Harry Potter & Hell\'s Assassin

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At first Harry had began to believe that this place wasn’t as bad as Voldemort had had him believe. Apart from the various vicious creatures and strange beings that seemed to replace humans as the superior species, the place wasn’t all bad. He may be being held captive but the accommodations were a lot better than what he had received within Voldemort’s Headquarters. They gave him water every day and though it smelt and tasted bad, he drank it without comment. At least he had water now. They give him food too. That is to say, their idea of food, which was a suspicious looking piece of raw meat and some kind of tough root, which looked like it might belong to a plant similar to the wasted trees of the forest. He had resisted at first, upon seeing the bloody slab of venison, but eventually the stabbing hunger pains had won out.

He wondered how many edible things existed here. He received the same root and piece of meat every day. Still, there had to be more to eat than this? Could a species survive on root and meat alone? He wondered what animal it had come from…and what plant.

No, this plave did not seem as bad. And then one day he had been roused from a fitful sleep and blindfolded. Then he realized that this was as close to hell as one could get.

His training had begun.

* * * *

The first day he remembered being taken from his cell, blindfolded, and led to an unknown location. He had expected to be brought back to the Demon Lord and the large throne room but he never once saw it again. He had been brought instead to a smaller room. When the cloth had been taken from his eyes he had stared around himself in a growing sense of horror. They appeared to be in the bowls of the keep, no windows were in sight. The stones of the walls were such a dark grey that they almost seemed black. The only light source was several torches the burned in their holsters on the walls. Iron shackles hung from many places, bolted into both the walls and the ceiling with rusty iron pegs as thick as a human wrist. There were various tables laden with steel instruments and Harry quickly moved his eyes away from the wicked looking tools, he didn’t want to speculate what they may be used for. But the more he tried to find something safe to look at, something that wouldn’t make the raw meat in his stomach roil with nausea, he found himself gazing at something more horrid than before.

There were other tables clustered in a corner of the spacious chamber. One was a bed of nails. The long, crooked, rusty spikes stuck out grotesquely in random directions. Another table was lying vertical against the wall. There were restraints at the four corners where wrists and ankles would be tied into place. From where he stood, Harry could make out a break in the wooden surface and large gears that sat on their side of the break. A vivid memory of a muggle movie flashed through his head where a man had been strapped to a similar looking device and stretched in opposite directions. He felt his stomach lurch.

Swords, knives, daggers, axes and other weapons hung from the low ceiling. A cage, also, could be seen swinging in the corner farthest to his left. It looked just the right size for a person to sit in.

Ukimu Noul walked slowly to the center of the room and then turned to regard Harry. Those large eyes seemed to glow eerily in the dim light of the dungeon. They wracked over his face, no doubt taking in its pallid color. Harry had no doubt he was trembling from head to foot.

“This is where the beginning of your training will take place.” The Dachen informed him, his tone flat. “If you have a question, you may ask it.”

Harry drew his eyes off the instruments of torture and stared at the creature in disbelief. A question. Just one? God, he had thousands. Finally he settled on the one that had been bothering him the most.

“What is this training for?”

Ukimu Noul regarded him for a moment before answering bluntly.

“You will become an assassin.”

Harry stumbled backwards slightly in shock and then felt anger make a strong presence in his gut. “I will not kill for you!”

Immediately, pain tore through his body, shredding his nerves and lighting fire to his bones. When it ended, he was on the floor. Convulsions still wracked his body as he fought to breathe. He could taste dirt in his mouth and realized he was lying on his stomach, the side of his face pressed into the warm sand. He couldn’t bring himself to move onto his back and decided to stay how he was for a little longer.

Ukimu Noul walked towards him and stopped inches before his face, so close that Harry could smell the worn leather of the Dachen’s boots.

“You will not kill for me, human. You will kill for our Lord.”

Though the convulsions had stopped, waves of pain still washed over his body every few seconds, and he didn’t move.

“The task of training you has been given to me. After I am done with you, it is our Lord you will be dealing with. Be grateful your time with him has been delayed.”

The Dachen walked away from him then, over to the wall where he set to fiddling with a set of the many iron shackles.

“Get up.” he ordered, without looking at Harry.

The dark haired boy struggled to push his hands beneath him, hi muscles felt like jelly on his bones and they trembled violently with the effort to raise himself and, halfway to his knees, they gave out and he fell back on his front into the sand.

Again, the pain returned. It sent shock waves of fire through his body, emanating through the silver bands of the collar like an electrical current. It ended after a short time but Harry’s hand went to his throat, trying futilely to sooth the burning there.

“Get up.”

Harry gasped as pain shook his limbs. The adrenalin was the only thing that kept him from collapsing again and he managed to push himself to his knees. He momentarily thought about crawling to where the Dachen stood but his dignity would not allow it and he forced himself to his feet.

He was told to hold out his hands and he did so at once. He didn’t think he’d be able to remain conscious if he did not comply quickly enough. The manacles, like he had expected, were clamped tightly about his wrists, a bit tighter than necessary he thought. His eyes traveled from his wrists and up the length of the chain were they were set up in a pulley system and then rested on the iron pegs.

“What is your name, human?”

Harry turned his attention towards the little creature before him. He stared.

“You may answer.”

“My name is Harry. You know that.” He wondered if the extra comment would set off the collar and he tensed in anticipation.

Nothing happened.

The lipless mouth twitched a little and the large eyes narrowed barely a fraction.

“Harry,” he repeated. The name sounded strange and foreign on the creature’s tongue. “When you can no longer answer that question…your training will be complete.”

Harry swallowed convulsively and unconsciously shrank back against the wall. That did not bode well for him. Not that he had had much hope in the first place. But if the end of his training was marked when he forgot who he was…

He wondered if that was even possible. He could not visualize forgetting his life. He could never forget Hogwarts, or Sirius or Ron or Hermione. How could he? It just didn’t seem possible.

Ukimu Noul was approaching him now. He had gone and retrieved something from one of the tables across the room. Harry eyed it, his stomach feeling as if it were being twisted in an iron fist. The steel tool reminded him something of a corkscrew, a spiraled piece of metal jutting out from the handle and ending in a shiny, needle-like point.

The Dachen wrapped a gnarled hand around a nearby chain and pulled hard. Harry hadn’t thought it was attached to his manacles, but a second later, his hands were pulled above his head. His feet still touched the ground, but he was on his toes. Next, Ukimu Noul grabbed a fistful of the thin tunic covering Harry’s torso. A startled cry escaped his lips when the whole garment was ripped from his body, leaving him bare above the hips.

He felt a prick of pain in his side and looked down to see the corkscrew instrument being pressed into his flesh and Ukimu Noul staring up at him with those big, lifeless eyes. Goosebumps had appeared around the point of contact and had spread across Harry’s entire body. His skin became hypersensitive to touch. The materiel of his pants rubbed against his skin as he trembled and the slight contact felt irritating and corrosive. The edges of the manacles suddenly felt more abrasive and it cause his skin to burn when it moved beneath the metal. And he wasn’t sure if the increased pain in his side was because his nerves were sensitized with adrenalin or because Ukimu Noul was pressing harder.

“What is your name, human?”

Harry locked eyes with the little demon at his side and felt his lips pull back over his teeth in a snarl.

“Harry.”

Outside the walls of the castle were several Dachen, tending to a dry, desolate field. They dug at the loose dirt with poorly constructed gardening tools, their actions listless and mechanic.

As one of the workers bent down and wrapped an old hand around the base of a shriveled plant, it’s fingers twisted and bent with a lifetime of labor, a scream erupted from the looming castle. Primal and agonizing, it would make most creatures shudder in fear.

The Dachen hauled the crumpled plant from the earth without a tic, sending chunks of dry dirt and small rocks tumbling down either side of the raised column of soil.

* * * *

Harry was beginning to understand how he may lose himself. Every slash of a blade, every singe of a hot poker, every instrument that cut, carved or peeled made him forget for a second, made his mind go blank with anguish. Every few seconds of every day, his moments of consciousness were filled with pain. Sometimes, he could not see. Sometimes his vision was obscured by salty tears, filling his eyes faster than they could empty. And sometimes, Ukimu Noul would take a needle, as thin as a hair, and slide it into certain parts of his flesh, making his sight turn black and his nerves catch fire..

As the days passed, the pain became greater and greater. At times, Ukimu Noul would bring other Dachen with him and they would introduce new forms of torture. New Instruments. New tactics. New ways to try and break his mind.

He resisted with the stubbornness and resilience he was known for. He was withstanding, but he often wondered when he would be able to endure it no longer. He knew the time would come eventually and, when the torture had first began, he had hoped that he could hold out until he died, because surely he would. Surely he would not survive this treatment for more than a few days. The blood he lost in those hours, the energy it took to remain upright and conscious, were leeching the life out of his body. He could feel it every day.

But his hopes that he might die before he went insane collapsed after the third session. They had returned him to his cell, he still did not know where he had found the energy to stumble back. They had stripped him of his clothes, even his boots, and washed his body of blood and sand and grime with the foul smelling water. Then they had rubbed into his skin and wounds a black paste that looked like mud. It was cold and smelt of rotting foliage and the pain it caused was excruciating, just another form of torture. His arms and legs had been held down by four Dachen while he struggled. Ukimu Noul was smearing the vile concoction into a hole in his leg that went straight down to the bone when he lost consciousness. The pain had overcome him, like it did so often, but this time they did not revive him immediately to continue the torment. They left him in peace.

When he had awoken, he remembered his body had ached and felt heavy, like he had been cut open and filled with sand. By that point, he believed it was something the little demons just might do. Lifting his arms to hold his pounding head had been a difficult task and he feared opening his eyes. He could feel the warmth of the sand against the skin of his body and realized that he was still naked.

Eventually he had forced open his eyes to inspect the damage and his heart leapt to his throat at what he saw. His body was whole. There were no cuts or bruises or burns. His flesh was unmarred and unbroken.

For several hours he had puzzled over this. Why had they healed him? Had they grown tired of him? Of his stubbornness? Perhaps they hadn’t thought he would last so long? Or maybe they just realized he was not worth the time and effort. Then Ukimu Noul had returned and blindfolded him. He had been taken back to the torture chamber and the torment had began again.

He figured it out after the second time it had happened. After roughly three or four days of torture, he was returned to his cell again and healed. He understood then, they were healing him because they wanted him to live. They did not want him to die before he lost his mind. They had foreseen this and so were preventing it, healing his body entirely every few days to insure that he would survive the brutal torture that was needed to break him.

That had been weeks ago now and his life had fallen into a routine that involved the rotation of only three things: Pain, Ukimu and his name.

“What is your name, human?”

Snapping back to the present and absently wondering why he had been given such a reprieve, Harry glared halfheartedly up at the little creature from his spot on the floor.

“Harry.” he hissed.

His throat stung terribly. It was a constant tenderness that never went away. Not even when his body was healed did it fade. It was from the screaming. Often now, he would try and scream, unable to hold it back, and then he would cough. And cough and cough… Blood would splatter on his lips and down his chin, the coppery tang coating the inside of his mouth.

He did not talk. Mostly because there was no one to talk to. He hadn’t spoken in a long time. He didn’t know how long exactly because he could not tell the passing of night or day. And the torture sessions had torn his vocal cords to shreds. The only sound he made now was either to scream or to whisper his name when he was asked

“What is your name, human?”

Harry took pause. Hadn’t the Dachen just asked him that? He had answered, hadn’t he? He must have, the collar had not come to life. And usually the question was only asked in between cuts.

Burn. Name? Slice. Name? Tear. Name?

Harry was lying on his back. Funny, he had been sitting just a moment ago. He gazed down at his battered torso. There was a thin rod, about the thickness of a knitting needle, laced through the surface of the flesh of his abdomen. That had certainly not been there before.

Harry’s mind reeled. Had he been so absorbed in his own thoughts, had he receded so far into his mind that he had not even noticed, not felt the pain of a iron bar penetrating his flesh? He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach that had nothing to do with the metal bar sticking out of it.

They were succeeding. Slowly, they were breaking him.

He set his gaze on Ukimu Noul again and found his eyes drawn to his lipless mouth. He was smirking. Distantly, Harry realized he had not answered the question and the collar had not gone off.

“What is your name, human?”

Harry opened his mouth, tasting salty tears mixing in with the tang of blood. “Harry.” he whispered, his voice full of despair.


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