Chapter 33.3- Doom Days

Fire breathed, fire bloomed, fire arced with the slash of my wand and washed across the creatures as they approached, both destroying them and revealing them to my sight at the same time Tiny little buggers that crawled along the earth. Each on was as a crab, earth shell fang the ceiling, with six pincers being used both for mobility— and mot likely offense. Then there was their inside. Because they did noy go quietly when the fire took them. No.The raged, screeched, and when the hot flames I’d conjured finally penetrated those shells, they exploded. A shield charm by rifle had saved me from the worst effects of the first one, but the rest had been easy enough to avoid.

In the end, I walked down the tunnel with burns along my robes, but skin unmarred, and magic roaring for the next challenge. “Lumos” I intoned with a flick of my wand while I reshaped the simple spell with my intent. Instead of a single ball of light in front of my wand, I created multiple balls that shot out of my wand and raced down the tunnel, finally giving me a good look at what I was working with. The answer? Not a lot, apparently.

The tunnel was sparse, but well designed. The walls had grooves and images carved into them. This wasn’t just a task for the triwizard, I realised. This was someone’s life work. Why did I think so? A hunch, more like. But the fact that of all the moments in wizarding history they could have chosen to document, the story of Ekrizdis building the famed Azkaban Prison was a strange choice. Especially because Britain was the only nation that hadn’t declared him proscribed— leading many to suspect that he was actually a British National and we were just hiding the information about it. That was a theory I could get behind.

I walked down the tunnel for a few more minutes, until I suddenly found the world turned upside down. I was walking along the ceiling, not the floor anymore. The actual fuck? I froze for a second before sending my magic out of my body trying to overpower the illusion that the undoubtedly was, except that nothing happened when I did so. Reality did not even so much as stutter when I did. With a shrug, I kept walked along the ceiling, and then arms made of stone began to rise from he ground. They did not reach for me. Only moving to the roof and attaching themselves in front of me, forming multiple earthen pillars that I had to duck around to make progress.

It slowed me down almost o a halt as I had to squeeze between the pillars at different spots in order to make it through. Part of me ached to just blow up the hole thing ad bring it down. But I had little idea what kind of knock on effects destroying the pillars would have— especially because any spell I used powerful enough to destroy the pillars en masse would be too powerful to keep aimed at them. Add that to the fact that if I tried to pair it back, then whatever I used would only destroy a few at a time and in that case, I would still be moving nearly as slowly, with the only exception being my magic capacity slowly running out as time passed. This way let me conserve magic at the very least.