Chapter 193: Care of Magical Creatures
The true form of the Boggart became an unspoken, ironclad secret among the third-year Slytherins. Not a single soul dared to breathe a word about what they had witnessed from their revered Sister Tamara. Even without her needing to issue a formal threat, the sheer weight of her presence ensured their absolute silence. To speak of it to an outsider would be social—and perhaps literal—suicide.
Filing out of the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, the students spilled into the crisp outdoor air. The sprawling lawns leading down toward Hagrid's Hut were slick with morning dew, the damp grass clinging to the hems of their robes. Gryffindors and Slytherins walked in their respective clusters, an invisible, razor-sharp boundary dividing the sea of green and silver from the red and gold.
"Did you hear?" Draco leaned in close to Tamara, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. He seemed desperate to wash away the lingering embarrassment of his own pathetic display in front of the Boggart earlier. A vicious, unmasked excitement danced in his pale eyes. "Yesterday in Divination, that batty old Trelawney predicted Potter is going to die!"
He snickered, the sound sharp and grating. "She claimed she saw the Grim lurking at the bottom of his teacup. A giant black dog—the ultimate omen of death! And it gets better. She said right there in the shadow of the mutt, a lethal, venomous snake was coiled up, just waiting to deliver the final, fatal bite!" Draco let out a triumphant, sneering laugh. "Whatever happens, Potter is absolutely finished this time!"
Walking a half-step ahead, Tamara's perfectly measured stride faltered for a fraction of a second. The sole of her polished shoe caught slightly on the damp earth.
Sybill Trelawney.
Just hearing the syllables of that wretched name felt like a rusted, poisoned blade twisting directly into Tamara's brain.
Fourteen years ago, inside the filthy, reeking walls of the Hog's Head Inn, that fraudulent insect had spat out a vague, rambling prophecy. Something about the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaching. And she—the greatest, most feared Dark Lord in history, Lord Voldemort—had actually taken the bait. She had stepped blindly into a pathetic trap that cost her her body, her power, and her empire, all over a few ridiculous, crazed words from a sherry-soaked hack.
It was the single greatest humiliation of her immortal life.
A vicious, disgusted sneer curled the corner of Tamara's pristine lips.
"Potter will die, of course," she murmured, her voice dripping with glacial malice. "With or without the babbling of a stupid prophecy."
Draco caught the sudden, freezing surge of killing intent bleeding into her tone. Misinterpreting it entirely, his smug grin widened. "Exactly, Tamara! Who could possibly arrange that Scarhead's expiration date better than you?"
The damp slope eventually leveled out into a wide clearing right on the gloomy edge of the Forbidden Forest. Rubeus Hagrid stood waiting for them, looking like a mountain of unkempt hair stuffed into a ragged, foul-smelling moleskin overcoat. Wood shavings, dried mud, and unidentifiable bits of dead foliage clung to his wiry, tangled beard.
Tethered to a heavy wooden fence behind the half-giant were a dozen massive, bizarre beasts.
They possessed the muscular bodies, powerful hind legs, and swishing tails of magnificent horses. Yet, from the chest up, they erupted into the front legs, sprawling feathered wings, and fierce heads of giant eagles. Their cruel, steel-grey beaks glinted in the overcast light, looking infinitely sharper than executioners' blades.
"These 'ere are Hippogriffs!" Hagrid boomed, rubbing his massive hands together with giddy excitement. He looked at the lethal predators as if he were showing off a basket of fluffy kittens. "Now, first thing yeh gotta know about Hippogriffs is they're very proud creatures! Easily offended, they are! If yeh don't show 'em proper respect, it might just be the last mistake yeh ever make in yer life!"
Tamara stood at the absolute fringe of the Slytherin cluster, her arms elegantly crossed over her chest. Her dark, fathomless eyes swept over the scene with freezing detachment.
'Letting a flock of incompetent third-year brats—half of whom can barely hold a wand without dropping it—interact with highly dangerous, temperamental raptors that would give fully qualified adult wizards pause?'A merciless, mocking sneer echoed through her mind.'Dumbledore isn't merely senile. The old fool must be suffering from some degenerative brain rot that makes him actively enjoy watching children get dismembered.'Predictably, Hagrid's pedagogical approach was nothing short of a masterclass in impending disaster. He offered zero instruction on defensive charms. He completely bypassed the fundamentals of basic magical soothing techniques. Instead, his grand strategy was to ask the students to simply step forward and... bow to the giant, razor-beaked monsters.'To deliberately beg for a filthy beast's approval? To entrust one's physical safety to the fleeting, unpredictable whims of an animal?'
Tamara stared at Hagrid's beaming, idiotic face. The sheer, unadulterated disdain pooling in her dark eyes threatened to spill over.
"Right then, who wants ter be the first ter give it a go?" Hagrid asked loudly, clapping his hands.
The clearing plunged into a suffocating, dead silence. Students collectively took a synchronized step backward.
Except for Harry Potter.
Driven by a desperate need to save his giant friend from public humiliation—and perhaps a reckless urge to prove he wasn't cowering from some tea-leaf death prophecy—Harry locked his jaw and stepped out of the Gryffindor ranks.
Following Hagrid's booming instructions, Harry approached a particularly large, grey Hippogriff introduced as Buckbeak. The boy's shoulders were rigid with tension. He looked so terrified he seemed to have forgotten the basic mechanics of breathing. Stopping a few paces away, Harry bent at the waist, delivering a stiff, painfully deep bow.
Buckbeak's massive, unblinking orange eyes locked onto the boy, calculating and predatory.
For ten agonizing, suffocating seconds, the standoff stretched. The wind rustled the trees. Finally, sensing the fearful yet entirely harmless sincerity radiating from the scrawny Gryffindor, the beast relented. Buckbeak folded its scaly front knees and lowered its proud, feathered head in a returning bow.
"Well done, Harry! Well done!" Hagrid roared, his voice cracking with joy. "Now yeh can go on and pet him!"
Harry exhaled a shaky breath, stepping forward to cautiously stroke the smooth, steel-grey feathers of the creature's beak. Before he could fully process his survival, Hagrid was hoisting him bodily onto the Hippogriff's back.
With a deafening, thunderous beat of its massive wings, Buckbeak launched into the sky. The beast carried the screaming boy high over the Hogwarts grounds, carving a wide, sweeping arc through the clouds before circling back and landing with a heavy, graceful thud in the mud.
The Gryffindor side of the clearing erupted into thunderous, ecstatic cheers. Harry slid off Buckbeak's feathered back, his legs visibly trembling. His face was chalky pale, yet his bright green eyes sparkled with a wild, adrenaline-fueled excitement.
Tamara observed the sickening display of camaraderie with absolute frigidity. The mocking curve of her lips deepened into a sneer.
'Stupid, brainless Gryffindors.'Her internal voice dripped with aristocratic venom.'To actually lower oneself to curry favor with a beast. Relying on a pathetic bow, discarding every ounce of human dignity just to trade for an animal's pitiful charity. How is that any different from a mongrel dog crawling through the dirt, wagging its tail for table scraps?'
Unfortunately, Potter's moment of glory violently struck a nerve nearby.
Draco, standing just inches from Tamara, caught sight of the faint smile playing on her lips. His pale eyes instantly flared with a toxic, consuming jealousy. He entirely failed to recognize that her smile was laced with lethal sarcasm. In his mind, she was impressed by Potter. That singular thought acted like a spark to dry kindling, allowing his spoiled, competitive young master's ego to completely obliterate his self-preservation instincts.
If a half-blood like Potter could manage it, how could a pure-blood scion of the noble House of Malfoy possibly fail? He needed to prove to Tamara, right here and now, that he was infinitely superior to that pathetic Scarhead!
"What's so difficult about this?" Draco scoffed loudly, his voice cutting through the Gryffindor cheers. He shoved his way to the front, swaggering out onto the damp grass.
He completely disregarded every single warning Hagrid had just issued about bowing and maintaining respect. In Draco's deeply ingrained worldview, he was a pure-blood wizard of the highest pedigree. The very concept of bowing his head to a filthy animal was utterly repulsive.
He marched in a straight, aggressive line directly toward the resting Buckbeak.
Stopping just feet away, Draco tipped his chin up in a display of supreme arrogance. He sneered, his tone dripping with grating contempt. "You're not dangerous at all, are you, you great ugly brute?"
That single, highly provocative sentence acted like a lit match dropped into a barrel of blasting powder. It instantly ignited the fierce, untamed pride hardwired into the Hippogriff's bones.
Buckbeak let out a deafening, ear-splitting shriek of pure fury.
The creature's orange eyes contracted into pinpricks of violent rage. Without a second of hesitation, the massive beast reared up on its hind legs, casting a terrifying, winged shadow over the boy.
Two massive eagle talons, curved and sharper than forged steel, sliced downward through the damp air. The sheer force of the strike generated a sickening whistling sound as the claws hooked straight toward Draco's pale, arrogant face.
"No—!!" Hagrid bellowed, his voice tearing at the seams, his soul practically leaving his body in sheer terror.
The clearing erupted into chaotic shrieks of horror. Several timid students clamped their hands over their eyes, unwilling to watch a classmate be decapitated.
Draco's pupils shrank to the size of pinheads. The freezing shadow of imminent death swallowed him whole. In the face of absolute, raw, predatory power, his previous arrogance was instantly crushed into pathetic dust.
Yet, in that fraction of a second, a singular memory flashed through his panicked mind. Tamara's cold voice echoing in the common room: Don't bring shame to Slytherin. Don't lose face for the House of Malfoy.
Fueled by that terrifying command, Draco didn't shriek and cower with his hands over his head. Instead, he clamped his jaw shut. Driven entirely by raw survival instinct, he threw his upper body backward, his spine arching desperately. Simultaneously, his right hand plunged into his robes, fingers scrambling clumsily but swiftly for the handle of his wand.
But human reflexes were pitifully slow.
Buckbeak's striking speed far outpaced a third-year's panicked draw. The lethal talons were already tearing through the space where Draco's face had been a millisecond prior, dragging a nauseating gust of wind right against his skin.
However.
Just as the razor-sharp tips of the talons hovered mere inches from slicing Draco's cheek open to the bone.
A voice sliced through the chaotic screaming of the clearing. It was cold. Glacial.
The tone wasn't particularly loud, yet it carried a dark, heavy resonance that seemed to bypass the ears entirely, striking directly against the soul.
No one had even seen her move. Like a ghost drifting through the panicked crowd, Tamara Riddle had already stepped out onto the grass.
Her hands remained loosely at her sides. She hadn't even bothered to draw her wand.
She simply tilted her exquisite, porcelain-pale face upward. Her bottomless, obsidian eyes locked dead onto Buckbeak's violently raging orange irises.
[Magical Creature Affinity +20%]
It was a passive skill, originally defined by the Virtue System's cheerful mechanics as an aura designed to 'make animals feel a warm, loving closeness.'
But when that saccharine system magic was forcefully filtered through the cruel, mutilated soul of the Dark Lord—compounded by the suffocating, pent-up hostility she had been nursing ever since the humiliating Boggart incident—a twisted, terrifying qualitative mutation occurred.
Affinity?
In Lord Voldemort's dictionary, 'affinity' was violently rewritten. It was forcibly transmuted into absolute, crushing, irresistible subjugation.
In that singular, breathless instant.
Buckbeak's violent, downward strike froze completely mid-air.
As a magical creature armed with primal instincts far surpassing any human's, the exact moment the Hippogriff met Tamara's dead, black gaze, its entire world collapsed. It felt as though it had been violently shoved off a cliff into a freezing, bottomless abyss.
Through the beast's supernatural vision, the entity standing casually on the grass was not a thirteen-year-old human girl.
It was a towering, unfathomable monster. An apex predator radiating an aura forged from mountains of rotting corpses and oceans of spilled blood.
The primal, genetic terror hardwired into the animal's brain instantly drowned out its rage like a tidal wave crashing over a lit match.
Whimper...
A shockingly human-like terror blossomed within Buckbeak's fierce orange eyes. The massive, lethal raptor let out a pitiful, high-pitched whine, sounding exactly like a stray puppy that had just been brutally kicked.
Trembling violently, the beast carefully, agonizingly slowly, lowered its raised front talons back into the mud. It moved with excruciating caution, utterly terrified that even the slightest rustle of its feathers might provoke the dark god standing before it.
Under the wide, disbelieving stares of every single person in the clearing.
The fierce, untamed predator—which had been inches away from committing murder mere seconds ago—voluntarily collapsed its front knees and bowed its proud head entirely of its own accord.
It didn't stop there. Shuffling forward on its knees, the massive Hippogriff dragged itself through the dirt toward Tamara. Reaching her perfectly polished shoes, it gently, desperately rubbed the side of its lethal beak against the hem of her dark robes. It was a display of absolute, fawning submission.
The clearing fell into a silence so deep it felt like a graveyard.
Hagrid's jaw hung open so wide one could have easily shoved a whole pumpkin into his mouth. He rubbed his beetle-black eyes with his massive fists, utterly incapable of processing that this groveling creature was his fiercely proud Buckbeak.
"This... how is this even possible...?" Harry whispered, staring blankly at the impossible scene, his lungs once again forgetting how to draw air.
He had just spent agonizing minutes bending his back, his heart hammering in his throat, practically begging to earn the beast's mutual respect.
And Tamara? She hadn't bowed. She hadn't spoken a single word of comfort. She hadn't even raised a finger. She had merely looked at it.
And the monster had thrown itself into the dirt to worship her.
Tamara didn't even grant the pathetic, fawning beast rubbing against her ankles a fraction of a glance. She simply lowered her chin, her heavy, cold gaze falling upon Draco. The blonde boy was currently sprawled backward in the mud, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, his entire body trembling like a leaf.
"Open your eyes, Malfoy."
Her voice was laced with frost, delivering an absolute command that permitted zero defiance.
Draco's pale eyelashes fluttered open. When his blurry vision finally registered the terrifying monster lying completely flat at Tamara's feet like a docile, oversized housecat, his jaw went slack.
Tamara stared down at him. "Put your hand on it."
"I..." Draco stammered, his hand twitching upward. He hesitated, his fingers curling inward, clearly terrified the beast would snap its jaws the second he made contact.
"Do not make me repeat myself." A lethal, dangerous warning flashed in the depths of Tamara's eyes. "Pet the beast. Stop sitting in the mud embarrassing Slytherin."
Crushed beneath the sheer, suffocating weight of her stare—a gaze that felt uncomfortably similar to the pressure of a Killing Curse—Draco swallowed a heavy lump in his throat. His trembling hand reached out and pressed flat against Buckbeak's massive, feathered beak.
The Hippogriff's neck feathers instantly puffed up in deep agitation. It violently despised being touched by this arrogant little human. But with Tamara standing directly over it, that invisible, terrifying pressure remained firmly locked around its throat.
It didn't dare twitch a muscle. It merely let out a low, deeply aggrieved purr, forcing itself to endure Draco's clumsy, shaking strokes.
"Do you see clearly now?"
Only then did Tamara finally turn her head. Her contemptuous gaze sliced cleanly through the stunned crowd, bypassing everyone until it locked dead onto Harry Potter's green eyes.
An unmasked, cruel mockery curled the corners of her lips.
"True taming does not require groveling for favor," she stated, her voice carrying across the silent clearing like a ringing bell. "Only absolute power can command true submission."
The clearing remained paralyzed in a deathly hush. The sheer, unapologetic arrogance of her philosophy left Hagrid and the entire Gryffindor house utterly speechless. They couldn't find a single word of rebuttal to throw back at her.
But standing in the center of the crowd, Harry's brow furrowed into a hard line. Facing her blatant, arrogant provocation, his emerald eyes stared unblinkingly back into her black ones.
His very core instinctively violently rejected her cruel, twisted logic. The idea of trampling on the dignity of another living creature, of ruling through pure terror and oppression—he refused to believe that was the true essence of magic.
And yet, looking at the once-unruly, lethal raptor now reduced to a shivering, obedient pet at the Slytherin girl's feet, Harry felt a wave of unspeakable, heavy suffocation press against his chest.
Because in this exact moment, reality was proving her right. It was just that cold. Just that cruel.
In the face of Tamara's overwhelming, absolute power, the mutual respect he had so carefully earned through his polite bowing was suddenly made to look incredibly pale. Pathetic. Ridiculous.
Refusing to look away from Tamara's bottomless, mocking eyes, Harry lowered his voice. Even over the distance, his words struck back with quiet, stubborn defiance.
"Is that so?"
He clenched his fists at his sides. "I'll be sure to remember those words, Riddle."
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