Vox Corpis [Harmione]

Chapter 1

Things were in a state of near-total chaos in Mad-Eye Moody's office. Apparently, discovering an escaped prisoner of Azkaban and loyal servant to Lord Voldemort (who had gone through a recent rebirth) in their midst, assisting the real Moody (who'd been trapped in a chest for months without reprieve), handling the death of a Hogwarts student, juggling the visiting schools and officials for the Triwizard Tournament, and intercepting and placating a suddenly nosy Ministry of Magic was enough for anyone to get lost in the shuffle. Even a boy like Harry Potter.

After Crouch Junior had been unmasked for the impostor he was, Dumbledore had herded Harry to the anteroom of the office when the Minister of Magic had caught up to Hogwarts's head wizard and demanded to know why a young boy's body was being transported home for burial.

Dumbledore had gently led Harry aside and, with a pat on the arm, left him there to tend to the unpleasantries of a student death mostly out of earshot of the traumatized boy.

'Tending to a few details' had become entanglement in a thousand and one knots, and everyone was so busy and confused that no one noticed eerily quiet Harry on the outskirts.

Harry watched the heads of magic, both in the ministry and at Hogwarts, pass in and out of his line of sight. They moved hurriedly but with a strange flatness. They were like puppets or paper dolls, insubstantial and somehow unreal. They moved and talked and gesticulated and congregated but Harry saw only vague blurs of human shapes. It was like he wasn't wearing his glasses; he couldn't focus on any one person. He just let them flow in and out of his sight. No effort to catch and hold on a single object, no attention to the faces or shapes... just images, flowing past, coming in and vanishing.

His arm hurt. The lancing pain had given way to a throbbing, fiery sensation. He knew his arm hurt, part of him felt it, but even his own injury seemed disconnected. He cradled his wounded arm but it seemed autonomic, preprogrammed and stilted.

There was a blackness in his blood. He felt a thick, dark weight push through him with every hollow heartbeat. It pounded in his temples, ached on his forehead, sludged with freezing tendrils to his limbs and skin.

With each passing moment he felt less and less. The pain wasn't searing anymore, the terror ebbed, even the grief thinned. It left very little person in its wake when all the substance of him was stretched so far. He existed because laws said he did, but Harry watched his teachers bustle about, and he thought maybe he was a ghost. His mind played tricks and maybe he wasn't really there; maybe he'd died in the graveyard. Maybe he was a ghost, like Cedric, like his parents. Maybe he was dead and didn't know it.

He certainly felt more like a ghost than a person. An odd peace, a stillness, settled around him with that thought. Yes, dead... where there was no pain, no fear, no self... he could be that.

Maybe he'd disappear at any moment. No one seemed to see him. He could be dead. He should be floating but for the thick evil in his blood, bound to a demon and thrumming with a darkness he didn't own. It was in him like a disease, a possession. Black, thick, and oily instead of smooth, watery red. He would be a ghost but for that heaviness in his veins.

Death was cold. He was certainly that. One of the few sensations that did register, a sense that penetrated his nonexistence to hint of physical form, was cold. The room got colder and colder as time trudged on. He couldn't move to ward it off, his body wouldn't let him find someplace warm, but he felt it. Like the icy air when Dementors swarmed. He shouldn't know that, he was just a boy. A boy with demon blood.

Vaguely, distantly, he knew his body was trembling. It tightened painfully in his arm, made his insides ache and his brain pulse against his skull, but it wasn't enough for him to do anything about it. He wouldn't move for that... couldn't.