Rating:
R
House:
Astronomy Tower
Genres:
Romance Horror
Era:
Multiple Eras
Stats:
Published: 01/05/2004
Updated: 01/05/2004
Words: 5,807
Chapters: 1
Hits: 1,663

The Flesh and Blood of the House of Malfoy

Fabio P. Barbieri

Story Summary:
How Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy fell in love. This is one of the nastiest love stories you are likely to read and only for strong stomachs.

Posted:
01/05/2004
Hits:
1,343


THE FLESH AND BLOOD OF THE HOUSE OF MALFOY

By F.P.Barbieri

Malfoy Manor stands in its own spacious grounds in Hertfordshire, in a land that was once rural but that has, in the last fifty years, been swallowed by London. The house of Malfoy may hate and despise Muggles, it may have kept a large park around its home in an attempt to discourage contact, but it was primarily from Muggles that it got the wealth that made it great; for most of the land and houses around belonged to it, and the growth of London had multiplied their incomes manifold. Malfoy after Malfoy had taken care never to sell land or housing, often foregoing short-term profit for the sake of future prosperity; and their descendants had reaped the profits.

Those who grew in the homes of great wizarding houses such as the Malfoys breathed in refinement and beauty with their mothers' milk. The houses were adorned like royal places, with the simplicity of immense wealth; the Malfoys especially loved a spare, classical style suddenly lit by flashes of Oriental gorgeousness. This produced generations of demanding, pampered, self-confident heirs, as sure that the world belonged to them as that the sun rose in the East; and apt to be demanding and difficult in all matters to do with pleasure and taste. Sure, these things could go wrong - even grossly wrong; as witness the execrable taste of the whole Black family, mired in the worst of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. But Lucius Malfoy, sole heir to the wealth and power of the millenary Malfoy clan, was the most select of hothouse growths, the secure and demanding creation of millennia of power, wealth and fear. Lucius Malfoy would no more live in the overwrought palaces of the Blacks than he would kiss a Muggle or mismatch a set of robes. Lucius knew the difference between a well-cut and badly-cut diamond, between a fiery and a dull one; could measure by the finest shades the suitability of different colour in decoration; had a severe and demanding taste in food, wine, and dress.

There was only one thing to trouble that serene arrogance: Lucius was the last male heir of his blood. If he died, the name became extinct; if he and his sister died, it became literally impossible to find a legal heir to the estate, and the Malfoy riches - not to mention a number of things of which neither Muggle nor wizard outside the family had an inkling - fell into abeyance. Malfoy's father had therefore dedicated much of his time to finding a bride for him, and a groom for his sister. Historically, the Malfoys suffered from a fairly low birthrate, and branch after branch of the family had become extinct through lack of heirs. Lucius' own father had no brothers or sisters, and he had only managed two children; hardly enough, in his view, to be confident of the future of a dynasty in which so much had been invested over the centuries.

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The air was stale. The windows needed opening. The furniture was scattered with plates, glasses and remnants of food, and, while house-elves were able to work in with a rapidity unimagined by mortal servants, it would still take time to return to its pristine state.

Young Lucius Malfoy looked around himself with disgust. To see this beautiful room in this vile state made him feel as though a part of him had been violated, entered and fouled. He heaved a sigh.

"Where is Father?" asked a voice behind him - a voice whose vibrant and subtle quality never failed to thrill him.

"Gone to meditate on his sins," he answered with a plain sneer on his face.

"Father would never do that. He is incapable of imagining that he might ever be wrong in anything," said his tall, beautiful sister, as she sat down on his armchair's armrest.

"Yeah, but he is phenomenally good at finding fault with others," answered Lucius with an even more pronounced sneer.

"You know, Lucius, I think these parties would go much better if Dad was not such a complete misanthrope. It's all very well to invite the cream of wizarding society and hire the best there is in terms of music and catering, but it does rather spoil the fun when all the guests perceive that the master of the house does not approve of anything that happened after 1905. People don't just come for food and drink, you know."

"No. In this case, they come for sizing up heirs."

His sister looked down at him, and said nothing. It was clear that the party had been, as far as he was concerned, another disappointment. This princess, of a wizarding house that went back to Paracelsus, was crude and unsympathetic; that great lady, a Russian whose grandmother was the Baba Yaga, had shown all too clearly that she did not share his interests. This girl had been crude, that girl vulgar; the more interesting ones were already spoken for. And at any rate - thought Lucius to himself, glancing at the exquisite figure beside him from under lowered lashes - it would be a miracle if anyone ever came to match the standards he had come to know right here in his own home.

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It was his last time in Hogwarts, and he was glad it was so. As he strode forwards to get his final commendation from Armando Dippet, who was also retiring, he could not avoid the keen, suspicious eyes of his chosen successor: Albus Dumbledore, already reputed the greatest wizard alive - the bane of Grindelwald, the discoverer of the uses of dragon's blood, one of the only three wizards who knew the secret of the Philosopher's Stone. In his last few years, Dumbledore had been bad trouble for the gang of Slytherins who had been trying to become the godfathers of the school; and Armando Dippet, already feeling old and infirm, had let him have his head more and more. Tom Riddle, the legend who had inspired a whole generation of Slytherin gang members, had left five years before, and while his fame still lingered, the hand of authority had grown increasingly firm. Smiling and bowing to the frail old wizard, Lucius thanked whatever powers that be that he was leaving now; lately, he felt he could not turn a corner without meeting Dumbledore's tall, severe, Merlin-like countenance. He knew that Dumbledore was older than Dippet, but in terms of alertness, energy and obstinacy, there was no comparison. He was going to be very bad news in the future.

Then his thoughts turned to home. Unfortunately, the end of his career also meant that the marriage problem would rear its ugly head again. No, not rear its ugly head - make that stand up on its four legs and breathe fire. With every step that his doddering father took towards his grave, his thirst for heirs grew stronger. With no hope in this world or the next, the continuation of his family and of the family estates was the only thing he lived for. To a young man such as Lucius, the prospect of having children was something that stretched over fifty years - a nearly infinite amount of his life; he felt rebelliously that his old and infirm father, whom he had never loved, was trying to concertina his life, force an immediate marriage and birth into his earliest adult years, purely to please himself. Besides, if his father died... there was one prospect that Lucius never dared voice, but which had grown more plain and tempting before his eyes with every passing months.

When he and his sister were still children, they had been separated, sent to different boarding schools: he to Hogwarts, where at the time Slytherin was the dominant house, she to Durmstrang, which was then famous (or notorious) for a formidable and sinister German witch with a special talent for Dark Magic and an affinity for women. (This was to have a curious effect on the following generation. She hated her time at Durmstrang, a grimly disciplinarian institution with no sense of beauty and a mixture of Germanic efficiency and Russian oppression; so she insisted that her son should go to Hogwarts. He, on the other hand, dreaded the thought of Dumbledore at Hogwarts, and hated the idea of what his son would learn there; and he argued strenuously for Durmstrang.) The summer before they left, they had started hiding from the adults in the coppices and woods of the family estates, delighting in each other's naughtiness, keen and curious. They had invented, as generations of children before them, a game called playing doctor; then they had developed their own variants, she coming over all coy and setting him some difficult or disgusting task before she "showed him". He was seized with a greed he did not question or understand - had he been asked, he would not have been able to articulate it beyond speaking as though it was obvious. Sometimes he would ignore the tasks she set him and force her without completing them, wrestling her to the ground till he had raised her skirt, lowered her panties and placed his hand on her secret place. On one such occasion, she deliberately wet herself, making him reel back with disgust, and fled for the house before he could get his hands on her and - as he threatened - make her "eat it"; not that she was any less willing the following day. They were lonely, spoilt, naughty children, with nobody of their kind for several miles around, happy to enchant the birds so that the house cats could eat them, or play pranks on the Muggles nearby; and their awakening sexual interest had nobody except each other to develop. Their father, old, enervated and unsympathetic, never suspected a thing; but by the time September came and it was time to leave for school, their little games had become quite an obsession with both of them.

Then school came, and, with school, separation. Lucius was angry to be sent away, but knew there was no point complaining. He did not realize yet what a sympathetic environment he would find in Slytherin, with the tall sixth-year Head Boy Tom Riddle who was so clever at running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, and so understanding to naughty and lonely young boys; and with so many young people of the same temperament and interests - more than he had ever thought could exist. His thoughts left his sister, and fixated themselves on a sequel of boys in the school; by the time he had graduated, he had acquired a more than casual experience of his own sex. Typically, he had refused the submissive part, and waited till he found a partner willing to submit to him; for Lucius was a Malfoy - the Malfoy, heir to the head of clan and dynasty - and woe betide anyone who forgot it. His scared, sensitive, timid partner was later to kill himself when he found that Lucius had deserted him for a girl and no longer cared for boys.

His sister he saw only on the holidays, and already on the first summer, she was a stranger. She had shot up and acquired the beginnings of womanly shape, and with the beginnings, a completely new vocabulary and a new set of interests. She spent all her time owling her girlfriends at Durmstrang or speaking with them through the fireplace in her room; "I'm going to speak with Clara" - "But you've just owled her half an hour ago!" - "Yes, that's what we're going to talk about." She was distressingly girly, and as he had come to really dislike a number of his female Hogwarts contemporaries, he no longer looked on her with favour either. And so it went; each time they met for the long vacation or, more rarely, for the Christmas and Easter breaks (for he tended to find reasons to remain in Hogwarts for the holidays and avoid his lonely house and his unsympathetic father), each of them would find the other a stranger.

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But in the last couple of years, the atmosphere between them changed. As the Slytherin mischief was slowly squeezed out of Hogwarts by a stronger management, Lucius started feeling less and less happy in Hogwarts; and as he slowly grew away from the home of his teens, so he found that his sister and he had more and more in common. They could often exchange anecdotes about bad teachers, unsympathetic decisions, and boring lessons; about friends ill-treated or misunderstood; or about the sheer boredom of much school work. That was, at least, in the beginning. For Lucius and his sister were maturing into the hothouse flowers they had always been meant to be, and they quickly found that conversation on matters of beauty and aesthetics had an absorbing interest and brought them together, most frequently in common disapproval of the crudities and ignorance of their contemporaries. They could sometimes much older than their age, adult rather than adolescent in their views of people and things; only to collapse into adolescence, not to say childishness, in the most sudden way, when one or the other of their personal buttons was pushed.

Yet it was not until his father started giving his infamous series of parties for his children that Lucius really understood how he was starting to feel about his sister. Mincina Prewett came in a gold lamé dress; Jeesh, his sister's understated green was so much more becoming. Tamsin Parkinson wore a daring, new-fangled trouser suit to emphasize her long and shapely legs - crikey, my sister's are every bit as good. This girl danced with him and stepped on his toes, and he remembered his sister's grace and precision; that girl uttered trite nonsense, and he thought of his sister, so sparing of speech unless she had something to say. Everything anyone said or did reminded him of her.

......................................................................................................

At about the same time, Tom Riddle reappeared in their lives, in a new guise that awoke both fear and desire in them both. It became clear that major choices would soon be made about their futures; for it was no longer a matter of being friends with a notorious and clever scapegrace, but of deciding who had the right to ule over the wizarding world. Among wizards, wisdom was both strength and legitimate right: and one man could claim more dark wisdom than any other. They kept their father informed of their contacts with Riddle; he was too old himself to engage as an active supporter, but he identified intensely with what Riddle claimed as his values and his goals.

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Morning in the Malfoy lands in Derbyshire, sunny and green. The thumping of hooves on earth and grass; Lucius Malfoy, standing in the stirrups, head forwards over the horse's shoulders, riding for dear life and laughing with delight. There were obstacles he always tried to take in, for the pleasure of the jump and flight over, the wind in his face and the thunder of the hooves beneath him: a fallen tree, a ditch, a five-barred gate. Only as he came to the tree, he saw that someone was sitting on its other side... his sister. She turned one instant before the horse jumped, horror in her eyes; he pulled hard on the left rein, trying to force his mount sideways; and the creature simply jerked from head to tail, reared, fell sideways, and narrowly failed to crush him to death. Luck let him fall a few millimetres beyond, and, as the horse kicked itself upright and cantered off in disgust, luck allowed the kicking hooves to miss him.

As he got his wind back, his sister rushed to him and held him in her arms, her eyes full of fear and concern. He looked up at the beautiful face, and his arms reached to surround her, answering to her pressure born of concern with a pressure born of another feeling altogether. For a second, he raised his head so that his lips were nearly on hers; and then he suddenly let go and threw himself back, making his bruises throb. She also fell back away from him. He was breathing heavily; so was she.

"You know... it must have been on a day like this that the merchant who had sought all over the world for the enchanted pearl came home and realized that it was in his own house all along."

"I think so, Lucius. But would the merchant be right in keeping the pearl?"

"I think he would. I think it would be wrong to take Muggle cultivated pearls in place of the single enchanted jewel. I think the merchant comes from a family that has always taken what was theirs by right, and that does not bother with petty questions of morality."

"That's what I think too, my dear. I think the merchant deserved the pearl. I only wanted to be sure that you read the fable the same as I."

They rose from the grass together, with fluid and elegant movements, these two handsome, spoilt, unique creatures - Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy. They only held each other's hands, and looked in each other's eyes; yet the declaration had been made, more binding for them both than vows, and accepted.

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There was still the matter of the runaway horse to consider. Enchanting a stray horse to come to him was easy enough for Lucius, but he had to see the creature first; and the creature had galloped off. He told his sister that he would see her at home; she smiled deliciously; and they parted.

Fifteen minutes later, he was back, not only with the horse, but on its back. To his secret irritation, his father was waiting for him. Luckily, the old man only wanted to tell him that he was leaving for one of his rare visits, to a couple in far-away Cornwall that were as old, crabby and hidebound as himself; he received with less pleasure an intimation that yet another dance party was on the cards. He forced himself to keep a polite countenance.

"The truth, sir" - his father was so Victorian that he actually demanded the prehistoric term - "is that I have already made up my mind. There are difficulties in the way, but I am certain of who I want."

"Well, don't just stand there then, boy! Who is she? Why haven't you told me before?"

"Because, as I said, there are difficulties. And I will not tell anyone - not even you - until those difficulties have been removed."

Old Malfoy was hardly the sort of person to take this sort of attitude from his son. He reacted badly, and the discussion quickly degenerated into a one-sided slanging match, in which the old man accused the younger of all kinds of degeneracy, while the latter held himself upright and refused to answer. Finally the father reminded himself that he had an appointment to keep, and left his son, shaking inwardly with rage, to his own devices. Lucius was still seething with rage when he made his way up the grand staircase and down the left corridor to his sister's quarters; but he considered that he had made a date with his sister, and he was not going to let her down only because of a pig-headed, ignorant old fool. She heard him coming, and called him from inside.

"Come in, Lucius." If his sister's voice could smile, it would. It held a warmth that nobody at Durmstrang would associate with ice-princess Narcissa; it conveyed something that nobody, including her parents, had ever felt - a positive welcome, an invitation to be with her, to have her open to him, to make her happy with his presence. The very tone brought a smile to his face - but, as he crossed her door, his smile changed into a glad but incredulous gasp.

From head to foot, except for a little jewellery and a pair of pumps, his sister was naked.

Nobody, not even her mother, had ever been granted so much of Narcissa before; to nobody had she allowed the full view of her splendid body - and it was splendid, thought Lucius, even lovelier than his fevered dreams had imagined. Her nudity allowed nothing of rawness, of unpreparedness, of lack; she moved as though she wore a Balenciaga gown at a cocktail party. Hands and feet were long, exquisitely shaped, her nails projecting only slightly from the flesh; he noticed that she did not wear nail polish, and did not need to - her nails were of perfect texture and shape, polished like mother-of-pearl. Her feet narrowed into slim ankles, on one of which she had daringly placed an anklet (Lucius had only seen them on street women before) to underline its elegant shape; and grew into long, curving calves and exquisite thighs. For a body so generally long and lean, the buttocks were remarkably curvy and solid, standing out proudly like a Brazilian woman's. Her intimate parts, and her armpits, were clean-shaven, or else - Lucius would not find out which for a very long time - naturally hairless; and her inner folds closed elegantly on each other, not open and wet to the world, but ready to be unfastened by her chosen lover as he wished, delicately or violently, as gentle partner or strong ravisher. Her lower stomach curved gently upwards to a small, foldless navel with no pronounced features (Lucius had more than once been tempted to laugh, in the middle of earnest seductions, at the view of a lover's absurd-looking belly-button); at whose height her whole body came to a startlingly narrow waist, designed to caress and hold. Above the waist, her body widened to a strong chest, standing out proud and jutting in two not over-large but astonishingly shapely, firmly thrusting breasts, and up to two lean but broad shoulders - there was nothing delicate, in the sense of weak, about Narcissa. Her arms and throat were long and lean, their shape underlined by long necklaces and collars; as for her face - more than one lad at Durmstrang had written adolescent love poems to her face, and, while Lucius had never been willing to give himself away to that extent (writing love poems down was the same as asking for them to be read aloud in Common Rooms and be ridiculed for one's pains; no wonder so many Hufflepuffs did it), he had secretly agreed that his sister's face was a thing of wonder.

As for Narcissa, she was as glad that her brother was fully clad as he that she was naked. In her view, naked men, however handsome, were not as interesting as naked women, and she found highly sculptured muscles of the body-builder type vulgar. She preferred to see them wearing elegant, studiedly casual clothes of the kind her brother modelled so well, open at the throat but not to the chest, suggesting rather than throwing in your face his sensuality and manly strength. She had never seen Lucius sloppily or inelegantly dressed; his fine, discerning and impatient taste in clothes was comforting to her, the evidence of a nature as fastidious as her own; and even for such strenuous exercise as a horse ride, his choice of boots, jodhpurs, sweater, shirt and cravat was faultless. She came straight to him, with no false modesty - was this the coy creature who had teased him so mercilessly when they were children together? - and her arms met behind his neck as her lips met his.

He answered back with an intense but not violent pressure. He had made up his mind that she would enjoy every aspect of his love-making technique; but he would not start with the more forceful kind. He reached down and scooped her up into his arms, her shoulders against his right arm, her knees over his left; and though her weight was great and the strain more than he expected, he grinned at her as he brought her to her bed and let her delicately down. He sat by the bed's side and reached for her feet, caressing and cradling their exquisite form in his hands, feeling and contemplating their beauty, kissing them gently a few times. Then his hands and mouth moved up to her legs and knees, her beautiful thighs, kissing and caressing; and finally he reached her vulva. There he used his tongue on her to such an effect that she took almost no time at all to explode, shouting and twisting with joy. She had never felt anything like it, and was only too glad to reach out and kiss his mouth, feeling her own taste on it. She reached out to his belt, eager to give as much as she had just received.

To tell all that they did that memorable afternoon would be long, repetitious, and useless. Narcissa Malfoy, who was still technically a virgin in the morning, received a long, intense, multi-faceted and highly pleasurable introduction into everything that her brother knew about sex; which, while perhaps less than he fondly imagined it to be, was still quite enough to insure an interesting evening to any woman, let alone one he loved. The lovers used no protection; they were not concerned about not having babies, rather the opposite - they were Malfoy enough to feel that the notorious Malfoy low birthrate had to be overcome.

But that was not accepted by their father. They had underestimated the old man. As soon as he had heard of his son's mysterious new girl - spoken in a voice he had never heard before - old Malfoy had realized that there were reasons why his son would not speak to him; and had surmised that, if he went away, his son would head straight for his secret love.

But the old man had not expected what he had found. Few parents, perhaps, would; but in addition to that, there was in him a certain element of ignorance, of being sheltered from the real world. In his day, he had been just as much a hothouse flower as his children, just as pampered, spoiled, and insulated from reality; and this training had left him with a curious mixture of cynicism and naïveté, which led him to think that all the world was made of scoundrels, yet did not allow him to believe that his son (who had already had homosexual relationships which his father would have found perverted) would do something really outside his views.

The old man exploded. And the two incestuous lovers were caught in a very undesirable position. To be found fully naked by an enemy who is himself impeccably dressed is an inevitably embarrassing situation, especially when the person in question is an old tyrant they have subtly feared all their lives. Both brother and sister found themselves stuttering and almost helpless for the first few minutes of what threatened to become a really long scene, before they pulled themselves together.

It turned out that it was not the immorality or perversion of it that bothered the old man so much; it was his own abiding fear - the notion of the inherent Malfoy breeding weakness. He ranted and raved about it. He was certain that to mate Malfoy and Malfoy would lead to sterility, and that the line would die with them (and yet it was on that afternoon that Draco Malfoy was conceived). He was crimson with fury.

Eventually his children lost patience and started answering back; angrily at first, then with a more dangerous calm. "A Malfoy does what a Malfoy pleases, sir. It was you yourself who taught me that," said his son - and if old Malfoy had not been in such a towering rage, he would have read the plainest possible danger signals in the cold and ugly way those words were spoken. But the old man was past reason; he kept screeching, almost to the point of unintelligibility - he would disinherit them, he would disown them, he would end the line of Malfoy here and now rather than face public disgrace - and his son and daughter, almost at once, drew out their wands and shouted "Stupefy!"

"He is still alive," said Lucius Malfoy a minute or two later, after thoroughly checking the limp and silent form. The old body had not taken well to two full-strength Stunners in the chest, but it would not die immediately; so the brother and sister used a few healing spells that encouraged such vitality as was left to start a process of recovery. They did not love their father, but they did not want him dead; and - a consideration of some importance - they did not want to have to explain his death.

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"Keeping father in a coma is not going to solve anything," said Lucius. "We still have to figure out what to do."

The issue was simple. If their relationship became public, whether or not they could legally inherit the Malfoy estate, they would be socially ruined. This was unacceptable. Besides, they could not be sure that, if their father recovered, he would not carry out his threats and disinherit them. Then there was the matter that, whatever the legal status of incest in the wizarding world (on which neither of them was clear), their children would certainly be illegitimate and could not inherit; which neither of them was disposed to accept. Finally, they were not sure that incest itself was not enough for a term in Azkaban, or at least for compulsory separation under threat of Ministry curse - Narcissa at least was almost sure the latter was the case.

On the plus side, they were both powerful sorcerers. It should be possible to do something about this - something highly illegal and secret, of course. But when it came to working out what, things became more difficult. The idea of altering Narcissa's identity and appearance did not appeal to Lucius, if nothing else, because he did not want to be making love to anyone but to the splendid beauty of that afternoon. Besides, as soon as they started thinking of the technicalities of changing identities, they became aware of how many different facts and records had to be altered to fabricate a convincing new character. The bride of a Malfoy heir could not come from just anywhere: too many interested eyes would be scrutinizing her origins, her background, her powers. Everything had to be made, and made convincingly; it amounted to altering reality.

Soon it came to them that they might as well do it thoroughly.

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There is a day that the hospitals of Hertfordshire do not like to remember. On June 16, 1979, twenty-four new-born babies vanished from the wards of several neighbouring hospitals and were never found.

It is as well that the grieving parents never knew what happened to their new-borns. Most couples, in time, came to terms with their loss by imagining that their babies were still alive somewhere - sold, perhaps, or taken away; many of them actually made up fictional accounts of their future lives, imagining them grow and learn. But the babies never did. They were all murdered on the day they were abducted; sacrificed in a pagan ritual to some of the most loathsome gods known to man.

Standing on the highest roof of their mansion, as doing duty for the top of a pyramid, Narcissa raised the last of the small hearts, still beating and bleeding, to heaven, as her brother cast the small carcass down. The blood dripping down her arms disgusted her, and she hated the filth and smell of human sacrifice. However, as she was making a mental note of setting up a very thorough cleansing spell once they were done, the thing they had prayed to came.

He did not come in a swirl of thunder and lightning, for it would have drawn attention, and there was no need to be dramatic. For a few hundred years now, proper sacrifices had been few and far between; now someone had offered a truly excellent one - no private individual had ever done more, only caciques and emperors. Huitzilipochtli was pleased; and a strange, hushed, rumbling voice, that shook both Lucius and Narcissa till their bones rattled within them, told them so.

He was less pleased to hear what they asked of him. They saw him in front of them, a monstrous skull covered in jade and gold, staring from two obsidian eyes that never blinked; displeased with them both for the enormity of their demand and for its reasons - for incest was one thing he did not patronize. Things looked like going badly wrong, until Lucius had a brilliant idea: improvise a chant, such as pagan priests often used to offer their gods. He raised his arms to the manifest god in a praying posture, and started:

You are the god of things that are; of what is and was and is to be.

In your hands they lie, and you make them and alter them at your whim.

Two armies face each other, and you hold the balance between them,

You, lord of the fated and the unfated, lord of death and of that which will never live.

To you are offerings given - not only on temples, not only on the height of mountains

But with each heartbeat, each human wish that belongs to you;

You lie at the core of their being; you make them breathe and to be.

Reality is in your power, and you can stretch and erase and remake it.

Three suns have lived, one lives; and you are the master of all,

The heart of their heart, the distinction of being and non-being.

The skull-spirit was pleased. "You have done as you ought, Lucius Malfoy. The ritual is now complete. You shall have your heart's desire."

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The spell unleashed was of incredible power; of a power that no magician could embrace, and few even comprehend. It reached from one end of the globe to the other, from the largest to the smallest things, and altered everything. Everything except for Lucius and Narcissa's memories; for they wanted to remember who they were, and how much they had done to be able to lie in each other's arms. But to the rest of the world, Narcissa was now Lucius' cousin, a child of the Black clan, and a suitable match for the proudest clan in magical Britain.