At night I hear it creeping, at night I feel it move

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The nightowls of Rothbury, population 1694, are the small village's sentinels - evidence of their insomnia detectable only in scattered and steadily dwindling squares of light. It is these furtive and sleepless few who are the first to sense something is amiss, putting it off, in true muggle fashion, to their own neurosis. Yet, the choking sense of dread winding through the streets and slipping coldly through door gaps and windows is no figment of the mind.

Tall hooded figures skirt through the pines surrounding the town, their oblong, concentric march growing tighter and smaller until finally they spill into an open alleyway and fan out, seeming more liquid than army.

It did not take much for the Dark Lord to sway them, although it did take long. A slow coaxing away from their comfortable Ministry agreement with the promise of chaotic and widespread consumption far more tantalizing than the tired and impure souls of criminals. Voldemort has insured their first rebellion will be nothing short of spectacular, the promised banquet unarmed, unseeing and unsuspecting.

Naturally, a small group of Death Eaters flank the rear, giving their ghastly peers a wide, safe berth. They wait for the moment they can follow and make short work of any survivors.*

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[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*From his position crouched in the woods outside the village, Regulus can't see the rest of the Death Eaters enter it, but he watches their every step on the hand-drawn ground plan he has spread out wide before him. Their markers move in real time, delicately drawn masks with a name and a life attached to each, crawling closer and closer in then arranging themselves like a guard around the towns edges.

Once they all have passed over the dotted line he's drawn encircling the village, Regulus stands and points his wand to the west. Conjuring a ward encircling an entire area is a difficult thing to do, but merely activating one that has been planted days ago only takes a moment. Behind the guard's backs the air shimmers like a nighttime heatwave, and the line on Regulus' map turns from stippling to a faintly glowing solid blue. Rothbury is encased, with the dementors inside of it.*

[purely-better.livejournal.com]

*It's simply dreadful, all these innocent Muggles snug in their beds, no idea what's gliding for them as they sleep. Tragic, really.

Behind his mask, Lucius's mouth curves into a cruel smile, genuinely amused at the prospect of what's about to start happening. This is the boring part, but he does his duty flawlessly anyhow, even if it is just waiting, for the moment. Standing ready on the southbound road out of town, his anticipation piques as the air behind him ripples; Regulus can be tiresome, but he's good at what he does, Lucius has to admit that much.*

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*It's a stupid comparison. One Mulciber would likely tease him about for days if he knew - still, all Snape can think about is popcorn. Like anything solid and edible, Snape has a strong dislike for it. He has an even stronger dislike for waiting for it. That absolutely irrational suspense, that silence before the barrage of sound. You know it'll happen any moment, you think you're ready - eyes peeled on that slowly rotating bag - but every time that first kernel pops it's like a gunshot.

He's twitching. He knows he's twitching. He's also extremely aware of his hands, which seem suddenly very cumbersome and awkwardly positioned. It feels like they should be doing something useful, but in the silence and the stillness he can't find a practical application. He isn't consciously nervous, but he's supremely uncomfortable. The directness of these little events always making it considerably more difficult for Snape to play his usual trick of shifted responsibility.

The first kernel pops.*

[whysosadistic.livejournal.com]

*Mulciber is bored out of his fucking mind. He is this close to lighting up, really. It feels like ages since the last raid, and the restless anticipation is like a slow building high. This sentiment is palpable, as if every Death Eater is waiting for a fix of their own.

Suddenly, a high pitched scream pierces the night sky and desecrates the otherwise tranquil Muggle town. Mulciber grins, turns to Severus, and whispers.*

Finally.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*Muggles can't see the dementors, but wizards can, and Regulus had stayed as far from them as he could when they were brought in. He had overheard a Death Eater whose voice he hadn't recognised from behind his mask, say that they seek out children first if given the opportunity, their souls being such a rare delicacy as opposed to the more tarnished ones of adults. Even though Regulus does not consider himself a child, he had kept himself tucked away in the bushes to set up his workstation, relieved he had not been chosen as a guide for any of the horrifying creatures.

Keeping his eyes on the map to distract himself from anxiety of being alone in dark and dirty woods, Regulus takes comfort in the fact that he is on the opposite side of the ward to the dementors. They don't show up on his tracking charms, their magical signal too foreign and unstudied to possibly detect like he can the presence of a wizard. But even without seeing them move on the map, he knows that by now, down in the houses below, they must be doing what they were brought there to do.*

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Snape fails to echo the sentiment as a wave of dread and cold hit him, the unfortunate side-effect of hundreds of not particularly picky mouths. As the Dementors begin to reach a frenzy, lights, movement and sound erupt in pockets all over the village. Somewhere, a police siren begins to wail in time with several car alarms and the voices of muggles spilling into the street rise above the din in panicked tones. Snape draws his wand as the Death Eaters around him begin to move in, their only task to leave no kernel unpopped.*

[whysosadistic.livejournal.com]

*He certainly isn't feeling as cheery as he looks: Dementors—while they don't put him in as much of a depressive state as Severus—are hardly a mood booster. But the sensations of unease attempting to penetrate him fail to put a damper on his desire to wreck havoc.

He twists his wand in a circular pattern between his fingers and shakes off the sudden chill. He feels his eyebrows knit. It's better to talk, he realizes. He doesn't want to dwell on unpleasant thoughts on a night with such unlimited potential.

In an attempt to distract himself further, he nudges Severus in the ribs as they walk through the woods.*

Ignore them. It's not that hard, really. You look like your bollocks ran away or something.

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Snape feels like his bollocks have run away, padding off into the distance in a strange little gait. He doesn't express this, instead he looks away, seemingly unimpressed.*

I'm fairly sure a can-do attitude just makes you more delicious for them, really.

[whysosadistic.livejournal.com]

Please, I'm delicious to everyone.

[purely-better.livejournal.com]

*Snape and Mulciber aren't the only ones beginning to be effected. At the first sign of Muggles trying to make a run for it Lucius steps forward, bold as brass down the middle of the high street, not bothering to keep to shadows. The smirk and the bravado fly right out the window, though, the instant he draws near the first house, and his pace slows, falters, stops. He's never been this close to a Dementor before, and even though the nearest one must be somewhere inside the little cottage, he isn't prepared for the creeping dread, the cold, the irrational sense of air being sucked away into nothing.

Caught off guard and too surprised to do more than stand there, stupidly, Lucius just stares at the front door of the house in a kind of bleakly inching horror. It's only when it bangs open and a man stumbles out into the road that he's jarred from himself, that he refocuses on why he's there in the first place. His wand rises and a curse is cast; there's a violent flash of red light, and the man falls, gasping for a moment, before there's no more breath to gasp. There's no joy in the killing for Lucius, though, not now. It was perfunctory. Required. Frowning at the corpse that a moment ago would've given him a kind of grim satisfaction, he steps away - unconsciously closer to the far side of the street - and waits, uneasily, for others.*

[whysosadistic.livejournal.com]

*Elsewhere, several streets away, Mulciber leads Severus down a back alley. A chorus of screams flow from a nearby row house, immediately catching Mulciber's attention. He looks up to see an illuminated upstairs window and a series of shadows scattering in complete disarray.

Mulciber stops in his tracks and tries to get Severus' attention.*

[dontbegoofy.livejournal.com]

*Mulciber doesn't have to try very hard, Snape too hears the commotion, looking up at the window with a pinch of reluctance. However, unlike Mulciber, Snape makes no attempt to stop - as far as he's concerned unless the muggles have escaped they're of no consequence to him.

After all, he's not keen on becoming competition when Dementors aren't the choosiest of monsters.*

You can't be serious.

[whysosadistic.livejournal.com]

Why the hell not? The Dementors clearly didn't finish the job in there. Come on, it'll do the spirit good.

[Outside the ward, Regulus only]

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*The woods are not at all an appropriate place to work. Regulus has discovered this harsh truth after half an hour of crouching on the ground with sticks and thorns stabbing his knees though his robes, and his hands becoming somehow filthy even though he has made a point to touch as little as possible. A breeze twines it's way though the trees, making the pale balls of light that he's cast above him to illuminate the area keep flickering as they get batted back and forth in the wind. With faulty light it's hardly possible to read his map correctly, particularly as the leaves whisper all around him and his skin feels like it's crawling. He is cold and his knees are damp, and it is only when he takes a brief break from his work to take stock of all the misery that he's incurred by setting up here... that he sees it.

His hand stands out like a pale beacon in the dark, a dramatic contrast from the black of his robes and the woods around him. So he sees, in perfect clarity, the shape of the big black spider as it scuttles across the back of his hand and away along the side of his map. After he sees the first one, the others start catching his eye all around him. Suddenly the crawling sensation that has been irking him takes on new, horrible meaning, and the log he had set up beside seems less like a shelter and more like a biohazard, infested with nest after nest of spiders.

In record time, Regulus' lights extinguish, his map is swiped from the ground, and he's on the move to set up somewhere else.*

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*Further away, a house looms. It's an old farmstead, well outside the ward and clearly well outside proper maintenance as well. However, far from a horror film trope, the place is almost quaint in the half-light - some merry dwarf-inhabited cabin sure to smell of home-baked pies and beer.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*It does not smell like pies or beer, and probably hasn't for years. By the looks of it no one has stayed here in several seasons, probably someone's Summer house left unused. The door is locked but Regulus gets inside without a thought, and once he does all he can smell is dust and trapped Summer air. At least there doesn't appear to be spiders in here, and that is all he is looking for.

Regulus ducks into the first room he finds and lays his map flat on a counter to get back to his work, shaking out his robes as he walks just in case any spiders have survived the trek over.*

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The front parlour faces the wrong side of moon, leaving it in near complete darkness. The only proper light comes from the kitchen door, which having been left ajar for years, casts a long triangle of silver light across an old couch. Beyond there's a sight of clean looking, albeit dusty counters, which seem more than a little inviting after the uneven, spider-laden ground of the forest.

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*The palms of his hands are already smeared with dirt but Regulus still uses his shoulder to push the kitchen door open. Coming from all the rustling of the woods this little house seems incredibly silent, so much so that he feels almost self-conscious as his shoes click on the floor in the kitchen.*

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The kitchen is oddly cooler than the living room, the stale air having a damp, crisp edge to it which is unpleasantly reminiscent of a cave. Despite this, it seems innocuous enough - both expansive and beautifully outfitted - the previous owners were clearly passionate about cooking.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*He spreads his map out, the faintly glowing web of wards lighting his face from below. It's a unflattering look, really only useful for small children telling ghost stories with a torch under their chins, and makes him look quite a bit ridiculous.

Once he's scanned the map for any disturbances and spotted none, he hefts the rest of his things up onto the central countertop, cursing mildly in his head as his wand gets bumped by his bag and rolls across the counter to clatter to the floor opposite him.*

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The cold, meanwhile grows slightly sharper - more acute - and a sound, like leaves hitting the house siding, echo through the empty, cavernous house.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*After first leaning onto the counter to see if he can see where his wand landed (he can't), Regulus sighs and starts to walk around the counter to so search for it.

He makes it halfway there before a creeping dread in his stomach stops him, slows him to a stop where he can't quite figure out if he's upset or ill. He puts a hand out on the wall to ground himself but the feeling only gets stronger, a deep and aching and cold sorrow he hadn't acknowledged until now, too distracted by his usual sense of depression and his mission to find a bug-free place to set up. His eyebrows knit together and he tries to bite his lips between his teeth but he feels too cold and heavy to muster up the effort.

Summer nights shouldn't be this cold, and small farmhouses shouldn't cause any of the yawning despondency he always carries around to flare into his consciousness.*

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The rattling of leaves seems to move, as though the farmstead is surrounding by malignant roving trees, rustling their branches as they heave up their roots and scuttle laboriously towards the front door.*

[spindleform.livejournal.com]

*His skin prickles into chills, his lungs feel laboured and slow trapped by ribs as stiff as ice, and the room seems so dark he can't imagine how the map had seemed so clearly visible when he had first walked inside. Regulus feels incredibly lost but, listening to the strange sounds, he no longer feels quite so alone.*

[batshitscary.livejournal.com]

*The leaves seem to be closing in, as though they're melding through the walls, now rapping against the inside of the window.*