so large they terrified him to attempt and left him crumpled on the ground with splitting headaches and shaking limbs vowing never to apparate long distances without land underfoot again, Regulus couldn't bear to have his motives and location given away by accidentally talking to the wrong Albanian.
He had had to risk these things, though, the dangerous apparation and the lost in translation questions. Just getting out of England with the new throttlingly strict travel regulations was a risk, and he cannot be certain that he will return to his country with his cover story intact. On the coast of Italy, in the small town of Melendugno right before making the biggest jump of his journey across the sea, he had stopped to pen a quick letter to Barty, hoping to both establish that nothing is out of the ordinary and that he is safe and sound taking some time alone at the family's grim Summer home, as well as calm his fears of the impending apparation. The owl had flown off toward Brighton and Regulus had flown off toward the small rugged Albanian peninsula reaching tentatively out into the sea to catch him on the other side.
He had made it just barely to this new territory of Europe, pinched out of the air and landing with his feet still in the surf and fear up to his ears, and with as few stops as possible he had left the sea behind and found the place he had been looking for. The locals, none of whom would dare to build near it, had described the woods as filled with a powerful strength, a darkness that had rotted it and twisted it into something half alive and always awake. Their directions had been more caution of how to avoid it than instruction to reach it, but he had known when he had. The thinning spread of plants and trees he had been traveling through had stopped in their tracks, slashed through by a thick tangle of dark, tall trunks whose infantry stretched on from side to side. A stretch of bare earth separates the forest from the rest of all of Albania, as though someone had long ago burned around it and left the soil barren, looking almost like the shore where the tide perpetually flushes up onto the sand and leaves a strip of beach half-wet and devoid of any chance of permanence. There had still been some light lingering from the setting sun when he reached this end of the easy road, but even then it had seemed impenetrable, Regulus' wandlight seemingly having difficulty illuminating much beyond a foot. He had just leaned inside the edge of the forest and taken a look around before knowing that he must stop for the night and continue when he wouldn't be at the mercy of the long cold night.
So tonight his tent is just metres from it's edge, far enough to be outside it but near enough to witness the silence it casts into the country around it. His final thought before falling asleep as he tried to keep the blanket of anxiety off him had been that he had slept at Hogwarts, not far from the Forbidden Forest, for seven years of his life. However, once he has fallen asleep with no guard, something whispers though the magically charged forest that guards part of Voldemort's soul, and a plot is put forth into the night to show Regulus just how very different this place is to Scotland's mere monsters.
The ground is thick and hard under Regulus' unconscious back, but under the ground something stirs, pushing it's way with ancient persistence through the soil and the rock, reaching out toward the tiny tent and the tinier boy inside it. The silence gradually becomes filled with a slow straining sound, almost imperceptible from the sounds of settling branches that all forests have. Then there is a scrape, long and slow, and a tremble from the ground, and Regulus'd eyes snap open and his heart cowers into his throat as something big and strong pushes up the ground beneath him, rolling him and his bedding up into the air and down again like a wave or the hump of a giant snake. He throws the cloak off his face, sending his tired body into the shocking cold, and hears the scratching of a hundred fingertips against the canvas above him, sees their elongated hands reaching toward him as more and more come and the starlight is blocked out.
The tent is blacker than behind Regulus' eyelids, his wand rolls away from him as the earth rolls again and he dives onto his stomach to grab it. Something punches him from below, knocking the air from his lungs in a wheezy gaping sound, but he has his wand now. The fingers tear through the fabric in places, puncturing through the thick tent with impossible strength like poles of iron. The calm before the disaster has broken and so has all semblance to silence, filled with the deep crunching crackling sound of enormous bodies surrounding him that deafens his ears on a low and blood-chilling register he has never heard before. The noise grows louder and the giants come closer, one of the hands that has broken through the wall reaches Regulus and scrapes his scalp, wetting a finger to taste him, drawing blood. He cries, bewildered, his fragile nerves flashing to the most awful of places he can recall, adding this final night to his worst experiences, and he staggers upward with his wand pressed to his thin chest, preparing for fight or flight he isn't sure which. He rips the tent door open, expecting eyes looking at him, expecting a colony of something old and cursed and too strong for him to reach out and take him - but as he stops so does the noise, and the numbing stillness returns in the wake of Regulus' realisation.
Dawn comes, but it hardly makes a difference in here inside the forest, and that is indeed where he has found himself. Regulus packs his things and leaves his tent behind where it has been encircled, skewered into place by the wave of knotted ancient trees that had advanced upon him in the night. Their enormous bodies had dragged across the forest's shoreline, trapping anything foolish enough to come near inside it, thundering toward him with intelligent strategy, pulled along by their roots, reaching toward him with their branches. They have not moved since he had run out to face them, frozen under his gaze. He suspects that had he stayed inside he would have been crushed, his blood used for fertilizer for their starved roots, but he has no proof of this and doesn't wish to find out. He has tried to get out but a very effective wall of wood had stopped him, all the cracks large enough for him to just slip through to daylight seemed to throb invitingly, just daring him to stick an arm or a leg or a torso through them and see if they won't begin to move and squeeze again. And so he moves inward, bouldering clumsily over big trees so tightly pressed together that he frequently has to throw his large bag up and over in front of him or climb his back against on trunk and his feet on another opposite it until he can slip between them to the other side. Bark and dried blood from his scalp flake into his eyes, he is scratched, the soft palms of his musician's, mapmaker's, artist's hands are red and perforated with the pattern of trees pressed into them from climbing, and this is by far the most claustrophobic he has ever thought the world could seem.
He cannot gauge how far he has walked but after some time he begins to notice a change in the terrain and a whispering that runs through the progressively less stale air. When the trees had run forward down this huge hillside, swallowing him inside his tent and changing the border of the forest, they had to come from somewhere. More and more the deeper he goes the spaces between trees grows larger where the forest used to be thick but had abandoned their posts for the frontlines. Soon the gaps between them are huge, giving the forest an almost calculated checkerboard appearance the plays tricks on his eyes and tempts a icy and starving breeze to twine around between the trunks. He thinks he sees things, up in the buttressed canopy above him which stays somehow just as dark as dawn had been, but they are nothing but the flicker of shadows dancing as the trapped wind stirs everything it touches. His hair is brushed in all directions but he continues to hike up the slanted ground, the air stinging his lungs with each breath as though to unfortunately make up for the suffocating welcome he had received.
Twigs snap beneath his feet and he feels on alert at the noise, not wanting to upset any of the clearly wizened trees by breaking their carpet of feather-light sticks they've dropped from so high above in the sky like discarded down. He comes to realise just how well planned this secret is, how different trees make up different parts of the wood and, as strange yet true as it is, perform different tasks. He feels watched but impressed, as by a well executed Quidditch play, and though his scraped skin stings he feels he is reaching the very place that a true Ravenclaw might come to hide something so valuable. This is not a place of just books or tests or the various mundane things associated with the Ravenclaw students he had gone to school with, but it is a web of logic and magic that keeps things guarded as smartly and carefully as it plans it's patterns and tricks those threatening it with their own foolishness.
Regulus has been foolish again himself, and the sound of falling snow thumping to the ground startles him back to reality and fear. He had been so focused on the bite of the eerie breeze and searching his mind for any idea of how this forest had come to work so strangely and resourcefully, he only now realises that snow has finally fallen and that if the trees move again, he will be buried in it as it's knocked from their black branches. With shoulders raised toward his ears in caution and his wand out but lowered, he turns full circle to look intently at the surroundings, and sees it. Up ahead and to his left the spacious layout of the trees is interrupted, or so it seems. As he slowly approaches there is a shift of the wind and the branches above him and he realises that what he had mistaken for a knot of trees is the single enormous chest of just one. Nothing here is new, this forest is a collection of the wisest things, too old to be hesitant or weak-willed or small, but craning his neck backward, seeing it's twisted arms spiralling up to pierce the freezing grey clouds that have been coating the canopy with snow, his heart sinks. This is the heart of everything in this wood, the gnarled commander of this high altitude chess game. It is just where he would hide a horcrux, and it towers over everything with a weight Regulus can feel in his very bones and more history than all of Hogwarts.
The wind has been playing tricks on his ears for some time, filling it with voices and blocking out all of the silence he had experienced earlier, but now a particularly slicing lick of chilled wind hisses past him on an errand, running up the ancient old trunk with pressing news. Regulus holds his breath, not knowing what to do next, but that is all decided for him in seconds. Still looking upward at the endless world of black and white, knowing the Diadem is up among it somewhere, he feels dread numbing him from the toes up and takes several hurried steps backward just in time as an icicle the size of his forearm hails down and shatters. Bits of glass-like rubble sprinkle his shoes. Even though the sky seems quite still from his vantage point, there is the old deep creak of ancient wood filling the air so far above him he can't see what is causing it, and even so far away from that sound he feels like he was walked into the path of the Whomping Willow. Regulus cowers among giants, wishing he could have gone home along with his letter to Barty and that the thin chill would stop numbing his body and his thoughts. His heart feels slightly squeezed in the thinner air and he feels that for all his ancestry he lacks the qualities any of the founders would want in a wizard, for he certainly doesn't feel brave and his mind is too battered by the wind and the journey to be cunning or wise and even his dedication is wavering confronted with such heights. The sadness of this place is trapped in the very air, and Tom Riddle has twisted something old and purified by the sky into what he wants it to be, for though everything he sees shows him a Ravenclaw mind all he feels is bitter dread and insecurity flapping in his cloak.
Suddenly, the slow creaking above him stops, the central tree giving a hint of fast awakening sentience. Its roots, allowed to flourish for a thousand years and to stretch dozens of metres in every direction, churn the entire forest around it as it becomes aware of Regulus' intrusion. The forest floor trembles as it had last night and Regulus has nothing to cling to to keep balance, he is trapped on the ground. With a stroke of intuition Regulus realises his only way of escape and he shrugs his bag off his shoulders and overturns it, pawing out it's charmed-small contents out onto the rumbling earth. As he touches them, each object springs back to it's original size, drowning him in coats and papers until he finds the smooth handle of his broom. Leaving everything else behind, he propels himself upwards just as the ground too pushes itself up, a twisted root following his feet in their ascent. The trees around him sway, their canopies knotting fast above him, like the bars of a prison cell. Without his feet on the ground to steady him the very air becomes a tangled mass of winds, pushing branches to close in around him from every direction until he's forced to weave at their command, follow their path upward, circling the ancient, Horcrux laden tree. The more Regulus circles the more the bark becomes ever knotted and creviced, as if by wrinkles. A face, more ancient and horrible then can be imagined begins to form, eyes lined with dried pus-like sap, nose broken and knobbed and finally a mouth, wide, hungry and gaping. With a rush of horror, Regulus realizes where the twisting branches are leading him. His plan of escape is ruined as the wall of wood shunts him towards that great gash of a mouth until he’s swallowed, the great lips cracking and creaking as they close, clipping the tail of his broom.
Inside there is only darkness and Regulus clings to his broom waiting for the crunch of wooden teeth he's sure should come. What he feels instead is a claustrophobic den of sticks, sharp with splinters and smelling deviously fresh and alive and green, so unlike the undead appearance of the tree's outside. Getting to his feet gingerly, Regulus becomes aware of a regular rhythm of thumps as he lights his wand. He had at first mistaken it for his own heartbeat, for he can hear that as well, beating wildly in his ears, but when the hollow is illuminated he sees the true source of the sound. In front of him is the Diadem, the same as it had appeared in paintings and statures atop Ravenclaw's head. It is inset in a pillar of intertwined sinews, beating and osculating like a living heart, pumping the air and the veins of the tree full of the same rotten, curdled, hateful feeling that the Locket had seeped into his own body when he had worn it. Before he can change his mind he plunges his hand into the bubble of amber sap that encases the circlet. It tugs his arm in deeper, pulsating sickly, but he yanks it free. Potent, heady pine-scented fluid drizzles from his sleeve, sliding off the horcux and onto his shoes as the wind roars around the outside of the tree, trying to get inside to stop him.
Without it's lifeforce, Voldemort's clever curse to keep it alive, the tree spasms, tossing Reg off his feet and into the savage splinters of the wall. Shoving the Diadem up his arm onto his shoulder to keep from dropping it, he covers his face with his arm and points up, blasting a hole through the wood straight through to the outside. Chunks rain down on him but he keeps moving, getting on his broom and out into the gail. The wind is even stronger than it was before, sending him spinning sideways out of control as he tries to compensate for his broom's trimmed trigs. A giant gnarled limb swings just past him, missing him by a mere foot and crashing instead into the wrinkled old bark in an explosion of wooden ash. The giant seems to be ageing too rapidly to keep up with it's attack, disintegrating in patches, losing stability the horcrux had provided. But the entire tree hasn't fallen apart yet and the wave of air caused by the great swinging limb slams Regulus hard into an offshoot of the trunk. He hits it without a bit of his usual grace, slapped so hard his cheek bleeds and his face crumples in pain that shoots paralysingly from his knee that has been smashed between his broom and the tree. Regulus is not brave or valiant but he was a Seeker, and he knows that if you don't fly through an injury to get to safety no one will wait until you're feeling better to take another shot at you. He pushes off with his bad leg and, tears stinging his scraped face, bolts completely vertically into the sky.
He is blinded. Looking down at himself he sees his hands, his wand, his broom, his painfully dangling leg, and most importantly the Diadem still circling his shoulder with it's cruel weight, but the wind has stopped short and the entire world is thick grey nothingness as far as he can see. Battered and heavy and coated in ash and snowflakes like a ghost, Regulus doesn't wait to listen for a sign of what happened to the tree, just picks a direction and flies as far as he can in the cover of cloud.
In the acres beneath him the trees finally still for good, their dark canopy untwisting, their magic lost. Someday saplings will grow there again, mingling with the ancient and knotted trunks Regulus had climbed through, and the once feared wood will gradually mingle with the rest of the mountain. All that will remain is what's left of the horcrux's wooden body, turned to a pile of ash that slowly blows away in the breeze, it's burden and unnatural immortality lifted from it by a single terrified figure with his sights set on London.*