Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/12579664.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Fantastic_Beasts_and_Where_to_Find_Them_(Movies), Harry_Potter_-_J._K.
      Rowling
  Relationship:
      Credence_Barebone/Gellert_Grindelwald, Original_Percival_Graves/Gellert
      Grindelwald, Credence_Barebone/Original_Percival_Graves/Gellert
      Grindelwald
  Character:
      Credence_Barebone, Gellert_Grindelwald, Original_Percival_Graves
  Additional Tags:
      Extremely_Underage, Extremely_Dubious_Consent, Shota, muggle_prison_camp,
      War, Muggle/Wizard_Relations, very_unhappy_ones, Minor_Character_Death,
      Violence_against_Children, noir
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-10-31 Updated: 2018-02-12 Chapters: 4/? Words: 47223
****** Arms and the Boy ******
by HerrGrindelwald, x57
Summary
     "Commander Grindelwald... is the master of all muggles, little one."
     The guard came to a halt directly behind the boy, dropping two firm,
     gloved hands on the boy's shoulders and squeezing, in a threatening
     mockery of a massage. "He's the reason you've been liberated from
     your lives ofignoranceand brought into your proper place in the world
     order."
     Credence Barebones' life changed abruptly when Gellert Grindelwald's
     army swept through and conquered his little town. With Ma dead and
     the Second Salem church burned to cinders, Credence is rounded up
     with the other muggle children and marched toward an uncertain fate.
Notes
     Welcome to a round-robin-esque story written by myself (Piper/x57)
     and HerrGrindelwald. We hope you enjoy. - thepiperofhameln
     I hope you'll have as much fun reading this as x57 and I have writing
     it. Who doesn't need a little forbidden escapism? Mh? -H.G.
     [https://www.dropbox.com/s/6fgj0drosfvuryc/arms-and-the-boy-
     ao3heading2.jpg?raw=1]
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
- Arms and the Boy, by Wilfred Owen
See the end of the work for more notes
***** Chapter 1 *****
Credence almost fell when the boy behind him grabbed his shoulders to steady
himself. He grunted and bent his knees, but said nothing. The clay lay close to
the surface in this region, and the wizards had overturned the soil to build
The Camp. The endless rain had transformed the resulting mulch of clay and
earth into a slippery trap that alternately threatened to throw the children
flat on their backs or suck off their boots.
The wizards were not affected, of course. They rode beside the solemn column on
tall, dark horses, shepherding their young captives toward the camp gates. The
finely carved sticks they waved as they barked their commands were more
terrifying than any gun. Credence kept his shoulders drawn up to his ears and
his eyes on the ground ahead of him. He had seen firsthand what those sticks
could do, back in the army camp, before all the captive children were rounded
up and marched toward The Camp.
They weren't as many as they'd been.
Through the squelching of the muck beneath their feet and the clacking of the
horses beside them, the soft cries of the children were still audible. Whimpers
here and there. Heavy breathing all around. Not too loud, though. Credence
remembered the sparks, like licks of fire, that had stung the last boy who had
called out for his mother. As did they all.
Mary Lou’s Hell had sprung up from the depths of the earth, and its harbingers
had stormed down upon the town to snatch them all away. Her children. Children
who had not yet been worthy, clean, and righteous enough for her God had been
plucked from her grasp before they’d been saved. Credence knew that was how she
would have phrased it, and he could not help but wonder whether they were
headed for damnation now. Her screams still reverberated inside his head.
He nearly ran into the body in front of him when they came to a sudden stop,
only just managing to jerk back before it could happen. Driven by some
instinctual fear he could not restrain, he glanced up, needing to see why
they’d stopped. He’d learnt never to raise his eyes to his Ma, but now the fear
gripped him harder than it had ever before. Even when he was a child not old
enough yet to know his letters.
Credence tasted burnt air as the wizards raised their sticks, looking like
statues with their heavy coats, and sparks flew up out of them all at once.
Some of the children screamed, but this time there was no bloodshed and no
falling bodies. It was a signal, he realized, and before their little band, the
gates creaked and opened.
Credence startled at the sight of those gates. The Camp had looked so small in
the distance; a dreary, flat lump on the landscape, barely visible behind
sheets of rain. Up close, the wrought iron gates towered with an ominous
majesty Ma's church could never have hoped to match. Credence noticed an
unnatural iridescence shimmering deep in the dark metal, and he did not need to
be told that these gates, like so much else, were imbued with magic.
Some foolish curiosity kept Credence's eyes raised as they were marched
through. It was easier to keep his gaze aloft than to sneak glances. None of
the uniformed wizards seemed to be paying him much mind as they steered the
line and rendezvoused with their commanders and compatriots. They were probably
eager to get out of the rain as well, though none of them seemed as frightfully
cold as the children they herded.
"Muggles! Form a line! Single file! Three, two, one—done!"
Credence blinked and tried to see where the voice was coming from. There was
some confusion and crowding at the head of the line—and a moment later, a
shrill scream.
Before Credence's eyes, a small, blond boy, surely no older than six, rose high
into the air before them, wreathed in glimmering magic.
"Let's try that again! Single file! Three, two, one, DONE!"
Credence was jostled from all sides as the boys tripped over one another from
their disordered line to form an orderly one. Three seconds was not enough
time, and some were still tripping into place by the time the voice shouted
'done.'
The magic that surrounded the floating boy pulsed, and he screamed again,
clearly in pain. Credence could see the veins in his neck standing taut against
his fair skin.
"I said three! Two! One!"
"Done!" came a small, boyish voice from the line.
"That's right."
The boy in the air slowly floated back down to solid ground. Credence was
beginning to get the idea. He was shaking as they stood there, back to back in
the new single file line, much more orderly than they’d been before. The rush
left him trembling even more than the fact that they were now standing just
inside the gates, looking out at their captors. Pressed this close together,
Credence could feel the girl in front of him trembling just as much, and for
once he was glad to be so short for his age. She and the boy behind him were
taller, and all he wanted to do was shrink and disappear from sight.
The wizard who’d been shouting wheeled his horse around at the front of the
line, dangerously close, and a few of the children startled so much they fell
back into the mud.
“Up, now! There will be no dawdling here!”
They all flinched, anticipating the wooden stick that was brandished a moment
later. With a flick, the children were pulled to their feet like marionettes on
strings. It did not look pleasant. They cried out, but one was noticeably
shriller than the others and when Credence allowed himself to look again, he
saw that the boy’s leg had been twisted into an awkward angle. He stood on the
mangled limb anyway, not daring to fall again.
But the horse was moving down the line and the wizard began inspecting each of
them, making sure no one was out of place, with that stick still raised too
high in the air to know where he would strike next.
It was the wizards’ unpredictability that kept them on edge, always vigilant
for the next command. In this, at least, Credence had an advantage: he'd lived
his whole life in a state of tension, reading Ma's every movement and mood. So
far, he had not tasted the invisible lash of magic, though he'd been shoved
along a few times. Didn't matter. He knew how it would go. Even the most
earnest efforts at obedience could only stay the rod so long.
This bitter wisdom, too, was an advantage.
A bright flash lit the mud around Credence's boots, and for a moment he thought
it was lightning—but instead of the sound of thunder, the flash was followed by
a child's wail. A few moments later, the flash went off again, and another wail
was heard. And then again. And then the line began to shuffle forward.
The wizards that flanked the line on horseback kept them moving with little
zaps to their ankles and commands that sounded almost bored. Credence could
tell that whatever was making the flash was waiting for him at the front of the
line, though he didn't dare stick his head out to peek. The only thing he could
glean with his wandering eyes was that they were crossing a gap that stretched
between the outer wall and the inner structures, which all looked like
identical black blocks in the dim rain.
Credence's heart sank. The wide gap made sense.
Any child making for the wall, whether sneaking or running, would be easily
seen.
His breath was coming faster. Too fast. These little realizations were too
much. Credence may have been used to living under the sting of Ma’s lashes, but
the more he noticed about this place, the more it began to dawn on him what he
could be walking into. The other children had no idea. If any of them realized
what their captors were thinking or knew that the lashings and intimidations
would not stop if they only got past this point, they didn’t show it. Credence
tried desperately to slow his breathing, to not look for an escape, to keep
moving forward, but it was hard.
The creak and clack of metal behind them resounded through his bones. The gates
had closed. They were locked in, and even if he had thought there could be hope
of escape before, there was none now.
Someone’s bloodied hand grabbed his shoulder when the line jostled and the
wizards shouted at them to keep moving. Credence was startled by it, dark and
gleaming there just beside him, and it occurred to him that he didn’t know
whose blood it was—that of the boy behind him, or one of the boy’s loved ones,
like his mother, or father, or any of the number of bodies that lay strewn
across the town after the wizards had come.
He couldn’t linger long on the thought before his attention was forced to the
front of the line, where he was drawing close enough to see what was happening.
A man stood there, waiting as each child was fetched forward, then reached out,
grabbed their arm, and raised the stick in his hand. The subsequent flash of
light and the scream that followed obscured Credence’s vision and made him duck
his head. No matter how much he knew that he needed to quell his fear, that his
steps needed to be steady, he couldn’t help his trembling.
He looked up again just as the girl in front of him was shoved away, crying,
stumbling, and clutching at her arm, and before Credence had time to react, the
man grabbed him next and lifted his arm into the air. The stick rose, pointing
at his flesh, and the same blinding light shot out of the tip and went searing
through his arm.
Credence screamed.
"O-ho...! A screamer, that one... Very good, lad. Let it out. Better for ye
that way."
Credence's ears were still ringing from the sound of his own cry, and his eyes
were blinded from the flash, when a large hand grabbed him firmly by the back
of the neck and marched him forward. He had a vague impression of passing under
a small archway, and then he was abruptly brought to a halt. Deposited.
Credence did not question. He planted his feet, and did not stir from the spot.
But as he heard footsteps retreating in the squelching mud, he could not help a
glance at his arm.
Bright dots swam in his vision, but there was a glow beyond the blindness that
seemed to pass through it all like an image beyond sight. Credence blinked, and
realized he could still "see" it when his eyes were closed—in a colorless,
lightless way he found incomprehensible.
Tentatively, he curled one tiny finger around the hem of his sodden sleeve. The
roughspun fabric clung wetly to his skin, chafing him badly, but the strange
glow was pulsing just below it, on his forearm. It felt as though a bullet of
light had gone through the heel of his palm, up into his forearm, and settled
there, making his arm throb as it found a home in his flesh.
He didn’t know whether to risk a peek. Nothing could hurt worse than what he'd
just experienced, he decided. While his heart was still brave, he lifted his
sleeve, and saw.
There, glowing beneath the surface of his skin, was a perfect triangle. Nestled
within was a circle, and within that again, a line—slightly fatter in the
middle, like a cat's eye, watching.
His skin crawled. He didn’t want to touch it, but he wanted to cover it.
The children in front of him were still crying and clutching at their arms. It
didn’t look like anything bad would happen if he did, but he couldn’t help the
thought that touching this magic would be a terrible idea.
Somehow, they’d managed to keep their line even after the branding. The wizard
who’d herded them inside was waiting at the very front, where the first boy was
still whimpering.
“Hurry it up, we haven’t got all day!” he shouted, waving his stick to corral
them back into order as they rejoined the line, one by one.
By the time the last child had been branded, they were back into place, wounded
and sniffling, but not daring to step out of line. Credence felt the hot throb
of pain more sharply than the chill of the rain and was sure that he was
sweating just as much as he was shaking now. Some of the other children looked
a little green.
The wizard rocked back in his seat and surveyed them with the most insincere
smile Credence had ever seen. “Welcome back to school, boys and girls! Class is
now in session.”
If this was some kind of joke, neither Credence nor any of the other children
seemed to get it.
Girls were sorted into their own line and marched out of sight to the east end
of camp. The remaining boys were made to count off, one through four, and were
assigned their housemates as simply and randomly as that. They were already
standing in the thick of the western dorms, it turned out, though Credence
would not have judged the squat, dark blocks that surrounded them to be
residential buildings.
The wizards finally dismounted their horses and split off to lead the four
smaller groups into four separate, but identical, buildings. By then, it was
raining so heavily that Credence felt weighed down by the sheer force of the
water. Or perhaps that was exhaustion, gripping him in a fresh wave as the
searing in his forearm receded into a dull, distracting throb. Even if he could
collapse right there in the mud, he didn't think he could sleep with the pain.
When the door to his dormitory finally creaked open and Credence was lead
inside, what he saw was a room that was only distinguishable from the gloom
outside in that it was blessedly, blessedly dry. Otherwise, it held none of the
comforts of a proper home. The walls were thin and the windows rattled in their
frames as the wind howled. The floor was hard-packed earth, kept dry by a layer
of straw. No walls divided the many bunks, nor even the privy pots, though some
flimsy curtains separated the latter.
There were boys already occupying some of the bunks, and they sat up from their
slumber when they heard noises at the door, peering fearfully at the newcomers.
Credence did not think it was possible for any place to feel more miserable
than Ma's church, but he was wrong. He'd had his own bed, there; his own
private room. He'd even had some personal possessions, and a place to store
them. He'd had a hardwood floor, and lamps he could light of his own accord.
To think he had taken all that for granted. This was surely his punishment for
wanting more from life.
“Go on.”
A heavy hand shoved his shoulder, and Credence quickly ducked his head and
hurried along. That was all the prompting the other boys needed to scurry into
the center of the room. Punish one, and the rest would fall into line. But
Credence already knew that.
“Now there’s a smart one,” the man laughed, voice too loud in the confines of
the room. The boys sitting upon the bunks tensed, but none so much as the new
arrivals. “See that.”
Credence knew he was being pointed at, but with his shoulders up and his back
straight and his eyes on the floor, he did not dare meet the wizard’s eye.
“Now that is model behavior. I want you all to take a good long look at the new
kid here, and the next time I see you, you better be just as obedient.”
Credence swallowed silently. His gut churned, being singled out like this,
knowing it was not good. He knew that tone of voice. This was a man who liked
to hear himself talk, who liked to play games, and he began to feel the eyes of
the others on him soon enough. Still, all he could do was stand there,
motionless, not daring to step a toe out of line.
“Only with obedience can any of you do well here. Isn’t that right, boy?” the
wizard asked, punching the question through the air.
The beat of silence that followed told Credence that he needed to answer no
matter how much ice was in his veins. He opened his mouth and spoke as loud as
he could, which wasn’t very loud at all, “Yes, sir.”
A sharp jab between his shoulder blades had Credence tripping forward, but he
caught himself and shot back up into his guarded position, like a pin at the
faire.
"Yes, master," the wizard corrected, an infuriating smugness lacing every
syllable of his voice. "That is what we are, boy. Your masters. All wizards are
your masters."
"Yes... master."
Credence's voice was so hoarse, he wasn't sure he could be heard. He stood firm
as a stump, his middle back tingling in anticipation of another blow. Credence,
who had experience with these matters, knew that blows often came to punctuate
points as well as make them.
But when the wizard touched him again, it was not a blow. A leather-gloved hand
landed on his head and mussed his hair. When it retreated, Credence was still
waiting for pain—but that never came. He realized, with a sinking gut, that the
gesture had been... affectionate. As one might be affectionate with an obedient
dog.
"To bed! All of you! Find an open bunk. The rest of your lives begin tomorrow."
The way the wizard drawled it, the promise of new life was imbued with all the
threat of misery they anticipated. Before Credence could unglue his legs from
his little spot of floor, he felt the wizard's breath against the shell of his
ear, and a private, comment growled:
"Bet you like the bottom bunk."
His face heated. Tingles of another, deeper kind of fear shot through his body
all the way from his head to his frozen toes, but Credence managed to keep his
expression in place; managed not to look at the man. He stood still until he
was released and the wizard straightened, watching as the boys climbed swiftly
into bed, or searched for one.
That was Credence’s only chance to get away. They’d been given an order and he
had to find a bunk or risk being singled out and punished, or…. He didn’t want
to think about anything more than that. He wasn’t an idiot. Ma may not have
allowed such talk in her presence or the house of God, but Credence had heard
the other children talk. Especially the older boys from the neighborhood who
liked to taunt them, sometimes threaten them. Credence had figured out what
they meant.
The wizard’s watchful gaze made Credence race that much faster to find a bed,
top or bottom, he did not care.
Just when he thought he’d found one on top, however, another boy kicked him
away and scrambled up the shaky few boards that made up a ladder. He only
barely managed not to fall, but a split second later he realized the bottom bed
seemed to be empty and jumped into it. The pillow smelled of must and the
blanket wasn’t much of a blanket at all, but Credence pulled it up over his
shoulders as fast as he could, realizing only then that he had forgotten to
take off his shoes. It didn’t matter, he told himself. All that mattered was
that this man left them alone.
Thankfully, the wizard was more interested in a hot meal and a cot of his own
than in sating his sadism further that night. The door slammed shut with a
piteous whine of its hinges, and Credence was left in a darkness that was
punctuated only by a dim blue flame in a swinging lamp, and the occasional
flash of lightning.
He'd hoped to simply kick off his shoes and try to sleep his terrible ordeal
away, but the other boys immediately began to chatter.
"Welcome to hell," one of them said bitterly; an older boy, whose voice had
begun to change.
"I'm Cress," said another. "What're your names?"
"Doesn't matter," someone else cut in, with a thick English accent. "They just
call you 'muggle' anyhow. That's all our names now. You, muggle, over there."
"How long have you all been here?"
One of the newcomers found his voice, though it was ragged from the rain—and
from screaming.
"I been here since summertime," the English boy said. "Since my birthday. In
June. Not summertime no more... S'cold now..."
"It's November," one of the newcomers squeaked. "November twenty-second."
"I tried to count the days at first," said the oldest boy. "But you give up
tryin' that sort of thing after a while."
Credence listened to the chatter, but did not participate. Instead, he focused
on unlacing his shoes as quietly as possible, hoping not to draw any attention
to himself.
"What- what were those things they put on our arms?"
"That's your chain. They can use it to find you. No matter where you are. And
they can make it hurt, too. Even if you're not there in front of them."
Credence stopped halfway through unlacing his second shoe, and it was all he
could do not to sob. The tears pressed fearfully at his eyes, and he squeezed
them shut, holding his breath so he wouldn't make a sound.
He had always been able to hide, at the very least. And when Ma's footsteps
retreated, he knew the pain was over. The thought that he could not even escape
their punishments when he was alone with his own thoughts was almost too much
to bear. Alone had always protected him. It was too much to have that refuge
taken away as well.
Was it automatic, he wondered? If one of them, marked with the glowing symbol,
stepped foot outside the camp, would they be hurt? Would sirens ring out? Or
did the wizards have to notice them missing and activate it? This new threat
filled him with questions, but they fought against his determination to stay
quiet. The two instincts warred within him.
Ma would have laughed.
‘Of course the Devil’s minions would be able to find you wherever you go. Just
as you cannot hide from the eyes of God.’
Someone began crying.
Now that the wizards were gone, it broke out. First one, quiet voice, and then
another, muffled, but louder than they were allowed to be on the march
there—except during the branding. The boys that were talking ignored it. Like
this was normal.
“What is this place?” one of the boys Credence knew as Johan asked. He had been
a regular at Mary Lou’s soup offerings, but didn’t stick around much after the
requisite readings from the Bible. Credence thought he was bold. “Are we like
prisoners now?”
The older boy, sitting on one of the lower bunks, shrugged. “Basically. Only
kids end up here. They say they’re gonna teach us things, but mostly you just
get put to work.”
Credence finally got his other shoe off. He set it down as silently as he could
and moved to curl back under the blanket, peering out at the others across from
him. Those he’d arrived with weren’t all children he recognized. Some were from
nicer parts of town. But on all of them, even the ones who’d been there for a
time already, Credence could make out a faint glow under the sleeves of their
clothing.
If he stayed quiet that night, and let the others forget that he was supposedly
a model prisoner, then maybe he could ask more questions tomorrow.
===============================================================================
The chance for questions never came.
Credence was woken by a shrill, head-splitting whistle and shouted commands.
"Out of bed! Three, two, one-"
"Done!" shouted a chorus of groggy voices—followed shortly by wails and moans
from the boys who were not accustomed to switching from a dead sleep to
standing on their feet in a matter of seconds.
Credence was one of those boys. A sharp zap stung the stole of his foot, and he
yelped as he flew to his feet, embarrassed by the high pitch of his own voice.
"I expect a line at the door in ten minutes! And bunks made!"
Some of the boys raced for the privy pots to do their morning business, while
others began folding neat corners on their bunks. Credence was so overwhelmed
with the rush of motion, he only stood there, dazed. Perhaps he could sleep...?
For eight more minutes...?
The mark on his forearm pulsed, as if in warning, and Credence woke up
instantly. Could it detect defiant thoughts?
He'd just finished making his bed when one of the other boys strolled past and
tugged all his neatly tucked sheets free. Credence heard a few sniggers. He
froze.
A familiar instinct overtook him. Something that compressed him until he was
standing taut as stone with all his resentful feelings packed as tight as coal
into his center. He managed to unlock his joints and make the bed again—but the
wizard came in to march them out just as he'd finished, and he didn't have an
opportunity to relieve his full bladder. He marched into the cold, bright
morning with it jostling unpleasantly inside him, and balled his fists at his
sides. The rain had finally stopped, but even in the light of day, the camp was
colorless, all various shades of brown and black.
The morning’s chill had always held a certain quality that differentiated it
from that of the day. Maybe it had something to do with the frost upon the
ground; that it had dipped those few degrees colder overnight and that Credence
would still long for bed for a few more hours yet. He had never liked it.
Mornings being thrust out into the streets of his old town to hand out leaflets
were always unpleasant, but this, he feared, bode worse.
He fought to pull his head out of the dark place it had gone and just deal with
it. He’d been helpless at Ma’s church, and he was helpless here. The knowledge
that there was nothing he could do should have soothed him, but it only made
things more difficult.
The distant sound of a shouting voice caught Credence’s ear. Across the packed
roads and squat, wooden buildings, he could see another line of children with a
witch in front of them, her voice and movements sharp as she paced. It was the
girls, he realized, who had been segregated to the other side of the camp.
His attention was quickly brought back to his own group when the wizard who’d
woken them stepped out in front.
“Listen up, muggles!” He planted his feet and folded his arms behind his back,
the very picture of a smug soldier. “This morning you’re going to be digging
out rocks on the plot for another dormitory. We’re expanding, you see, because
all you little muggle vermin spread like vermin. Pretty soon this world
wouldn’t be able to contain you if we don’t do something about it. And for all
you newcomers—you work for your breakfast here.”
Picking up rocks.
Credence's shoulders slumped. It sounded just as tedious as handing out
leaflets, though perhaps a little easier on his fragile disposition, since no
one would be slapping leaflets out of his hand or snarling at his offering.
Sure, it sounded more physically demanding, but Credence was healthy enough,
though he looked painfully pale. This was better, he told himself. All he had
to do was keep his head down.
By the time he had a cold bowl of breakfast oats in hand, he knew how wrong
he'd been. The work wasn't really work: it was just an opportunity for the
wizards to drive home who was really in charge. They could lift the damn rocks
with their magic sticks if they wanted to—they rubbed as much in the children’s
faces. Credence's fingers were numb from touching so many stupid rocks, and his
muscles burned in a way he'd never experienced. He wished the oats in his bowl
were warm, but nothing was warm here. It was as if the cold settled deeper each
passing hour. It lived in his bones, now. He was sure he would never feel warm
again.
It had been bad enough with his threadbare clothes back at Ma’s. Now he had the
same threadbare clothes here, mucking about in the mud and making it even
worse. Most of the other children at least had better trousers and thicker
shirts, although not all. Credence spotted a few who looked like they’d been
wearing nice clothes when they were captured. Though he noticed the ones who’d
been there longer all wore gray.
Everything had been a whirlwind since the attack. Moving too fast and too slow
all at once. He couldn’t believe they’d only been captured for…two days, now.
Was that it? Everything had been such a jumble. He’d thought he and the other
children were going to die while they were rounded up and held behind faintly
glowing fences amid the wizarding army, until they were marched off. Until they
arrived here.
It didn’t seem that anyone knew what this camp was. Not really. The wizards
said it was to teach them to be proper muggles. The children here just repeated
that sentiment, although there wasn’t much real teaching going on. Or maybe
Credence didn’t understand it yet. Maybe, he began to suspect, the only thing
they needed to learn to become ‘proper muggles’ was subservience.
Credence watched the children who’d been there the longest. They all ate
quickly. He forced himself to do the same.
Two of the newcomers had been punished for whispering to each other while they
picked up rocks. Their punishment had been swift and brutal, leaving both on
their backs with the mere swish of a wizard’s stick, but all the older children
had kept their heads down and kept working. No one but the new ones even
glanced their way, and it was very clear that this was the norm here.
Punishment was to be expected for stepping out of line, no matter what was
asked of them, and the other children would not help.
At the fifteen-minute break for breakfast, the wizards stepped away and took
out a pipe—one that blew wafts of green smoke into the air—and for the first
time since they awoke, the children started to chatter quietly among
themselves.
"Psst... New kid."
It took Credence a long moment to realize he was being addressed. He froze,
staring into the face of a grinning boy, younger than him, whose two front
teeth had just barely started to grow in where his milk teeth had been. How
could anyone grin in a place like this?
"I heard the guards talking," the kid lisped on. "Commander Grindelwald sacked
your city. Didn't he."
The kid's attempt to say 'sacked your city' landed some spittle on Credence's
hands, and he tucked them into his underarms.
Thankfully, someone next to him answered on his behalf.
"Who's Grindelwald?"
His question rang out a little too loudly, and attracted the attention of a
guard. It put a queer feeling in Credence's tummy, watching the wizard saunter
over in that form-fitted uniform, with its sharply tapered shoulders and long,
black cloak, fluttering aside to reveal slimly tailored hips. There was such an
air of power about each of their wizarding captors. And why wouldn't there be?
They could do anything they wanted by waving a stick.
"Commander Grindelwald... is the master of all muggles, little one." The guard
came to a halt directly behind the boy, dropping two firm, gloved hands on the
boy's shoulders and squeezing, in a threatening mockery of a massage. "He's the
reason you've been liberated from your lives of ignorance and brought into your
proper place in the world order. You'll learn all about it in your classes...
The way muggles have hunted and disparaged wizardkind for generations... and
wizards, out of kindness, never lifted a hand to retaliate. We hid in the
shadows and got out of your way while you bred like pests and sprawled across
the landscape... driving us out of our ancient homes..."
The wizard's voice was taking on an almost mocking, operatic quality—but
Credence could tell he believed every word he was speaking.
"But. That's all changed now. Hasn't it," the wizard concluded with a stale
smile, giving the terrified boy beneath him a reassuring pat.
The rest of the boys shrank back as he strolled around the table, muttering
something Credence didn’t catch and lighting up the end of his stick with a
short series of numbers. The time, Credence realized. They only had a few
minutes more left to eat.
Credence didn’t know when he’d next have the chance to ask any of the questions
he’d had that morning. It was now or possibly never. He hunched over his empty
bowl and spoke quietly.
“How well can they track us with these glowing… marks? Does it raise an alarm
or something if you go where you’re not supposed to? Or do they have to go
looking for you with it, or…?”
He looked around the table to the other boys, but most of them were just
staring at him. A few cast their eyes around the table. “Glowing?” the boy with
the English accent asked. “You mean the marks on our arms, yeah?”
Credence blinked. “Y-yeah?” Had he said something wrong? They were looking at
him in confusion.
The same boy spoke up again. “Yours glows?”
Credence glanced down at his arm. Faintly, he could still see the light under
his sleeve, even through the dirt. He glanced around the table and all the boys
were looking at him now, but the wizards had gone back to their pipe, and
didn’t notice the shift. One of them was keeping watch on the time with the
little glowing numbers in the air.
Careful to keep an eye on them, Credence raised his arm and pulled back the
sleeve for the others to see, although he didn’t know why they didn’t believe
him. Theirs didn’t look any different.
“Psh, see?” the other boy said, making a flippant gesture. Credence glanced
between the boys as they rolled their eyes, suddenly becoming very
uninterested. “Don’t make stuff up like that or you’ll get your arse kicked
here, yeah? And as for what they can do, dunno how it works, exactly. One way
or another, they just know.”
“Yeah, and if you get caught being somewhere you’re not supposed to be…,”
another boy chimed in.
A round of somber hums and nods followed as the more longstanding residents
echoed the unspoken warning.
Credence felt pins and needles all over. His eyes passed furtively over the
rows of glowing forearms as his paranoia grew. Were they hazing him because of
what the guard said last night? Messing with his head?
It wasn't until Credence was putting his empty bowl on the serving tray that he
noticed the blood on his hands. He'd been making tight little fists in his lap,
as he often did when he was enduring something unpleasant. Only, his skin had
been so punished by recent abuses that it cracked over his bony knuckles.
Credence's hands were so cold, he hadn't even felt it.
Embarrassed, he wiped his hands off on his dirty clothes and hurried into
formation so that they could march to their next locale. A classroom, it turned
out. At least, they called it that; to Credence, it looked more like Ma's
church, with pew-like rows of seating in a dreary space where flashy,
opinionated posters were the only source of color. The posters declared the
coming of a new age, with stylized illustrations of witches and wizards gazing
toward a rising sun in noble profile, or wands spilling sparkling slogans, or
beasts of legend soaring through bold headlines like "FREE" and "REVOLUTION."
As they piled into their seats, one poster in particular drew Credence's
attention. It featured two fisted hands, stretched out before the viewer, with
heavy shackles that burst open with a magical glow, again and again, under the
words: "Out of the shadows at last."
He was still staring at it when a voice at the head of the classroom shouted:
"One, two, three—eyes on me!"
The more experienced boys echoed: "One, two—eyes on you!"
Credence couldn't help but notice that they had no pencils, no paper, and no
surface to write on. Apparently, this classroom was only for looking and
listening—not acting.
Their teacher was a sharp-eyed, sandy-haired wizard who dressed down for the
occasion only by removing his heavy outer cloak and gloves. He leaned over the
desk at the front of the room as he took stock of the class.
Credence wanted to be grateful that they were inside, resting now, and at least
out of the wind, but he could not fight the trepidation this man’s bearing
instilled in him. Somehow he felt like they’d been under less scrutiny when
they’d been hauling rocks outside.
“Welcome newcomers,” the man began in a calm tone after he had thoroughly
counted them, possibly memorized each of their faces. “You will join in the
lesson where we are now. Any catch-up must be done on your own time. Is that
understood?”
Credence thought there would be hesitation, but half the voices in the class
called back immediately. “Yes, master!” A cascade of murmurs from the new
children followed, catching on a little late, and, startled, Credence joined in
ever so quietly.
The wizard looked like he’d been expecting that. He gave a long pause before
smiling, and not kindly. “When I ask you a question in this classroom, I expect
you to be quick with an answer. If I can count to three before you begin, there
will be punishment. If you talk out of turn, there will be punishment. If you
question me, there will be more punishment. Now,” he straightened, “who can
tell me why a muggle is classified as a ‘beast’ rather than a ‘being’?”
And so the class went on.
Only the children who’d been there for a long time raised their hands to speak,
and it quickly became apparent that the only reason they did so was to not be
called upon when they didn’t have an answer ready.
Sometimes the instructor would pick up a heavy book and read them a paragraph
of what sounded like history, but it was history Credence had never heard
before. Afterward, he’d call on a few unfortunate children to summarize what
he’d read. There were lines he had them all chant in unison, repeated over
enough times for the new children to remember, and Credence knew he would spend
the rest of the day fighting to get the sing-song voices out of his thoughts.
His head was like the inside of a bell by the time he left the classroom, with
strange new notions reverberating inside. Somehow, they'd managed to turn
information into a sort of assault. Credence normally loved to read and learn
new things, but this class only left him bewildered and small. He was still
turning over the notion of a "spark" in his head, and how he didn't have it,
and how that meant he wasn't even a person, really, when two wizards in blue
intercepted their line and exchanged a few words with their chaperone. Shortly
after, all the new boys were pulled out of line and made to march after the new
wizards to some other identical, dreary place within the compound.
Credence was beginning to feel like he marched every time he closed his eyes,
even when he was sitting down. Pretty soon he'd be marching in his dreams.
He was surprised when the building they entered was actually a proper building,
with insulated walls and linoleum floors. They passed through an area where
more blue-clad wizards were hard at work, and Credence caught a glimpse of
someone filling a vial with some viscous liquid that looked suspiciously like
blood. The same substance was splattered on the wizard’s apron. He stretched
his neck to see more, but the worker disappeared behind a translucent plastic
sheet. Was this some sort of hospital?
They were lead out of the nicer area and down a cramped, damp hallway, lit only
by the magic sticks of the wizards who flanked them front and rear. At the end
of the hallway, their leader turned and pushed open a door, beyond which the
smell of chlorine emanated so strongly that the inside of Credence's nose
burned.
"You'll remove your clothes and throw them in the basket to the left, then
proceed to the showers."
Credence went cold all over. Remove his clothes...? In... in front of them?
The line began to file into the room, but the person behind Credence bumped
into him. Credence tried to unfreeze his legs, but he couldn't move. He was
paralyzed from head to toe. They had hurt him and exhausted him and harassed
him, but this... this was too much. His modesty—he couldn't give that up. He
couldn't.
The boys behind him began to grow agitated. Not only was the line not moving
when they’d learned very quickly how important it was to follow orders, but
they, too, were unsure about the idea. If it had not been the other new boys,
Credence would probably have been pushed forward without a second thought.
“I said move!” the wizard barked, going suddenly from perfunctory to biting.
It caused Credence to jump into action before he realized what he was doing. He
was already a few steps forward, following the other boys with his heart in his
throat before he could think to stop himself. He was trembling again,
surrounded by stripping boys.
Some were quicker than others, obviously optimistic at the prospect of a shower
and unworried about their nudity. And some were more hesitant, removing their
clothing slowly and trying to hide as much as possible as they did so.
Credence was the only one not following directions as he stood, mortified, in
the midst of his naked peers. It was not that the thought of nudity had never
occurred to him outside of Ma’s teachings before. It was that it had, and he
knew how bad those thoughts were, if she or the other children at the church
ever knew. If he had not had unclean thoughts in the first place, he would
never have had to worry.
The wizard nearest them noticed. He unfolded his arms, stick in one hand, and
took a step towards Credence.
It had an immediate effect. Credence’s back straightened and his hands shot up
to his collar. Swiftly, he began to undo it.
His fingers were halfway down the row of buttons on his shirt when he
registered that the warm feeling on his face was tears. He tried to stop it. He
hadn’t cried in front of anyone in a long time, but that thought only made it
worse. A quiet sob escaped his mouth. Thin, whinging, and pathetic, the sounds
spilled out and condemned him. He could feel every eye in the room turning his
way.
"Shut up," snapped the wizard who had drawn his weapon.
Credence wanted to. But it didn't matter now. The sounds wouldn't stop, and the
deeper he dug his hole, the more he surrendered to his mewlish wails. His
fingers were trembling violently and one of the buttons caught on a loose
thread and tangled so badly that he couldn't free it in his shaken state. He
didn't understand how the undressing could feel like such a violation when it
was his own fingers baring his skin—but it did.
"Oh for fuck's sake..." The wizard stepped right into Credence's space—and put
his stick away. Credence was confused and irrationally relieved for half a
breath, before the wizard grabbed his shirt in tight-knuckled fists and ripped
the remainder of it open.
Credence heard buttons dance across the cool, concrete floor.
His wails died off into numb shock.
He stood, unmoving, as the wizard briskly and efficiently stripped off the
remainder of his clothing. His dread from a moment ago had been replaced by the
saving grace of blankness.
Somehow, this was better. Not really having a choice.
"Now get in the shower," the wizard murmured, snatching up Credence's clothes
irately and marching off. The man sounded more tired than angry. Credence
couldn't explain why, but he felt strangely grateful to him.
On legs that moved of their own accord and shoulders hunched into himself,
Credence followed the other boys. There was no hiding his nudity, but they
didn’t look at him now. No one looked at anyone much as they searched for the
handles to turn on the water.
The showers were all along one wall of the room, with a cold, linoleum floor
that dipped into a small drain at the center. There were not enough shower
heads for all of them, so several boys crowded around each.
As soon as one turned on, the boys under it let out a quiet yelp. The water was
cold. Frantically, they tried to turn the handle every which way to get it
warmer, but only looked like they had marginal luck. In quick succession, the
rest of the showers turned on. Credence, too, yelped when the sting of ice
water matched with incredible pressure touched his skin. All the boys in his
group jumped back, and then, quickly, darted their arms under the spray,
getting themselves as clean as they could a little bit at a time.
“There’s soap in the alcoves next to your showers,” the same wizard said,
pacing slowly on the other side of the room. “Use it.”
Credence, being closest to the wall, saw it first. He didn’t think before he
grabbed it. Thoughts of cleanliness rushed through the dull shock still
lingering in his mind. It wasn’t simply a selfish thought. Ma had always taught
her children that cleanliness and order were praised in the eyes of God. It may
have been a small relief, but it was a relief nonetheless.
Hurriedly, Credence worked up a lather and ran the soap over his body before
handing it to the next boy. He tried to touch himself as little as possible,
aware of the others standing so close. Everyone washed in silent compliance.
The icy water stopped stinging so badly once his fingers and toes went numb,
and Credence even bowed his head under the jetting spray to rinse some grease
out of his hair.
As always, any silence that grew too comfortable was quickly corrected.
"Wash everywhere!" a nasally voice cut through the air.
Credence rubbed water from his eyes and squinted toward the source of the
voice. It was the wizard who'd followed them in the rear. Credence had hardly
cast him a glance, but now that he saw the man stalking forward with his hands
behind his back and his long, pointed nose held high in the air, Credence knew
at once that this was someone he would hate. The wizard had sky blue eyes
squinted into thin slits, and a single streak of yellow facial hair that lay
like a pondering finger from his chin to his bottom lip.
"I see a lot of dirty bottoms!" he scolded, displeasure in his tone but a grin
on his narrow face. "We don't want dirty bottoms here at camp. You there,
lad..."
The man pointed, and Credence followed his finger to a confused little boy with
smooth, creamed coffee skin and a mop of black curls. Adam, Credence recalled.
He'd thought the boy was a girl at first, and so had the wizards; they'd peeked
inside his waistband before sorting him into the boys' line. Adam seemed like
he was barely keeping up, and Credence suspected his German wasn't very good.
"Yes... master?" Adam asked, his accent thick.
"Show your muggle friends how to wash. Get some lather on that hand."
When Adam just stood and stared, the wizard grasped his wrist roughly and
pressed the soap to his palm, rubbing in harsh circles until Adam's palm was
dripping with lather.
"Now put it here."
The wizard wrenched the boy's arm behind his back and thrust it at the crack
between the boy's lower cheeks.
The boy went rigid, and so did Credence.
A lot of the nearby boys froze as well, and the wizard looked up at them with
his brows raised and a falsely sincere smile on his face. “That’s right, watch
closely now.”
Credence was sure the boy’s face would have been red if it hadn’t gone white
from the cold and probably the fear. But even though the fear was evident on
his face, he did his best to stand there and comply with the way the wizard was
moving his hand. He looked like he just wanted it to be over with as fast as
possible.
“Now then, time for the other side.”
The wizard lathered up Adam’s hands again, and this time he cringed, knowing
what was coming before his hand was brought down between his legs. The wizard
worked the boy’s hand over his small cock and balls, up and down in a way that
was difficult to watch. In any other situation, it might have looked
pleasurable. It did not seem to be so now.
Soon enough, the wizard deemed his demonstration finished and rinsed off his
hand. Adam trembled where he stood, and Credence could understand why he didn’t
dare move away, even if he was technically released.
The wizard glanced around. “What are you waiting for, your turns?”
With that simple question, all the boys jumped back into motion, grabbing for
the soap and washing their private parts before they could be told they weren’t
doing it properly. That they needed ‘help’.
The wizard shook his hand, dried it with a flick of his stick, and then folded
his arms behind his back again before he paced the length of the showers.
His colleagues did not intervene. Credence glanced at them out of the corner of
his eye and found them still on the other side of the room, leaning against the
wall in subdued conversation, looking bored. Even the one who had ripped his
shirt before, but hadn’t been worse than he’d needed to be.
For some reason, Credence wished he could plead with them for help. It was
irrational, maybe, but it twisted in his chest, that they were just sitting
there like they didn’t care. His desperation rapidly turned into anger. That
same deep, compressed, but quiet loathing.
Credence felt like a different person when he let that anger overtake him. It
had come upon him before, when he stewed alone in his room after Ma had
inflicted some injustice, or when he stood on the open street and endured the
heckles and shoves of passers-by. He couldn't control when it happened, and he
couldn't fully recall what it was like when he was free of it. His anger was
much like a dream in that way.
But he did know how to clutch it when it came. He knew how to burrow in deep
and let it blacken his every thought. When he was afraid, he couldn't remember
what it was like to be angry—but likewise, when he was angry, he couldn't
remember what it meant to be afraid.
Credence let the anger thicken his blood. He sank deeper than he ever had
before. Anger was a harrowing, bottomless thing that threatened to erase his
very identity—but that didn't matter so much anymore. Not here, where his
identity had already been taken. Here, where his name was Muggle.
When the wizard looked his way, the anger that wore Credence's face looked him
in the eye. Anger lowered his hand to his genitals and worked them slowly in a
lather, squeezing at the base so that his sac grew taut and almost painful. The
whole while, he seethed with a single, throbbing fixation: that he wanted the
wizard dead. He truly, guiltlessly, with all his being, wanted the wizard dead.
The wizard only smirked, and moved along. He exacted no punishment for
Credence's impertinent eye-contact.
After their showers, the boys were given new clothes to wear. They seemed like
nothing more than the laundered garments of other residents, except that all
their color had been transformed into the same dull, stormy gray. They had
trouble finding something suitable for Credence ("Damn skinny runt...") and one
of the wizards shrank a larger garment with his magic stick. Although it fit in
the end, it sat awkwardly high on his waist, so that Credence couldn't raise
his arms without showing his midline.
He didn't care.
He didn't care about anything.
All he focused on was not letting the anger slip away. It normally left him
after he'd exhausted himself, or slept, but he didn't want that. Once it was
gone, and the fear crept back in, he knew it might be impossible to rekindle
until chance struck again. He had to keep those embers stoked and burning low
in his core.
It didn't hurt his dignity so much to follow their orders if he wrapped his
obedience in the seething, irrational conviction that he would one day kill
them all.
He managed to keep it up through another hours-long session of work outside.
Mind-numbing busywork that the wizards could have done themselves had they
wanted to, but it seemed they thought that a part of the boys’ “learning”
should involve rigorous manual labor. It wasn’t difficult to stay angry for so
long when one of the wizards laughed when telling them they’d be moving bags of
flour from one store room to another, and said it built character.
The boys were not given carts or tools of any sort, and each bag weighed as
much or more than some of them. It was a long and arduous task that required at
least three, sometimes four to grip and carry the bags from one building to
another, but Credence bore the strain with tight lips and cold burning inside
his chest.
It helped keep him going, he thought. Although it was just as hard not to let
the anger take over and tire him out too quickly by working too hard.
By the time they were finished, the sun was low in the sky and the boys were
clean no longer, but at least they were not as dirty as they had been that
morning.
They were made to wash their hands and then given dinner—in the same bowls they
were given for breakfast. But it was soup this time, with a single, stale
portion of bread beside it.
Credence’s heart sank when he saw the meal. He had not been fed particularly
well at Ma’s table, but it had been more than this. Somewhere in the back of
his mind, he knew it would be hard to hold onto the anger if he got too hungry.
He’d gone without meals before, when he was being punished, sometimes for days
at a time if it was particularly bad, and remembered well how the pit of his
stomach consumed every other emotion he had when it was empty of food.
Prickles of worry threatened somewhere inside him, but he forced himself to
focus as they ate. Still only fifteen minutes of time to consume their soup and
bread, but as long as they had two regular meals a day, even if they were not
particularly big, Credence thought he could manage.
He could beat the fear. He hoped.
===============================================================================
A shrill whistle pierced the air.
"Out of bed! Three, two, one-"
"Done," Credence croaked. He wasn't awake yet, but his legs were under him. His
body had learned to move without him over the course of the past week. It was
strange how quickly new routines became habit. Became programmed. Became...
normal.
"Ten minutes start now," the wizard drawled, bored, before stepping out to
light a smoke. That was Rumples. Generally bored with his duties and irate
about his unglamorous posting, watching a bunch of snotty kids. Pros: He was
unlikely to be harsher than he had to and he generally preferred to leave them
alone if he got the same in return. Cons: He couldn't be swayed with sweetness,
simpering, or flesh—and if annoyed, he went straight for a zapping hex.
This, too, had quickly become a daily reality: weighing the threats and moods
of their captors. Credence had learned that the wizard who tormented Adam in
the showers was called Snarlack, and he had only one pro: he only tended to
single out one person at a time. When he was around, the boys did their best to
be the least interesting of the crowd. But Snarlack seemed to have a special
ability to sense the person who was feeling weakest inside, and got very
creative with his public humiliations.
The wizard who had torn Credence's shirt was Ambrose. He had deep, soulful
eyes, and gave off this deceptive air that he was someone a boy could turn to.
Run to. Talk to. But he never interfered when the other wizards punished them,
and on the rare occasion he laid down a punishment of his own, it was
terrifying, and reminded them all that they had no friends there.
He never punished Adam, though. Credence's every waking moment was a tense
vigil, observing every detail of his surroundings and reading them for ways to
survive. He hadn't missed the way Adam and Ambrose would sometimes go missing
at the same time, nor the way Adam's bowl seemed a little fuller than everyone
else's when Ambrose was ladling.
"All in line?" Rumples grumbled, sticking his head back in and crushing his fag
just outside their door, where it joined a graveyard of its brothers.
"Yes, master," they said as one voice.
This was still what they called the wizards—and the wizards still called them
"muggle." But there was a strange intimacy hidden behind this erasure of names
and identity. The boys only knew the wizards' first names because they only
heard them when the wizards were talking with one another, on a first-name
basis. And so in their private chatter, after lights out, those names were
spoken aloud. The wizards, meanwhile, did the same: they called the boys by
their given names when discussing them amongst each other, and occasionally the
boys overheard it.
It was hard not to feel an illusion of familiarity. Like they were all just
trapped in the same sorry play together, acting out different parts. Credence
wanted to hate them all, all the time—but on most days, he only had enough
anger inside for one. Somehow they managed to keep him just hungry enough, just
sleepy enough, and just tired enough to stay acquiescent. While at the same
time, just fed enough, rested enough, and engaged enough for hard labor. This
didn't leave enough fuel for Credence to nurse his anger
indiscriminately—unless it was Snarlack overseeing their activities. He always
had a special reserve of hatred ready for Snarlack.
"Is this block C? Where on earth are you taking them—they can't look like this.
You have to take them to the showers, get them fitted with fresh clothes."
One of the female wizards from the girl's side of camp had stopped their little
column to talk with Rumples. Credence groaned internally. All he could think
about was his breakfast.
"What? Why? Their clothes are fine."
"Gracious me—haven't you heard?"
"Heard what? No one ever tells me anything around here."
"He's coming, you fool. They set out from Glastaug this morning."
Credence kept his eyes lowered, and couldn't see Rumples' face—but he could see
his hands.
They were shaking.
This sounded like something bad, but Credence couldn’t put it into context. Who
could these wizards be afraid of? He didn’t even recognize the name of the
city, and Ma had taken her children out canvassing in a lot of cities.
“What? Why didn’t anyone fucking tell me?” Rumples turned and paced a few steps
away and then back again, his movements suddenly full of anxiety. “We’ve been
out in the field for hours.”
“Well that’s probably why you weren’t told,” the woman shot back. “Just hurry
up.” She stalked off, but not back towards the girls’ dorms. More likely, she
was making rounds through the camp, looking for any other blocks who hadn’t
heard the news.
Rumples didn’t waste any time stewing after that. “Change of plan; we’re headed
to the showers. Move.”
Whatever was causing this anxiety in the wizards spread quickly to the boys.
Down the line, everyone stiffened and walked hurriedly behind Rumples, their
short legs struggling to keep stride with his rushed pace.
They passed another line on the way, and Credence was almost startled to see
them. In the week he’d been there, Credence hadn’t seen any children as clean
as they were and wearing clothing in such good condition. Each one of them had
crisp, brown button-up shirts, a light jacket, a belt, and trousers. Some even
sturdy, clean shoes. He only caught sight of them at a glance, but the
difference was glaring.
Whatever was going on, Credence did not like it. If he’d learned anything since
he’d arrived, it was that unexpected changes did not bode well. He wished he
could have felt some satisfaction over how nervous Rumples had suddenly become,
but it only made him feel the same way.
It wasn’t just the woman and Rumples who’d been late doing whatever they were
supposed to do. Every wizard they passed walked with quicker steps and a tense
disposition. Their cloaks billowed out behind them in impressive and
intimidating displays. Credence sometimes suspected this was intentional, but
just now, it seemed rather due to their pace.
None of the boys dared to say a word out of turn under the new atmosphere. They
stayed silent as Rumples led them into the showers and told them to hurry up
and wash while he waved his wand—the proper name for those magic sticks,
Credence had learned—and sent what looked like a shimmering, silver fox running
off through the wall.
“I’ve sent for your new clothes,” he announced. “I want you to be clean, dried,
and ready when they arrive.”
Credence scrubbed diligently. He knew he should let the anxiety overtake
him—ready him for whatever lay ahead. His caution should be on high alert, his
obedience at the tip of his reflexes.
Instead, he felt… awake. The adrenaline of facing down some change of pace,
some relief from the tedium, made him feel more reckless than cautious. The new
charge in the air was thrilling. It tasted of anticipation, and the more
Credence saw his tormentors wring their hands and exchange nervous glances, the
more emboldened he felt. There was something in this world even wizards feared;
something they couldn’t wave those stupid sticks at and dismiss. All the anger
he had nursed hatched inside him, but what came out of the egg was something
new. Credence tried to put a word to it as he watched Rumples and the others
sweat, rushing to and fro as they brought the freshly washed children out to
the main path. The wizards shouted angry instructions and repinned their own
uniforms and used their wands to clear clutter and shine windows—tasks that
would have taken the children days.
Not hatred, Credence thought. The feeling was too merry for that. In fact, it
was almost… light. As if Credence might float away with it. He watched a wizard
trip over his own cloak in his hurry, and felt the most peculiar sensation in
his face. The urge to smile.
“Form a line. Form a line!” A woman wizard was herding the children with
erratic wand movements, shouting so loudly that her voice sounded hoarse and
broken. There were no rhymes now, no clever punishments. Everyone was shuffled
into place outside their blocks so that they stood facing in toward the broad
center pathway that divided the girls’ and boys’ sides of camp. It wound all
the way down to the sinister iron gate—a structure Credence thought of as
simply part of the wall, and not as an exit.
“…Do you know what they’re fussing about?” asked Johan.
Credence shrugged, but the boy next to him—Willem, who was a long-time
resident—chuckled and leaned in to answer in a hushed tone.
“The boss is coming, I reckon.”
Something tingled in the back of Credence’s mind.
“The boss…?”
The other two boys looked at him, somewhere between impressed and shocked.
“…You can talk.”
Credence scowled.
“Of course I can talk.”
“Didn’t think you knew no other words than ‘yes master’,” Willem laughed.
Credence’s shoulders hunched up to his ears, but the scowl remained. It was
rare that the boys could talk for long unless they were in their bunks under
lights out or quietly during meals, but right then the wizards were so
distracted making sure everything was set and ready. Credence didn’t find
himself much inclined to reply, however.
Instead, his mind cast back to the first meal he’d had at the camp, when one of
the boys had mentioned a Commander Grindelwald. This was the commander that had
sacked his city, but neither Credence nor the boys who had been there for a
time knew any details about the man. They’d all been kept behind magic bars
before they were sent off to camp, so most of what they knew was second-hand
rumor. There were probably dozens of factions in the wizard’s army, but
Credence wondered if this same commander was who they meant by ‘boss’.
The other boys went silent as a pair of wizards strode by in a hurry.
All along the line of children, Credence could see heads turning this way and
that. The strange sense of both excitement and apprehension filled them all. He
hadn’t realized how many they were, though—not until they were all in lines
like this along the pathway. He could see the girls now, still separated from
the boys, but gathered in neat and orderly rows across from them.
Credence was beginning to wish he could chase away this irrational feeling of
excitement. The way the wizards around them looked to be in a mild panic told
him that he should have reason to worry. His survival instincts were usually
better than this, even if he thought they deserved the fear for a change.
His thoughts were interrupted, however, by a shrill sound cutting through the
air. It vaguely resembled the wail of a trumpet.
Quiet conversation in the lines died instantaneously. As did all sound
throughout the camp, except for the rustling of cloaks and heavy footfalls as
the last of the wizards ran to their positions.
The hair on the back of Credence’s neck stood on end.
He stopped breathing when the shimmering, faintly iridescent colors of the iron
gates began to glow. He could see it even from where they stood down the path,
and he could feel static in the air as the glow magnified.
With a heavy groan, the gates swung open.
Beyond was an endless expanse of flat, lifeless soil that stretched into the
blue haze of the distance, where it met the dreary, pale milk of the overcast
sky. Credence couldn’t believe they had marched across that distance. During
that time, all he’d been able to think of was the next step, and the next. What
all those steps had added up to took his breath away.
But it also confused him. What were they opening the gates for? An empty field?
He looked around for answers, but the wizards were all fixed in a stalwart
pose, their backs as rigid as their uniforms, staring straight ahead. Some of
the other children looked as confused as Credence, craning their necks as far
as they dared, squinting at the open gates.
The silence stretched on—and then, quite from thin air, a black figure appeared
upon the landscape.
The figure seemed a mirage at first. But with each yard of their ominous
approach, new details came into relief. The figure was a rider upon a long-
legged, dark horse, and as they passed through the gates, Credence could see
the sharp, black uniform of their wizard oppressors. From a distance, Credence
thought the rider’s face was masked as well, but was startled to realize the
wizard’s skin was almost as black as the cloak that flapped behind them.
Credence had never seen such a person before; not in real life. As the horse
trod slowly up the path, he realized the rider was a woman, with a hundred lush
braids spilling down her back, and a wand of bleached white bone at her hip.
She came to a halt a few feet from where Credence stood, and surveyed the area
with sharp, scrutinizing eyes. Some of the wizards grew a little taller, almost
on their toes with their efforts to straighten their backs.
When she had combed through the crowd with her gaze, the woman reached for a
small, seashell whistle that she wore about her neck. It was so small that she
held it between thumb and forefinger, but when she blew into it, the commanding
vibration of a trumpet sounded throughout the camp. At such a short distance,
it was so loud that Credence’s ears still rang when the sound faded.
“Muggles!” the woman roared. Credence’s bladder twitched with animal fear at
the sound of her voice. “Bow your heads! You are not worthy to look upon the
Commander!”
Credence had never looked at his feet so quickly—and he was usually quick about
that whether anyone told him to or not. The camp guards’ attempts to project
authority suddenly seemed forced and pitiable when stacked against this single
rider. The clopping of hooves resumed, and Credence did not release the air in
his lungs until the woman was well past.
His new clothes were well-ironed and free of all the stains that marked his
gray work clothes. The fabric had not worn away at the knees, all the buttons
were there, and it even fit him decently. His shoes, though. His shoes were
still caked with a cracking layer of mud. Bits of straw had stuck from the
floor of his dorm, and though he could not see the hole, Credence’s left sock
was always moist and cold about the toes.
What a farce it was to dress them up prim and pretty for this commander.In all
his time there, Credence hadn’t really questioned why this was happening to
him, or who orchestrated it, or to what end. But now, the reason his life was
what it had become would pass in front of him, and he wasn’t even allowed to
look.
Credence thought back to the night of the attack. His mind instantly conjured
images of fire and sounds of screaming; a whirlwind of terrifying sensations
that always pushed him away when he glanced toward his memories. This time,
however, Credence pushed back. He tried to remember the wizards who had taken
Ma’s church, wondering if any of their faces were about to march before him.
He reached… and he reached… and found nothing.
The dim drone of hooves approaching in scores began to fill the air, and
Credence started to lose his mind. He approached the memory from many different
angles. What was he doing just before the attack? Was he in bed? In the chapel?
He couldn’t say. What about the army camp, before the march? He knew he’d been
in a moving camp, surrounded by soldiers and glowing bars—knew it as a fact.
But when he tried to summon a single image or sensation of that time, they
slithered away from him before he could look too closely. The smell of horses
was burning the inside of Credence’s nostrils, and the shadows of tall riders
overtook him. A chilling conclusion gripped his body as a full procession
crowded the path, while Credence stared blindly at his shoes.
He didn’t remember. Not one thing.
His hands began to shake at his sides and he balled them into fists so tight
that his nails dug into the scars on his palms. The flame of anger he had so
carefully nursed in his core found dry tinder, and went up in an all-consuming
rage. It was one thing for them to take his freedom, and his time, and his
fate. But they’d done worse. They’d taken his memories. They’d reached into his
head and ripped out a piece of Credence that made him who he was. His head! It
was supposed to be the one, sacred place he could always retreat to.
Wizards’ faces and the flashes of spells flickered through his mind’s eye,
warped and blurring. His desire to see them dead crystallized into raw,
murderous power, too hot and bright for his tiny body, and Credence felt that
if he just opened his mouth, it would shoot out of him like dragon’s breath and
consume them all.
Instead, he raised his eyes.
The gleam of a horse’s shoes caught him off guard. They were so close, he
nearly jumped back, but the stubborn stiffness of his bones saved him. His body
froze to the spot. Their hooves flashed barely yard away in a slow trot. The
animals were straining against the slow pace, lifting their legs and slicing
their hooves through the air, excited to be within the walls of civilization
again.
Their riders were stone-faced. Some wore great cloaks that fell loose over
their horse’s backs. The material was so dark it appeared to suck up the light
of the sun that filtered down upon them through the dull clouds overhead. They
would have looked like faces floating in darkness had he not known what they
were.
He could hear his own breathing amid the heavy clatter of the horses and the
clank of metal from somewhere further down the line.
These wizards did not look like the ones who kept watch over the camp. Some of
their faces were as dark as the herald’s. Others were ghostly white. All
appeared to have a singular focus. Even when their eyes cast around the camp
and took it in, they were above it. The dirt and the mud there would not stain
their clothes or get under their nails like it did Credence’s. They were not
the pristine and delicate fairy creatures that he had imagined in Ma’s tales of
the wicked, but after one glance at them, he knew that the filth and grime of
every “muggle” in this camp would not touch them.
Credence’s fists clenched harder. He should have expected that, but the hate in
him coiled tighter.
With his head bowed and his shoulders hunched, he glanced down the procession,
imagining every figure clad in leather straps and thick wool tailoring were the
demons of Hell. The anger inside him hissed like a living thing. He was ready
to fight them. His rational mind and his survival instinct froze his feet to
the ground, but they could not stop the roiling, churning thing inside him
yearning for revenge.
The formation of riders changed suddenly. They’d marched in pairs and threes
before, but then there came a line of them side by side so tight together they
formed a wall. These wizards carried iron shields before their bodies,
shimmering in spite of the dull light and threatening to glint in Credence’s
eye, so he glanced away again.
They looked like knights.
All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men danced in Credence’s head in an
inopportune rhyme.
A blood red banner waved over the heads of the men who followed the wall, and
something in the air changed. It was the wizards from the camp standing beside
the boys. Credence could see them out of the corner of his eye. One dropped his
gaze to his shoes even though he held his head high. The others stopped
blinking.
This was it.
Credence lifted his eyes again, past the flash of hooves and past leather
gloves gripping horses’ reins as the men behind the wall of shields came into
view. His gaze instantly locked onto one man in particular, who was cloaked in
heavy furs and riding atop a white horse, with crimson sleeves visible above
his gloves.
Everything inside of Credence and around him was telling him not to let his
eyes raise any further, but he could not stop himself.
The Commander of this army of death, of all that was and all that would ever be
of Credence’s life now, approached before him.
It wasn’t Ma or the people of his city he thought of when he made the decision
to raise his eyes further. It was only himself. If these wizards could get into
his mind, then Credence had a mind no longer. His only refuge was gone. Without
that, he may as well disobey, for he may as well be dead.
And so be it.
Credence followed the heavy furs up straight-cut shoulders and was met with the
face of a man with ivory blond hair, pale skin, and a clever mustache between
his smirking mouth and sharp cheekbones. A striking man. More striking than
Credence had anticipated.
The Commander cast his narrowed eyes over the camp and down the line of its
inhabitants as his horse pressed forward, taking in details in a roving gaze
that Credence ignored in favor of studying the man’s features. It was while
following the handsome cut of his jaw to the shadow of his cheekbones that
Credence found himself drawn up to the man’s eyes, and realized where he was
looking.
He was looking down at the children.
Credence stiffened.
From the height of his horse, this regal figure had eyes for nothing in the
camp but them. They were the smallest, most pitiful creatures of all that lived
within the walls. His gaze should have been anywhere else.
Credence realized too late what was going to happen. He was supposed to be
small. Supposed to be meek and unnoticeable. But among all the children, only
his own eyes were upturned, and the great Commander’s gaze was moving down the
line.
It fell upon him next.
Their eyes met and held. Credence could not move and he could not think. He
floated on adrenaline, caught in the man’s eyes and only dazedly realizing they
were mismatched. One was dark and the other light. Both focused on him with
great intent, but no expression.
Credence could not break free, and for a long, perilous moment, it seemed that
the Commander did not want him to.
It was over as quickly as it started.
The horses passed. Credence’s eyes, burning, dropped to the ground, but not
before he caught sight of another rider at the Commander’s shoulder, who leaned
in close to say something. It was the scar on the side of his face that seared
into Credence’s mind: a pink, angry gouge that started just under the grey at
his temple and ran down his cheek to the base of his jaw.
Credence did not look up again.
***** Chapter 2 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
When Credence went to bed that night, there was nothing but bleak sky above the
camp wall.
When he woke up the next morning, there was a castle.
At least, it looked like a castle at first glance. The reality was far more
astounding. Credence gaped at the structure on his way to morning chores, and
tilted his head so far back to look that he almost lost his balance. The boy
behind him was similarly afflicted, and stepped on Credence’s heel.
“Ow,” he whispered.
In the line ahead of them, one boy straight up collided with another.
“Oh stop,” Rumples groaned. “Go on. Everyone take a nice, long gander. Get it
out of your little systems.”
The boys stared with their mouths open in stupor.
A second camp, comprised of tents, had sprung up beside theirs. Only, it didn’t
spread out—it spread up. Tents hovered in mid-air, as fixed as if they’d been
on solid ground. Rolls of long carpet connected them—flat where they were of a
level, or falling in neat steps as if draped on invisible stairs where the
levels changed. There were larger areas where the carpets splayed out into
courtyards amid the maze of walkways, and Credence could see wizards milling
upon them as calm as if they had wings. The lowest tents hovered just above the
walls of the muggle camp, and were spread far and wide, while the higher tents
were crowded more narrowly, so that the overall structure took on a jagged,
pyramid shape. The higher tents were larger and lusher, with golden tassels on
the ropes that bound their doorways, and crests sewn into their heavy fabrics.
At the very top of the stack was a tent that stood alone above all others, cut
from a deep red crimson and walled with shimmering shields. Bright red
standards flapped upon posts along its walls, and from its center pierced a
pole that bore an ominous black flag with some white design in its center. All
told, the structure was so tall that its spotted shadows fell over the entirety
of the children’s camp. Credence had to squint to make out the design on the
black flag, which seemed hardly the size of his thumbnail from so far below. It
eluded him until a strong gust of wind stretched it taut, and Credence felt
gooseflesh rise down his spine.
It was the symbol on his forearm.
“Had your fill? I know it’s terribly exciting, but toilets still need
scrubbing. This is naught to do with you lot. Best put it out of your minds and
focus on your studies. Right then—march!”
Credence marched, but he cast every glance he could spare at the vertical camp.
He saw a witch and wizard on a lower courtyard, shooting magic at each
other—apparently for sport. One of them skirted dangerously close to the edge
of the carpet and the other cast some magic that tugged her back, and the two
hugged companionably. All up and down, within the innumerable zig-zags of the
camp, flashes of colored lights were sparking, objects were floating, and even
people were floating. Credence gaped as he saw a wizard fly up a level on what
looked like a common broom. Elsewhere, a wizard levitated an entire tea set
from one tent down to another below, and the recipient waved their thanks.
There were hair colors such as Credence had never seen, and skin tones he’d
only read about, and men and women mingling as if their genders were invisible.
“Everyone grab a brush! Two to a bucket. It’s your block’s turn to make the
rounds and scrub the privies. The other boys do the same for you. You don’t
want Snarlack to see any dirty bottoms, do you? Hop to it.”
Credence wanted to summon his usual, low-burning anger to see him through his
task—but for the first time, a conflicting feeling doused the flames. Until
that morning, Credence had only seen magic as something that destroyed, or
caused pain. It was a weapon: one that had marked him, lashed him, raped his
mind, and obliterated his home. The sight of a wand had aroused only the
infuriating injustice of an unfair upper hand. But now…. Now, for the first
time, Credence looked at magic and felt wonder.
Credence was only disappointed that the privies were inside. His gaze was torn
from the floating spectacle overhead when they were led into the small toilets
a couple blocks down. As soon as it was out of sight, a weight settled upon him
again. Most boys covered their noses when they visited this building. Cleaning
it was an exercise in olfactory torture when it went neglected long enough,
which was very much the case when they entered and settled in to work.
Their wizard guards never used such places. Credence didn’t know where they
went instead, but he never thought about it either. With the way they treated
the boys, Credence barely thought of them as human, magic or not.
It was strange to look upon his captors, now, after having glimpsed another
class of wizards in the procession the day prior. Credence saw them in a new
light. He had known they were petty, had known they were bitter, angry, bored,
and insufferable beings who did nothing but run the camp, watch over muggle
children, and attempt to teach them the superiority of wizards. On a mental
level, he knew they were human, or close to it, but on an instinctual level
they may as well have been a pantheon of gods. They had no pity. Their only
enjoyments seemed to come from ignoring the boys or humiliating them. Little
kindnesses, or acts that were at the very least not cruel, were few.
All of them paled in comparison to the army that made camp next door.
Credence knew not to rest his hopes on this difference. All he had to do was
remember the herald’s words, commanding muggles to bow their heads—threatening,
regardless of how ethereal she had been. Instead, he preferred to think about
the glimpses he saw of their tents from below, as he got down on his knees with
a brush and did his best not to breathe through his nose. Or mouth. Did his
best not to think about the grime and the stench right in front of him. He
preferred to think of floating broomsticks and levitating tea sets. It was
easier to think of these wizards from a distance, when they were not paying
attention to him or any other muggles. He wondered what their lives were like
on a normal morning. Sparring? Tea? How long had the structure of tents taken
to set up, and how had they done it?
His mind took him away from the scrubbing, and the bodies of the other boys
around him. They crawled around on the floor, hunching and squatting and trying
to keep their voices from bouncing off the walls while they whispered to each
other. His peers were desperate to break the monotony, but Credence didn’t care
what they had to say.
He tried to edge himself closer to the door, just to get a glimpse of the
structure outside, while he dug his brush into the cracks between the tiles. He
was so close. Glance and scrub, glance and scrub, he caught the edge of it in
the distance and could make out some of the floating staircases and long
ribbons of cloth flying in the air.
A burst of pain and fire spread through the back of his skull and Credence was
flat on the ground before he could register the blow. He let out a sound, but
could barely hear it over the ringing in his ears. He’d been caught entirely
off guard.
“What did I say about distractions?” Rumples’ leather boot stomped down next to
his face.
Credence winced and froze. He couldn’t remember the last time Rumples hit one
of the boys without warning.
“We’re going to be putting on our very best behaviour around here from now on,
and that means you’re to be attentive to your duties and nothing else. At all
times. Do you understand me?”
For a long moment, Credence remained frozen. All he could muster was a blank
stare at Rumples’ boot. This close, he could smell the leather, even over the
stench of the privies. He could see every pore of the material; every ridge in
the soles. The sensations lured something forth from the unlit corners of his
mind.
’This will help.’
A voice spoke in Credence’s head, but it wasn’t his own. Though the voice was
almost a whisper, its phantom presence reverberated so loudly inside his skull
that Credence thought his head might split open. He let out a distress yowl,
but that only intensified the pain, and his hands came shooting up to press at
his temples.
“For fuck’s sake… None of that, now. Get up.”
Credence didn’t want Rumples to strike him again, and tried to force his body
to obey. But when he lifted his head, it felt like his brain had come loose and
was sloshing around inside at the slightest movement.
He fell back onto his stomach, and retched.
“Shit… shit. Disgusting, agh…!” Rumples jumped back to protect his leather
boots, clasping his wand with impotent uncertainty. Even all the powers of the
universe condensed into one wooden stick didn’t do much good if the man
couldn’t think of how to use them.
The other boys had paused their labors to watch the scene. They corrected that
mistake when Rumples whirled on them with his wand still in hand, its vicious
point threatening them all in its sweep.
“Get back to work!” he barked, though the edge of anxiety in his voice
undermined his authority somewhat. It also made him seem unstable, and the boys
hurried to bow their heads and scrub, not wanting to agitate him further.
“Right… okay…”
Rumples turned back to Credence.
“You didn’t hit your head that hard,” he insisted. “You just-… Go sleep it off
in your dorm.”
It was panic that put Credence back on his feet. He couldn’t be sick. He
couldn’t be hurt. Not here. There were stories that ran through the camp about
what happened to defective muggles. He’d heard of one boy in particular who had
come down with a serious wasting sickness—cholera, some of the boys had
guessed, eyeing the well at the center of the blocks, though none knew for
sure. It had been mid-summer then, under uncommonly blazing heat and air thick
with humidity—the kind that could be felt before a storm. According to a boy
who’d gone in for stitches, even the air in the hospital block had been
oppressive.
The wizards could have healed him, the other children told the newcomers. At
least, they thought so, because there didn’t seem to be anything the wizards
couldn’t do. But Snarlack had said it was a distasteful muggle disease, and
gone on about how sad it was that they would have to prevent a contagion
spreading.
Credence hadn’t understood until Willem explained that boy hadn’t been seen at
the camp again. A day later, the storm had broken, and everyone had moved on.
Blinking, Credence tried to clear his head and make his insides feel stable
again. He couldn’t tell what was anxiety and what was real disorientation
anymore, so he just nodded and gave a quick, “Yes, master,” and then tried to
move as fast as he could out of the stinking shack.
Stepping into the shadow of the new and ethereal structure overhead did not
bring Credence up short this time. He barely looked at it as he made his way
back to block C, his stomach twisting in knots all the way. Its presence only
felt looming now.
The arrival of the army was going to change things, Credence could tell, as he
laid down to bed in the empty, musty dorm with daylight and distant sounds
outside reminding him that this bit of respite was an unprecedented privilege.
Even having been there just a week, he could feel the difference in the air; in
Rumples and the others who stalked about like they were being watched and too
obviously tried to keep the status quo. The new tension in the atmosphere was
seeping into the boys as well, making them extra vigilant and quick to obey.
Credence didn’t know what the changes would mean for them. He was only grateful
that his head wasn’t hurt as much as Rumples feared, and he was able to rest
soundly through the remainder of the day.
===============================================================================
Credence didn’t have to wait long to see changes take hold.
Everywhere he looked, there were now three times as many black cloaks
fluttering about. The wizards from the Commander’s camp were a different breed
than the guards, identifiable by their confident strides and vivacious energy.
Whereas the guards had long languished in this bleak and tiresome place,
babysitting muggles, the wizards from the army had been on the road of
conquest, and still burned with the sweet intoxication of recent victories. It
was evident that they looked down on the witches and wizards who’d been left to
rot in this place, and this realization was a paradigm shift for the boys.
Before, there had been only two classes: muggles, who were beasts, and wizards,
who were gods. Now, the tiers of those hierarchies had expanded and invited new
complexities, much like the pyramid that loomed above the grounds.
The smell of horse was strong about the camp, and Credence soon learned that
the army’s mounts were kept just beyond the wall, below the bottom tier of the
pyramid. Mucking their shit and carrying pales of water from the well for their
troughs fell to the muggles, and for the first time since their arrival, some
of the children found themselves outside of the wall. Credence was one of the
children to draw such a lot, and now he lined up three times a week to be
marched beyond the gate by army wizards, while the rest of his block were led
away by guards for their usual rotation of camp chores.
This was an exciting notion at first, but the children realized quickly that
the symbolic freedom of being on the other side of the wall was not worth very
much. They were still supervised closely, and the work was not any easier.
Nor were the army wizards any kinder.
They learned this on their second outing, and the lesson pierced deep. One girl
was so desperate to escape, something about being on the outside of the wall
had lit a spark in her, and she’d decided to run. Credence tried to imagine
what must have gone through her mind. Perhaps she’d felt emboldened by the way
these new wizards were always laughing, talking amongst themselves, and
ignoring the children. She might have had some delusional notion that they
wouldn’t notice, or that they simply wouldn’t care if they saw one little cut
of meat running into the open distance.
He would never know. He had looked on helplessly from the boys’ line as the
girls’ column halted to observe the runner’s attempt. The two witches at the
head of the line had merely stood with their arms folded and watched for a
time, tilting their heads close and exchanging a few comments. Then, when the
running girl was growing small in the distance, one of the witches had lifted
her wand, as casually as if she were brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes,
and with a single spoken word, the distant girl had erupted into a massive red
spray.
Credence could still see that red cloud when he closed his eyes. She had
exploded into such a fine mist that it carried on the wind for a moment before
it dissipated. All the children had stood mute, bloodless with shock at the
brutality. In contrast to the guards, the witches had not spoken to them. No
warnings about “this is what happens” or trumpeting about how “this is what
muggles deserve.” Instead, the witches had simply resumed their conversation
with one another and led the girls onward to their chores.
The incident had left him cold inside, and planted a dull ache of numbness in
his chest. Before the army arrived, he hadn’t thought it possible to feel any
glummer. As magnificent as their tower was, the ember of hope he’d carried that
its presence might change things for the better had been snuffed out.
Strangely, that loss did not take away the awe he felt around the new wizards.
It was an unnerving sort of awe. He never dared to speak to the witches who led
the children out to fetch water, nor any of their kind, unless it was
specifically demanded of him—and it rarely was—but his eyes followed them
wherever they went.
The wizards who ran the camp still maintained most contact with the children.
They still taught the lessons, and they were still unpleasant. Most of
them—even Rumples—grew stricter under the watchful eyes of the army.
It was not difficult to figure out why. Soon after their arrival came the
inspections. Either alone or in pairs, wizards from the army came with scrolls
of parchment and quills trailing in the air behind them to observe the children
at work or in the classroom. They often spoke only to the wizards in charge, or
asked simple questions of the children. ‘What have you been learning? What do
you consider the qualities of a good muggle society? What would you like to do
with your future, if you had one?’
At that point, the boys knew how to answer. They had no future. If their
masters were gracious enough to provide them with one, then they would use it
to serve wizardkind and remain humble as muggles.
The witches who questioned Credence cooed and remarked how adorable and well-
trained he was. Their hats were almost as tall as he was, and their cheeks were
smeared with bright purple rouge. He felt a bit bubbly despite himself, until
one of them decided it was her right to reach out and pinch his cheek—while the
other made a high pitched noise and squealed, “Ohh, you touched it!”
The witch who had pinched him wiped her fingertips on a pink, fragrant
handkerchief that left the saccharine stench of roses in the classroom for the
rest of the lesson. Whatever little boost Credence had felt was gone as quickly
as it had come. Being seen as a novelty was not the same as being seen as a
person.
He was grateful for the evening after lights out. Although they were stuck in
the dark, and their blankets were threadbare defenders against the cold, they
were at least blessedly alone. The wizards left them be until the morning
whistle, and although loud noises would draw the guards, simple conversation
would not. Whatever reticence the boys had felt at speaking their minds in that
hushed hour had melted away as time passed and no consequences presented
themselves. They were, by all appearances, free to complain about their
overlords, lament their conditions, and dream of escape.
The only thing none of them ever did was reminisce about the past. This
occurred to Credence as he lay in the dark of his bunk one night, listening to
the soft chatter. He was always a listener; never a participant. As it sunk in
that he’d never heard the boys discuss their lives before the camp, he had the
panicked realization that he rarely thought about his life before, either. Not
anymore.
What if that was gone, too? Credence reached back—and to his relief, could
still recall his small room upstairs in Ma’s church. Could still recall
services and sermons; mealtimes and routines. Long, sweltering days on the
pavement, handing out pamphlets. Scrubbings. Beatings.
He closed his eyes and sighed into the dark. There wasn’t much in his past
worth reflecting on.
“Has anyone ever tried to get out? At night, I mean. When they’re not watching
us,” Willem asked the room.
“Why? There’s still the wall. Still the gate. We’re never getting past that.”
“Sure, but… I dunno, you could hide. Hide until the next time they open it-”
“And get splattered like that girl?”
“I’m just saying…”
“Oh give it up. It’s hopeless.”
Credence listened to the treasonous conversation with creeping tension in his
body. Just then, the entire dorm lit up in a cool flash of white as lightning
struck outside. He began to count silently inside his head. He seemed to
remember learning somewhere that one could tell how far away a storm was by how
many seconds there were between a flash of lightning and its accompanying
thunderclap.
“Oy!” the English boy—Joseph—called out in a sharp whisper. “There’s someone
right outside…!”
Thunder rumbled through the clouds, strong as the voice of god, before the boys
could move. Credence felt his heart jump into his throat, and his body froze.
Several of the others dove underneath the covers, fearful the figure might have
seen them.
“Shushhh!” Joseph hissed, having hunkered down beneath the window.
There was a stir about the room as the boys whispered back and forth, trying to
stay low, settle down in their beds, and remain alert all at the same time.
Credence knew that if there was a wizard outside, looking into their window,
then it was probably all for naught. They could easily be heard through the
paper-thin walls.
But there was no one. He could see the window from his own bunk, and no dark
figure moved across it or peered inside.
With a rat-tat-tat- something sudden and sharp sounded against the roof. Again
the boys jumped, this time casting their eyes to the ceiling, but the sound
only came faster and within moments Credence knew what it was.
Rain.
Soft sighs of relief eminated from the corners of the room. But none of the
boys moved yet. When Credence caught glimpses of them, they were casting their
eyes about the room to be sure they were safe. All eventually landed on Joseph,
who still looked pale.
Finally, some of the boys sat up.
“What’d you see?” someone whispered. It was so soft Credence couldn’t tell who.
Moving just one limb at a time, Joseph began to crawl out from underneath the
window. He still kept his head ducked down, and didn’t stray in front of it,
but looked like he was going to check again. And he looked like he expected to
find someone directly on the other side of the glass.
He raised himself up just enough to peer out the corner of the glass into the
dark of the yard, now glistening with rainfall. At first, he didn’t move. Then,
slowly, he turned to get a better view.
“There!” Joseph’s body stiffened at once. “There, look! That man over at block
D, he was just here.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the other boys rushed out of bed to see. Even
Credence sat up and drew a little closer.
Sure enough, not too far away, they saw a man dressed in the dark cloak of the
army, partly obscured by sheets of rain. Straight-backed and square-shouldered
as though the downpour didn’t bother him, he walked up to the dorm opposite
their own, and loomed before the wall.
Collectively, the boys of block C held their breath.
Then something shimmered. At the man’s side, a warm, yellow glow began to form.
Credence realised it was the tip of his wand. The light grew as he raised it
up, drawing a long, elliptical shape. It did not reflect against the glass of
their window nor the water pooling upon the ground. When the man pressed the
tip of his wand against the side of the building, Credence’s eyes widened.
The wizard had created an opening in the wall—one made of soft yellow light,
which flickered orange around the edges and looked as warm as a campfire.
Through it they could see the figures of the boys next door in their beds where
they, too, appeared to be either resting and talking, unaware that they were
being observed.
The wizard stood for a long minute with the rain gliding off his back and the
warm light casting onto his front. Its soft glow landed upon him alone, and
though he was faced away, Credence could make out the same silver temple and
slicked dark hair that he had seen on the man at the Commander’s side the day
the army arrived.
“What’s he doing?” Jeremy hissed.
“They do watch us at night!” Cress squeaked, shrinking back. “See! See, I told
you! Ohhh, they’re going to whip me for what I said about- about what you-know-
who should put you-know-where…”
Credence moved up so that the tip of his nose pressed against the cool glass of
the window. His vision fogged slightly with every breath. As he watched, the
figure in the darkness twisted, as if looking over his shoulder at them.
Credence sucked in a breath.
“Can he hear-” That was all he could get out before lightning flickered
violently for several seconds and flashed a sharp, bright vision of the
wizard’s face.
A cold stab of fear thrust into Credence’s gut. Half of the man’s face was
turned toward them, and it was… deformed. Monstrous. He’d seen the gash in
passing, during the light of day—but here, with the unforgiving shadows of
lightning, it was a thing of nightmares. The flesh was raised and warped in a
ridge that ran from his temple to his jaw, and its path cut along the very
corner of his eye and mouth, which dragged both down so that the lip of his
lower eyelid folded over and his mouth seemed set in a permanent half-frown.
Credence was still choking on his own racing heart when the thunder finally
followed. The boys beside him appeared equally paralyzed.
“That’s Graves,” said a solemn voice behind them. All the boys twisted around
to look. It was the oldest boy—Derik—whose voice had begun to change. None of
them really knew what would happen to him when it did; what would happen to any
of them.
“Graves…?” whispered Cress.
Derik nodded. “He’s the Commander’s right-hand man. If you can call him a man.”
“Oh… I’ve heard of him,” said Willem, his voice shaking. “That’s- that’s him?”
“Wh-… What’ve you heard?” Cress asked, anxious.
“That he’s… a monster. That-… that he goes out and hunts, when his master
wants-” Willem gulped. “Human flesh.”
“I heard a boy in Block A talking…” Jeremy piped up, and all eyes turned on
him. “Said-… He said-… That G-G-Graves never sleeps. So that he can g-g-guard
his master. Even at night.”
“He’s loyal as a dog, that one,” Derik agreed. “D’you know…? How he got the
scar…?”
The boys all drew close to hear the story, dodging low to stay out of sight
from the window. Only Credence remained, still pressing his nose to the bottom
pane and watching the figure in the rain.
“The Commander wanted to test if his loyal pet was really so loyal…. So he sent
him on a special mission.”
A soft light began to grow at the end of Graves’ wand yet again, white and cool
this time, like the lightning.
“Graves was taken prisoner… and tortured.”
Credence saw a corresponding white light glow on the forearm of one of the boys
across the way. It lit the boy’s face from below, making him look ghostly—but
the boy didn’t seem to notice. No one around him reacted.
“They sliced him and sliced him, trying to make him give up his master’s
secrets….”
The boy with the glowing arm was laughing with the others… but then seemed to
grow distant and thoughtful. All expression gradually drained from his face
until he seemed… empty. Trance-like.
“But no matter how bad they hurt him, Graves wouldn’t talk. So they told him
they were going to use a special serum, to make him tell the truth. And what do
you think Graves did?”
Credence watched as the glowing boy stood from his bunk, his motions
mechanical.
“He bit through his own tongue.”
Graves held his wand raised patiently as the boy stepped out of the dorm,
closing the door behind him, and walked calmly through the rain to meet the
wizard. None of the boys inside so much as flinched or glanced toward the door
when it opened. They kept on talking, oblivious.
“Of course it turned out that the Commander had been watching the whole thing.
He fixed Graves’ tongue up with magic, but left all his cuts. Under his uniform
there’s dozens more.”
Rumbling thunder was the only sound in the room as Derik concluded his tale,
and Credence watched as Graves led the bewitched boy away to disappear behind
glittering sheets of rain. The false window of yellow light the wizard left
behind gradually smoldered shut like the edges of a page burning away.
“But where’s he taking that kid?” Cress asked the question Credence was
desperate to ask, himself.
It was hopeless to see the pair in the depths of the dark now, but still
Credence remained at the window. He knew that whatever the reason this Graves
had come for the boy, the show was over. He wasn’t going to see anything more,
but he didn’t want to pull himself away either. The notion that any of the
wizards could step into their dorms at any time, with them completely unaware,
sent a chill through him. It locked up his bones and made his arms stiff and
his fingers cold against the rough cut planks of the wall.
“Nobody knows.” Derik lifted his chin. The room remained silent around him.
“Most of us never knew they were gone. We don’t even know if they all come
back. Nobody remembers.”
Silence fell with Derik’s voice, and Credence finally turned from the window.
The boys sat with ashen faces, none of them knowing what to say, but every one
of them having the same sinking realization. They didn’t just need to worry
about stepping out of line during the day. Any moment, without warning, this
Graves could come and snuff out their lives in the middle of the night and
there wouldn’t be a single thing they could do to prevent it.
“Shit man….” One of the boys spoke up, but his voice cracked and the sound hit
the pit of Credence’s stomach. By the look of everyone around the room, they
all felt it.
“Yeah.” Derik nodded, lips thin and eyes in the middle distance. His grandiose
storytelling was over.
The rain poured on. As far as they could tell, block D across from them slept
soundly through the night without further disturbance. As they succumbed to
tiredness and crawled back into their bunks, Credence wondered if anyone would
tell the boys of block D what happened. Maybe it was a mercy not to share the
terrible secret they had learned this night.
There was no more chatter, but every so often the sounds of fitful sleep would
punctuate the stillness.
Credence had nightmares, too.
Sweltering nightmares. Nightmares so hot that he woke in the night to find his
blankets damp with sweat, even as he lay shivering from the cold. He got up to
piss in one of the pots and felt a little better when he laid back down, but as
soon as he slipped back under, he was there in the furnace again, smoldering.
It wasn’t a fiery kind of heat. It was too damp for that. It was more of a
suffocating compression, pressing him into the mattress until his body seemed
to melt into the luxurious fibers. He could feel the sheets under his palms,
thick and silken. He grasped onto them, twisting fistfuls of fabric as he
gasped for air, and felt his lungs open gratefully—but then there was wetness
in his mouth, clogging his breath, and he writhed against the great weight that
held him down. Everything was overwhelming. He wanted to say so, to beg for it
to stop, but when he opened his mouth wider, the wetness slithered down his
throat like a great, hard snake. He could feel the pressure of it behind his
ribcage; could feel it tingling as it passed through his stomach; and then he
felt it down there, opening him up on the inside in a way he’d never felt
before. He gasped, and realized he could breathe again, but the pressure
between his legs was still immense. He clenched his jaw hard to endure it and
closed his eyes tight- but they were already closed, and then closed again, and
again, folding him into infinite darkness…
The whistle sounded.
Credence opened his eyes to light and sound and didn’t know where he was. A
pair of legs dangled above him and then a boy came down with them, landed on
the ground, and ran off. Others were hurrying about, a mass of frantic bodies,
and with their urgency Credence came back to himself. He was in a re-education
camp for muggles, and it was morning. He should be up with the rest of them.
There wasn’t much time to get ready.
Pulling himself out of bed was a task. His limbs felt like dead weights. His
sweat had dried and left him cold on one side and feeling distinctly unclean on
the other. How warm his dreams had been compared to this…. His hair was matted
to one side of his forehead and he tried to unstick it with marginal success.
Finally awake enough, Credence grabbed his day clothes and hurried to get ready
with the rest of the block.
They were all still there, as far as Credence could see. That should have eased
the tension creeping back into him as he recalled what he’d seen the night
before—before sleep had muddled his mind—but it didn’t.
Breakfast was a silent affair with the guards watching. Even if it was only
Ambrose and Rumples, and not wizards from the Commander’s army, the boys stayed
tight-lipped. The most they allowed themselves were a few glances exchanged
across the table. Credence watched the silent communication, but he, not being
a decision maker within the group, was not included. He spent his time sneaking
glances to the other blocks as they passed in the yard or down the main path,
but he had yet to catch sight of block D.
To Credence’s gratitude, they were allowed a shower after their second shift of
work, before lunch. He hated the cold, but he appreciated being clean. Today
especially, when the uncomfortable dreams resurfaced in his memory whenever he
touched the film of dried sweat on his skin. By lunch his knees were knocking
together with cold, but at least he felt a little more refreshed.
What none of them had been expecting was to arrive at the lunch table to not
only find block D deep in their bowls, but the very same boy Credence was sure
he’d seen be led away in the middle of the night sitting at the end of the
bench and spooning mouthfuls of soup with just as much enthusiasm as the
others.
The boys of Block C exchanged glances as they lined up for their ladle of soup,
casting furtive eyes at the table. None of them could speak up—not here—but
they were all thinking the same thing. The boy from Block D looked about as
hale and heartened as anyone else. Nothing about him projected any hints that
he’d gone on a midnight adventure. Not even dark circles under his eyes.
As the boys of Block C settled down at the adjoining table, Johan leaned across
and tapped the boy on the shoulder.
“Hey,” he whispered, when the boy twisted in his seat. Credence and the others
peeled their ears to hear the exchange, while casting wary glances at the
guards.
“What?”
“Where did he take you last night?”
“Hu?”
“Last night, with scarface, where did you go?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well where were you last night?”
“In my bunk. Leave me alone.”
“You woke up there too?”
“Yeah. Wait, no… I had a check-up… or something… Snarlack took me back after. I
dunno, I was tired.”
A spark went off between them just then, and both boys leaned swiftly back to
their own tables. It was a lazy warning, and the guard who’d sent it went back
to smoking with his peers, but Johan didn’t dare lean over again.
“What if he’s a dummy?” he whispered to the others in Block C. “Like a puppet,
I mean. Like the wizards sent a fake boy to watch us.”
“That’s not possible… is it?” It was the boy with the lisp who spoke, and
everyone put a hand over their bowls. It occurred to Credence that he still
didn’t know the boy’s name. He’d only ever heard him called “muggle” and “hey,
lispy!”
“There’s floating tents right behind you,” Willem pointed out. “Anything’s
possible.”
“They took his memory…” Credence spoke so softly that he wasn’t sure he’d been
heard.
“Woah, hey- Bowlcut’s speaking.” Johan said, motioning for the others to be
silent. “What’d you say? They took his what?”
Credence’s throat was suddenly tight as a fist. “H-h-his memory…”
“Hmm…” Willem considered. “That does make the most sense.”
“B-b-but-” Cress cut in fearfully. “If they can take our memory, then… then…”
“Then any of us could have already been taken?” Derik, the oldest boy, finished
gently.
Cress nodded, a thin film of tears coating his eyes.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve already been to the med bay a couple of times,” Derik
confessed. He sighed, with the resigned manner of someone who has seen too many
horrors to care anymore. “I’ve woken up with bruises on my inner arm… stuff
like that…”
Credence wasn’t listening. Wasn’t eating. A high-pitched ringing was piercing
through his ears, filling up his head, making it vibrate like a bell…
How many times had he been taken? Something had happened to him between the
night of the attack and arriving there at camp. But what if it had kept
happening? Was Credence going to the med bay, too? Were they conducting
experiments on him? Putting things inside him? The feeling of pressure down
there came back to him from his nightmare. Such a distinctive sensation. One he
shouldn’t know; shouldn’t even be able to imagine. In his mind’s eye, he
conjured up an image of himself, naked, laying prostrate on a metal slab as the
wizards in blue circled him. In his imagination, their faces were obscured by
medical masks, and his own eyes were open but unseeing as a witch slowly
inserted her wand into the hole between his legs.
The ringing intensified. Credence was shaking, spiraling, sucking hard at the
air to get it into his lungs. Somewhere far away, someone was talking to him,
touching his shoulder—but Credence couldn’t hear. He could only hear the
ringing. It filled the entire world, louder and louder, until it was as if his
eyes were ringing too, and he could only see the bright, sharp white of it…
’But you think about these things… don’t you?’
It was that voice again. Indistinct against the shrillness of the ringing, but
recognizably the same. A little more three-dimensional than it had been
before—more like a proper sound—but it still sent a wave of nausea through
Credence’s body, as though it had to rip through some barrier inside him to be
heard.
Someone grabbed his hair, and jerked his head back.
Credence blinked away the whiteness, and found himself staring—upside-down—into
the soulful eyes of Ambrose, the guard.
“Are you sick, boy?” the wizard asked, with a peculiar softness to his voice.
“N-… No…” Credence answered, though he could taste bile on his own breath.
Ambrose released his hair and pointed sternly at his food.
“Then eat.”
The other boys were staring at him with bloodless fear on their faces. Credence
assumed it was because he’d brought a guard down on them, and opened his mouth
to apologize, but as soon as he looked at them, the other boys ducked their
heads into their bowls and began shoveling food into their mouths.
Credence looked into his own bowl and felt the nausea swell. But with refreshed
determination, he picked up his spoon and forced himself to eat. The focus of a
newfound mission fortified him.
He was going to figure out what had happened to him. He was going to recover
his memories.
He had no idea how, except by sheer willpower, but he had that. It may not seem
like it to the other boys or anyone who had ever known him, but Credence knew
it was there. He kept going every day. There were times his anger and pain grew
so deep it threatened to consume him, and still he managed to stay quiet and
keep going.
His insides clenched with uncertainty, but he tried to push it away. The
wizards may as well have been gods. They seemed to be able to do anything. And
there Credence was, a mere mortal in their clutches. His determination felt
shaky thinking about such things, but it didn’t vanish.
For the rest of the day they went to their classes and Credence didn’t speak up
again, not even when they repeated lines back to their instructor. He moved his
mouth and pretended to speak along, but his mind was elsewhere. He tried to
think of the day after the children in his town were captured, rounded up, and
herded along with the army. He tried to remember every hour of that day, but
somewhere along the line it went fuzzy. He remembered things in the wrong order
and couldn’t tell when one memory happened compared to another.
He didn’t remember that night at all. Only the following morning and the march
out.
By the time they were sent back to their dorms, Credence felt he’d made little
progress, if any. His only consolation was that he hadn’t had another
disorienting attack in front of everyone.
As much as he wanted to remember, a small part of him dreaded it. He wasn’t so
sure he wanted to experience the dreams he’d had last night again. They’d been
confusing—too hot and too intense, and he’d been too afraid. Nothing like the
nightmares at the beginning of the night—those were distinctly different—but
still…too much. All day afterward he’d felt tired, like he hadn’t gotten any
sleep at all.
Much to Credence’s disappointment, the other boys didn’t want to go to sleep
right away that night. He laid in his bed wishing they would stop talking, that
they would go back to their own bunks, but they persisted in their chatter.
Many of them were determined to stay up all night, now contending with the fear
of being taken. It didn’t matter that they’d seen how easily the boy from Block
D had been led out right in front of his bunkmates and not one of them had
noticed.
Credence lifted his forearm to his face, peering closely at the yellowish glow
of the symbol beneath his skin. He tried to wipe aside some of the grime that
clouded it, but only succeeded in smudging it around. It felt so strange to run
his thumb over the brand and feel nothing but grains of dirt and the soft give
of his own flesh. There was no texture to the mark itself. No ridges. No
lumpiness beneath his skin. Only that incessant, dull glow.
Above him, raindrops began to drum their fingers on the rooftop. Every memory
he had of the camp was coated with that noise. When would it ever stop raining?
The wet season seemed to have stretched forever this year. It was raining when
he marched in. It was raining the night of the attack… when Credence laid under
the slanted roof of his attic bedroom, and the drops were muffled into a gentle
hum…
The mark on Credence’s arm flared to life, shining so brightly into Credence’s
unprepared eyes that they ached as his pupils contracted. The fragile thread of
memory evaporated. Alarm and confusion gripped him instead.
The other boys were still talking like nothing had happened. Credence rolled
his head on his pillow to look around the room, needing to see if their marks
were glowing too—and horror struck him like an ax in the gut. In his periphery,
the nightmare had come to life: the north wall was wide open. Golden light
glittered at the edges of the artificial window. A dark figure stood in its
center, tall and imposing.
Credence choked on his own heart. It seemed to have moved from his chest and up
into the narrow of his throat where it thrashed like a panicked rodent. His
stomach whined and twisted into a cramped knot.
No one else had seen.
This was plain from the quiet laughter that rolled through the room as Johan
made a rude jape. Conversation carried on like normal, and Credence didn’t see
any other arms glowing like his.
He was being taken. Just like the boy from Block D.
Any moment now, his legs would move under him and carry him away of their own
accord. Would he be conscious when it happened? Trapped inside his own body as
it betrayed him, fully aware? Or would he black out any moment now, and awaken
tomorrow morning, clueless that anything had happened? As much as Credence had
fought to reclaim his lost memories, he suddenly wasn’t sure which sounded
worse.
The mark on his arm… tugged.
Credence exhaled shakily, making a point of not looking at the magic window.
There came another tug at his arm, more insistent, and Credence thought: this
is it. Yet his legs remained stretched out on his bunk. His body did not betray
him. Nor did his mind.
None of the other children could see the glow in their marks.
What if the same unique ability that allowed Credence to see the glow… also
allowed him to see the magic window? From what he’d observed in Block D, the
chosen boy had been just as oblivious to the voyeur as the other boys. Perhaps
Credence was somehow… immune. Immune to obfuscation. And, it followed, immune
to the magical imperative to obey.
The mark tugged again, painfully this time. With a flush of determination,
Credence swung his legs off the bed, and planted his bare feet firmly on the
straw floor. His fear was still there, screaming inside him—but his willpower
surged to meet it. He rose, shoulders squared, and began to move toward the
door, schooling his features with the same blankness he’d seen on the other
boy. If he could convince them he was under hypnosis, but actually remain alert
and aware, he might finally learn the secret of his missing memories.
Still, as Credence stepped out into the rain and let his socks sink into the
cold mud, he had to wonder. Was this how it worked? Did they simply… make the
boys think it was their own idea?
He couldn’t let himself believe that was true. And even if it was, it wouldn’t
matter. He tried not to glance at the wizard who stood waiting for him mere
meters away, but he could see enough of the man in his periphery to know that
if he did try to run, he wouldn’t get far.
With a soft ripple, the glow of magic that had created the portal swiftly
diminished. Credence tried not to react. He could see his own breath in the
fog. He could hear every inhale, deep and on the edge of anxious, but he did
his best to make it even, hoping against all hope that this was normal. Maybe
it didn’t matter, he thought, as he and the wizard—Graves, they had called
him—stood there in silence. Maybe he only forced the boys along who did not
obey.
Graves was looking him over, Credence realized. He wasn’t used to being the
recipient of such attention, but the man was taking him in head to toe as the
rain seeped into his clothes and hair, threatening to turn his skin to ice and
leave him shivering. Credence couldn’t tell whether the man was looking for
something or if he’d done something suspicious, but the gaze did not feel
accusatory. Merely scrutinizing. Curious. Maybe even… appreciative, if what
Credence could see out of the corner of his eye was right. If the man’s half-
marred face could form such an expression. An expression Credence had seen on
certain other wizards when they looked at the boys.
He would have trembled had Graves not turned and walked ahead, evidently
expecting that he would follow. He did, quickly, his feet squelching in the
mud. He felt shaken from the weight of that gaze more even than the cold.
From behind, Graves stood tall with shoulders squared and a severe haircut. He
wasn’t as tall as some of the wizards Credence had seen in the camp, but there
was something about him that made Credence feel like he could take any of them
down in a fight—a sturdiness of frame that Credence hadn’t seen on anyone else.
He tried not to think of Derik’s stories about the man. He tried to tell
himself that it didn’t matter if it was this man or any of the others who came
to collect him in the middle of the night, that he wouldn’t stand a chance to
escape either way.
It was difficult to make himself believe it.
Graves led him along the back of the dorms, outside the regular paths. The
children were all in their bunks at this hour, but the way was still lit by a
sparse scattering of lamps and patrolled by the occasional camp guard. They
crossed one along the way who’d been strolling towards them from the perimeter
wall. Graves gave no sign of greeting or even acknowledgement, but the guard’s
eyes darted toward them, looking from Graves to Credence in a flash before
catching himself and averting his gaze. His back straightened, his shoulders
tensed, and although he didn’t falter in his stride, Credence swore the wizard
wasn’t breathing as they passed.
They seemed to be headed towards the gate.
Credence’s breath sounded far too loud in his own ears, and he wondered every
moment if he would betray the behavior of a boy who was not under hypnosis.
That something about the way he walked or breathed would alert his captor to
his conscious state. But Graves never even glanced down at him, pacing a half
step ahead and trusting his catch would follow on its invisible leash.
The massive iron gate whined as it made an opening wide enough for two.
Credence’s hair stood on end as they passed close to the metal. The magic in it
was so strong, it felt like the repulsive end of a magnet. The latch had just
clicked shut behind them when Graves whirled around and flung his hand toward
Credence’s throat. It was a good thing Credence was too frozen with fear to
react because the man only grasped the inner curve of Credence’s shoulder, with
his thumb resting harmlessly over the dip where Credence’s Adam’s apple would
one day grow. And then the world dissolved.
When it reappeared, Credence didn’t know what he was seeing at first. The
change was so overwhelming, it took his mind several moments to catch up. Ahead
and below him stretched a wide, dark block, planted before a bleak, flat
landscape. A stripe of mist clung to its horizon, absorbing the silver of the
moonlight. As Credence’s eyes adjusted, he could make out geometric shapes in
the dark block; cubes and pathways…
The camp, he realized, with a rush.
He was seeing the camp from above.
Graves made a disgusted noise somewhere above him, and a bright flash of magic
zapped at his feet. Pins and needles shot up the length of Credence’s body, and
he flinched, expecting it to turn into pain—but it never did. The feeling
evaporated, and when he looked down, he saw that all the wetness and grime that
had long begun to feel like a second skin had disappeared. Every fiber of his
clothing and crease of his skin was as pristine as his masters’. His muddy
socks were gone, his feet bare and untarnished on the carpet. He curled his
toes against the resistance of it, struck by how firm it felt, even though he
knew it was stretched over open air. The feeling of rain pelting against his
scalp was also noticeably absent here. Here… in the pyramid camp.
Credence’s heart thrilled, and for a moment, he was too excited about being in
this magical place to remember his immediate perils.
The bulky shapes of the structure around him weren’t easy to make out against
the night sky, except those closest. He could see they stood at the very top.
The tents below were made of thick fabric flapping in the wind, somehow
untouched by the rain and full of rich, winding patterns. From the ground
they’d appeared to be solid colors, but now he could see that they varied
beautifully, just like the intricate weaving in the carpet below him. The
carpet that floated on air. Credence accidentally peered over the edge. A
breath of cold air nearly made him choke and the sense of vertigo that overtook
him was unstoppable.
A heavy hand clapped over his shoulder and held tight. Credence didn’t move a
muscle more.
Graves squeezed and it was painful, but Credence tried to pretend that it
calmed him—that the fear retreated and the haze he was supposed to be under
took over. He didn’t feel it at all. His legs trembled and he could feel sweat
in his palms, and he almost wished he really had been put under some kind of
spell, just for the calm it would bring him.
Graves pulled him away from the scene of the camp, before his legs had
unfrozen, and he stumbled. Instead of letting him fall, the wizard caught him.
With ease he lifted Credence back onto his feet and steadied him. Credence
tried not to look up at the man’s face. He knew it would give him away. He knew
he would stare at the misshapen side of it and the wizard would know instantly
that he was aware of what was going on around him. He could feel the man
looking down at him and it made goose bumps raise across his arms.
When Graves was satisfied Credence could walk, he led him down the short path
of the carpet toward the canopy of a tent. The only tent this high up. Its
crimson fabric fluttered, revealing lines of dark embellishments all along its
surface. As gilded as this tent looked in the daylight, even at a distance, it
only made Credence feel small under the looming bulk of it in the dark.
If he tried to run, he truly had nowhere to go. Five meters in any direction
and he’d be tumbling through the air, plummeting to the ground below. Credence
didn’t want to get too close to the wizard; instinct told him this man was not
a friend, but reason prevented him from lingering too far back.
Graves wasn’t paying him any attention. The man drew up to the doorway, framed
by golden embroidery that glittered softly in the moonlight. He straightened
his shoulders andreached out for a golden tassel beside the cloth.
A bell sounded faintly within, and then the latch upon the curtain fell open.
All on its own.
A sinking feeling began to grow in the pit of Credence’s stomach as the wizard
drew aside the curtain and looked back at him. Credence was expected to follow.
He put one foot in front of the other and forced himself to go to the man,
catching a glimpse of furnishings inside a well-lit room that seemed much
larger than he’d expected from the outside. Graves stepped in behind him and
let the curtain fall, but as soon as Credence passed through, his feet stopped.
There, before a sturdy desk stacked with rolls of parchment and a glass tumbler
in his hand, stood the Commander. He looked like he’d been expecting them.
"Ahh, good, you found him."
Chapter End Notes
     HerrGrindelwald: Do you love Grindelwald as much as we do? Please
     come visit our blogs! We're always looking for more quality
     Grindelwald content to follow.
***** Chapter 3 *****
Chapter Notes
     As a special holiday treat, we give you this chapter... and new art
     by The Piper of Hameln, straight from the camp showers. Click_here_to
     feast_your_eyes.
The dimensions of the tent’s interior defied its exterior. The room they stood
in was as spacious as it was luxurious, housing such improbable items as a
grandfather clock, a small liquor cabinet, a large desk, and—hanging high above
them—a chandelier made of crystal sheets that hung from real antlers. Looking
up alerted Credence to a second level, where he could just barely make out a
wide bed, piled with furs. A ladder lead to this level, and—impossibly—Credence
thought he could see the flicker of fire up there. He certainly smelled a
fireplace, and the interior of the tent was so warm that it made his icy toes
prickle with pins and needles as the blood rushed back in.
He moved his eyes back to the Commander, who was standing with a drink half
raised to his mouth, raising an eyebrow and ready to meet Credence’s gaze.
Credence fell into the trap of the man’s eyes for a split second before
lowering his own with a gulp.
The Commander sat his drink down on the desk with an aggressive thud.
“Oh Percy.”
Credence sensed the man behind him stiffen.
“…Sir.”
Credence kept his eyes on a massive pelt on the floor, wondering what sort of
beast it had been. It could almost have been from a tiger, but it was the wrong
color: white and almost silvery, like the Commander’s hair.
“Have we forgotten something?”
When the Commander’s question was met with nervous silence, Credence heard him
round the desk and come toward them in a steady, mocking swagger of steps. He
saw dark slippers trod over the striped winter fur of the pelt, and then draw
even closer, until Credence was looking almost directly down at them. He felt a
flushed awareness of the Commander’s belly so close to his face. The next
breath he took had a gentle, enticing spice to it, and in his core there came
an inexplicable surge of… belonging.. Some feeling warm and safe, loose with
the letting go of hurts…
“He’s awake.”
Credence’s shoulders came up before he could help it, jarred out of the
strange, soothing feeling. He tried to remain still as silence descended upon
the room. His muscles were stiff, but he wasn’t trembling—not like he so often
did out in the cold, when Snarlack would conjure a whip from the end of his
wand and rant about how worthless their hides were between his strikes.
Credence thought that maybe the warmth of the room prevented it, because he was
surely in more danger here than he’d ever been at the hands of the camp guards,
but that pleasant scent still filled his nose and his heart wasn’t racing like
it usually did in the presence of wizards.
“I….” Behind him, Graves’ voice trailed off. He didn’t sound frightened, per
se, but there was a note of uncertainty in it.
That did not bode well. Credence didn’t know how to make it right. It wasn’t
his fault he was awake, but he knew that didn’t matter. It never mattered,
especially not in the camp. If he fell short of the wizards’ expectations of
him for any reason, even if it was their fault, he wouldn’t escape punishment.
He closed his eyes and tried to feel grateful that he was out of cold, if
nothing else. And if he was struck, then at least he’d fall upon a soft rug
instead of rock and mud.
But the strike never came. Instead, something smooth and warm touched his
cheek. A hand—the Commander’s hand. He was so startled he jumped and opened his
eyes. He expected to see the mocking sneer worn by the guards whenever they
pretended to take pity on the children, but it wasn’t there. The Commander’s
expression was serene, and searching, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
“Tsk. Poor thing.”
To Credence’s shock, the man bent to kneel down at Credence’s level, and
although the hint of a smile remained upon his lips, it didn’t seem malicious.
“Poor little urchin had you fooled, Percy.” The Commander’s mismatched eyes
lifted to fix on Graves, who still stood straight-backed behind Credence, and
danced merrily at the other wizard’s expense.
The man gave a quiet sigh, chastened.
“That must have been frightening for you,” the Commander’s attention fell back
to Credence, “leaving the camp and coming all the way up here.”
It could have been a question, but Credence wasn’t sure and didn’t feel like he
should give an answer.
“What do you say I help you relax a little?” The thumb at his cheek brushed
softly over his skin—an indication of intent before the hand moved and fingers
brushed into the back of his hair, massaging slowly in the most pleasant way.
Relaxation was dangerous, Credence knew. It meant letting go of his vigilance.
Around the camp, blows came out of nowhere. He had to be prepared. He couldn’t
let himself be blindsided.
But he already was. The sensation of the Commander’s fingers against his scalp
blossomed through his nerve-endings and sent a shiver down his spine so
powerful that he gasped and arched his back when it reached his tailbone.
Credence heard a pleased hum, low as brass, and realized the sound came from
beyond the darkness of his eyelids.
When had he closed his eyes?
The Commander’s fingers were strong, and they worked their way down, grabbing
at the back of his neck and pulling like a mother cat lifting its kitten. If
Credence’s muscles could moan, they would have. He’d never consciously felt the
tension in his own shoulders until the Commander’s hand started kneading at
him.
That was it. That was why his willpower withered so quickly. He had never felt
this before. Touch.
Oh, no doubt someone had touched him to change his diapers as an infant. Mary
Lou had touched his shoulder to lead him around, or his wrist to hold his hand
still. Some of the guards had handled him. But stroking? Hugging? He was only
ever a voyeur to such acts. He had never tasted their mystery; not even once.
Certainly, no one had ever touched him as though it were their mission to make
him feel good.
“I…,” Credence breathed out, but nothing else came.
“…Look at me, boy.”
The Commander spoke deep in his chest, gentle and only for Credence to hear.
Credence’s eyelids felt heavy when he lifted them, and they sagged over his
gaze. Up close, he could see all the little details of the Commander’s face.
The grooves in his cheeks from years of speaking, smiling, shouting commands.
The way the skin around his eyes was delicate and crinkled like a candy
wrapper. The irises of those confounding, day-and-night eyes. And most of all,
the burning presence with which he inhabited every little muscle of his
expressions. Credence thought he could feel the energy of the man like pins and
needles against his own skin. He was so used to people who were far away inside
themselves, never really seeing him. The Commander’s attention was shining out
of him. Blinding.
“I’m looking, sir.”
“Do you really think you can stop me?”
Credence’s breath hitched in his throat. A panicked confusion swirled in his
chest, even as his muscles relaxed beneath the warmth that was seeping from the
Commander’s hand and into his neck. He was suddenly intently conscious of that
hand.
“N- no, sir, I-”
Credence felt the Commander’s other hand find one of his own, where it hung by
his side. The Commander was prying his fingers from his palm, one by one.
Credence had not even realized he’d had his hands bunched into fists. Taking
the hint, he reluctantly unclenched them. It felt like the showers all over
again. Getting naked.
The Commander’s mouth drew so close that Credence crossed his eyes to follow
it. He could see the individual hairs of the wizard’s mustache before they
blurred out of view, and Credence felt the peculiarity of their bristles
against his forehead as the Commander planted a kiss.
His mind was blank as the wizard drew back and looked him in the eye.
“If you can’t stop me, then there’s no reason to fight.” The hand at the back
of Credence’s neck finally slid away, creeping down his jaw and away, until
only the tip of the commander’s middle finger lingered below his chin. “Let the
fight out, boy. You’ve been holding onto it for too long.”
With a skeletal creaking that Credence could feel in the roots of his teeth, he
let his shoulders drop.
Goosebumps ran down his flesh. He felt them everywhere. There was a chill
inside him that contrasted with the warmth of the room and the Commander’s
hand. He’d brought it with him from the camp. This was the first time he’d been
asked to let it go, and the first time that anyone had noticed it there at all,
much less addressed it. The guards didn’t care. It seemed unfathomable that
this man should.
Credence didn’t know whether relaxing his muscles would be enough. His heart
still pounded so hard against his ribcage that he feared it was audible.
“That’s better.” The soft smile at the corner of the Commander’s mouth was
back.
A tiny surge of relief washed through Credence, even though he knew he
shouldn’t take it for granted. Whatever this man wanted from him, he knew it
would be in his best interests to acquiesce.
The man’s smile widened by a fraction as though he’d read the thoughts right
off Credence’s face. With a fluidity Credence had only seen in the wizards from
the army, the Commander rose from his crouch and looked down at him from a
proper height. Credence wasn’t used to standing that close to anyone, and this
man, even though not particularly tall, seemed a giant to him.
“Come and sit with me for a while.” The Commander offered his hand.
Credence stared for a split second, dumbfounded, before reaching out and
placing his hand in the man’s palm. The Commander squeezed it gently. The
action should have been grounding, but Credence felt like he was entering into
a haze of confusion. He hoped it wasn’t a spell. It didn’t feel like he
imagined one might feel. He simply had no idea what was expected of him. No
idea what he should say or do, even though he knew, rationally, that his life
possibly depended on it.
The Commander tugged, and Credence was pulled forward, unable to think on it
any longer. The man took up his glass again and led them deeper into the room,
where a small, plush couch waited. The Commander sank into it and took a sip
from his glass while he looked Credence over.
From his toes, all the way up to his eyes, the man’s gaze wandered. Then he set
the glass down with a clink and patted the spot beside him. “Come, sit.”
Credence glanced over the dark cushions, fearful he’d track dirt upon them, but
then he looked down at his feet again and remembered that the other wizard had
cleaned him with magic. He was still damp and in his nightclothes, and although
they were worn, they were not stained with signs of labor like his day clothes.
Tentatively, Credence climbed up onto the cushion beside the Commander.
Movement from the door drew his attention. The other wizard—Graves—bowed low in
a practiced gesture and turned to leave them. But to Credence’s surprise, when
the man neared the exit, he simply… stopped. Credence blinked as the man
clutched his hands behind his back and shifted into a comfortable stance with
his feet shoulder width apart. He stayed there like a statue, his back turned
to the room, neither moving a muscle nor making a sound.
Credence’s eyes flickered uncertainly to the Commander. All the brazen defiance
that had allowed him to raise his eyes during the parade had left him now. The
most he dared do was stare at the Commander’s chest, where a smart row of
silver buttons kept his deep crimson robes taut against his form. To Credence’s
infinite embarrassment, the Commander raised his hands and undid the first two
of those buttons while Credence watched, causing his cheeks to turn the color
of the Commander’s robes.
“You can get comfortable, too, if you’d like.”
“I… don’t…” Credence didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure he understood. He
fidgeted, squirming against the plush cushion. Ever since his mark had lit up
in the dorms, he’d been tied to the present, existing only in the moment. Now
that he was warm and dry and at least partly freed from the looming terror of
the unknown, his confusion began catching up to him—and with it, frustration.
He wanted to know why he was there. He didn’t want to be toyed with.
“You must be wondering why you are here,” the Commander said smoothly.
The statement was so in line with Credence’s thoughts that for a moment, he
wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it. The Commander’s voice echoing his mind was
like the world going double for a moment. He blinked hard enough to see stars,
trying to push away the disquieting sensation.
“Yes… master.”
“You are here… to keep me company for the night. To delight me.”
To… delight? Credence felt more thrown in this moment than he had when he
discovered that magic was real. Credence couldn’t delight anyone. The Commander
had made a terrible choice if he thought Credence could entertain him. Dirty
socks were more entertaining than him.
“I always choose exactly what I want,” the Commander said. “If you are
uncertain how to act… follow these two simple guidelines. Be yourself… and
refuse me nothing.”
Be myself, Credence repeated inside his own head. And… don’t say no.
“That’s… it?” he asked, tentatively. Then added, quickly, “Master.”
“You don’t have to call me master every time you speak,” the Commander
chuckled. “And… yes. That truly is it. Nothing more, and nothing less. Would
you like some hot spiced wine?”
“N-…” Ma had always told him that alcohol was the drink of degenerates. That it
polluted the body. But the Commander had instructed him to put aside refusals,
and how he conducted himself tonight could impact life and limb. “…Yes.”
Credence had to gulp down the ‘master’ stuck in his throat.
The Commander made a pleased noise and flicked a hand to summon their drinks.
“Good. You understand.”
The Commander’s voice had a richness and a warmth to it. One that percolated
past Credence’s fear and softened his insides, despite his better instincts.
Something about it kindled feelings of safety within him. Made him believe, in
his gut, that he really would not be hurt if he only did what was asked. That
there were no unexpected blows or capricious punishments waiting around the
corner. That he could let go, just for now… in this soft couch, this balmy
tent…
He tried to tell his body it was all illusion. Tried to stay focused on
remembering that threat was ever-present as a ceramic goblet was placed into
his hands. The heat of it seeped into his fingers and dispelled a cold there
deeper than he’d known he carried. His very bones sighed with the release. From
the goblet, a heady aroma of fruit and spice floated up and burned the inside
of his nose. It was difficult to compete with his own senses as saliva gathered
thirstily beneath his tongue.
“Try it.”
Credence pressed the warm ceramic to his lips and inhaled the aroma once more
before taking a sip. He expected it to taste like the hot apple cider
parishioners brought to the church only on Christmas, but it was nothing alike.
His brows knit and his face scrunched up at the bitterness before he could stop
himself from being rude. He pulled the cup away and licked his lips, trying to
school his expression back into place.
To his surprise, a chuckle sounded from the man at his side. The Commander was
watching him over the rim of his own cup, and his eyes were strangely delighted
to see Credence’s reaction.
Credence flushed. His heart was still beating fast. He thought for sure he’d
been rude, showing such obvious distaste.
“Try again.”
As Credence watched, the Commander took a sip of his own beverage, displaying
none of the aversion Credence had. The ridge of the man’s throat bobbed as he
swallowed, and Credence watched the tendons under the pale skin move until his
gaze landed at the man’s collar bone, just above the open buttons. The
Commander made the drink seem sweet and smooth.
There was a hint of sweetness to it, Credence conceded, and raised his cup
again, feeling a certain amount of trepidation this time. He didn’t want to
offend the Commander, but the bitter taste of alcohol was just as strong as the
sweetness and the spice. At least his reaction wasn’t unexpected this time.
Credence’s mouth pursed, but he managed another sip well enough.
Again, the Commander was smiling at him, mouth turned up at the corners with
something that looked like fondness, but the expression had an edge to it—a
heat to it—that Credence couldn’t place. It made his skin prickle, but it also
gave him the oddest sensation. He felt nervous, almost to the point of being
frightened, but that strange sense of safety deep inside him remained firm. The
contrast didn’t make sense. Reality and what he was feeling couldn’t be
reconciled.
“Too strong for you, hm?” The Commander shifted, drawing one leg up on the
couch so that he could better face Credence. “I can think of something you
might prefer instead.”
Mismatched eyes held Credence’s own while the man leaned in and reached for his
goblet. He thought the Commander might take it and give Credence something
else, but the movement didn’t stop. His larger hand wrapped over Credence’s
fingers to hold the cup in place while he drew into Credence’s space.
Credence only realized what was about to happen a moment before the brush of
whiskers grazed his cheek, and then soft lips pressed against the corner of his
mouth.
He froze.
The Commander didn’t draw back. Instead, the fingers of his free hand found the
back of Credence’s neck, just like they’d done before. Gentle, but firm. Ready
should Credence pull away. When Credence didn’t, the man’s mouth moved over his
own—feather light, yet decidedly not chaste.
Credence held as still, as if the kiss had been a blade at his throat… except
for his lips, which did the strangest thing of their own accord. They relaxed,
and parted. Softly, delicately, like they did in the moments before sleep when
the tension of the day’s quiet rage would leave his face. He felt the Commander
respond to this; felt the minutest exchanges of touch, loud as words. The man
shifted subtly against the new give so that his bottom lip pressed between
Credence’s. His mustache tickled Credence’s nose, which tingled with the piney
musk of aftershave. The irrational feeling of safety Credence had felt when he
first smelled the man grew warm and oozy inside him, like melting caramel.
It wasn’t until the Commander’s lips disappeared that Credence grew aware of
how much everything had narrowed into that moment, that contact. He found that
he was leaning forward in his seat, having trailed after the Commander’s lips a
ways when they withdrew, like a flower’s stalk bending toward sunlight. Some
part of him was embarrassed, but for once, his shame was upstaged by other
feelings. Relief, curiosity, and… a confused wonder. He blinked his way back to
the present, finally finding the courage to look directly into the Commander’s
eyes. What he saw there was a profound satisfaction, and-… could it be?
Fondness? It was doused in smugness, whatever it was.
“…why?” Credence could hear how small his own voice was. How very much a child
he was. How vulnerable.
It baffled and frightened him that all his resolve—all his fight, as the
Commander had called it—could evaporate in the face of such simple,
affectionate contact. How the sacred flame of hatred in his belly had been
replaced by a sweet, fluttering emptiness in less than a minute’s time. He
found himself painfully, stupidly hopeful at the hint of caring in the
Commander’s eyes. Awash in the naive notion that maybe this one won’t hurt me.
But that didn’t make sense. Nothing about Credence invited that sort of
kindness.
The glint of smugness drained out of the Commander’s eyes, and for a fleeting
instant, he looked almost sad. It passed.
“I saw you at the parade,” he said, by way of explanation.
Credence shrank. The Commander chuckled.
“I thought you had remarkably beautiful eyes,” he said, sipping his wine. Was
the Commander teasing him?
Credence licked his lips, imagining he could taste the kiss.
“I’m sorry I looked, master.”
“Don’t be. I’m too vain. Someone had to appreciate that overcoat.”
From the doorway, the other wizard emitted a quick, gruff sound, quickly
clipped. Credence startled, and almost spilled some of his wine. The Commander
captured all his attention so expertly, he’d forgotten about the man with the
scar. Sheepishly, he disguised his racing heart by raising the mug to his lips
and taking a few, anxious gulps, larger than he’d meant to. He coughed when he
pulled the mug away, and the spiced wine felt like a fever when it reached the
core of his body and blossomed out into his limbs. A deep headiness was
overtaking him, though he wasn’t sure if it was the wine, the Commander, or the
blissful relief of finally not being cold.
“You don’t need much coaxing, do you?” The Commander regarded Credence as he
spoke, wearing an expression Credence could not interpret, except to note that
the edge of heat had crept to the forefront. “I don’t need to convince you. You
want to be touched more than anything. Isn’t that true?”
Of all his list of wants, Credence would never have thought to mention touch.
But when the Commander reached out and traced the pads of his fingers down the
side of Credence’s face, he knew the Commander saw truths he did not. Credence
closed his eyes, breathing deep into the sensation of being stroked with
affection. Where there had been fear, there was now only a vulnerable, cringing
sadness, praying that all this would not suddenly turn into a lie. If this
kind, affectionate man hit him now, it wouldn’t be the pain that did him in,
but the heartbreak.
“Yes,” Credence whispered.
He heard the Commander put his mug down.
“One more sip.” The Commander’s fingers pressed against the underside of
Credence’s mug, lifting it up so that he had to raise it to his mouth again.
Credence didn’t disobey. As he drank, he wondered why the wizard asked this of
him. Ma had always said the Devil seduces good souls with liquor and spirits.
Credence had seen drunken men before, late at night, stumbling down the streets
in front of the church, but he had no idea why the Commander would want him to
drink. He tried to obey, though. He drank from the mug as deeply as he could
before he coughed again.
The Commander took it from him then, and placed Credence’s mug down beside his
own.
“To help you relax,” the man said, even though he wasn’t obligated to explain
anything to Credence. “Come here.” He patted the seat cushion beside him. The
one that separated them.
Credence shifted forward, closing the distance between them while his heart
began to pound loudly in his ears. There was a smile on the Commander’s lips as
he reached up to touch Credence’s face again. This time, when he bent down to
press his mouth to Credence’s, the contact was not light, and his hands were
not idle.
One hooked around the back of Credence’s neck—an anchor more than a
restraint—and the other slipped around his middle to stroke down the length of
his back. Credence’s spine arched, surprised at the ferocity of the touch, but
with warm lips upon his own and a tongue opening his mouth with playful little
swipes, there wasn’t much room for analysis.
His mind reeled in the magnitude of it all.
He would have frozen if the Commander’s hands and mouth hadn’t felt so…nice.
Insistent, but gentle. Coaxing instead of demanding. At least not with force.
Not the way Credence was used to—the way the guards forced their labors and
lashes upon the bodies of the boys. If the Commander wanted to kiss him, he
didn’t have to do it this way. Credence didn’t understand why he did, but he
was grateful the man did not betray the kind touches with cruel ones.
The more Credence thought about how different things were in the camp below,
the more he soaked up the press of the man’s mouth and fingers, and even the
soft nip of teeth against his lower lip—the suggestion of a desire for
something more, but restrained enough for only a tingle to mar Credence’s plump
flesh.
Credence opened his mouth to it and pressed himself forward, hoping that was
what the Commander wanted—because he wanted it too. Wanted to feel the safety
of this strange affection.
He was pressed backward very suddenly after that, fearing for a split second
that he’d done something wrong, but finding the Commander only wanted to press
him down against the cushions, with eyes glittering and an approving smile on
his mouth.
“That’s it,” the man whispered.
Credence felt his breath grow heavy and deep, his chest expanding between the
pressure of the Commander’s hands and the give of the cushions. He should have
been squirming, kicking for his life beneath the looming arch of the grown
man’s body, but against all reason, Credence felt calmer than he ever had. He
wasn’t on edge, waiting to clench against the next blow, or to bite, or claw,
or dodge. He was… surrendering. The wolf’s jaw was open on his throat, ready to
bite down any moment, and he was limp.
“Tell me what to do,” Credence whispered. He didn’t know. This was all so
unfamiliar to him. The Commander clearly wanted something out of him. He was
working up to it, with the kisses and the hot wine. Credence was willing to
give it to him, whatever it was. He just needed to be told how. He didn’t want
to be some passive object, manipulated and placed where the Commander wanted
him. That profound will was still burning in him, but for once, its intent was
not bent toward resistance.
He’d caught the Commander off guard. He could see that, in the way the man’s
brow loosened all at once, raising his pale eyebrows and softening the area
around his eyes. He could feel it in the way the intense wave of momentum the
Commander had washed over him paused, just for a moment, the way a sucking tide
holds its breath before a crashing wave.
The Commander didn’t answer him in words. Instead, he ran those heavy hands
down Credence’s torso. Down to the edge of his shirt, and then up again, under
it, stroking his vulnerable belly. The Commander’s hands could cover the entire
breadth of his abdomen, and Credence breathed deep into it, experimentally
lifting those hands. Then… he reached up, and started to unbutton his own
shirt.
It was just like in the showers. But not. Somehow, Credence taking the
initiative made it different. Doing it before he was asked. Doing it because he
wanted to… or thought he wanted to…
The Commander’s eyes shone fiercely as they watched, the lips that had kissed
Credence moments ago now parted with disbelief… and with something thirsty that
made Credence feel wonderful to be looked at. A sensation as unfamiliar as
being touched.
“Am I under a spell…?” Credence asked in a whisper, as his fingers came down
low enough to brush against the Commander’s, undoing the last few buttons of
his shirt.
“No…” The Commander growled the word, soft and breathy. Then added- “But you’re
putting me under one.”
Credence actually giggled. It didn’t sound like his own voice, though he knew
it was. The sound was pure and light; a sound of bells he’d sometimes heard
ringing from nearby parks where caring parents took their children to play.
With the last button undone, the Commander’s hands slid the rest of the way up
the bare skin of Credence’s torso, parting the fabric as he went. Credence
sighed at so much skin-to-skin contact. It was a blissful submersion after the
light dip of the Commander’s hand on his neck. This time, when the Commander
leaned down to claim Credence’s lips, he lifted his head to meet him.
He wondered if this was some type of fear-response as the Commander settled
over him, pressing him back into the cushions, and he felt his body go pliant
all over. It would make sense, if his survival depended on giving the Commander
what he wanted… but Credence didn’t feel afraid. He didn’t feel anything except
warm and soft inside and so, so glad he was no longer in the camp. His thoughts
should have been on the hows and the whys regarding his purpose there in the
Commander’s tent, but his mind shied away from such things. All he wanted was
relief. And comfort. …And safety.
The pad of a thumb dipped into the divot of his belly button as the Commander’s
hand wrapped around his side, so large in comparison that his fingers spread
halfway across the small of Credence’s back. The hand moved down over his hip
where the ridge of bone protruded, and then the Commander’s thumb lowered to
massage into the ravine where Credence’s thigh met his pelvis.
The touch was so unexpectedly stimulating that Credence squirmed beneath the
man’s hand. His toes curled and he let out a soft sound, muffled between
presses of the Commander’s lips and tongue. It felt like grazing a nerve. One
that went directly to the pressure pooling between his legs, which Credence was
trying to ignore.
The Commander sat up and looked down at him with heat and approval, but
Credence felt too dazed to follow the gaze. He laid there on the seat, sprawled
out as he’d been with the man on top of him.
“I think you’re just about ready, aren’t you.” Teeth flashed in a grin and
mismatched eyes danced from Credence’s mouth and down… down, all the way to his
crotch, where his legs had fallen open, spread on either side of the
Commander’s.
Credence didn’t have time to be embarrassed. He was lifted up into the
Commander’s arms, shirt discarded along the way, as the man got to his feet. On
instinct, Credence wrapped his legs around the man’s waist, and with the state
of things down there, the contact felt good. That earned him a grin while the
Commander walked him to the ladder that lead up to the second level.
“Hold on tight, now.”
Credence’s arms wound anxiously around the Commander’s neck, his thighs
squeezing hard at the man’s hips, and a moment later, the Commander released
his hold and grabbed onto the ladder. Credence’s stomach fell out from under
him as the man hoisted them up the first rung, and then the next, and the next.
It made him feel oddly fluttery to be carried like this. Partly afraid that
he’d fall, and partly captivated by the way the Commander’s strong arms seemed
to carry both their weights with such ease. He closed his eyes tightly when the
man put his knee on the second level and pushed himself to stand, knowing they
were right on the ledge. But strong arms wound around him again, and Credence
felt the pleasant jostle of further steps, carrying them away from danger.
Gravity shifted, and Credence clung with a racing heart as the Commander bent
and the world tilted—but then something soft embraced him from behind, and the
Commander’s weight came down on top of him, pressing him slowly into the
softness.
His eyes fluttered open, seeing the blurry nearness of the Commander’s hair and
the deep red of the tent ceiling further beyond. The sound of the fire was very
close now, and it was significantly hotter here than it had been on the lower
level. Whatever he was laying on felt so luxurious against the naked skin of
his back that he wanted to moan. No sooner had he suppressed the impulse than
he found himself gasping, his whole body arching tensely as wet heat and
suction claimed his neck. The Commander’s mouth was on him, stimulating him in
ways Credence didn’t know was possible. Electric shocks shot through his body
from the point of contact, making him curve his back and press into the
Commander’s weight, as if he were resisting. He wanted desperately to make
himself pliant again, to not give the Commander the wrong idea, but it felt
impossible to speak. His attempts yielded only a small whimper.
In response, the Commander moaned against Credence’s neck and rolled his hips
upward, which had the effect of pressing his groin against the tender area
where Credence’s buttocks tapered off toward the soft stretch of skin before
his private parts. Credence’s mind went utterly blank. All his awareness
evacuated his head and drained into his body, pooling with tingling heat in the
base of his pelvis. He was acutely conscious of the way his legs still wound
around the Commander’s hips, his feet hovering floppily in the air above them.
The Commander must have sensed him freeze, because he lifted his head to peer
down at Credence, his mouth flushed red from its attentions to Credence’s neck.
The Commander looked so different like this. His face was reddened, and the
effects of both gravity and the firelight accentuated the lines on his face.
Credence could see a vein in the man’s forehead standing out against the skin.
His eyes looked unfocused and bleary. Searching him.
Without thinking of what he was doing, Credence unwound his arms from the man’s
neck and placed both hands on his weathered face, feeling the texture of the
skin under his palms. The roughness of the shaved areas, the soft flesh over
hard cheekbones. His hands, even splayed, were too small to cover the man’s
cheeks. He had to trail them up, following the curve of the man’s bone
structure until he had one hand on either temple, framing his eyes, which were
squinting at him with confusion. Everything felt a little too hot and out of
focus. A pleasant, low dizziness was settling over Credence, loosening the
tight restraints he kept inside his own head and letting strange thoughts flow
unimpeded. Among them, that he felt an inexplicable… tenderness for the man
above him just now.
He wanted this. He didn’t even know what this was, but he could identify parts.
The way his skin sighed under this full-body contact and wanted more—infinitely
more—straining greedily toward the pressure of the man’s weight. The way the
heat in his pelvis was swelling to the point of throbbing, and felt so good
when the Commander moved against him. The way being the man’s center of
attention induced those strange feelings of warmth, safety, and something
else—something that Credence couldn’t name, but reached for with all the
wounded neglect of his short life. How was it that a few moments ago, he had
been afraid to be here—and now he was afraid this man would ever make him go?
“Please…” Credence whispered, and pushed his hips down, seeking the pressure of
the man’s groin again.
A chuckle sounded above him. “Look at you.” The Commander’s face split into a
smile, still touched with that note of bemusement.
Credence got the impression his response wasn’t expected, or perhaps not to
this degree, but he couldn’t spare the strength to be ashamed. The Commander
certainly wasn’t displeased. That was more than evident. Credence knew in the
back of his head that he should be upset with himself for acting like this, but
he couldn’t find it in him. He wasn’t in pain anymore. This man was touching
him with affection and gentleness, even if his words had held a vaguely
threatening undertone at first. The Commander’s clever fingers and the
insistent press of his body overwhelmed Credence’s reservations. This was not
at all unpleasant. This was overwhelmingly pleasant, and Credence never thought
he’d experience anything pleasant ever again. He’d never had much experience
with it to start with.
Strong fingers gripped his hip and held him still while the Commander’s other
hand worked its way into Credence’s hair. He was suddenly very grateful the
other wizard had cleaned him of the dirt and grime on his skin before entering
the tent, otherwise he didn’t know if the state of him would have discouraged
the Commander from touching him like this. The rational voice in the back of
his mind told him that had been why the other wizard had done it in the first
place. The man had known.
But Credence’s mind shied away from following that trail of thought just now,
with the Commander leaned over him, his sensuous mouth curved up to reveal the
hint of teeth and his eyes drinking in the sight of Credence bent nearly in
half below him. The Commander shifted and his groin rubbed against Credence in
the most pleasurable way.
The feeling was so strong that Credence’s mouth fell open and his breathing
became labored. He felt engulfed in this man’s presence, with those strong
hands holding him in place, that larger body curled over his, and their hips
rubbing together in a way that overwhelmed Credence’s every tactile sense and
stalled his thoughts. Never in his short life had he experienced anything like
this.
Credence felt himself trembling as the Commander leaned down and captured his
mouth again. The hand in his hair seemed to take pleasure in making it as
unruly as possible, for when the man pulled back, his eyes lingered on the
disheveled strands before they swept down to take in Credence’s face and
finally catch on his eyes. After a moment, they dropped to Credence’s lips,
which felt hot and swollen from all the attention, and the man’s smile curved a
little more.
“Such a delight you are. A little treat.” The words whispered by the Commander
made Credence’s cheeks flare with heat. He’d never been called anything like
that before, not even by the people he’d used to hand leaflets to, who thought
him a poor soul worthy of pity. This left him feeling out of sorts, both
struggling to understand how and why the Commander would think this of him,
while the praise also muddled his head and left him feeling like he was
floating.
Credence clung tighter around the man’s neck and didn’t want to let go.
But then the fingers left his hair and both the man’s hands moved down to the
hem of his pants. The Commander didn’t waste time pulling them down, and even
though Credence had begun to suspect that was a possibility, he was still left
in slight shock when it actually happened.
The rough fabric got halfway down his thighs before it could go no farther and
Credence was left exposed, his arousal pink and flushed and standing straight
up in the air, small as it was. Quite suddenly, he had the presence of mind to
recognize that he should be embarrassed, but the Commander’s eyes were drinking
him in with too much appreciation and he was too dizzy to feel anything but
surprised.
“Mmm…” The Commander let his appreciation be heard as well as seen. He sat back
on his haunches, with Credence’s legs still trapped on either side of his hips,
pants and undergarments taut across his spread thighs. And then he slid one of
those warm, wonderful hands up over Credence’s most private parts, just like
that. Over his taut little balls and up the short, perky shaft, pressing it
down against Credence’s hairless skin.
The feeling Credence had been straining against when they ground their bodies
together surged through the raw, open wire of his genitals, up through his
spine, and blossomed in a bright light of pleasure behind his eyes. It was more
than pleasure, it was- realization. As the Commander’s palm pressed down and
stroked him, again and then again, Credence’s very understanding of what was
even possible to feel in this life blew wide open. The hovering, unanswered
question of what exactly the Commander wanted with him was answered in one
blissful awakening:
This.
“My, you like that…”
The Commander’s faintly amused tone drew Credence’s attention back into the
rest of his body, and he realized his face was scrunched up in concentration
and that he was making some very silly “oh” noises. He caught himself and
flushed harder, embarrassed—but it was a good sort of embarrassment. Something
Credence had never imagined could exist. Something shared that made the
Commander chuckle as well.
“It’s not a problem. It’s… delightful… when you show me… just how much you like
it.” The Commander was shifting back as he spoke, tugging Credence’s remaining
clothing all the way off. Between the fire and the furs, it was a relief to be
naked. Credence felt so content in his own skin, he actually stretched when he
was free of his clothes, all the way out to his fingers and toes.
“M-master…?”
Soothing hands ran up the side of Credence’s thighs, and he gasped as the
Commander leaned down to place wet kisses between his legs. Not quite on his
penis, but nuzzled around its base and his balls. It made his toes curl so hard
that his feet almost cramped.
“Yes, pet…?”
Credence felt the bristle of the Commander’s mustache against his most
sensitive anatomy when the man spoke.
“A-a-are you going to take yours off…? Too…?”
The Commander made a thoughtful noise… and then crawled up over Credence’s
body, dragging his nose and lips over the smooth expanse of Credence’s skin.
Inhaling him as he went.
He stopped when his collar was directly above Credence’s eyes. Hovering there,
with the two open silver buttons winking at Credence in the firelight. He
understood at once, and reached up with tiny, shaking fingers to undo the rest.
Credence worked the buttons all the way down to the bottom, where the shirt was
tucked into the man’s trousers. Credence’s fingers brushed against the
waistline, and he held his breath. Somehow, it seemed forbidden.
All of this should have been forbidden, according to everything Credence had
absorbed so far, living in the camp. This much contact between a muggle and a
wizard felt taboo, but touching the Commander anywhere close to there,
especially so. Yet clearly the man wanted it.
So Credence steeled himself and grabbed little fistfuls of fabric, tugging the
shirt free. He tried to breathe steady as it fell open and the soft material
brushed over him, forming a fabric curtain that enclosed him in the space
between the bed and the Commander. When the Commander looked down at him,
trapped in that fabric cage, Credence wondered whether the wrongness of it all
had crossed his mind. Inviting a muggle into his tent. Touching him.
Credence’s hands hovered in the air between them, unsure what to do next, until
the Commander leaned back to shrug the shirt off his shoulders. It slid like
water over his back and then pooled beside them, nestled in the furs and
forgotten as soon as the Commander turned his attention back to Credence.
He bent to nuzzle against Credence’s ear. It was quite nice at first, but then
the Commander opened his mouth and Credence felt the scrape of teeth. He froze,
but didn’t feel any bite. The Commander only seemed to be playing with
sensations. He repeated the gesture, until Credence began to relax again, and
then pressed his mouth to Credence’s ear.
“One more thing,” the Commander whispered, voice soft as the fur beneath
Credence’s back.
For a second Credence didn’t know what he meant. He hesitated too long before
the Commander took hold of his wrist and pulled it down to the front of his
pants and Credence nearly squeaked. Funny how propriety could sink its claws
into him at a moment like that, but he was caught off guard, and for a second,
he resisted the pull.
A soft rumble filled his ear, warning him not to deny the Commander. But
Credence didn’t want to deny him. He wanted not to be alone in the pleasure the
man was giving him. And he wanted… he wasn’t sure what he wanted, exactly, but
he wanted to see the man’s skin and he didn’t want to be the only one naked. So
Credence’s fingers searched for a button or a clasp and when he found it, he
didn’t hesitate any longer.
Carefully, Credence peeled the man’s pants down his hips, tugging as they went
and trying to avoid the large bulge underneath, which was filling out
noticeably to one side. The underwear came with, and Credence’s fingers brushed
coarse hair and tight skin and all at once, that hard length of flesh sprang
free.
Credence’s fingers froze as his eyes fixed on the deep flush of it, the sloped
head, and the thick veins that ran up the girth. He’d never seen a grown man’s
erect cock before and his mind stuttered to a halt at seeing one now.
It was the nip of teeth that brought him out of his daze. The Commander moved,
sitting back up so he could look down on himself and Credence underneath him,
whose legs were still spread over the sides of his hips. Credence wondered what
he must look like to this man. By comparison, he was tiny. Everywhere.
The Commander shifted and pulled his pants off the rest of the way and
carelessly tossed them aside. He was as bare as Credence then, skin pale and
smooth. The only hair was a light trail leading from his belly down to… there.
Credence’s eyes fell on it again and the man’s face split into a smile. He
reached down and took hold of one of Credence’s hands, and this time Credence
was too dazed for his limbs to stiffen. The Commander brought it to the base of
that length and cupped Credence’s slim fingers around it.
“You’re welcome to touch.” His smile grew wider, clearly enjoying the sensation
while he ran Credence’s hand up the thick shaft.
Credence’s mouth fell open. The skin was a fine layer of silk over rock
hardness underneath. With the encouragement of the Commander’s gaze, he gave a
tentative squeeze. His fingers barely wrapped around it. He imagined what it
might feel like for the Commander, and then the man’s eyes closed and he let
out a deep breath before falling on Credence again.
It startled him, the way the Commander attacked his mouth. His hand remained
trapped, and the Commander squeezed firmly around Credence’s fingers. The
sudden aggression made him tremble. He felt like he was about to break apart
from the immensity of the sensations being laid upon him. His skin raised with
goose bumps even though he felt hot all over. Every nerve ending inside him was
alight, but especially the ones under the Commander’s mouth and hands, and he
could feel the cock under his fingers responding to the touch before the
Commander abruptly let go and began to move down Credence’s body.
His mouth ended just beside Credence’s own small erection, and Credence’s world
narrowed down to that wet heat and soft pressure. He was filled to the brim
with sensation, and he hoped desperately that it would continue. That all of
this would continue.
He let his legs fall apart and breathed out with as little sound as he could,
but he couldn’t suppress a soft whimper or the way his toes curled when the
man’s tongue darted out to graze against the tiny, straining erection between
his legs.
The next sound caught in Credence’s throat and never made it out. The
Commander’s tongue felt nothing like his palm had, but it was just as good. Hot
and precise, and wet, the man curled it around the base of Credence’s little
cock with teasing licks and touches until Credence’s whimpers finally broke
free. He tried not to squirm—not when the man’s face was right there, pressed
up against his pelvis like that. Credence feared that if he made any sudden
movements, the Commander wouldn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it.
His legs drew up, pressed tight to either side of the Commander’s torso,
thrilling at the feeling of so much skin against skin. He shifted this way and
that in the tiniest motions, wanting so much and trying to get just a little
more.
The Commander teased him, reading the wordless pleas in Credence’s body but
steering clear of granting them directly. His lips made sure to keep Credence
wanting, squirming, and eventually outright bucking with a whimpered little
apology. Credence put his hands over his face in embarrassment. His whole body
felt flushed, and the room was starting to spin—from the wine or from the
Commander’s mouth, he couldn’t say. Every good sensation he had felt since the
Commander touched his neck had gathered deep in the core of his pelvis, and
while it had been nice at first, it was now throbbing, and clouding his mind.
His hips were leading his mind on a leash, demanding more sensation and telling
him to do stupid things like thrust at the Commander’s face.
The soft slick of the Commander’s mouth drew away, leaving the wetness on
Credence’s skin to chill against the open air. He wanted to apologize some
more—to correct himself for presuming—but before he could get the words out, he
found his penis suddenly engulfed in wet heat. His hands flew to the sheets
with a broken gasp, gathering desperate handfuls of the material and wringing
it in white-knuckled fists. The Commander was sucking, moving up and down on
his tiny shaft with a fierce insistence. It felt like he was trying to suck the
pool of heat in Credence’s groin right out of his body. But none of it was
coming out. Instead, Credence felt the pressure build unbearably, and his
little organ grew almost painfully stiff and sensitive in the Commander’s
mouth. His back was arched so far off the mattress that only his buttocks and
the back of his head still made contact with it. He wanted to sob, to scream,
to beg—but his muteness was so ingrained in him that it choked down all the
sounds that were clawing to burst out.
And then, just when he thought he would rupture, a deep, sweet spasm swept
through the pressure and released it all at once. It was a release more
profound than any Credence had ever felt. More deeply satisfying even than the
release of a good cry or the tingling relief that settled in after a painful
lashing was over. This release was pure pleasure, and it rippled out into his
body with each successive spasm, flooding even his very fingertips and toes
with the sweet balm of bliss. If there had ever been an ache or a tension
anywhere in Credence’s body, he couldn’t tell now. It was all swept away as his
back finally relaxed and he flopped back onto the furs, slipping out of the
Commander’s mouth. He laid there with his eyes closed, sprawled like a ragdoll
and tuning into the gentle aftershocks that still whispered deep in his veins.
His head was floating, filled with white light. He should have cared that the
Commander was still staring; he should have cared that he was just lying there,
ignoring him; but for once, Credence did not give one single thought to the
demands of his insecurities. For a few brief, blessed moments, the cringe in
his shoulders was gone.
The Commander moved over him, eyes drinking Credence in with a new gleam that
made Credence’s stomach tingle. The man’s hands laid over his hips and drew up
his body in a slow, sensuous massage that only pulled Credence under deeper. He
felt like he might sink into the furs beneath him and never surface again.
Credence’s eyes fluttered. When the Commander laid himself out over his body,
weight pressing him down into the mattress, he thought it might happen. Down
and down and down he’d go, caged in skin and fur and warmth and satisfaction
forever. It wouldn’t feel as much like a cage then, he thought distantly, as
the Commander’s hands turned him over. He pressed his cheek into one soft
pillow and sighed.
The hands drew down his body. The Commander’s mouth brushed the back of his
neck, disturbing the short hairs there with warm breath. Credence would have
shivered had he any tension left in his muscles to do so. One of the
Commander’s hands drew down between his buttocks and stroked there. Distantly,
Credence thought it odd, the way his thumb was smoothing in circles over that
unmentionable flesh, but then, it was one of Credence’s softest places.
Somewhere in his mind, that made it make sense—that the Commander would like to
touch him there for that simple reason. He didn’t think much more when he felt
wetness added to the caress, nor even when it grew more insistent, the whole
length of the fingers running just beneath his balls all the way up to the
crack. Everywhere over his most private places. This man had access to all of
him without a second thought, and through Credence’s hazy mind and the recent
memories of his misery in the camp, he didn’t question it.
One large hand planted beside him and Credence let his eyes drift shut,
wondering if the Commander was going to lay with him, but then his knees were
parted just a little more and something slick and blunt replaced the fingers
that had been moving between his cheeks. The haze in Credence’s mind made the
mental image foggy, but he thought he knew what the Commander was doing.
Thought he knew, until the shaft dragged upward through his cleft and a great
pressure was suddenly applied where he’d never felt anything like that before.
Credence didn’t know what was happening. His mind couldn’t catch up and make
sense of this new feeling—not until something breached.
Credence’s eyes widened, realizing that the Commander’s cock, which had been
pressing up against him, was now partially inside him.
When he gasped, Credence felt the Commander’s arm wind underneath him, body
sinking down on top of him and deeper at the same time. Credence whimpered,
feeling a dull but strong pain, as well as a fear of what irrevocable damage
this might do to him. He could barely have imagined this if he hadn’t felt the
hardness of every new inch pushing inside him.
“Shhh now,” came a voice in his ear. “You’re alright. Just relax; you were
doing so well.”
Credence knew he had no choice. But he was scared—so very scared. The sharp
knife of panic cut into the soft bliss of moments ago, and the two sensations
warred inside his limbs. His muscles wanted to stiffen in self-defense, but had
been so thoroughly kneaded by the Commander’s attentions that everything felt
limp and weak. His head swirled with shock and confusion, trying to work out
how to react to something he didn’t understand.
The hand that wasn’t planted by Credence’s side settled warmly onto his lower
back and slid up the length of his spine.
“All you need to do… is nothing,” the Commander whispered. When they held still
like this, Credence could feel the wizard’s pulse against the sore skin of his
opening, which was stretched so tight around the intruding mass that Credence
thought it might snap. “All you can do… is nothing. Do you understand? Let go.”
Credence heard a sharp, tragic sob. It was surreal to know it was his own
voice. The fur beneath his cheek was wet with his tears, and he turned his face
into it, breathing in the musk of the leather and seeking comfort in the
darkness. Behind him, as if far away, the most private part of his body
throbbed from the forced openness. It was a little less alarming now that the
pain had fully settled in, and Credence could feel things the way they were.
Reorient himself. It had seemed so impossible, those first few instants,
suddenly having something inside him like that. He thought he had been stabbed,
opened, destroyed—but now, there was only this dull, raw throbbing. The severe
pain of injury Credence had anticipated never came. Whatever the Commander was
doing, it was deeply uncomfortable, but probably not dangerous. It couldn’t be.
The wizard had been so nice to him…
“That’s right…” The Commander’s hand was on the back of his neck now, massaging
the tensing muscles there. His voice had a new edge to it, thin on its previous
patience. Credence let out a muffled yelp as a sharp, eager movement of the
Commander’s hips moved the mass inside him. “Be a good boy, now…”
There really was nothing else to do. Credence made the decision against the
private darkness of the furs and took another heady, suffocating breath before
turning his head back toward the open air and giving what he hoped was a
perceptible nod. In an act of will so different from any he had exercised
before, Credence made himself… let go. Like cutting the strings to a
marionette, he relinquished his body and let it become limp beneath the
Commander’s weight. Although his anxiety remained, a strange peace settled over
him as well. No matter how terrible or scary this was going to be, there was
nothing for him to do but endure it.
The Commander seemed to feel his victory in Credence’s slackened body, and the
hand on his neck moved to the furs at his side, giving the wizard more
leverage.
Credence closed his eyes.
The body part inside him slid out a ways, yielding a few, precious inches of
relief. But then the Commander’s hips came down hard, and Credence made a
choked sound as it all filled up again—and more. He couldn’t gather himself
before it happened again—the Commander’s flesh dragging out and Credence
feeling every inch against the tight ring of his opening before it slammed back
in. He tried to breathe between thrusts, but they came too fast, so that the
length of his gasping inhale was punctuated by each jolt of motion. He felt a
deep, achy pressure in the depths of his being where the Commander’s hard flesh
impaled him deeper with every inward thrust. The rough in and out motions
seemed to be plowing Credence open a little at a time, though he whined out
loud despite himself when the Commander ground down to increase the breach.
“Here…”
Credence was shaking as the Commander shifted behind him, the weight of his
body lifting as he sat back. Credence felt the man’s hardness slip out of him a
ways, but it was still lodged so tightly that it helped to drag Credence onto
the man’s lap when strong hands hooked around his hips and pulled them up. He
moaned as he slid against the fur, his body as lax from the shock of it all as
the echoes of pleasure from before. His own penis felt overly sensitive against
the blankets, and he noted distantly that it was hard again, though he couldn’t
understand why.
One of the Commander’s hands pressed down on his lower back, and Credence let
himself be pliant. He felt the wizard put a bit of his weight into it, making
Credence’s back curve almost to the point of discomfort. His other hand grasped
Credence’s hip, the pads of his fingers pressing into Credence’s abdomen while
his thumb dug into the center of his lower back. Credence’s penis began to
throb, responding to the handling with a mind of its own. It was a sharper
pleasure than the one he had felt before, mingled with pain and fear in
confusing ways.
The Commander shifted again, adjusting his angle, and then sank down. Straight
down. Sinking into the full depths of Credence’s body and spreading him open
with the blunt pressure of his shaft until there was nothing left in Credence
but an overwhelming feeling of fullness. The force of the grown man’s weight
brought the intrusion past the deepest points of pressure Credence had felt
before, and he felt his whole body give a distant shudder before going utterly
limp beneath the wizard’s hands. He had no choice but to trust him now—trust
him completely, with the most vulnerable depths of his being. Credence felt
that if he shifted, tightened, or resisted, he might break. So instead, he let
himself become air, splayed and bent at the Commander’s mercy.
He heard a deep groan of satisfaction from the Commander’s throat as their
bodies sank fully together—almost a growl. The wizard didn’t move at first,
seeming to pause just to savor the sensation of sinking so deep. Credence took
the opportunity to breathe, and to settle back into his limbs. The throbbing in
his groin seemed to blur with the throbbing deep in his behind, where he could
feel the Commander’s rigid member pulsing. Experimentally, he tried to tighten
his muscles back there, just to grasp the contours of the man, but he was
stretched so taut that his muscles had nowhere to contract, and they only
quivered weakly in response. He heard the Commander groan again.
The experiment resulted in another deep thrust, lifting Credence’s hips even
higher as the Commander loomed over him, driving his cock down into Credence’s
body. He felt like his back was bent as far as it could go, just shy of
uncomfortable. When he turned his head to catch a glimpse of the man behind
him, he saw the Commander up on his knees, leaning over Credence with one hand
planted against the bed and the other on his hip, and Credence could see the
man’s cock sinking inside of him.
It took his breath away to see the girth of it driving in and out as the
Commander began to work up a rhythm. Credence couldn’t believe it was going
into him. Couldn’t believe his body could take something like that, just as he
couldn’t believe this man, this wizard, was doing it to him.
The ache inside him began to dull the more he accepted it, and Credence wasn’t
sure if that meant he was relaxing or whether his body was just getting used to
it. The slickness between them was dripping down his thighs, and Credence had
no idea where it had come from, only that it helped.
After a time, the Commander sat back on his haunches and pulled Credence’s hips
flush against him, thrusting forward and into him at the same time. Credence
gasped. It was involuntary; a small sound with every thrust, the sheer force of
them driving little noises out of his throat. It was so disorienting. He was
usually so good at staying quiet, but this he couldn’t help.
Apparently determined to use Credence’s body in a variety of positions, the
Commander shifted forward, his weight sinking down on top of Credence’s back so
that he could drive into him with just his hips. This time, something about the
angle changed for Credence as well. Something that made Credence whimper louder
than before, but not in pain. A deep pleasure was suddenly building inside him
every time the Commander’s cock pressed deep. Credence couldn’t explain it,
except that it felt reminiscent of when the Commander had his mouth on him,
only it was inside.
It made him squirm and try to tighten his muscles again—not from discomfort
this time, but just to see what it would feel like. Above him, so close now
that the Commander had his chest and stomach pressed to Credence’s back, the
man groaned again. He had to curve his back and lean his head down when he
nuzzled against the back of Credence’s ear, being so much bigger.
“You have no idea what it feels like when you do that, do you?”
Credence’s heart skipped a beat. The Commander’s arms wrapped around him and
pressed Credence tight between himself and the bed. Credence could barely move
like that, but that didn’t stop his attempts at squirming, nor that minute
clench of muscle when the sensations filling him up became too much and he felt
like he might go mad if he didn’t move. He hadn’t thought about what it would
feel like from the Commander’s end when he squeezed like that, but the man
certainly seemed to like it.
Credence didn’t feel like he had the words to respond. In the overwhelming
onslaught of sensation, he didn’t know whether to nod or to shake his head;
didn’t know which would tell the Commander that no, he really had no idea what
it felt like from his end because Credence was too consumed by the other side.
Between the sheer impossibility of this situation and the sensations coursing
through him, Credence could barely think at all. The wine was somewhere in the
mix, making sure of it.
And then the Commander tightened his grip. His breath became ragged and he
squeezed Credence so hard, Credence thought it might split skin. The thrusts
turned sharp and nearing the edge of painful again before the Commander pressed
his nose to Credence’s hair and gave a soft cry. It was a strangely vulnerable
sound, compared to his previous groans. His hips drove into Credence once last
time, pressing his cock deeper and deeper until it was buried as far as it
would go, the weight of the man nearly smothering him. He held like that for a
long time, muscles taut and caging Credence in from every possible angle,
restricting even the barest motions. All Credence could do was let it happen.
Let himself be held, restrained, moved where the wizard wanted him. It should
have been awful, but then a hand began petting his hair, and Credence sighed
into the fullness of the Commander’s member inside him, relishing the pressure
it put on that place where all his pleasure had built. In the stillness that
passed between them, the edge of pain fell away, and somehow, the arms around
him didn’t feel like such a terrible cage.
When the man finally eased his grip and sank to the side, Credence fell with
him. He felt the cock inside him pull free, inch by inch until he was empty.
The Commander laid next to him, flat on his back and breathing deep, one arm
still loosely wound around Credence’s torso.
Credence was free again. He didn’t know what to do. Everything inside him felt
raw, but half empty. Echoes of pain and pleasure still tingled inside him and
the open air that replaced it felt strange.
Tentatively, Credence turned over on his other side to face the Commander. The
man was staring up at the cloth of the ceiling, his eyes distant and his
breathing starting to even out. He wasn’t paying any attention to Credence
anymore. It looked like he’d forgotten Credence was even there, and for some
reason that stung a little. Credence looked at the arm still beneath him, and
after a moment’s thought, he gripped it and dug his nails in just a
little—desperate to have a bit of the man’s attention again. The Commander
blinked, and turned his head.
Those mismatched eyes looked through Credence like the Commander had been
looking at the ceiling, and Credence slackened his hold on the man’s upper arm.
His heart was beating fast again, anxious now that he’d gotten what he wanted.
The Commander’s eyes slowly searched Credence’s face before moving down the
bare length of his neck and lower still. They stopped when they reached
Credence’s groin. A look of quiet surprise came over the Commander’s face, and
when Credence looked down, he saw that he was still hard. He could feel it, the
sensation simmering just under his skin and in the empty passage the Commander
had inhabited.
A slow smile spread over the Commander’s face and his eyes darted up to meet
Credence’s. The man came to life again as he lifted himself up on one arm and
rolled Credence onto his back, hovering over him.
“Enjoyed that, did you?”
Credence was sure he was going to stop breathing for good if this kept
happening, but he laid himself out quietly underneath the man and something
small and traitorous thrilled at the wickedness in his eye.
“Mmh…” the Commander hummed thoughtfully, perching his elbows on either side of
Credence’s head. He brushed Credence’s hair back, and Credence was surprised to
feel it sticking against his forehead. Sweat. Sweat from the heat of the fire,
furs, and flesh, yes, but Credence also suspected that being ravaged had been
rougher exercise than he’d realized. In the moment, it had all been so
overwhelming, but now he could feel the subtle burn creeping into his muscles,
joining the faint throb of his hardness—and of the part of him that had just
been so thoroughly broken open.
Credence squirmed as he tuned into that part of himself, still feeling the
oddness of it. It was wet down there, and when Credence shifted, he felt liquid
ooze out of him. It made a sound, and Credence blushed to his roots, curling
his shoulders in with embarrassment.
“Shh, that’s alright… Mein Schatz…” The Commander’s hand trailed down, his
fingertips brushing lightly down Credence’s throat, and then down over his
chest and the sensitive skin of his belly. Credence squirmed a little against
the ticklishness of it, but quickly grew still as the Commander’s touch neared
the hard little rod between his legs, suspended with a breathless hopefulness.
He wanted the Commander to touch him there again. He wanted it so badly.
Above him, the Commander hissed a breath in through his teeth, and Credence
tried to blink up at him with bleary eyes, though all he saw were bits of
clarity amid the fogginess, as if looking through a frosted glass. He saw the
Commander’s Adam’s apple, and the momentary flare of a jugular muscle… A sheen
of moisture clinging to the shapely expanse of his chest…
Suddenly it all crowded very close, and Credence felt the wizard’s lips
pressing against his forehead with a confounding gentleness.
The Commander’s hand moved lower.
It brushed over Credence’s member, which sent a wave of gooseflesh up his body,
but didn’t linger. Instead, the Commander’s fingers made straight for that
ravaged place between Credence’s legs again, and almost as if watching someone
else, Credence found himself drawing his knees up and planting his feet flat
against the furs to give the Commander better access. He tried to relax, this
time. It had been so frightening when it had pushed into him like that, without
warning, but now he knew the Commander didn’t actually mean to harm him. Things
were sore down there, but he was used to being sore. He was willing to be sore,
now that the tenderness had returned. In fact, he’d give almost anything to
keep it. He felt like he was floating, now. Hollow inside and vaguely unreal.
The Commander’s fingers rubbed gentle circles over the raw opening, smearing
the fluids around. The effect was soothing, even if it was all very sensitive.
Credence liked the way the wetness felt.
“You want my come back inside you, don’t you?” the Commander whispered.
Credence wasn’t sure what he meant, but an instant later, the wizard’s fore-
and middle finger were breaching into him. They slipped in so easily, sinking
into Credence’s body like a sigh of relief. After the blunt heft of the
Commander’s member, two fingers felt like gentle play. Credence was surprised
by how much his body melted into it, yearning for that bit of fullness again
after being so suddenly bereft. It made the ache in his groin stronger, and
when Credence peered down, he saw his own penis twitching in the air, as if
declaring its longing to be touched.
“Do you know how special you are…?”
Credence looked back up and found the Commander peering intently down at him as
he worked his fingers slowly in and out of Credence’s depths. Something about
the look in the man’s eyes went straight to Credence’s gut, and a sweet,
beautiful certainty blossomed there. Credence didn’t think he was anything
special, but in this moment, he felt for a certainty that he was special to
this man. This wizard.
Credence arched his back, remembering how the Commander had made him do it when
he wanted to go deeper.
“Please…” Credence whispered.
’I’m yours,’ was what he wanted to say, with the entirety of his being. ‘Make
me yours.’
But it was too complicated a thing to express. Just a feeling. Not something he
had words for.
“Keep me,” he whispered instead.
He didn’t ever want to leave this tent and go back do the camp and its miseries
below. He wanted to stay here in this warm bed with this gentle, captivating
man pinning him under his body and attentions. Inside him, so literally.
Touching him.
The Commander’s expression twisted up for a moment, but then his fingers curved
firmly up against some part inside of Credence that made him close his eyes and
gasp, and everything was darkness and pleasure. As it built, and built, a truth
crystallized inside of Credence: that however strange, or difficult, or
incomprehensible, this was home.
Credence shuddered when, counterpoint to the fingers driving inside him, wet
heat surrounded his erection. He heard himself cry out, a high and muffled
sound, and felt, for the second time that night, nothing but the bliss of
climax. The heat and pressure increased as he fell apart, shaking, with sounds
coming out of his throat he never knew he could make until they finally gave
way to quiet, content breaths.
When his eyes fluttered open again, he saw that head of white blond hair
between his legs. He couldn’t see what the Commander was doing, but he could
feel every inch of it. Little licks and swirls of a tongue replaced the sucking
pressure of the man’s mouth and every one of them sent residual tingles down
Credence’s spine. That tongue moved away from his sensitive cock and carried on
to the crease of his thigh. Credence shivered. Lick by little lick, the
Commander tasted him in the most sensitive areas, and Credence couldn’t believe
he was left trembling so. He wasn’t sure he could move if he wanted to anymore.
That should have bothered him, he knew, but all he could feel was a rapidly
building certainty in his desire to stay.
Before he knew it, another whimper left his throat, but it didn’t sound like
those he’d released at the height of pleasure. It brought the wizard’s eyes up
to him again, searching. Without thinking of propriety, Credence reached for
him, small hands grasping at the Commander’s arms and trying to draw him up
again. Closer.
Amusement flashed across the Commander’s mismatched eyes, but he went. He
crawled back up the short length of Credence’s body, moving furs aside so that
he could look down at Credence, who was looking right back up at him.
Credence’s heart beat faster when he was searched like that. The Commander’s
eyes pierced straight through him somehow, as though he could know Credence’s
every thought and desire with a mere look. Maybe wizards could do that,
Credence thought, wildly, although he’d seen no evidence of it with the guards.
Even Graves—whom Credence realized must still be standing beside the doorway on
the lower level—had not known he was awake and aware the whole time they’d
walked together. The Commander, though… Credence wasn’t so sure.
A smile played at the corner of the wizard’s mouth and his eyes crinkled around
the edges before he stroked the back of a finger gently over Credence’s cheek,
and Credence found himself flushing. He tried to push his thoughts about this
man away, just in case this moment shared between them wasn’t as silent as it
seemed.
The Commander sat himself up on one arm and drew a cloth from somewhere
Credence couldn’t see. It may have been out of thin air, for it was warm and
damp and heavenly when he drew it up Credence’s thighs, in between his legs,
and over his stomach. He was being cleaned, but it felt more like a warm
massage, and Credence turned his head towards the man and let his eyes close.
If this was a dream, he decided, he never wanted to wake up again.
A quiet chuckle met his ears, and then with a soft brush of wind, he was dry
again. Credence would have looked to see, but strong arms and heavy blankets
were wrapping around him. The Commander was settling down beside him and
Credence was too tired to move. Too tired to think.
“Rest now,” the man whispered against his cheek.
Credence thought he nodded, but he was falling under so fast, he wasn’t sure if
he actually did.
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Notes
     We're sorry this one took a little longer than usual. To comfort you,
     the Piper of Hameln has illustrated one of the scenes from this
     chapter! We hope you enjoy. -Herr G.
     CLICK_HERE_FOR_ART
See the end of the chapter for more notes
The texture of furs floated into Credence’s consciousness before he was
properly awake. Piece by piece, other sensations followed. The achy, languid
sensation that spoke of sleeping as long as his body needed to, and the notable
absence of the morning whistle. The echoes of dreams. The dull throbbing of a
sore bottom, almost pleasant in its faint burn. And… and the sensation of being
watched.
Credence’s eyes shot open.
For a moment, his vision was so blurred from sleep that all he saw was the
shape of a great, dark obelisk rising above him. But with a couple of blinks,
the shadow resolved itself into the looming figure of one Lieutenant General
Graves. The wizard had a knee on the bed, almost touching Credence’s shoulder,
and was grasping onto a post with one hand. The other hand-….
Credence gasped, and his body came to life all at once, tensing up to crawl
back and away. But he hadn’t gotten an inch before the Lieutenant raised a
finger to his lips and let out a harsh, sharp, “Sh.”
Credence understood at once. Though still tense, he ceased all motion,
breathing shallowly as the man continued the work of his right hand. Right
hand. Right side. His scar side.
Don’t look at it, Credence thought, closing his eyes and turning his head
aside—only to find his face in a hard grip, his lips crushed into a fishy pout
as he was turned roughly back toward his master.
“Keep your eyes open,” the wizard commanded, his voice raspy with arousal. The
sound of his stroking was a rhythmic whisper that drove Credence’s anxiety
deeper and deeper, making his heart race ahead of the pace. His cheeks burned
when the wizard released him, and he vaguely wondered whether he would have
finger-shaped bruises on his face in a few hours.
Unable to close his eyes or turn his head away, Credence faced the problem of
where to look. He just had to wait until it was over—that was all. If he was
good and laid still, perhaps the wizard would not want to do anything worse to
him. But that scar—it beckoned for his gaze, and Credence knew that if he
stared at it, he’d go mad with fear. So he dragged his eyes down to the second
most shocking thing about the man: his erect penis, jutting out of his
unbuttoned uniform, with its bright red head appearing and disappearing into a
tight, wettened fist.
It was soothing to stare at the repetitive motion, somehow, and the wizard did
not seem to mind. The sight of an erect, adult penis brought memories from the
night before flooding into Credence’s mind, and he exhaled with relief that
those memories were still there. He summoned them like a shield, stroking them
in his thoughts. Burrowing into memories of warmth and pleasure. Of the
Commander’s playful gray eye, and his intimidating dark one.
“Ah fuck… hng…”
The General’s voice was nothing like the Commander’s, but as Credence got over
his startlement and let himself relax just a fraction, the carnal edge in it
began to percolate through his pores. He remembered the heat from the night
before, and the way the Commander’s want had crushed him into the furs in the
most heady, wonderful way. What the General was doing seemed so cold in
comparison, and Credence found himself beset by the strangest wish that the man
would make a little more contact. Not something hard and painful, the way he’d
grabbed Credence’s face, but maybe… just touching him in some way, if he was
going to use him like this. A hand on his shoulder. Scooting a knee against his
arm. Anything. As it was, Credence was keenly aware of his own naked skin, his
bared front cool against the air and his back sweaty against the furs. The
glowing fire from the night before had long since burned out, and the loft room
was all shadows with slim streaks of cool morning light cutting in from
somewhere beyond.
The bed suddenly warped under him as the wizard released the post and fell
forward, catching himself on one arm, towering over him in an arch that brought
his member within inches of Credence’s face. His stroking motions were so fast
now that Credence held his breath, a little frightened by all the intensity
crowding in.
“Close… fuck… so close…”
Credence thought that maybe if he could be still enough, it might help. Or at
least not provoke another grab at his jaw. When he had to breathe again, he
tried to will away the heady scent of sex just inches from his nose. He could
make out a clear bit of fluid at the very tip of the swollen head in front of
him. The wizard’s calloused thumb brushed over it and spread the glistening
wetness down the side of the shaft.
The wizard’s breath drew in harder. He sounded at the very edge, and Credence
thought he must look it, too, but he still didn’t dare look up at the man’s
face. The attention was too strong on him, and Credence knew he would be caught
in it, unable to look away.
But last night, the Commander’s attention had been on him. Last night hadn’t
been like this, and it made Credence wonder. Graves sounded like he was having
trouble, his panting edging into a whine at the end of each breath, and
Credence thought that maybe, if he just thought of last night….
With a flush of boldness, Credence lifted a hand and reached up. His heart
pounded in his chest as he grazed his fingertips over the ridge of the head.
He pulled his hand away twice as fast when Graves sucked in a breath through
his teeth. A lance of fear drove into Credence’s gut that he’d done something
wrong, and he couldn’t stop himself—he looked up.
Dark eyes under heavy, twisted brows met his own, holding Credence’s gaze
despite the draw of gnarled flesh at the side of the man’s face and the way his
teeth clenched tight in effort. The wizard was trying to quiet himself,
Credence realized, before another groan escaped Graves’ mouth and he resumed
his activity, more hurried than before. The thrust of his hips grew erratic,
and suddenly globs of warm fluid were landing on Credence’s face.
Credence pulled his hand away immediately, wincing and startled. He screwed his
eyes shut and scrunched up his nose, waiting for it to be over. After what
seemed like endless spurts landing on his cheeks and mouth—even dripping across
his eyelids—it was. No more fell, and Credence heard the wizard’s heavy
breathing above him turn into one long exhale.
There was silence afterward. Graves slumped. The wooden bedpost creaked, and
Credence expected to feel the man’s hand, but no touch came. He heard the
rustle of fabric and wanted to wipe at his eyes so he could look, but
uncertainty kept him rooted to the spot.
When the sound of boots hit the floor, Credence knew the wizard was standing.
The scent of the man’s release filled his nostrils, overwhelming in its
unfamiliarity, but a moment later, Credence heard a whispered word, and the
mess vanished without a trace. All of it. The wetness dripping down his face
and the immediacy of the smell, all gone.
Tentatively, Credence opened his eyes. He found there was no residual wetness
left on his lashes, and after a few blinks, he found himself looking up at the
man, his penis put away and his uniform and posture now perfectly poised. But
for the scar, nothing interrupted the neat, clean lines of his composure.
Credence drew in a shaky breath, and then the floor creaked from below. His
eyes shot to the ladder. Shoes sounding atop its rungs preceded the appearance
of a now familiar head of platinum hair.
“News from the south: Salzburg fell last night. They’ll be clearing out the
town for the next few days.” The Commander looked to be in a good mood and did
not seem at all perturbed to see Graves standing over Credence and his bed.
Graves, on the other hand, looked like he’d been caught with his hand in the
candy jar. He turned his back on Credence, clasping his hands behind his back
and facing his Commander with an erect, attentive posture. It was almost
comedic, the way he sprang into place, halfway obscuring Credence as if that
would conceal what he had been up to. Credence leaned up on his elbow to peek
past the General’s hip, eager and hopeful at the Commander’s presence. He laid
there in quiet obedience, waiting to be noticed.
Commander Grindelwald drew himself within inches of Graves’ face, and had eyes
for nothing else.
“You’re flushed, Percival,” he remarked calmly. Credence thought he might have
been trying to humiliate the man, but the tone didn’t quite fit that narrative.
It was too… sensual.
A creeping anxiety took hold in Credence’s belly, but he refused to acknowledge
it just yet.
“Sorry, sir.”
“Tsk… Don’t be.”
One of Grindelwald’s black-gloved hands rose up to Graves’ face, its fingertips
trailing lightly down the side. From where Credence lay, he couldn’t see the
contact directly, but he knew that Grindelwald was touching the scar side. He
was… he was tracing the scar itself. Fondly.
Graves’ breathy shudder disguised Credence’s own.
“You’ve never asked me to fix it,” Grindelwald remarked. There was a glint in
his eyes as he searched the other man’s gaze, his posture as relaxed as Graves’
was not. Credence got the feeling there was a sort of test in that question.
The same cruel tests he and the other children were subjected to in the camp
below, daily. Tricky questions with slippery answers that had to be considered
carefully, but quickly.
“No, sir,” Graves agreed, gruff and laconic even with his master.
“Why is that?” Grindelwald gave a pondering tut. He was still… caressing it.
Only Credence could see the way Graves squeezed his hands in uncertainty.
“Because… you would have fixed it if you wanted to. Sir.”
The Commander’s caress halted, and Credence’s eyes glued to the wizard’s face,
holding his breath as he waited for a reaction. Graves’ tension was contagious.
A few seconds passed in silence… and then Grindelwald smiled, and Credence
watched Graves’ white-knuckled hands release and stretch.
“Quite right,” Gellert confirmed,speaking with a voice as soft and husky as the
one he’d used with Credence last night. A lover’s voice.
Credence’s guts squirmed as Gellert continued to gaze at the other wizard’s
eyes for many moments more, before his hand finally dropped away—and he turned
to go.
Credence’s spirits plummeted through the floor. They went crashing into the
room below, and then further than that, tumbling down through every layer of
the pyramid until they landed in the horse manure at the bottom.
Don’t go! he wanted to shout, and to his horror, almost did so—but managed to
clamp down on his own voice at the last instant, releasing little more than a
despairing hiccup.
“Obliviate the boy, if you’re done. Put him back in the camp with the others.”
The sheer heartbreak of those words made Credence choke. Not just their
content, but their delivery—thrown casually over a shoulder as the Commander
walked away, with not even a glance in Credence’s direction. Panic roiled up
inside him, worse than any he had ever felt—even when facing the unknown. This
was deprivation, because there was finally something to take away. This was
true cold, because there was warmth to cast him out of. This was abandonment.
This was desperation.
“No!” he cried out, bounding out of the bed, naked and pink as the day he was
born. His outburst was so sudden that even Graves was caught off guard, and his
grabbing hands didn’t reach in time. Credence slipped away, crossing the short
distance to the Commander in seconds, and threw his arms around the wizard’s
waist, pressing his tear-streaked cheek to his back. “Please don’t… Don’t make
me go away…”
Beneath his grip, the Commander was stiff. His stride had paused, but he made
no move to turn around and confront Credence’s tears. Instead, he waited—and
sure enough, a much rougher pair of hands grasped Credence from behind, prying
him away.
“NO!” he cried out again, truly out of his mind with fear and grief this time.
And then: “No! No! NO, no!” Over and over, like a wounded animal, thrashing in
the Lieutenant’s grasp.
Distantly, he heard the Commander’s voice—”Get it done.”—before watching the
figure retreat through the cloud of his tears, getting one last look at the
face that had promised him so much tenderness as the wizard turned to climb the
ladder. And then, it was gone, too fast even for Credence to take a picture in
his head.
“Master!” he cried out, in one long, lurching sob that devolved into mindless
crying. He stopped trying to claw his way forward when the Commander
disappeared out of view, knowing deep down that he’d lost. The General eased
the painful hardness of his grip a few moments later, when he was more certain
the fight had gone out of his captive.
Credence was fairly certain he’d scratched the wizard in his efforts to get
away, or at least kicked him in a sensitive area. He was surprised the man
hadn’t snapped his neck already. That would almost be better. It would be over
quick, and he wouldn’t have to be scared. He wouldn’t have to go back down to
the camp below; back to a life of daily subjugation and misery, with only the
memory of something better to comfort his nights.
…Of course, they were going to take that from him too, weren’t they.
Credence suddenly stilled, his sobs dying in his throat as awareness of this
new threat crept into his limbs and froze him like a cautious deer.
“Don’t worry,” the gruff voice said behind him, with surprising gentleness.
Careful but unyielding hands were maneuvering him back onto the bed. “Soon, you
won’t know there’s anything to miss. If it helps at all… I understand. He’s
like that. Gets into you. Some days I think I’d take your mercy over mine.
Tasting and forgetting, rather than never tasting at all.”
Credence sat back on the furs, dazed by the unexpected confession, and by the
ringing in his own head from his sudden bout of panic.
“Now then… You can close your eyes, if you like. It won’t hurt.”
The wizard’s wand was out.
Credence tracked it, his chest heaving with every breath, but his mind already
blank. There was no way out. No way around the man to get to the ladder, no way
through the tent—and even if there was, there was nowhere to go but down. The
air burned in Credence’s lungs, but for all the desperation he felt, he
couldn’t think of a single thing to do as Graves’ hand rose above dark eyes
that seemed a touch softer than before.
It came down in one long stroke as Graves intoned the word Credence most
feared.
“Obliviate.”
Credence fell back. His arms flew up and crossed over his face protectively as
the room lit up in a blinding flash. It covered everything, so brilliant he had
to screw his eyes shut, and a cry escaped him before he could help it.
And then, everything went still.
The world was dark. Credence could hear his own rough breathing. Feel the
softness of the bed against his back, and the weight of his own arms held tight
around his head. His heart was still pounding. He was still in the same room,
on the same furs, in the Commander’s tent above the camp. He hadn’t forgotten.
Slowly, Credence unlocked his arms, daring to peek out from the ball he’d
reflexively pulled himself into, and froze at what he saw.
There stood Graves, his arm still outstretched and his wand pointed straight at
Credence. He waited for the wizard to fire again, but the General was just
standing there, a wavering statue. That bit of sympathy in those brown eyes had
gone, but Graves’ earlier coldness hadn’t replaced it. To Credence, his
expression looked more like… confusion.
Credence’s lips parted and he glanced around the room, but nothing else had
changed. When he set his sights on Graves again, he lowered his arms to his lap
and stared into Graves’ eyes. He knew he wasn’t supposed to look at the wizard
like that, but a horrifying suspicion was dawning in the pit of his stomach and
quickly spreading with goosebumps to the rest of his limbs. His mouth went dry.
He knew he had only seconds to take advantage, if he was right.
Credence opened his mouth and found he had to forcibly push the words out.
“What happened?”
His voice was so small even he could barely hear it, but he couldn’t look away
from Graves. Every twitch in the man’s face would tell Credence whether he was
right or wrong.
The wizard blinked and then lowered his wand. He blinked again and rolled his
shoulders back, as if trying to straighten his already perfect posture. It
wasn’t just Credence’s imagination—he seemed disoriented for several moments,
before he gathered himself back together.
Credence grew more confident.
The spell had backfired. Graves had erased his own memories instead.
“Where am I?” Credence asked, with feigned confusion. He had an idea of how to
get out of there with his mind still intact, but he was reeling all the while.
His hands were shaking. He tried to use it. He looked down at himself as though
he hadn’t known he was already naked and swiped one of the furs to cover
himself.
Graves rubbed the side of his head, stretching the marbled flesh in a way
Credence couldn’t look away from, and pocketed his wand.
“You’ve been sick. Needed to be looked after, but you’re alright now.” Finally,
Graves looked like he had a grasp of the right narrative again, and he finished
with confidence. “I’m here to take you back.”
“Oh,” Credence said, and focused on looking frightened. He didn’t want to
overplay it, though he’d been able to fool the man well enough the night
before. He didn’t have to feign his anxiety as he scrambled to find his
clothing, eager to be out of the man’s grasp before he could think too hard
about the situation and notice something amiss.
Graves grew impatient as Credence was hunting for his shirt and barked for him
to hurry, sending a sharp but harmless zap at Credence’s bottom. Over his
shoulder, Credence could see Graves rubbing his temple, his frustrations
clearly amplified by a headache. That made Credence’s stomach drop another
inch. Knowing that it hurt. Having one’s memories taken away.
Credence looked for his socks and shoes, before remembering that he’d walked
all the way there with bare feet and would have to do so again on the way back.
He whined internally, mournful of all the blisters he’d have.
“Let’s go,” Graves grumbled, and gave Credence a little jab between the
shoulder blades as they walked—though clearly, his heart was not in it.
Credence had hoped they might take the long way down, so that he could have a
better look at the wizarding camp from within, but once they were clear of the
tent, Graves took them back the way they’d arrived. For one blissful moment,
however, Credence was as high as the birds. He sucked in the fresh breeze while
the worries of the camp stretched out below him in distant abstraction. In the
daylight, the blocks almost looked like children’s toys from his great height,
with funny little ants marching between them. Credence could hardly imagine
that he’d ever been one of those ants, and he had only been gone for one night.
How did it feel to be Commander Grindelwald, born here above the clouds?
That was as far as Credence’s thoughts got before a heavy hand settled on his
shoulder and the fresh, crisp air was replaced with the stench of manure.
Instantly, the musky odor summoned the memory of aching arms and endless hours
of shoveling horse dung. It was a startlingly physical memory: one that lived
in his arms and lungs, not his head. By the time he exhaled, they’d appeared
outside the gate, and the guards on duty were straightening their backs to
salute the General. The creak of the gate sounded far away, and Credence was so
distracted he almost made Graves zap him again before he stumbled inside.
For some reason, he’d expected that Lt. Gen. Graves would walk him all the way
back to his block, retracing their steps. But instead, one of the guards was
shouting in his face, and Credence had to squint against the spittle and noise,
startled by the harshness of it all. It was a shock to his system, being
handled so roughly once more, and for a long, frightening moment, he lost his
ability to make sense of the guard’s words. All he heard were unintelligible
vowels, all vibrating with threat and growing increasingly agitated at him. He
gasped with fear, because he didn’t know what the voice wanted—and then a
bright light fired off between them, and Credence was on his back in the cold
mud. The sudden flip of up and down was so alarming that the pain registered
second.
Whatever the witch was doing to him, it was a reversal of everything
Grindelwald had done to him the night before. Every muscle in his body
cramped—like the worst muscle spasm he’d ever had, but all over, so that he
couldn’t even grab at it. All he could do was thrash in the mud, though he
quickly found he had no control, even over his own pained flailing. He was
trapped in his body as it reacted to the pain, screaming silently at his lungs
to please, please unclench and take a breath. His eyes were bulging wide and he
saw the mud rising to meet them, but couldn’t make himself blink. Of all the
images to rise up in his mind, he thought of a mad horse the wizards had
recently put down; thought of the blank, twisted agony in its single, beady
eye, and thought, I’ll go mad too. Mad like the horse…
But before the thought had finished, it was over. Credence found himself in the
fetal position with his wrists pressed up to his chin, his hands bent down and
his fingers curled like an old crone’s. He wasn’t sure if he could remember how
to move, until his whole body released with a great shudder, and pain gave way
to a deep soreness more profound even than the one he’d felt after his march to
the camp.
“Do you hear me now, muggle?” the witch snarled. “Which block do you belong
to?”
“S- s- C, block C….” Credence’s lungs squeezed with the effort of getting the
words out, but he managed to force them through, terrified of being hit with
that hex again. Whatever it had been, he had never felt anything like it, and
he was completely certain that if he had to endure it one more time, he’d
forget who he was.
“Block C…” The witch turned to her companion. “Block C is in the mill today,
isn’t that right?”
“I believe so. Unless that’s the girls.”
“No, the girls in C are having their check-ups. Alright—on your feet!”
Credence thought the command was surely impossible—and yet, when he begged his
feet to stand under him, they did. His knees shook and knocked together like a
baby deer’s, but they held.
“March.”
Credence turned, and marched deeper into the camp at the end of the witch’s
wand. Once at the mill, he was put to work pushing some sort of great wooden
gear, with cogs so large that a child could fit between each one. They may as
well have asked him to slit his own throat, as battered as his body was, but he
didn’t dare complain. He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to. He wasn’t sure
where his voice had gone. He was somewhere so far inside himself that it almost
didn’t matter if he dropped dead from the work. He pushed, and pushed, and kept
expecting it to happen—but it never did.
By the time he sat down at his cot, he discovered that one of his feet—bare all
day—had a livid and swelling sore covering much of the sole. Too tired to care,
he hauled both feet, still muddy, up onto the clean sheets and fell into a
dead, dreamless sleep.
When he opened his eyes again, it was pitch black—though as he stared, the
planks of the bunk above him slowly came into view. Gentle breathing sounds
filled the air around him, and Credence came to the surreal conclusion that it
was somehow the middle of the night. Had he slept through an entire day and
night? Or was he really so startlingly awake after only a few hours of sleep?
With a sudden horror, he thought that Graves might have come back and finished
the job on his memories—but just as quickly sank with relief, realizing that
couldn’t be the case if he knew to fear it.
Closing his eyes, Credence scratched through his mind, checking what was still
there. Graves was there… The wizard camp was there… The Commander was still
there, turning his back on him; leaving him; kissing him; plunging into him…
Credence writhed onto his side, burying his face in his arms and gripping
fistfuls of his own hair. He couldn’t dwell in those memories of comfort; not
if he wanted to stay sane. How quickly all that warmth and hope had been
banished from his limbs. How quickly his body had succumbed to pain, and cold,
and despair.
His body….
Credence uncurled a ways as an idea leapt into his mind. An idea that had just
been forming when that witch had cast her hex on him. He’d been thinking of the
way the smell of horse dung had made his arms feel tired. The way his muscles
had remembered for him.
It was one possible path. One way to dig for the memories that had been taken
from him; the ones that explained the gap between Ma’s church and his march to
the camp. If he could recreate something that had happened to his body—a smell,
or a taste, or a feeling—it might come to him, in that same automatic way it
had above the stables.
Credence clung to the notion like a stuffed animal, and tried to go back to
sleep. A notion was all he had.
===============================================================================
He awoke disoriented. Movement and voices were all around him. The other boys
were waking and rushing to get dressed for the day, but it felt unfamiliar to
his sluggish mind. He was coherent enough to pull himself up, knowing he needed
to hurry like the rest of them, but unable to shake the feeling that he should
be elsewhere. Until he remembered waking in the tent the morning prior, high
above the camp, so warm and comfortable that it might have been another world.
His stomach sank as he realized he must have been unconsciously hoping to wake
there again. Hoping the camp was all a dream, even though that made no sense.
The Commander’s tent should have been the dream.
Credence hoisted himself out of bed, but his feet buckled under him the moment
they hit the ground. He let out a cry of surprise which caused a few heads to
turn.
“What’s wrong with you?” someone asked, but Credence didn’t catch who.
His attention was on his foot and he brushed some of the caked dirt out of
yesterday’s wound, hoping against hope that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He
held his breath as he worked. It throbbed.
The foot was still swollen, red now, but at least it was warm, not broken or
sprained. He hauled himself off the ground, keeping his weight off it, and
reached into his boots for his socks—only to feel his heart sink as his hand
closed around emptiness. He looked around the room, trying to spot a pair of
double-layered feet, but everything was moving too fast. He understood, he
supposed. It was so very cold, and their feet were often numb. Knowing time was
limited, he searched desperately for something he could at least use to wrap
the bad foot. He needed some barrier between it and the chafe of the shoe.
Knowing how freezing it would be outside, and how quickly the temperature would
be dropping soon, he worried what would happen if he went too long without
socks. But all he had was the blanket. When he glanced around at the other
boys, they’d gone back to their morning routine, hurrying this way and that.
None of them would have clothing to spare, and if he asked, he would need
something to trade for it. This was his own fault for being weak.
With a heavy heart, Credence took hold of one end of the thin blanket and began
to tug. Carefully as possible, he tore a strip free and wrapped it around his
foot with hurried motions, then pulled the shoe on and laced it up as loosely
as was possible. It would have to do. He just hoped it wouldn’t get worse.
The rest of the morning went by in a haze. Credence remembered the motions, but
his mind wasn’t there. His chest felt heavy with the knowledge that he’d been
someplace else–someplace where nothing hurt, even if it was in the domain of
the most dangerous wizard in all the camp. He only just managed to use the
toilets and get his clothes on before he and the other boys were thrown back
out into the cold for another day’s work. Distantly, he’d feared taking too
long, as he’d gotten used to fearing every day, but that morning the fear
didn’t sink quite so deep as it usually did. His mind was wrapped in the
protective cloak of distraction.
They were digging out a trench that day. Credence wasn’t sure for what, but it
hardly mattered. The guards were back to their usual selves, shouting taunts at
the boys and playing some kind of wizard’s chess off on the nearby boulders,
having been left to their usual routine by the wizards from the army. Credence
couldn’t remember what day it was, but he’d know again once they were sent back
to “class”. It made no real difference, he supposed. Trying to get his thoughts
back on the usual things wasn’t easy.
He worked as hard as the other boys with a shovel in hand, but his mind was
still lost to the sound of the Commander’s voice and the feeling of the man
inside him. It was an unnatural, remembered warmth—the heat of the man’s body,
the way his arms wrapped around Credence, the way he was sometimes rough and
sometimes gentle. All warmth that didn’t exist for Credence anymore. Nowhere
but in his memory.
Someone bumped into his shoulder and Credence nearly stumbled on his sore foot.
He let out a grunt, but ducked his head, not wanting to get pushed by one of
the other boys who liked picking on him, but he heard was a quiet, “Sorry.”
When he looked up, he saw Adam wobbling down the path with a pile of rocks in
his arms.
Credence followed the boy with his gaze—and then noticed he wasn’t the only
one. His eyes refocused to the distance, where Ambrose and Snarlack stood
shoulder-to-shoulder, monitoring their activities. Snarlack was ranting self-
importantly about something between puffs on a self-rolled cigarette, but
Ambrose’s attention was fixed squarely on Adam’s progress. Credence saw the
wizard flinch as Adam tripped and nearly stumbled face-first into his own
armful of rocks. Luckily, Adam caught himself in time, though a few rocks went
rolling toward the wizards’ boots. When Snarlack looked like he was about to
leap down Adam’s throat for his clumsiness, Ambrose stepped in front of the man
and took care of the scolding. He yelled… but never drew his wand.
Credence felt a depth of understanding that had eluded him before. He’d noticed
that Ambrose showed Adam some special favoritism, but he’d only had a fuzzy
idea of what this implied. Now, he understood it in his bones.
A sharp zap ripped through the soil near his feet, and Credence jumped away
with all the instincts of a startled cat, watching a thin line of steam hiss
from the indentation.
“Just standing still, muggle?”
The voice behind him had a melodic arrogance to it, and when he turned to look,
he saw two witches from the Commander’s army camp sauntering up to their
worksite. The witch who had spoken was pale and had her hair slicked back into
a tight, pointed pony-tail. She wore a black officer’s uniform that was all
sharp lines, much like Lieutenant General Graves’. The witch beside her made
all the blood drain out of Credence’s face, and he wished that he could sink
right into the mud. It was the herald, from the arrival parade. She had become
such a figure of nightmares in Credence’s subconscious, it was surreal to see
her walking the grounds. Something about her raised chin and her cold gaze
seemed to put her above the baseness of soil. There was a density about her
presence that Credence couldn’t quite name. Pins and needles flared up in the
brand on his arm as the duo drew nearer.
Ambrose and Snarlack reacted, too.
“Sirs,” they both mumbled, straightening their postures. Snarlack flicked the
remains of his cigarette at the mud and stomped it out.
“Honestly,” the pale witch laughed, folding her arms as she took in the boys’
sad, dusty faces. “What are they doing? Lifting rocks? Digging holes? What’s
the point? Can’t we do this with magic?”
“Labor is part of their education,” Ambrose said sensibly. He seemed calmer
than Snarlack, who was visibly bristling. As Credence looked around, he could
see that the pace of digging had slowed, as the boys were now mostly watching
while half pretending to work.
“Ohhh, their education,” the witch responded, clearly dismissive of the notion.
“You know, I think I have a better idea.”
She raised her wand—which was a long, crooked thing with a sharp point—and
aimed it at the small mound where they were throwing all the rocks that came up
in their dig. The boys parted like biblical seas in the path of her wand, and
Credence found himself clutching the shaft of his shovel so hard that splinters
sunk into his soft skin.
The witch used her whole body when casting the spell, raising her other arm in
harmony and bending at the knees as she made the large, swooping motions of a
god commanding a wave. A rock rose from the pile—and another right behind it,
and another, spiraling out like pearls on a thread. A great stone snake
continued to grow until there was nothing left in the pile, and then slithered
with rapid speed between the boys’ legs, weaving in and out of muddy shoes so
that some tripped and fell on their bottoms in alarm.
When the snake was done teasing, it flew over to a flat patch of earth, where
it laid down row after neat row of rocks until its body expired. There were
several paces between the lines, like some sort of large ruler. A tense silence
followed in which all the boys were stock still in their shoes, waiting for
what would happen next. Snarlack and Ambrose were exchanging uncomfortable
glances.
The pale witch leaned in and whispered into the dark one’s ear. She must have
asked a question, because the herald began to scan the crowd with a considering
gaze, shifting from boy to boy with sharp assessment. Credence, who was used to
feeling invisible, was staring openly at her when her gaze passed his way—and
snagged on him.
The sudden eye-contact made him gasp, and then his mind folded in on itself.
Her eyes were no longer far away, but inches from his face, piercing him with
their dark intensity as clouds of glimmering smoke curled at the edges of his
vision. In some far-away place, divided from himself, he knew that the witch
was still standing far away, her gaze calm and level. But the eyes that filled
his vision felt more real, and they burned. Burned, like the fireplace
crackling beside the bed. Like the sweet heat of skin on his, and a wet, hot
tongue, languishing over his most private area. The feel of bristles raking up
his stomach. The caress of furs swallowing him up. Mulled wine on his tongue.
Smell of pine. The Commander’s face, hovering above his own.
Abruptly, the dark eyes vanished, and Credence felt his mind inflate again with
a painful snap. The herald had passed him by and was still raking her eyes
across the crowd. Credence blinked, trying to catch up to the seemingly
breakneck speed of real time. His mind felt the way his body sometimes felt
when getting out of water, as if the air were strangely heavy and all his
movements were slow as he resisted it.
Credence followed the herald’s gaze, and saw it land on Adam, who stiffened.
Credence wondered if he was enduring the same thing.
A moment later, the herald looked to her companion and lifted one elegant,
ring-studded finger to point at Adam.
The pale witch flicked her wand, and Adam flew toward them as easily as the
rocks.
Ambrose took a stuttered step forward, then seemed to catch himself. The
muscles of his throat were taut, and his usual calm frayed at the edges as he
watched the situation unfold. Credence had been around long enough to notice
the way the fingers of his wand hand were twitching near his belt.
Adam landed harmlessly near one end of the ruler, though the moment his feet
touched the ground, the soil rose up to his thighs and cemented him in a cone
of hard clay. His long-lashed eyes were full of fear, and Credence thought
again how much he looked like a girl as he twisted in his prison to cast a
watery, pleading look at his companions and—for a fleeting, forbidden moment—at
Ambrose. Not being too well-versed in German, Adam was even more frightened
than another boy might have been in his place, because he couldn’t hear enough
context to comprehend his situation. That terrifying feeling of the world’s
unpredictability was one Credence empathized with greatly.
As guard and boy alike watched with anxious anticipation, the pale witch walked
up the rows of her ruler and cast a series of enchantments on each interval.
For a brief moment, each patch of earth lit up with magic before it returned to
innocuous, muddy nothingness. The first crackled momentarily with electricity.
The second gave a brief, bright gush of flame. The third bubbled. Credence
tried to memorize the displays as she walked down the line, enchanting as she
went. When she came to the last patch, the herald stepped up behind her and
placed a hand on her shoulder. The pale witch blinked, and stepped back,
allowing the herald to cast the final hex.
It was far less flashy than the others. Just a burst of darkness on the soil,
and then a brief plume of smoke that Credence thought vaguely resembled a
screaming skull—but the wind carried it away before he could be sure.
The pale witch gave her track of magical landmines a wide berth as she clasped
her hands behind her back and put on a commanding manner, pacing in clean,
measured steps before the boys. There was a strictness to her that could just
as easily have cowed a troop of adults as a sorry, motley band of boys.
“Listen up, muggles! You’re going to play a game!”
“Now that’s e-” Snarlack seemed to have found his tenacity and stepped forward
to protest, but the witch cut him off as she carried on.
“Everyone line up at the beginning of the track!” she commanded. “Chop, chop!
Or I’ll be chopping off feet!”
Credence dropped his shovel quicker than a hot coal and ran for the track.
Everyone else rushed, too. Nobody wanted to be last. Boys who were last often
got singled out.
Credence’s foot throbbed as he crowded in front of the first line of rocks with
the others. He didn’t doubt how this was going to go. They were going to be
electrocuted, burned, boiled, and whatever else lay on the tracks ahead.
One, two, three, four…
Credence mouthed to himself as he counted the steps. There were nine, including
the one the herald had hexed.
Nine… He could endure nine…
He had to.
“This is really quite enough!” Snarlack tried again, placing his hands on his
hips in the very image of disgruntlement. “There’s absolutely no point to this.
These boys are to be digging a ditch! It needs to be done in three days!”
The pale witch looked Snarlack up and down with such condescending disgust,
Credence thought it could have melted the man’s uniform right off his body. He
found the dark-skinned witch harder to read, but could have sworn there was a
glint of amusement in her eyes.
“Do you care so much for these muggles, Unteroffizier?” the pale witch asked.
Credence wasn’t sure what an under-officer was, but Snarlack’s face reddened
significantly, so that his thin strip of facial hair stood out like a gold
ribbon. He looked like he was working so hard on holding something back that he
stood the risk of rupturing a vein.
“Of course I don’t care,” he snapped after a moment, his lips glossy with
spittle from the force of his objection. “I just don’t see the fucking point.
It undermines our authority.”
A deep, chilling sound undulated through the air and made the hairs on the back
of Credence’s neck stand on end. It took him a moment to realize it was the
herald, laughing. She laughed from her throat without even opening her mouth,
and a moment later, the pale witch joined her. Snarlack clenched and unclenched
his fists by his side, while Ambrose slowly edged up to him and placed a
cautioning hand on his shoulder.
The herald turned the wicked blades of her eyes on the boys, and said:
“You make him nervous.”
It was the first time he’d heard her normal speaking voice. It was thick, and
softly accented, with a gentle lull. Intelligent.
All the other boys cowed, but Credence found himself staring in a daze. Her
eyes passed over his for the second time that day, and they narrowed for an
instant in a private smile, as if they shared some secret. On his forearm,
Credence’s mark buzzed under his skin like a live wire.
“Enough,” the pale witch announced, grinning with malevolent cheer. “Let’s
play. Here is the only rule: when we say ‘go,’ you step over the next line.
Versteht Ihr das, Jungs?”
A chorus of ‘ja’s sounded anxiously around him, and Credence made himself
mumble the word as well.
The pale witch watched them all for a moment, then shrugged and said
pleasantly: “Go.”
As one, they all began spilling over the first line of rocks. Predictably,
high-pitched yelps pierced the air as each boy got a powerful zap upon entering
the new square. Credence was crowded behind some of the bigger boys and had to
watch them jump and yowl as they made contact with the electrified soil, before
he himself took a deep breath and jumped over the line. The zap fired through
him too fast to process, and left him tingling like his whole body had fallen
asleep. Even his tongue felt numb in his mouth, and he rolled it awkwardly
behind his teeth as he tried to push aside the general feeling of ailment in
his body. The hex `knocked him down a peg, but he was relieved that it only
fired once. He’d been afraid they’d be made to stand on the hexes like some
kind of stamina test, but it seemed they would only need to endure passing
jolts.
The pale witch was clapping. Credence had never realized clapping could sound
sardonic.
“Very good!” she shouted. “I think you all have the idea. But there is no game
without consequences. Am I correct?”
At that, the herald undid a leather strap on her belt, and drew a dagger. It
was unlike any dagger Credence had ever seen. It looked carved, not forged. The
hilt and blade were all made from the same material: some sort of black, smooth
rock, so finely polished that the thin blade almost seemed translucent.
Credence could see an oily iridescence in it, like the gate. He knew what that
meant by now. It meant magic.
With a deep underarm throw, the herald tossed the blade over their heads.
Credence thought it would land and shatter on the ground, but instead, it
buoyed in mid-air and flipped on its axis a few times before settling
decisively into position. It hovered in the air with the sharp point of its
blade aimed firmly at Adam.
Credence was lightly jostled as the boys all bristled and mumbled amongst
themselves. Ambrose lost his grip on the diplomacy of silence.
“I would ask that you stop-”
“GO!”
Credence’s head was buzzing. He couldn’t stop staring at the knife. It seemed
to be looking into him, the way the herald had looked into him. The screams of
his comrades and the bright blaze of flames seemed far away, until some
subconscious alarm snapped him back to reality and he jumped over the next line
of rocks.
The punishment of fire was such an escalation from electricity, Credence was
unprepared. The initial blaze was more startling than anything else, but as
soon as its lick faded, the sting it left behind brought him to his knees. He
wasn’t alone. Several of the boys were on the ground, shaking, holding their
arms out from their bodies. The scratch of clothing against their skin felt
like salt on flayed tissue. Numbly, Credence noticed that their clothes and
hair seemed unsinged, but their skin was pink and swollen. The sounds of agony
all around him began to blur, as if they all emanated from one monstrous,
suffering beast. Piercing through it all was a single high pitched tone,
growing louder and louder in Credence’s head until it threatened to make his
skull explode.
Panting, he turned his eyes from his swollen hands to the hovering knife. He
knew the ringing was the knife’s voice. It wasn’t singing out loud; it went
right into his mind, like a secret message. The ringing was as sharp as the
blade, and just like a blade, it wanted to slice him open.
Credence hadn’t heard the witch say ‘go,’ but his eyes drifted up to see his
cohorts clawing at themselves in the square ahead as their faces bubbled. Some
of the bubbles stretched so bulbously that they burst, leaving open sores.
Credence blinked numbly at the sight.
I’m in hell, he thought.
He bowed his head, and only then realized that he was clutching at his forearm.
The rest of him had cooled, but the brand on his arm was still burning.
Gingerly, he lifted his hand—and saw that a hole had been singed in the fabric
of his shirt, in the shape of the triangle beneath. Through the open hole, he
could see his mark, glowing angrily. It was pulsing to the beat of his heart,
his blood beating at it like fists on a closed door. As he watched, tiny red
droplets squeezed out of his pores, as if desperate to get out. The ringing
consumed the world.
“I see someone didn’t obey,” the pale witch observed, her voice laced with
mocking disappointment.
Credence clasped his hand over the mark again and looked up, startled by the
sudden silence. The ringing was gone, and he was alone in his square. All the
other boys had gone ahead, and were now glaring at him with dark resentment as
their skin settled down and stopped puttering.
“I-” Credence tried, but it was too late. With a flick of her hand, the herald
commanded the blade to shoot several inches closer to Adam’s face.
Some part of him had already understood that was how the game worked. Still,
the cruel unfairness of it wrecked him.
“I’m sorry…” he whispered, but the other boys turned away from him, choosing to
focus instead on what came next.
“You’re out of the game, little one,” the pale witch said with a tut. “You just
stay where you are and rest up. The rest of you: go!”
Credence closed his eyes against the screams, and fought the terrible feeling
of relief that threatened to overtake his tired body. The relief that nothing
else bad was going to happen to him. That Adam’s fate was everyone else’s
problem now. That he didn’t have to fight anymore today. That he could sit
down. Give up.
He sunk his head against his knees, and faded into defeated darkness. As he
went under, part of him wondered whether this was death. But he found he was
too tired to care, or resist.
When he came to, the first thing he heard was whimpers. At first he thought it
might have been the sound of his own, but as his head lifted dizzily from his
lap, sights and sounds reoriented themselves.
Ahead of him stretched the rest of the track—and so did the crumpled forms of
the other boys. It seemed that most had fallen or given up shortly after
Credence, and were now on the ground nursing both their wounds and their guilt.
Some had made it as far as the fifth square, but beyond that stretched empty
space. Empty, but for one single boy, standing naked and shivering on the
eighth patch. In his disorientation, Credence couldn’t tell who it was. The
boy’s body was so covered in scorches, welts, sores, and strange growths that
he barely looked human, hunching there with his hands feebly protecting his
modesty.
Then he heard the other boys:
“Cress…”
“You can do it, Cress…”
“Cress, come on, we believe in you…”
Their entreaties were quiet; whispered. Credence wanted to cry. Of all the boys
he’d come to know at the camp, Cress was possibly the only one meeker and more
frightened than himself. How Cress, of all people, had made it nearly to the
end of the track when everyone else had failed utterly baffled him.
“I- I- I can’t,” Cress was whimpering, staring into the last patch of hexed
earth. “I- I’ll die…”
“You won’t die… It’ll be over fast… Please, you have to…”
Credence’s gaze drifted wearily toward Adam—and saw the blade hovering directly
in front of his left eye. Its lightly curved point was so close that Adam
brushed it with his lashes when he blinked. The boy didn’t dare to move a
single muscle, and was breathing so tensely that Credence could barely see his
chest move. Silent, fat teardrops were rolling down his cheeks, making his
lashes clump together. Beyond him, Credence could see Snarlack… smoking another
cigarette, with his back turned. Ambrose sat glumly on the ground, watching
with a heartbroken expression. The wand at his hip was gone.
Credence took up Snarlack’s strategy, and looked away.
He focused on a point far in the distance, where the lifeless soil faded into a
blue haze. Their digging site was just on the outside of the walls, and had
fallen into shadow as the sun shifted. Credence remembered a time when those
walls had felt like the only thing standing between him and freedom, but now,
they seemed almost irrelevant. This endless emptiness was what truly separated
him from the world. He wondered whether anything lay beyond the fog at all, or
if his long march to the camp had actually been his death. Perhaps that was why
he couldn’t remember anything just before. Couldn’t remember how he… went.
Maybe that was a mercy after all.
And then: a flicker of red.
Credence sat up straight. The sudden injection of hope in his chest was so
alien against the despair that had overtaken him, it almost hurt. He peered
hard into the distance, holding his breath, waiting to see it again.
There it was. Unmistakable this time. A small group of riders were emerging
from the fog and trotting toward the gates. At the head of the company rode a
man with pale white hair and a cloak lined with crimson red that winked
brightly against the cool backdrop every time it fluttered. It was the
Commander. Inimitable. The stern, clean-cut shape of Lieutenant General Graves
was visible on the horse beside him.
In the span of a heartbeat, Credence’s world shrank to that red glimmer in the
distance. It was the living antithesis of all his pain and despair. It was hope
in the shape of a man. The single, bright flame in a moonless, starless night.
He rose to his feet and leapt off the track to chase the red. If he ran fast
enough, he could intercept them at the gate. He knew he could. He knew it.
His legs crumpled under him with the first step. It startled him, and he bumped
his head into the hardpacked mud as he fell, totally unprepared for his body’s
betrayal. He could barely feel it, he realized. But with the blind
determination of insanity, he pulled himself back up, and tried again. This
time, his legs ran.
It was exaltation itself. Running. Just running. Credence could feel the wind
beating against his face, and the squelching suction of the mud. It was all
glorious. His gait grew more crooked and limping as he gained distance, and he
knew his swollen foot had to be hampering him, but he felt no pain. All he felt
was a brilliant lightness so sweet that he would have laughed if he wasn’t
already pushing his lungs to the limit to run.
The Commander’s form was growing closer as the trotting of the horses and
Credence’s own feeble legs slowly brought them together. He could make out the
shape of the man’s brows and mustache now. See him talking to Lt. Gen. Graves.
The sight made his heart sob with all the relief of a child running toward the
comfort of a parent. Before the Commander, he had never known such a feeling.
The feeling of all the world’s warmth, and safety, and love existing in one
person. Waiting for him with open, strong arms that would take care of
everything. Just like he had before. The Commander would make the pain go away.
“Commander-!” Credence tried to shout, but all that came out was a wheeze. A
moment later, he heard a sharp zap behind him. No pain followed, but the
reality of his situation slammed into him like an iron grate.
They were firing at him. The memory of the young girl who had tried to run
filled his mental vision all at once, and he saw the fine mist of blood she’d
become floating in his memory. Was he about to end just like her? Would he have
time to notice what was happening? Or would he simply be running one moment,
and know nothing the next?
“C-commander…!” he tried again, and this time managed to squeak out half a
shout, though his voice cracked feebly. “Commander! Master!”
It was Graves who noticed him first. He was close enough now to see the man’s
thick black eyebrows knot into an expression of confusion and concern. He
nodded Credence’s way and said something to the Commander, who finally turned
his head.
Credence saw the crease of light brows narrowed in his direction. He could have
leapt for joy as they fixed on him. He would be safe. It was only a short
distance more. He could make it, and he needed to. A flash of light and spray
of dirt sprang up beside him again, and Credence’s heart leapt in panic, but
the eyes on him did not soften.
The Commander raised a single hand, gloved, palm out.
Just like that, Credence’s feet planted in the dirt. He wasn’t sure if it was
his will or the Commander’s—it was so abrupt—but it may as well have put a
physical barrier between them. Credence couldn’t move, and he was too far from
the Commander’s party. Too far by a lot. He heard the shrieking voice of the
witch close behind him, but he didn’t dare turn around. Terror clawed its way
up his throat and strangled his voice. He could feel tears in his eyes. They
were going to shoot him down from behind and the Commander had stopped him in
his tracks.
Credence’s hands clasped together, clutching the front of his shirt and
twisting it in helpless knots. He wanted to fall down on his knees and beg,
cry, plead to be let into the safety of the Commander’s presence, but his knees
just shook where he stood and all that came out of him were pitiful sounds
vaguely resembling a soft litany of “pleasepleaseplease”. His voice was subdued
by the Commander’s raised hand.
When a thudding beat upon the ground sounded behind him, Credence flinched so
hard he nearly fell. But it wasn’t a volley of curses. It was the footfalls of
the pale witch.
Only then did Credence realize the Commander’s hand had stayed her attack as
well.
“Pardon the interruption, sir,” she called, all trace of conceit gone from her
voice. “I’ll take him out of your way.”
“Lost one, did you?” Graves asked. He was nearest to them and Credence could
see the curve to his mouth on the unmarred side. He could only imagine what the
witch’s face must look like, and how much fury she would want to rain down on
him after this.
All Credence had eyes for was the Commander. He tried to force every ounce of
hope and desperation he had into his pleading eyes, knowing this man was his
only possible salvation even if he had sent Credence away so coldly the day
prior, but he found the man staring back at him with only a stony manner of
curiosity.
The Commander’s eyes moved to the scene behind Credence, but he didn’t flinch.
His expression didn’t change at all. Even Graves didn’t seem to find anything
wrong when his gaze followed, but Credence didn’t dare turn to see how the
others fared.
“Only a little game to pass the time. Stir things up. No harm in that,” the
witch interjected, clearly catching the path of their attention.
Graves raised a brow. He didn’t look like he approved of wasting time. “Wrap it
up and get them back to work. They’re not out here to play games.”
With that, the witch was dismissed, and by extension so was Credence. The
Lieutenant General gathered his reins and the party moved on. Credence could
see the Commander’s attention already moving to the gate of the camp beyond
them while Graves leaned to his side, speaking to the man in a private volume.
Graves had spoken for the Commander the entire time, but it was the Commander’s
will to leave Credence there with the witch. It was his will to leave the rest
of the boys in the midst of their “game”, and Credence didn’t know what to do.
It was with a heavy heart that he watched them touch their heels to their
horses’ flanks and resume their trot toward the gates. The Commander’s cloak
lifted in the wind as he did, and for a moment, Credence saw the bold red
lining of it open its vibrant maw. It was a flash of life—the only vital color
in this dismal, gray place. A reminder of all the warmth and luxury that
floated so impossibly far above him.
And then the cloak fell—and caught. It happened so quickly. Credence saw the
end of the cloak snag on a brittle, thorny growth that might once have been a
living bush. He saw the small tug, and the way the Commander glanced over his
shoulder in mild irritation. A casual motion of the man’s fingers sent a quick,
neat sear through the fabric, severing a small patch of it as though it had
been cut with a hot knife. The sequence was nearly seamless, unfolding as
Credence heard the witch approaching behind him with heavy steps. He knew that
she would grab him in just another second or two. That it would hurt. That he’d
be dragged back to horrors unimaginable. But every ounce of his focus was on
the tiny strip of fabric that clung to the bush. He could see a wink of red in
it.
Time slowed down. After being overwhelmed by the sensation so many times,
Credence was beginning to recognize it. A vibration at the edges of his being,
brought on by shock or suffering. Only this time, it had a focus. The fabric.
The fabric…
Credence let it happen. It felt different, letting it. A white film flickered
over his vision, and even the witch’s nails digging into his shoulder seemed
far away.
The fabric. The fabric.
It was the Commander. It was all his feelings about the Commander. It was his
hurt and confusion. His helplessness and desperation. It was all glaring back
at him in that small red eye…
The witch jerked him around and shoved him forward, causing him to stumble. In
that same moment, a fierce gust of wind crashed into them so strongly that the
witch nearly tripped and joined him on the ground. Credence made hard contact
with the soil, having been too distracted to catch himself, and his ribs
groaned as the shock passed through them and the air was expelled from his
lungs. He blinked, disoriented, with his cheek pressed to the cool earth,
finding his way back to reality after the brutality of physical pain had cut
through his trance.
As the world came into focus, he saw a hint of red, only inches from his eyes.
The small patch of fabric from the Commander’s cloak was trapped under his arm.
The gust of wind had blown it free, and he had somehow fallen right onto it.
With his heart in his throat, Credence shifted his arm to surreptitiously curl
his fingers around the cloth. He tried to disguise it as an effort to stand,
though an instant after he had his prize in hand, the witch grabbed the back of
his shirt and forcefully lifted him to his feet.
“Get up. Move,” the witch growled, and it was several shaking steps later that
Credence realized she hadn’t seen. He squeezed his fingers tight, protecting
his treasure.
Up ahead, the boys were still seated where they had fallen, but the rocks that
had marked their torturous game board had scattered. Adam was kneeling,
shivering from shock, no longer trapped. The black knife was conspicuously
missing.
Credence resisted the tremor in his legs as he was led to them. His body tried
to disobey the weight of the witch’s hand, not wanting to go back to the
treacherous patch of earth they stood upon. The boys’ eyes upon him made his
feet that much heavier. There were questions in their gazes, beneath the dead
and dissociated expressions they wore for the witches and wizards.
One strong shove launched him back into their midst, and he nearly fell again.
The world spun as he rejoined them, sinking solidly back into his place in the
camp.
He’d tried to run, but not away. He’d tried to run to the very man who held
them there under wizard rule, and Credence knew that wouldn’t make sense to the
others. It shouldn’t even make sense to him, except that that man had given him
the only comfort he’d ever received in this place. The only comfort he’d
received outside of it, too, if he thought back far enough.
He feared he could see a light of suspicion in their eyes now as they made room
for him. He couldn’t tell whether it was real or imagined.
The witch stalked off, the heels of her shoes striking the earth in sharp
staccato until she rejoined the other woman. The hiss of her voice wasn’t
audible to the boys, huddled where they’d fallen, but there was an air of pent
up frustration about her. The dark witch’s eyes drew to the gate where the
Commander’s entourage had disappeared and her face did not change. Her stony
expression was almost as bad as the radius of ire emanating from the other one.
Finally, the boys began to look around amongst each other, taking the
opportunity to shift as the witches spoke, desperate for a moment of reprieve.
Two boys near the end of the course crawled to where Cress had fallen. He
seemed to be okay, if still in great pain.
It was over, Credence thought. However the witches envisioned the game ending,
the encounter with the Commander had ended it for them. He slumped to the
ground as prickles of something akin to relief spread through him.
The witches seemed to be gathering themselves to leave, and off to the side
Ambrose had gotten back to his feet and Snarlack looked ready for the whole
ordeal to be over. Their heads were still lowered a fraction, but their eyes
were on the witches.
Sensing this, some of the boys began climbing to their feet. It was a shaky and
hesitant process getting some of them up again, but others offered hands to
help them up. Credence stayed on the sideline, hugging himself and clutching
his treasure under his arm. His eyes were on the witches. He wouldn’t feel
entirely certain the ordeal was over until they left.
As the witches passed behind Adam, the herald turned her head and looked right
at him. For the first time, he saw her expression change. A smile twisted her
stalwart mouth. The rest happened in a flash. A sweep of the arm, the glint of
an obsidian blade, and then an unholy screech that electrified the air.
Adam was on the ground. His shaking fingers clutched at his eye with blood, so
much blood, seeping through them. A long arc of red spray stemmed from the spot
where he writhed, painting a smile on the cold, hard earth.
The boys froze as one. So did the guards. Credence could see the bloodless
disbelief on Ambrose’s face.
The moment broke when the pale witch curled her lip in a mocking sneer, which
she directed first toward the stunned boys and then the guards. She lifted her
head with a sharp jerk, and just like that, control of the block was handed
back over to the guards as the witches swept away, leaving their inferiors to
deal with the mess of the maimed boy.
Adam’s anguished wails followed their heels as they headed for the gates.
Chapter End Notes
     Feeling lost and defeated after this chapter? Don't worry. Gellert
     will feature prominently in the next chapter. Cling to hope.
End Notes
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