Chapter Text
It was a cruel night, and the rain fell in a downpour that beat like a drum against James' face, flattening his usually-wild hair against his skull. He'd been sent to a rock in the ocean, a spire that came out of the sea that was a somewhat precarious spot for the Raven's port-key to land. In the mid-November cold, the sea was covered in an eerie mist, and droplets of water ran down the lenses of his glasses, obscuring James' vision of the landscape.
He reached up to wipe the rain away. And, after placing the horn-rimmed glasses back upon his face, James understood why the port-key's coordinates hadn't been plotted somewhere more comfortable. For, extending out of the sea, was a great cave, jaggedly cut in the side of a cliff. It would have been impossible to approach from above, making the little rock James was perched upon the best vantage point; from here, he could easily apparate into the cave's mouth.
The information that Raven had given him in preparation was next to nothing; the usual port-key, the time that it would activate, and a handful of words: Blood wards. In the basin. Avoid the water. The note sat heavy in James' breast pocket, handed to him less than a week ago by the informant.
The Raven's notes were always vague, always cryptic. James often tried to decipher a deeper meaning from them, and yet there was no pattern he had found between the notes—they were simply random.
Readying himself for the unknown, James apparated, feeling the familiar tug at his navel as it seized him. Seconds later, he was gripping a cavern wall as he landed, almost slipping into the water below. The sea wove further back into the darkness of the cave, extending further than his (admittedly, limited) vision. It would be a blind approach, but he didn't have much of a choice.
With a crack of thunder in the background, James gathered himself and drew his wand, casting a lumos to light the way. I should move fast, before the storm closes in further, he thought. The causeway dangled just above the water, and with the brewing storm, the sea seemed to leap at his heels as it tossed and turned; he didn't want to think about the consequence of it swallowing him—he'd get battered against the rocks instantly. He clambered down it further until he reached a stretch of cave where the magic in the cave had intensified beyond his own. It thrummed low, a constant stream of strong, powerful magic that countered his own.
James drew his wand, prepared to begin his dissection of the wards he would, inevitably, come across the deeper he went into the cave. With another crash of thunder, he walked faster, the water considerably calmer now that he was in the true depths of the rock. Every couple steps, he cast another depremurus, to detect if there were wards ahead. It was when he reached a dead-end, the rock shaped unnaturally flat, that he realised the blood wards were of a different variety than those he'd been expecting; usually, blood magic was used primarily to strengthen wards, or sometimes used to grant access only to those of blood relation to the caster.
"Fuck," James cursed.
The Raven could have been a bit more specific, James thought. But that was the deal; he had to use his own mind to get through this one, as he always did.
As he approached the stretch of wall closer, he realised it had been carved, although it didn't look like it'd been by magic—it was too imperfect. But upon the wall was a circle of runes, repeating over and over in the same pattern. James wished, for a moment, that Moony was there, the only one of their friends who had taken Ancient Runes at Hogwarts, before he banished the thought.
Instead, he inspected the wall with his fingers, running them along the jagged stone. He avoided the runes deftly, knowing of the consequences in touching unknown magic, instead trying to determine the sort of magic imbued, undoubtedly, within the wall. He thought back to what he'd studied on blood warding, what the Goblin texts had described, how it was possible to imbue it within an object. What had it been, was it a—
