Protection: The Sword and the Shield

Revenge Of The Itch

......Shrieking Shack, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Severus Snape was not a happy man. He sat in his comfortable lounge chair staring at nothing in particular. He had finally calmed himself from the rage that he had been in for over a month. At present he was barely hanging on to his temper as it threatened to get away from him again. He had already killed both his captives early in his tirade and the sight of their bodies had been one of the many things that had kept his anger sustained.

He had also destroyed his living space and the only thing that had kept the expansion and anti-scrying charms from collapsing was the skill of the ward caster. He was lucky that had been the most powerful dark lord in a century. Unfortunately, the items within were not as well protected by charms and it now looked similar to the destroyed and disheveled Shrieking Shack that his trunk was hiding in.

Realization that he had destroyed his own space had ushered in another phase of his rage and he had destroyed it some more. As with all of the negative things that happened in his life, he blamed his current situation on Potter. He no longer distinguished between the father and the son and in fact had suffered a mental break and now considered himself in a vendetta against the entire House of Potter.

In one of the more lucid moments of his rage period, relatively, he had tried and failed to cast a course on the House of Potter. Casting a course against an entire house was possible. In fact many families were currently feeling the relief from having Sirius' cleansing ritual free them from curses various Blacks had cast against their families. However, unsurprisingly for all things magical, casting a course on a family required power.

The equation that determined the required relative power differential between the caster and the family they wanted to cast against was one of the most famous and complex in the field of Arithmancy. Basically, the equation determined whether the curse would work, do nothing, or rebound against the caster. The fact that a powerful Prima Potentia family with an affinity for ritualistic magic could only cast relatively minor, though cruel, curses against other families was indicative of the dangers and difficulties in even trying.

Severus Snape, despite his high opinion of himself, did not have any familial magic to help him and even though he was powerful, he was nowhere close to being powerful enough to cast against another family, much less a Prima Potentia one. He failed and it cost him. The backlash had damaged his hands and ended his ability as a master potions brewer. That had ended his lucid moment and he had exploded in rage once again.

The cause of all of this turmoil within the Trunk of Snape, was the legendary acts of Harry James Potter at the beginning of the school year. One of the functions of the trunk was that it had a simple version of the teleportation runes that was used in the Vanishing Cabinets. With it he had been able to get the Daily Prophet. With his mind finally back under his control, he thought keeping abreast of invents in the world might have been a bad idea.

He had taken out his frustration on the two ladies he had captured when he read that Harry Potter had turned down the title of Hogwarts Guardian and given it to his "useless friend's whore". But he had kept his composure for the most part. He had even found a rare bit of joy when looking over the aftermath of the two mentally broken women he had chained in his "playroom".

Unfortunately they had not survived the announcement that Potter and his friends had become animagi like his father and his friends before them. That the Potter brat was a "King Dragon" was a slight against him that he could not countenance.

He was in the rage that had blossomed from the realization that he had "broken his own toys" when news broke that Harry Potter could do wandless magic. The rage had simmered to practically nothing as he searched through the paper for any hint that it was false or that the boy had deceived the public. But there were pictures and witnesses.