Death and the Black Dog

Prologue - A Deal With Death

There was a flickering, shifting light against the stone wall across from him, familiar in its shadow-play. Just another candle in a draft, a drowsy fire on a cozy hearth. If altogether an unusual color. When had he ever seen flames the same shade of blue as the winter sky? So cool and pale, distant and unattainable, taunting him with his own frail mortality and human weakness.

A snort escaped chapped lips, and black eyes sparkled with wry, dark humor. Indeed, his mortality had finally caught up with him, Fate shrouding herself in the dark, gaunt beauty of his cousin. How could he have missed it, seeing the curse coming? Been so incredibly stupid?

"The oddest things happen in the heat of battle." The voice was a mere thread of sound, more sensed than heard. A figure, slight and pale, stood now at the end of the hall, a strange apparition that looked like no ghost he'd ever seen. Sirius blinked as it raised a slender, long-fingered hand, pointing to something on his right.

He could see Remus holding Harry back, sorrow drowning those brown eyes with tears he wouldn't shed. Sirius lunged for the opening as Harry called for him, desperately trying to shout to him that he was coming, he was alive, yet found his voice mute, the arch impassable.

"You can't go back that way." The voice was stronger now, the source a step closer, more real. He realized a moment later it was not because the person had moved, but he had.

"How do you know?" Sirius tried to see past the shifting shadows to see the person, determine a gender, a face to accompany the voice.

"Others have tried, and failed." The voice paused, a considering silence falling around them. "This is only a doorway, a waypoint between one life and another. There is a way to return, but not the way you came."

He took another step towards the shifting light, deliberately, watching for a reaction. There was none. "Who are you?"

The voice was a cool trickle of water, a clear and musical alto. "A passing guardian, an unwanted soul." A shrug of slim shoulders shrouded in white linen. "I am many things, and yet nothing at all."

"What is your name?" Another step. Eyes the flat, bleak grey of the North Sea met his from a face carved from translucent ice. Tendrils of no-color hair curled and tumbled about her head and shoulders, white caps on a turbulent sea.

"I have many names. What would you call me?" Drops of crystal ice, from pearlescent lips and a soulless gaze, drawing a shiver of cold fear from Sirius.

Like the shiver, the words were not meant to happen, pulled from him without his conscious direction. "Ice, I would call you. Winter..."

"Death?" A smile touched the pale face, and a single icy fingertip traced the line of his jaw.

"Death," he echoed, dread rooting him to the spot.

A whisper of a laugh - imagined? - and a slight tilt of her head as she watched him. "Than make a deal with Death, Sirius Black." Her eyes held his as he made a choice, and the world tilted crazily about him.