Harry Potter And Bellatrix Lestrange

"Longbottom, once again you fail to look beyond the obvious," Snape replied, though Harry noted that he was lacking his usual acerbic tone. "In war, history is always written by the victors, and sadly, that history is often very biased. It may very well be that the history books, which give only a brief description of the uprising, have omitted significant details. Maybe the Lord Polairix of the time was a tyrant. Maybe Gregorianus was more than a power-hungry usurper. I find it difficult to believe that in millennia, not one of the heirs of House Polairix was corrupt or tyrannical."

"So if he's buried in there, then that's where the Rod is?" Harry asked as he approached the sarcophagus apprehensively.

"Most likely," Snape agreed.

Harry was about to reach out and touch the lid when one of the Ice soldiers stopped him. "It may be dangerous. We don't know what kind of protection is on this, milord. I suggest you allow one of us to try opening it," the man said.

The young lord of Polairix was about to protest when Bella caught his eye and she shook her head. He reckoned it was just one of those things that came along with being a ruler of so many people. It didn't mean he had to like it, though, he thought with a frown as he stepped back to let the soldier to his work. No, putting someone else in harm's way just because everyone else believed him to be more important was not something that sat well with him.

The sarcophagus opened without problems, and the small party gathered around to peer inside, only to find that it was-

"Empty." Bella swore under her breath. There was nothing in there, no mummy, no remains, no rotting corpse or magically preserved body.

"We made this whole trip for nothing?" Snape grumbled as he looked around the chamber, trying to figure out what was going on. While he didn't exactly like Bella - especially since he knew just what the woman was capable of - he held no illusions about her intellectual ability. Nor did he doubt Hermione's ability to conduct research, not after having to deal with the Muggleborn witch for six years. No, if both of them agreed that this was the most likely place for the Rod of Dominion to be, then it was here. Or it had been, at some point.

"This makes no sense," Bella commented as she traced the inscriptions on the sides of the sarcophagus with an expression of intense concentration. "Why put up all of this for an empty coffin?"

"Grave robbers, maybe?" one soldier offered.

Bella shook her head. "I don't think so. Nothing's been damaged, and I highly doubt any robbers would have made it past the wards. Not to mention the fact that in recent times, Azkaban has been inhabited, and not exactly by friendly creatures, either."

"So the body got moved, then, maybe?" Neville suggested, looking a little lost. He was there more to support Harry, knowing full well that he wouldn't be much use when it came to curse-breaking, but wanting to do something nevertheless.

"Maybe…"

Snape stopped short at one of the walls of the chamber, the one opposite to the stairway they had entered through. "I don't actually think the body was ever here to begin with," he finally said, after studying the inlaid mosaics. When he had everyone's attention, he pointed out three separate places on the wall. "Look here, here, and there."

Harry squinted at the wall, trying to figure out what the potions master was talking about. The wall Snape was standing in front of was depicting the death of Gregorianus at the hands of the ruling Lord Polairix, the mosaic painstakingly put together from thousands of little, one-eighth inch square pieces of colored stone and almost frighteningly realistic, down to the vivid sky-blue color of the mantle fluttering around the dying Gregorianus.

Wait a minute… Harry thought as he took several steps closer to the wall. The mantle Gregorianus was wearing was a solid sky-blue, but there was something off about it, something that he couldn't quite put his hands on. He reached out to touch the mosaic, feeling the smooth stones beneath his fingertips, and traced the outline of the cape, the rest of the world forgotten for the moment.

And then he froze when he felt a roughness that was completely out of place. Looking down at his hands, found a little silver spot embedded in the place of one of the blue tiles in the mantle, the color completely alien amidst the rest of the mosaic, small enough to be missed on anything other than a close inspection. Glancing around at the other places on the wall Snape had pointed out, Harry could make out faint glints of silver, now that he knew what to look for.

"What are these?" he asked, not really expecting an answer.

"Blood gems," Snape replied after a moment, a hint of awe in his voice. "They're very rare and very powerful magical catalysts, usually used to key blood magic. They're very expensive, because they cannot be made, and must be mined from very specific locations deep beneath the ground. Dwarves used to mine them centuries ago, until they became extinct. A number of wizards tried to use the old mine shafts to do it themselves, but very few actually managed to survive that deep down, much less return with usable blood gems," he clarified a moment later.

"So… what are they doing in this wall?"

Snape walked along the wall then turned as he reached the end, and started on the adjacent wall. "There's some here, too. This is odd… they're in no particular pattern. This isn't a rune. At least not one I recognize."

"Runes?" Harry blinked, wishing Hermione was there to explain things to him. Bella was off on the wall opposite to Snape, looking for a pattern, herself, which left Harry, Neville, and Luna standing next to the sarcophagus along with the Ice soldiers. Feeling like he wasn't being much help, Harry resigned himself to looking at the walls, trying to see if he could spot the gems. With a lot of squinting and moving his head around so the ambient light caught the small slivers of silver, he managed to distinguish fourteen on the wall Bella was standing in front of, and fourteen in the wall Snape was looking at.

Harry turned around, looking behind him at the mosaic and again found fourteen gems. I'm beginning to see a pattern here, he thought in amusement. The gems were arrayed in squares. Fourteen gems formed six adjacent squares in the shape of an elongated cross that was three squares wide and four squares tall. He brushed his hand over one of the gems again, trying to see if he could maybe push it in or pry it loose…

"Ouch!" Harry pulled back his hand, even as every eye in the room fixated on him at his sudden outcry. "The wall stung me," he said, wiping his now bleeding index finger on his robes.

Bella was about to berate him for not being careful when the ceiling opened up with a loud rumble, but instead of the stormy skies of Azkaban, it showed nothing but a brilliant white glow that forced them to shield their eyes. Harry barely noticed as the gems in the walls began to glow and pulse with the opening of the ceiling. A second rumble went through the hall, and the gems turned from silver to a blood-red hue that he assumed had given them their names.

Beams of light, their red a stark contrast to the white light from overhead, arced through the room, crisscrossing in the middle of the hall, forming a pattern Harry had never seen before. Before long, the light from above and the beams from the gems faded again, leaving them in the ambient light from the chamber itself, but what hovered in the center of the room was what had gotten everyone's attention.

Though the beams from the gems had been cut off, a glowing figure remained, sustained by magic. Lines of glowing red light crossed each other, forming a series of eight cubes, four of them stacked vertically with the remaining four arranged near the top, forming a kind of three-dimensional cross. It hummed serenely as it hovered, like a sleeping guardian, over the marble floor.

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