Seven Locks. [MAX]

[Max Kameren]

August, 2039.

---

“Set ‘im down then – oi! Be careful!” The gruff wizard barked at the two younger men in healer-green robes as they dropped Kameren on the floor of the unfinished Catacombs, their slipping grip causing his head to crack audibly against the stone floor. If he had been conscious Max could have looked up and recognized where they’d dropped him all too well: the same ceiling above him he’d stared into as he nearly drifted off from blood loss, his head tugging with each slice from Winston Warghollow’s knife.

But these men were far from Winston Warghollow. “Can we apparate now, finally? We led the trail back here. Codger’s thin as a switch but heavy.”

“Not yet, we need to leave more than just this little bit of blood. They can’t wonder about him.” A gnarled hand reached out and cupped Max’s slackened face, blood running over his fingers from the open wound on his jawline. “Something that gives them a lead.”

“Wait – “ A third man, balding with spectacles picked up Max’s right hand, his eyes moving from the stump of his ring finger up to his co-conspirators “ – Isn't Warghollow a cannibal? Bit pieces offa him, didn't he?”

The three men made eye contact over the body of their captor. In silent agreement, the one at Max’s shoulder pulled out a knife. “We’ll leave a bit, then.”

When he moved to take Max’s hand, the bespectacled man swatted him away. “Caint just hack it off – he’s a cannibal.” After a confused beat he tweaked his eyebrow and clacked his teeth together in a biting motion.

The insinuation bred an awkward silence. As much as Winston Warghollow may enjoy the taste of flesh, neither wanted to be the one to chew a finger off their unconscious captive. When the young man tried to pass Max’s hand along, Spectacles stiffened.

“Was your idea, you do it.”

“Sactly: was my idea. You do it.”

“Oh, for the love of Beezlebub...” the older man rasped. He stepped between the two and snatched Max’s hand from them. He pulled out his wand, and with a twist under his bite and a muttered incantation his teeth shone in the dim light of the Catacombs like sharpened razors. With a quick snap and a hitched breath from their unconscious captive, the pinky finger was liberated.

The younger men flinched. The old man spat it to the floor where it rolled through a puddle of Max’s blood, the viscous liquid slowing it to a stop. The two made frightened eye contact as the old man lifted their captive out of their hands.

“Orders are waitin’, then. Get a move on.”

[Max Kameren]

August, 2039.

---

Was he dead?

When Max came gasping back into consciousness there were few answers to greet him. His eyes opened into total darkness, the only sound the adrenaline-quickening pace of his breath. Even his mind was quiet; for the first time in years he couldn’t detect a single aura nearby. This felt like nothingness, but it didn’t feel like death. Not like last time.

First of all, it hurt. When the wizard leaned forward from where he sat leaned against a wall he felt the itchy crack of dried blood down his neck. He shuddered as each breath brought on a painful grinding sensation in his jaw. When he brought his hand to inspect it he discovered another blinding pain and cracking of blood from between his fingers. Max couldn’t see what state he was in, but if he looked even slightly as bad as he felt he knew it wasn’t good.

With a hitched breath of pain he shifted his weight and flicked the fingers of the less-painful hand. “Lumos,” he croaked, but no light sparked free in his isolation. A few more tries left him without even a glimmer but his jaw in so much pain he was starting to feel sick.

He huddled tighter together against the wall, using his better hand to hold his grinding jawbone together and call out: “Eden! Ro?” His desperate voice echoed upwards against stone walls, but there was no reply. The pressure of his hand and stretching of his cries broke open the injury on his jaw and blood ran warm through his fingers. He could bleed. He could feel pain. He wasn’t dead. Was he?

“…Dad?”

A white light suddenly broke above him and Max squinted into the brightness, hoping either for salvation or closure. Blurry figures shifted within the light and he heard muffled sound before an unfamiliar voice echoed down the stone walls to his ears.

“Oh, for Beezlebub’s… He’s bleedin’ again. Would you get the healer? Cain’t present him like this…” The bright light above him slid closed and slowly the darkness began to lift and a hazy orange glow illuminated his surroundings.

And suddenly Max wished he was dead after all. As the light rose he found he was in a prison: stone brick walls stretched high into black nothingness of a square cell. The room was somewhat longer than his height square so he could lie down on the stone floor. Though he wouldn’t want to, as he took in the stains of blood smeared all over the floor. His blood, he realized as more droplets streamed out of his palm to add to the mess.

He started and scrambled backwards as some of the brick quickly gave way for a figure to step through a doorway into his cell. She was a young woman, Max could tell by her stature and the lighter mint-green of her faded St. Mungo’s healer’s robes. He didn’t recognize her. She must have started her training since his departure from the hospital. But any attempt to ask for identification Max realized would fall on deaf ears: the blurred feeling of her aura and milky irises of her eyes told him the Imperious Curse was compelling her to mop up his blood and inspect his jaw.

“Hold still,” she sad in a sing-song voice; she put her wand to his jaw and Max felt the skin mend, though the bone beneath still floated uncomfortably beneath the surface. He was about to thank her when she reached for his wrist and gently pulled it towards her. “Your hand.”

“My…” Max glanced down and his eyes widened at the sight of his right hand. Not all the blood pouring down his arm had been from his face apparently: a hand that once had four fingers was now down to three. A sickly mangled stump spouted blood where his little finger had once been, showing cracked bone and dangling tendon. He watched on in quiet horror as the enchanted Healer sloppily mended his stump and closed up the mangled wound.

When she’d finished her work and cleaned the last spot of blood from his neck and hand the Healer retreated. Now was his chance; Max tried again to cast a spell to kepp the door open so he could slip past the enchanted healer, but again his magic didn't present itself. Instead his attention was drawn to two marks rippling on his wrists: runic tattoos, sloppily applied but effectively blocking his spellcasting. He had no power. He could only watch on helplessly as the Healer stepped behind the doorway and sealed Max back into his tomb, the light slowly fading back to pitch darkness in her absence.

No, Max wasn’t dead. He wasn’t so lucky, for his fate was much worse: they’d lost. Max was a prisoner in a world ruled by the Shadowloved. With no magic to aid him and no auras to sense, there was no escape. They’d failed.

[Max Kameren]

September, 2039.

---

The pressure was too much, Max thought as he felt his ribs crack threateningly under the weight they’d put on him. He was frozen in place but his green eyes rolled around wildly, silently pleading with his stone-faced torturers that stacked more and more weight on his chest. He paled and his lips slowly turned blue as it became impossible to take in breath. He would suffocate, he thought as his senses became hazy. All their effort to heal him and imprison him led to this?

“Oi, let it off him now.”

Suddenly the pressure was lifted and Max’s body went limp, his chest rising with pained heaves to pull air into his lungs. The bespectacled man sitting closest to him rolled Max’s head to face him, pushing Max’s eye open to inspect it. Max did nothing to stop him, just stared helplessly as he struggled for breath. Their method of torture was so tiring he couldn’t lift his hand to fight if he tried, spell-blocking tattoos be damned.

Spectacles turned to the leader of the trio with a shrug. “Still no Shield. Should we try another round?”

No, please. Weakly Max shook his head and the leader smirked. The older man knelt to join his associate at Max’s shoulder, his smirk darkening as he pulled out his wand. Max flinched but with a wave of the man’s wand the spell-blocking tattoos at his wrists painlessly reappeared. The leader chuckled. “What do we need to do to activate you, Shield? What’s the magic word?”

Max shook his head. He took a deep breath, taking in enough air to wheeze out a reply: “I… I can’t… I can’t.”

The leader let out a raspy chuckle, pushing himself back to his feet and nudging his associate to do the same. “Very well, then. We’ll try again later.”

[Max Kameren]

September, 2039.

---

“Max.” A few firm slaps brought Max back into consciousness and gasping despite the tightness in his chest. The raspy voice and accent was unmistakable, but it also couldn’t be right. Max shook his head and his breathing slowed as his eyes closed again. Another slap woke him. “Max! Wake up. They’re going to kill you.”

“If you’re here haven’t they already succeeded?”

“What? No!” Max’s eyes opened just in time to catch Curse Kameren’s scoff, his sharp cheekbones and thin scars illuminated in the darkness with the same soft orange light that came through the open doorway. How had he missed the clanking?! Max shot into an upright position, but when he searched all he found was darkness. “Relax, I’m a hallucination. From the sensory deprivation. Or the torture. Maybe both?”

With a smile Curse spun on his heel and leaned against the wall opposite Max, their green eyes meeting like a mirrored reflection. The Curse who sat across from Max was the one from his childhood: around Max’s current age, stronger, and not quite as ravaged by the poison that would later take his life. “Listen. You need to figure something out. If they keep torturing you to try to activate the Shield they’re going to kill you. If they realize you’ve lost the Shield abilities, they’re going to kill you. You need a plan.”

There was a long pause as Max mulled the statement, his injured hand scratching at his beard still tangled with blood, tears, and bile coughed up from his torture.

“Why?” Max asked. Curse hung his head. “Really: what am I fighting for? The battle’s over, we lost. I’m sure everyone else was killed; evidently I was only scraped off the battleground to be kept as a weapon for the Shadowloved.” Max shook his head, curling into a tighter crouch in the corner to pull away from his father. “I’d be better off if they crushed me.”

“Max, that’s not - “

“What did you do, then?” Max cut Curse off before he could negate him, glaring over his shoulder. “When Mosrael held you victim. When she used you like a blunt object and left you broken and hopeless what did you do?”

Silence. Max may not have been around for the darkest days of Curse’s life post-Mosrael but he’d caught pieces of information from Alex and Ari over the years. He buried his face in his arms to hide from the stricken look on Curse’s face. It would be sensible for Max to give up, he figured; anyone in their right mind wouldn’t see a point in living a life of torture and captivity when all your friends were gone.

“You won’t, though.” Max tightened in his corner when Curse’s voice sounded ever closer, the imagined presence now so close to Max he could feel him brush against him. “You know you won’t.”

“I don’t know anything,” Max growled.

“You couldn’t do it.” Curse shrugged and Max felt his shoulder nudge into his back with the motion. He finally turned to face his father when he smelled the familiar stench of cigarette smoke and glanced over his shoulder to watch the image of his father illuminating the cell lighting a cigarette with his thumb. “You won’t let them win. You’re stronger than I was.”

“Or too stubborn.”

“What’s the difference?” Max watched Curse take another drag and blow rings of smoke into the towering darkness of the cell above them. “You won't let them kill you, and you won’t kill yourself... That leaves only one option.”

“Break out.”

“Or die trying.” Curse smiled crookedly when his son finally relaxed his posture and turned to meet his eyes.

[Max Kameren]

October, 2039.

---

Max woke with a start.

He was facedown on the patterned rug in his bedroom, a beam of dusk sunlight shining through the shaded window between his bookshelves and into his eyes. He pushed himself up to his elbows, looking around at the room but afraid to move. Was it a trap? He wasn’t sure; everything felt normal, even the auras of his muggle neighbors moved around in Max’s mind like pins on a map. Even Eden was sleeping in the living room, her aura pulsing with her dreams. Was this a dream? Was his captivity? He tried to cover his face with his hands to get a grip on himself, but noticed his right hand was still down to three fingers. His captivity wasn’t entirely a fiction, then.

Hesitantly he pushed himself to his feet and looked around his room. If it was an illusion it was a mighty good one; with his books organized and even the auras of his neighbors behaving normally, Max wasn’t sure what he was imagining or what was real. Nothing seemed out of place until he fell on an empty space by the door: his mirror was gone. He cocked his head in confusion and stepped into the space where the wall was blank. It was entirely empty, without even a hole in the wall where it once hung.

“Eden?” Whatever question Max had for his best friend stalled on his lips and disappeared from his mind the moment he entered the living room. Outside Max’s room their apartment had been entirely torn apart; cabinets had been smashed and spilled their contents across the floor, walls were cracked and crumbling under blunt force, and glass shards from their windows littered the floor. In the midst of it all lay Eden, crumpled across the lopsided angle of their broken couch.

At his gasp Eden’s round blue eyes fluttered open, glassy as they focused on him and her tortured breath wheezed his name. Max rushed to her side and inspected the damage. It was too familiar: Eden was broken, her bones twisted and tortured just as Rowena’s had been when the Shadowloved had her at their mercy. There was a shuffle in the next room. Panic set in and Max glanced around wildly for his bedroom door where his Healer’s kit was. Before he could turn back his bedroom door slammed closed.

The sunlight coming in the windows was rapidly dimming until shadows blacked out all exits. Eden’s hands found his and squeezed. The figure in the next room’s steps sounded closer and Eden’s breathing quickened. “M-ax,” she croaked, blood bubbling behind her teeth, “do s-something…”

The shadows were closing in. Gently Max took Eden beneath her arms and tried to pick her up, but they were surrounded. The steps were so close, now. “Max, pl-please. U-se the sh-Shield…”

Tears welled in Max’s eyes as he squeezed them closed, trying to place out the panic to focus on finding the power within him. But there was nothing to tap into. No matter how deep he reached, it wasn’t there. “I’m sorry Eden,” Max whispered as he held her close, “I can’t.”

Eden’s pleading got desperate and louder as the shadows loomed ever closer and a tall figure appeared in the kitchen doorway. A hand holding a serrated knife gripped the door frame with a heavy clunk. Through the shadow Max could barely make out the shining grin of teeth before a razor-sharp shadow swung for them and he put up a hand to protect them. Instead of shielding them Max’s spell flickered, and a rune on his wrist glowed and burned hot-white as the darkness overtook them.

.

Max woke with a scream.

His eyes opened just in time to see a patronus light its way up the height of his brick cell and extinguish into the far-off ceiling. His wrists burned as if they’d been kissed with a hot iron poker, but he couldn’t lift them to see. He was held down. When he regained his bearing on reality he looked around to see what was happening: his torturers had returned.

“Damn!” The young man kicked the wall in frustration, spinning around to come to kneel next to Max and look up at the other two wizards who held him. “Thought that was going to be it!”

“Closer, though.” Spectacles shrugged, leaning in closer to inspect the tattoo on Max’s left hand and drawing back when he used what little motion he had to swing at him. “Got a shield, just not The Shield. What y’think, Tay - ”

Spectacles’ question was cut off with a hard slap to the back of the head by an older wizard, who Max recognized as their leader in the previous torture sessions. “Don’ use my name, fool! We’ll discuss it later. Out!” Without another word his two accomplices hurried to their feet and out the door. When they were gone the leader loomed over him, quiet until Max finally met his gaze. “Really, Kameren? Not even to save your best friend?”

“I can’t do it. I can’t.”

The leader’s eyes narrowed and he stepped forward to rest his boot on Max’s neck. “We’ll see about that.” He pushed off and left Max coughing as he sealed the door behind him and the lights went out.

[Max Kameren]

October, 2039.

---

“Hey.” Max huffed and shifted away from where Curse kicked at him. If he opened his eyes he knew the hallucination would be looming over him again. “Max. Hey.” Another kick finally riled him.

“What, dad?”

“Do you remember when you and Eden tried to go camping?” This was what he’d kicked him awake for? Max rolled his eyes and turned over to face the jagged-textured stone wall. “You were… what, thirteen? Fourteen maybe? She found that old magic tent in her basement and you two set it up on the hill behind the house, but you ended up having to come inside. Why?”

Max glared ahead into the pitch darkness, ignoring the irritating hallucination as he felt the toe of his sneaker make contact again. “Max. Maaax. Come on. Humor me. I’m going somewhere, I promise. I’m your brain after all…”

With a pained sigh from his cracked ribs Max relented, pushing himself up to a sitting position and turning to face his artificially-lit parent. “We had to come inside because I started having panic attacks.”

The telltale crooked smile stretched across Curse’s face and he knelt to be face-to-face with Max. “Did you, though? Think about it.”

What was he playing at? Max’s eyes narrowed but he thought back, the setting coming to life around him when painted onto his isolated surroundings. He was fourteen, not thirteen. It was the first year of his Empathy. He and Eden were going stir-crazy because of it, dying for ways to split up the doldrums of Godric’s Hollow summer. They set up the tent, got supplies, and went to sleep… but he couldn’t. Something was wrong. He felt numb, like something was wrong but he couldn’t name what.

“…No. It was my Empathy.” Max opened his eyes and Curse’s grin was wider. “Something about the tent set me off. Left me disoriented.” Recognition dawned on his face and Curse barked a victorious laugh. “I couldn’t feel anything outside of the tent because of the extension charm. It made a pocket that separated me from the world, which cut off my Empathy.”

“And how do you feel now?” The look they shared said all they needed to.

[Max Kameren]

November, 2039.

---

With no sight, sound, smell, or even an aura for his empathy to pick up on, the sensory deprivation was starting to eclipse the more conventional forms of torture that Max was being subjected to by his captors. The hallucination of his father now lived with him in the cell, receding to his peripheral when he wasn’t demanding attention but ever-present. Soon Curse wasn’t the only presence filling Max’s unstimulated mind; sounds of London traffic and moving lights would pass through in cycles and when he slept he was often startled awake by slamming doors or clanking metal. His delusions made it even more difficult to tell when the seven clanks indicated the Shadowloved returned to torture him.

Living in a senseless, timeless prison left Max with little options but to return to the base knowledge he learned early in his Empathy. He intended to center himself with the last sense he had that he could trust: touch. When his captors would leave him and his delusions would quiet Max would stretch out his limbs until he found the walls of his prison, feeling every inch of the world he inhabited.

The floor was smooth stone; in areas beneath his fingers Max could feel the cracked texture of chips and fine dust from where his dried blood still stained the floor. The walls were brick but opposite in texture; the stone was rough-hewn, coarse to the touch and sharp in places that would catch his fingers if he moved too quickly. The bricks were ridged around the sides and Max could fit the first knuckle of his finger between each stone to touch the mortar that bound them. Max knew from his torturers’ visits that the walls stretched high to a light that would beam down on him when he made a commotion, but he didn’t know how high the rough texture stretched. Weakly he pushed himself to his feet, reaching up as high as he could reach to find the rough stone expanding as far as his fingers could grasp.

A thought occurred to him.

When Max was very young, before he returned to the UK and learned anything about his Kameren heritage or the Wizarding World whatsoever, he lived in Southern France. In Beziers he lived in a vine-covered cottage with his mum and his grandparents, where he had a particular favorite pastime: climbing. As a child Max could climb from the ground floor to the roof of his grandparents’ cottage in minutes. It scared Amelia to pieces; when they finally moved back to a less vine-strewn building in London she breathed a sigh of relief. Little did she know introducing Max to his father would crop up an entirely new set of dangers for Max to get into.

In the darkness Max kicked off his boots, still muddied from battle. He found a particularly rough area of brick and tested it, placing one foot on a spiney outcropping and pushing himself up. He reached above and tried to find a place he could grab tightly with his better hand. As a kid climbing was easy; he hoped desperately that muscle memory would work its magic twenty years later.

It took longer here than his memory, surely. In the dark Max couldn’t spot where he was reaching and had to feel out his next move. His muscles burned when he held his weight in place too long and more than once he scuffed his forearms when he made a wrong move, but he caught himself. He climbed for what felt like hours on a wall that seemed to stretch forever when he heard a foreboding sound he knew wasn’t hallucinated.

Clnk. Clnk clnk clnk. Clnk clnk. Clnk.

Oh, no. Max squinted up into the light as the brightness broke above him, now wider and bigger than he’d ever seen it. He was close enough now to see the silhouette of a bespectacled face with a sinister grin staring down at him. “That’s some inventive thinkin’ there, Shield.”

A wand was pointed in Max’s face and instantly blinding pain shocked its way down his spine. He seized and lost his grip on the wall, tumbling backwards and falling back to the floor. A laugh echoed down the tunnel when he hit the floor on his back, wheezing as the wind was knocked out of him.

Where he lay prone on the floor Max squinted into the blinding light above him, blurred shapes coming into focus just as a barrier slid closed. When the pitch black enveloped him again, Max felt Curse smirk in his peripheral. He hadn’t escaped. He hadn’t gotten close. But he now knew the world he inhabited and the boundaries of the darkness he was subjected to. He knew the light above him was accessible, and it wasn’t just a light. It was a hatch.

It was a way out.

[Max Kameren]

December 2039 to April 2040

---

All Max had needed was a spark of hope to act upon. A goal to set what little life he had left to: if they lost the battle, if his loved ones were gone, find a way to end the Shadowloved. An obstacle: escape. A method: the hatch.

During his periods of sensory deprivation the hatch loomed over his thoughts even more it did above him. His hallucinations orbited around it; imagined sounds started to echo down from it as if it were calling out for his attention. His conversations with the apparition of his father became obsessed with planning, concocting dozens of scenarios to get the hatch open and Max through it. Having a continuous doorway to the outside world, even when it was locked, lead his mind to wander. It was only a matter of time before he began to test which methods could work.

Another climbing expedition provided similar results to his first attempt, and renewed vigor from his captors when next they came to torture him. But Max persisted: he climbed again, and was knocked down. Next he tried to ambush his captors when they visited, an idea clearly born of desperation that ended quickly without Max being able to defend himself with magic. He attempted several variations on preserving the side door his captors used to visit him: trying to keep it open, push behind them, and breaking whatever seal closed it from the inside.

After dozens of interrogations Max had little to show for it; the hatch stood untouched and the wall unmoved, and Max had no Shield power to give them. The only shift was the worsening patience of his torturers; every visit he felt their auras grate and worried their last interrogation would be his last. He hadn’t no way of knowing how much time passed, but it felt significant; at some point their pet project would run its course and Max would be considered evidence that needed to be destroyed. He needed to act before that happened.

Again, then. The phantom figure of his father offered Max a hand to his feet and Max found his favorite place to begin the climb to the hatch. So many attempts had made the climb easier on Max than his first; now he moved quickly and with confident intent, his limbs finding appropriate hand and footholds as easily in the dark as he would in broad daylight. He slowed as he approached the edge, smiling to himself as he felt the hatch brush against the hair on top of his head. He still couldn’t hear a sound; his last interrogation had been recent enough that he hoped his captors had given up and left him to exile.

When he was close enough Max braced himself against the corner of his prison cell to free his hands. He reached up, his fingers finding where stone met the cold metal of his escape and following its border until he felt the hinges of the hatch on the far side. If he could find any way to manipulate the opening from his side…

There was a muffled creak, like the opening of a wooden door.

An auditory hallucination? Max’s fingers paused and he looked around; it took a lot of energy to climb and hold himself at the top of the cell, if he got down due to a false alarm it would set him back even further, and Merlin knew how much time he had. Max glanced back down at the floor, where Curse looked up at him and shrugged. It was an entirely new sound: was it all in his head, or was he hearing the other side of the hatch for the first time?

He soon got his answer. Clnk. Clnk clnk clnk clnk clnk. CLNK.

“Shit.” Max reeled back and slid down the wall, scratching his forearms on the rough stone on his way back to the floor. The hatch opened and a furious face glared down at him: it was the Leader. Shit, shit, shit…

“That’s it.” The hatch slammed closed and immediately the lights came up. Max scrambled to the opposite side of his cell from where the door was opening. “You’re becoming more tedious than you are useful, Shield, and your antics over the last few months aren’t helping your case.”

Before the Leader even stepped into the threshold of Max’s prison the Crucio started at the base of his spine and burned through him, particularly potent by his torturer’s fury. “If we can’t activate the Shield physically, or mentally, and I’m sure we’re beyond the civility to just ask you nicely at this point…”

The spell let up and Max spit out a mouthful of blood from biting his tongue. His reprieve wasn’t long, though, before the pain started again. “I’m getting tired of experimenting on you. What is it?”

Off. Crucio.

“Was it Fletcher? Is there someone else we need to put pressure on you, Rowena Covington perhaps?”

Off. Crucio.

“Maybe another physical form? I may have some thumb-biters laying around…”

Off. Crucio.

“I mean, how many fingers does a man really need?”

“I can’t…” Max groaned through grit teeth.

The Leader tutted. “Oh, come Maxime. I believe in you.”

“NO!” The pain was finally too much and Max snapped. The spell was cut off and he pushed himself up, standing for the first time eye-to-eye with one of his captors. “No, you haven’t been listening to me. I can’t do it. It wasn’t my power to begin with; it was to protect her in the prophecy. And now the prophecy is done. It’s gone. I don’t have it. I can’t.”

A long silence passed with no reply from his tormenter. The Leader’s eyes narrowed and his face darkened, like a shadow had passed over him. Slowly he stepped back towards the exit, never taking his eyes off his captive. “We will have to see about that.”

Max opened his mouth to reply when he was cut off by a slash of the wizard’s wand. With that quick motion Max heard two sickly pops and an excruciating pain exploded from his knees. He collapsed with a pained groan that sounded barely human, his fingers shaking and breathing getting faster as he felt the damage. His patella bones were shattered in each of his knees; the pain was so excruciating that Max felt sick as the lights began to fade.

“Think on that, next time you try to climb the walls.”

[Max Kameren]

April, 2040

---

All light faded from Max’s prison, but the blinding pain from his knees was so overwhelming that Max barely noticed his captor take leave of him. Gently he put pressure on the joints to tell the damage, but his touch sent new agony blossoming through his body and Max trembled, laying back on the floor and burying his face in his hands to escape it.

He could fix it, he could heal it. He knew the spell to mend the larger pieces; he could stand again, though climbing would be agony. He could mend it if he had his magic, if it weren’t for these damned tattoos!

Max didn’t know how much more he could take. He didn’t know how he’d made it this far to begin with, really; months of torture with his only reprieve in a solitary hole that was sometimes even worse than what his captors could serve for him. His loved ones were gone, and he still fought on. He didn’t know how or why he still fought on, or better yet how he kept his sanity through the constant pain.

“Max. Max, open your eyes.” Sanity was relative, he supposed as he instead closed his eyes tighter to blot out the imagined voice of his father. His body tightened to keep his knees from shuffling as he felt his parent’s fingers close around his shoulders and shake. “Max, damn it! Look!”

He relented and opened his eyes to golden light assaulting his senses. It wasn’t the orange-yellow of the lights his torturers prompted, or even the imagined light cast upon the ghost of his father. It was real. It was his. Max pulled his hands away from his eyes and the light came into focus: his hands were glowing. A healing gold, the gold of the spell he had so desperately been wishing to cast.

Max gasped silently and gently pushed himself up, afraid any sudden movement would scare his magic away. When he was upright he had a better look at the miracle at his fingertips; by the light of his glowing fingers he could see scrapes down his forearms from climbing the wall. Angry gashes dug deep from his elbows to his wrists, where red broke through the black runes that blocked his spellcasting.

Somehow in his lowest moment Max had stumbled upon an answer. His angry, bleeding forearms were somehow the most beautiful sight Max had ever seen. Thankful tears welled in Max’s eyes and he shuddered as he cupped the golden light around his swollen kneecaps. He couldn’t help but laugh with dazed exaltation as the pain ebbed.

The spell worked, but not quite strong enough. His knees could support his weight, but they weren’t functional enough to climb. Max pushed himself to his feet and swayed like a newborn foal, leaning against the wall for support. His fingers fanned out on the bricks’ rough surface and searched until he found a particularly jagged section. Taking a deep breath, Max balled a fist and jabbed his wrist along the sharp edge as hard as he could. He grinned in the darkness as he felt the rune-inked skin give way and his magic flood back to him.

“Lumos.” For the first time Max was able to stand and turn around his prison, taking in the small, dank space free of his captors. It was disgusting, layered with grime and bodily fluids from his captivity there. It was a horrible place to live out your days, or to die in miserable captivity. Max couldn’t stand another moment of it.

After he’d taken in his miserable present Max’s eyes moved upwards, towards his future. He stretched a fist to the hatch, squaring his shoulders to prepare for the fight to come. “Bombarda!”

THTUM. Max watched the spell move like a gust of air upwards and make a dent in the doorway. Not quite enough. Max squared his shoulders and prepared for another. THTOOM. Still not quite.

Clnk. Clnk, clnk…

Shit, Max momentarily panicked, clasping his hands behind his back as if that would hide the obvious source of his assault on the hatch.

Clnk, clnk. Clnk. CLNK.

The hatch was just opening when a full plan suddenly sprang free into his consciousness. A sly smile stretched across his lips and he stretched his arms out at his sides. With a deep breath, Max bellowed the spell that would lead him to freedom.

“ASCENDIO!” Max shot like a rocket up past the four walls that contained him for months and out into the light, bowling over his bespectacled captor and falling in a pile with him on the floor.

A large traveling trunk fell on top of them and the two were pushed by its weight into a long bookshelf holding various items that were now raining down upon them. Max’s attack had moved very quickly and Max took advantage of his captors’ shock, pushing Spectacles back and letting the chest engulf him. Max scrambled to his feet and spun wildly for any sign of reinforcements or an exit; he stalled just a moment too long and Spectacles wrapped his long fingers around his bloody forearm.

Spectacles reared back with his wand, mustache twitching and wand flashing a perilous green. “Avada – “

Before Max could react a bottle of sand fell from one of the top shelves and landed between them, and everything was white. The bottle broke and exploded, sending a mushroom cloud of white powder into the air in every direction. Spectacles choked on the torrent and Max shook him off, searching through the sting of sand in his eyes until he found an exit and scrambled out into the unknown.