The wind picked up immediately, fierce, violent gales sweeping up into a blowing tornado around the circle of bodies. Harry felt his senses open like he'd just taken medicine for a cold, the sharp inhale of breath freeing him from muted feeling. It was freezing, frost gathering on his brow and he could feel nothing except pure terror. There was a hum in the back of his head, beating like a drum, dark and foreboding whispers. He could taste something wretched and iron, cloying and heavy on his tongue, but when he tried to spit it out, there was nothing there.
The necromancer, who did not appear affected by any of this, gathered the cup into both hands and held it high above her head, as though in offering to the moon.
She began to whisper and her voice carried and whistled along the wind. Echoing and harmonizing, as though the wind itself was speaking with her.
"I pledge myself, servant of Death, of the Old Ways, of the cycle of beginning and end - to the role of master, teacher, and guide for my apprentice, Harry Potter."
She took the goblet to her lips and without hesitation, drank deeply. Her eyes glowed brighter until it was painful to look in her vicinity. The glow cast its own shadows - thick and shiny like large puddles of ink. They moved through the current of wind, illuminating the bloody space with a nauseating hue of acid green on deep red. After a minute of drinking, she stopped and offered the cup over to Harry.
He really didn't want to touch it, let alone drink it.
"It's for your good health, apprentice." She assured him in an even tone which did nothing at all to assure Harry that drinking the blood of at least thirty people was a good thing. "Just repeat what I just said, switching the names around."
Harry started to realize he wasn't sure what he had gotten himself into. The fact that the forest was a scene from a horror movie and he had blood leaking into his shoes and socks made it all a bit gross and overwhelming. All of his senses were overloaded with blood and death and darkness and he was very, very scared.
"Um, I pledge myself, servant of Death, of the Old Ways, of, uh -"
"The cycle of beginning and end."
"The cycle of beginning and end - the role of apprentice and uh, student -" He faltered through the words. It felt a bit like it was too late to turn back, he thought to himself, as he swirled the fancy goblet of blood around. Maybe magic wasn't worth this… " - to my master Alabasandria Adams." He gave the cup another hesitant glance and firmly shut his eyes.
The frozen cold clung to his arms and stiffened them. The wind tucked underneath and lifted the cup to touch his closed lips. The wordless hum of drumbeat urged him.
As the blood licked him, a wave of power and peacefulness washed over him, buzzing around his ears and skull and down to his limbs. His whole body was encased in energy like he had drunk a thousand coffees. He gasped, and a trickle of the blood slipped past his lips. His mind was invaded by vague, abstract imagery swimming in a miasma of bright color and emotion - an overwhelming feeling of success and improvement. From somewhere, something assured him he had made the right decision.
His body guzzled down the blood without any input from his mind. It tasted sweet.
He felt something connect deep within himself, a rope wrapping around his soul to that of an impossibly ancient, freezing cold mass outside of his body. He was connected to the necromancer. He gasped, dropping to his knees. Ignoring the blood staining his jeans, he shuttered and gasped as he tried and failed to cope with the intense rise of power that settled within him. He realized with horror that his own eyes were burning their own harsh electric green hue across the blood-soaked ground, lighting up the forest like he was a living flashlight.
Alabasandria knelt beside him, sticking a finger into the blood and pressed it to his forehead.