"Don't act rashly," Moody rasped urgently in his gravelly voice. Both his natural eye and his magical eye were fixed with intensity on the crystal ball's image, studying every detail. "This is clearly a trap of some kind. Nothing about this situation is natural or innocent."
"Alastor, we can't just leave a child standing out there like that in the freezing cold!" Mrs. Weasley said with distress, her voice was rising with emotion. "Look at her—she's barely dressed! At the very least, we should give her some proper warm clothing!"
The moment Mrs. Weasley finished speaking those compassionate words, as if they'd been a trigger or signal, the front door of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place emitted a soft, ominous creak that echoed in the crystal ball's audio.
The door slowly swung in, opening seemingly of its own accord despite no one touching it.
The girl, moving with jerky, unnatural motions like a poorly controlled marionette, staggered forward several awkward steps. She crossed the threshold and entered the house's entrance hall, her bare feet were making no sound on the stone floor.
Adrian narrowed his eyes sharply, scrutinizing her movements and appearance with intense focus through the crystal's image.
The vacant, glassy stare that showed no awareness of surroundings. The rigid, unnatural posture held too perfectly still. The mechanical show of her movements. These were unmistakable signs of someone under magical control.
Was it the Imperius Curse? That seemed most likely. Or perhaps some other similar form of compulsion magic?
Just then, interrupting everyone's focused attention on the girl, Kreacher suddenly appeared in the entrance hall through house-elf magic.
He appeared with a soft pop, hunched over in his usual servile posture. His bulging eyes were distinctly bloodshot and wild as he observed this uninvited guest who had dared enter his mistress's ancestral home without permission.
The crystal ball had the useful function of transmitting sound as well as images.
They could hear everything happening below.
"Filthy Mudblood intruding into the noble Mistress's sacred house..." Kreacher muttered venomously to himself. "Defiling the pure Black bloodline with their very presence... Kreacher should not have to witness such degradation..."
His hands twisted together with agitation.
"We need to go down there and check on this situation immediately," Adrian said in a low, urgent voice. His gaze remained locked on the girl's increasingly abnormal behavior in the crystal. "There's going to be serious trouble."
Moody didn't respond immediately, his magical eye was spinning frantically as he calculated odds and dangers. But Kingsley and Remus had already gripped their wands firmly and stood up with determination.
Sirius roughly hauled Bellatrix up from her chair by her bound arms, making her cry out, and pressed his wand hard against her back, right between her shoulders. The tip dug into her spine.
"You're coming with us too," he sneered. "Don't even think about resisting. If anything goes wrong down there, if this is what I think it is, you'll be the very first person to suffer the consequences."
Bellatrix showed no resistance to being manhandled, merely let out a contemptuous snort of amusement.
The group moved quickly. They left the converted cell room and descended the stairs as rapidly as safety allowed with wands drawn and ready.
When they reached the second-floor landing where they could see down into the entrance hall clearly, they found the girl still standing in the center of the space.
She maintained that deeply eerie, unsettling posture, standing completely, unnaturally motionless like a statue or corpse.
As for Kreacher, he hadn't taken any direct action yet against this intruder, probably regarding the girl as just another unwanted guest invited by the traitor Sirius to defile his mistress's home.
His gaze moved continuously back and forth between the strange girl and Sirius's approaching group, his lips never stopping their mutterings. "Filthy Mudblood... defiling the ancient and most noble House of Black... Master would be ashamed... Mistress would scream..."
It was clear he remained deeply, bitterly displeased that Sirius had made this sacred ancestral house into the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix 'filling it with half-bloods and blood traitors'.
"Shut up, Kreacher," Sirius barked sharply at it, his voice echoing in the hall. While simultaneously giving Bellatrix a particularly hard, vengeful shove that made her stumble on the stairs. "What's going on here? Who is this girl? What have you done?"
Bellatrix let out a piercing, triumphant laugh that sent chills down everyone's spines.
Adrian and Moody exchanged glances silently. Both gripped their wands even tighter as they cautiously approached the eerie, motionless girl, step by step.
Although Adrian didn't yet know the girl's specific identity or ultimate purpose in being here, excessive caution was never wrong.
Just as they descended the last few steps, bringing them to about ten feet distance from the girl, everything suddenly changed.
"Amy!" Bellatrix suddenly shouted at the top of her lungs.
'Amy?'
Adrian froze for a moment, his mind processing. This was undoubtedly someone's name.
And as far as he knew with certainty, there was absolutely no one present here called "Amy."
So, the answer was obvious...
The girl named "Amy" immediately reacted to hearing her name called.
The name seemed like a key incantation, a trigger, instantly breaking whatever magical mechanism or compulsion had been holding her in that frozen state.
The girl, who had been standing stiff and rigid as a puppet with cut strings, suddenly shuddered. Her entire body shuddered, trembling as if struck by a powerful electric current running through every nerve.
"What's..." Everyone instinctively turned to look at her, alarm rising.
The girl's previously vacant, empty eyes fluctuated intensely, the glazed surface was cracking. After a brief moment of confusion as awareness returned, as her consciousness crashed back into her body—extreme, absolute terror quickly surfaced on her pale face, replacing her previous numb blankness.
"No... no, please..." she whimpered in a tiny, broken voice.
She couldn't even see clearly yet who had called her name, where she was, what was happening. But her body had already been trained, conditioned through repeated trauma. It reacted ahead of her conscious understanding.
She staggered backward desperately, her legs were barely supporting her. She pressed her spine tightly, painfully against the wall as if trying to phase through it to escape. Her arms came up to clutch herself defensively, desperately, wrapping around her own torso. She curled her entire body into the smallest possible ball, trying to occupy as little space as possible.
To become invisible through stillness.
This was an instinctive reaction carved brutally into her very bones through long-term systematic torment becoming the most primitive self-protection response sensing danger.
Make yourself small. Make yourself quiet. Maybe they won't notice you.
Mrs. Weasley's kind face immediately showed deep compassion and distress at this pitiful sight. She stepped forward half a step automatically, her maternal instincts were overriding caution. She was already reaching out, intending to comfort the terrified, trembling girl.
No matter how one looked at the situation, this appeared to be just a frightened, deeply traumatized, utterly pitiful child who desperately needed help and protection.
However, Moody's scarred arm shot out and blocked Mrs. Weasley's path firmly before she could get closer.
"Don't move another step!" Moody's voice was harsh, brooking no argument. His expression remained grimly stern, suspicious. His magical eye remained locked intently on the cowering Amy with unnatural intensity. "There's danger here."
"Alastor! She's just a child!" Mrs. Weasley couldn't help but protest emotionally, trying to push past his arm. "Look at her! She's terrified! She needs help!"
However, Moody still didn't lower his blocking arm, didn't budge an inch. His body was like iron.
In fact, he wasn't exaggerating or being unreasonably paranoid this time.
Just as he'd stated with certainty, his magical eye was detecting a faint but distinctly present aura of genuine danger emanating from this girl.
Something was very, very wrong.
"What did you do to her?" Adrian's voice was cold as ice. His gaze moved from the helpless, shrinking girl to Bellatrix's triumphant face. "You tortured her, didn't you?"
It wasn't really a question.
Bellatrix let out a sharp, mocking laugh of delight. Her face twisted with perverse pride, with satisfaction at her own cleverness. "Torture? Oh, that's such an ugly, crude way to put it! I prefer to think of it as... conditioning. Training. Creating art."
She gazed greedily, hungrily at Amy's evident fear and trembling, as if admiring her own masterpiece.
Amy felt that gaze filled with pure malice focusing on her. Her already trembling body began shaking even more violently, uncontrollably. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
Now Adrian could be absolutely certain beyond any doubt that Bellatrix had done something genuinely cruel to this poor girl.
The faintly visible scars on Amy's exposed skin could attest clearly to this abuse.
'How disgusting.' Adrian furrowed his brow tightly with restrained anger.
But there was still one critical question remaining: why had Bellatrix done this? What was the purpose? She wasn't simply sadistic—well, she was, but this seemed planned.
And that vital question was answered within seconds.
Amy, still curled up defensively against the wall, gradually quieted down. Her whimpering stopped. Her breathing became shallow and rapid.
In her place, replacing her consciousness, something else seemed to be struggling violently to break free from within her small, fragile body.
Then, horrifyingly, wisps of pitch-black, tar-like smoky substance began seeping from beneath her skin emerging from her pores like sweat. The darkness poured from her nose and mouth like expelled breath, leaked from her eyes like tears made of shadow.
The disparate wisps gathered and merged above her head, forming a growing cloud.
The agitating black mist seemed to possess independent life and malicious intelligence as it twisted and wriggled. It emanated a deeply heart-palpitating aura of grievance, of corruption. The very air around it seemed to dim, as if even the light in the entrance hall was being actively devoured by this darkness.
The temperature dropped.
"So, it is this thing after all..." Adrian sighed softly, heavily, as he watched the dark creation gradually taking more solid form above the girl's head.
"What is that?!" Mrs. Weasley raised her wand shakily to her chest in alarm, taking an instinctive step back. Her voice trembled with fear. "What's happening to her? What is that thing?"
"An Obscurus," Adrian explained briefly, his voice was grim. "A parasitic dark force born from suppressed magic and abuse."
Yes, an Obscurus. One of the rarest and most dangerous magical phenomena.
From the very moment this strange girl had first appeared in the crystal ball's image, he should have guessed what this was.
When young wizards or witches are forced to suppress their magic over a long period, combined with sustained, severe, cruel physical and emotional abuse, they might develop this dark parasitic entity called an "Obscurus" within their own bodies.
This was an extremely unstable, unpredictable force with truly astonishing, terrifying destructive power.
Adrian had encountered this exact phenomenon once before during his travels in other countries, years ago.
That had been when he had just begun his wanderings after leaving Britain, young and inexperienced. Though he had only observed that Obscurus incident from a safe distance, merely witnessed rather than confronted it—the destructive force it had unleashed still left him feeling deeply apprehensive years later.
As for the outcome of that distant encounter...
An Obscurus has no truly independent life form of its own. It isn't a separate entity. It requires the host child's life force and magical power as fuel for its survival, burning through them rapidly.
In other words, that previous disaster he'd witnessed had only ended, only stopped its rampage of destruction, when that poor child's life had been completely consumed by the parasite.
When there was nothing left to burn.
The child had died, and the Obscurus had died with them.
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