Lys knew with crystal clarity that while she might be quite good, "elite" wasn't something you could aspire to reach through mere competence.
How could she possibly contend with someone even the world's most powerful white wizard couldn't easily handle?
Igor had been running for a year. A full year. The people sent after him had escalated from ordinary groups of dark wizards to eventually Lys herself and the elite among the Death Eaters.
The Dark Lord would eliminate every piece of rot among the Death Eaters. Every piece of rot. No one could attempt to break free from the Dark Lord.
She wanted to do something. She was going mad. The desire for madness grew more intense each day, the urge to kill becoming increasingly frenzied.
With Frey absent, the Lys who had been disguised beneath their warm companionship was about to reveal the other side of herself—the side ground down by endlessly cycling memories.
What was lost from the soul was simply lost. That missing piece would inevitably make Lys different somehow.
She found herself increasingly unable to bear the crushing weight in her heart, unable to handle the present with any calm.
Her suppressed, torn, tormented soul—wracked by bitter resentment—seemed to quietly sprout malformed flesh, opening eyes that had always been covered, revealing the murderous gleam that had been hidden away.
Through the blurred window, she saw the wanted posters plastering the walls of the alley across the street...
Emerging from a chaotic patch of woodland at the border, Lys tilted her head back and sighed, smiling with satisfaction.
To protect someone? To take revenge on someone? It didn't seem to be either.
It was simply that when facing this scum, raising her wand and speaking "Avada Kedavra" seemed to carry no guilt anymore. For one fleeting moment, Lys imagined a world without the Dark Lord—where she had taken career assessments after fifth year and become an Auror after graduating seventh year...
She had just played the role of werewolf hunter, and even now the blood droplets on her mask hadn't fully scabbed over.
The illusion of her soul being soothed made her tremble.
She flipped through the booklet in her hands—wanted posters that the Ministry had put up on Diagon Alley's notice board—searching through faces of the condemned and desperate.
She tore off the corresponding sheet, wiped the blood from the hem of her coat with deliberate care, then casually tossed the crumpled parchment away.
With her bloodlust satisfied, she felt she could face the Dark Lord and that perpetually reeking snake that devoured corpses with equanimity for another half month.
To prevent the targeted nature of her actions from being exposed, Lys had even collected wanted posters from nearby France and Germany. A methodical madness, if such a thing could exist.
Breathing deeply of the forest air—clean and sharp with pine—Lys grinned and shuddered. Why hadn't she thought of this before? The solution had been so simple, so... satisfying.
Meanwhile, the werewolf leader summoned after the Dark Lord's return was utterly baffled.
How was it that several of his subordinates had ventured into the woods and simply... vanished?
Word was spreading through the underground that someone had been hunting werewolves recently. Methodically. Efficiently.
He had only risen to power by replacing Fenrir Greyback, so his control over his followers wasn't particularly tight. He could only attract more werewolves to his cause through indulgence and rewards—a precarious foundation at best.
He had promised to provide them protection when they raided Muggle villages or ambushed wizards, following the Dark Lord's grand design. But now several of the missing werewolves had been the most prominent recently, the ones who'd made the biggest splashes in blood and terror.
They had attacked Muggle villages following Voldemort's instructions, but he had failed to provide the promised protection...
His control over the werewolves was slipping like sand through his fingers. Anxiety gnawed at him with sharp teeth.
But these matters had nothing to do with Lys for now.
At the moment, she sat gracefully on a sofa in the Malfoy study, surrounded by the familiar opulence that had once impressed her as a student.
Narcissa was surprised to find that Lys's condition had improved considerably. The haunted look that had shadowed her features seemed lighter somehow. She probed indirectly, delicate as always, but Lys only mentioned that she'd been drinking rather a lot of Euphoria Elixir lately.
She even brought several bottles for Narcissa, their contents glowing with an almost unnatural vibrancy. "I brewed these myself. Added a bit extra dried billywig sting—makes you happier."
The overly vivid color of both Lys's words and the potion made Narcissa politely decline with the practiced grace of a pureblood lady.
With Lucius absent, she could face the Dark Lord at any moment. She couldn't afford to indulge in temporary relaxation, no matter how tempting the escape might be.
Looking at her former junior's excessively flushed complexion, Narcissa advised her to drink less, but received only Lys's perfunctory nod—the kind of dismissal that suggested the advice would be promptly ignored.
Lys hadn't actually been drinking the stuff—it was just for show. Another mask in her collection.
Putting the potions back in her satchel with careful precision, Lys pulled out two contracts and placed them on the polished table before her. "Contracts from that French wizard official who couldn't abandon his business interests and came to me asking for supply sources."
Lys wasn't lying. These were contracts delivered by that portly French wizarding official, clearly unwilling to wade into the Ministry's murky waters yet dependent on importing certain materials from Britain. Desperation made for strange bedfellows, forcing him to come knocking again.
However, he hadn't approached the Malfoys directly. Instead, he'd made it an open black market bounty, then had it passed to the Malfoys through a carefully anonymous intermediary.
They'd made things so complicated simply to avoid appearing to support Voldemort. Plausible deniability was worth its weight in galleons these days.
Narcissa glanced at the figures at the bottom of the documents and raised an elegant eyebrow. The commission rate was very much in her junior's style—couldn't calculate those numbers clearly? Just aim high and let others sort out the details.
She tucked away the contract with practiced efficiency, wanting to chat about other topics, but after opening her mouth, she seemed to have nothing safe to say. The walls had ears these days, and careless words could prove fatal. Finally, she could only mention that the Bobbin family, who ran the chain of apothecaries, had been extremely cautious lately.
Lys waited for her to continue, but was met with silence that stretched uncomfortably between them.
"When will Lucius be able to return?" Lys changed the subject, her voice carefully neutral.
Narcissa's composure cracked slightly. She shook her head, silver-blonde hair catching the lamplight. "I'm not sure. The Dark Lord seems to believe they deserve a harsh lesson for the mission's failure... He's truly furious about Lucius's failure."
Lys didn't know what to say. After all, as someone who wasn't advancing within this organization, there wasn't much she could do to help. She was a peripheral player in a deadly game.
She could only offer: "Don't worry too much. The last prison break was too recent—the Order and the Ministry's guards are bound to be overly strict. The Dark Lord still values the Malfoys, so naturally he'll let Lucius return."
But this statement made Narcissa frown, pain flickering across her aristocratic features. She felt so powerless. If the Dark Lord still valued the Malfoys, he wouldn't have given an underage child an impossible task. This was punishment... punishment for Lucius's mission failure...
She didn't try to explain this to Lys, because the Dark Lord's plans—whatever their true purpose—shouldn't be casually revealed. That would constitute evidence of betrayal, and betrayal meant death. She simply sat silently in Lucius's former seat, the weight of unspoken fears pressing down on her shoulders.
Lys could see that her senior had nothing more to say to her, but admittedly, this was probably a good thing. Some silences were safer than words.
Lys made an exaggerated farewell to Narcissa and left the room, her footsteps echoing in the grand hallway. When she reached the sitting room downstairs, she couldn't help but instruct the house-elf to take the carpet for cleaning again. Fifi obediently complied, the little creature's ears drooping with the weight of endless tasks.
She glanced toward the room the Dark Lord used for meetings and arrangements, then pushed open the door and entered. The furniture had been shoved to the room's edges in a haphazard pile, the windows were shrouded by heavy curtains that blocked out all natural light, and a long table remained in the center with black velvet high-backed chairs arranged on either side like silent sentinels.
Lys scanned the room with calculating eyes and closed the door behind her, sitting down on the steps with deliberate casualness.
This sort of pitch-black place held little interest for Lys under normal circumstances. She simply felt that she'd been too relaxed lately, not sitting on the steps listening to their meetings, and thought it necessary to come in and remind herself of the reality she lived in.
Ever since she'd started collecting wanted posters, she felt her condition had improved so dramatically she didn't even need to drink her medicine.
But Lys knew this was false—a dangerous illusion. If she resisted taking her medicine at this point, it would cause irreversible damage and changes to her soul. The missing piece would grow larger, hungrier.
Even knowing this with crystal clarity, she'd only been taking one spoonful of the medicine that should have been two spoonfuls recently. That hollow feeling after taking the medicine—as if something essential had vanished—made her want to continue her madness, creating a vicious cycle between reason and desire that threatened to consume her entirely.
Sitting on the cold stone steps, Lys took a deep breath. The putrid stench of the Dark Lord's fractured soul seemed to linger in the air like a malevolent presence, making Lys suddenly realize that above her was an even greater madman. By comparison, she seemed almost normal—almost human.
She smiled at the thought and left the meeting room, closing the door on the darkness within.
Returning to the reading room, she eagerly opened the letter delivered by one of Frey's fluffy owls perched on the windowsill, its amber eyes watching her with patient intelligence.
She began reading it carefully, hungry for news from the outside world.
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