Prior to her days in the Azkaban Prison, the infamous death eater named Bellatrix Lestrange had been said to possess a sort of classical beauty. After her days in the prison came to an end she was believed to have retained some vestiges of that beauty, though she was admittedly left forever changed even on a physical level by her fifteen years in the darkest, cruelest prison maintained by the Ministry of Magic.
The woman who appeared before me was Bellatrix at the very height of her power and beauty. She was not the skeletal figure who traumatized Harry Potter during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries. The Bellatrix Lestrange standing before me was a beautiful woman with shapely curves, long, thick, shiny black hair, a full face with fuller lips, and a figure that only enhanced her womanly charm.
She was dressed in ornate robes and carried her wand in her hand. The walnut wood artifact was a dark object with a long and cruel history, and my magic coupled with the magic of the remote was easily able to recreate it and return it to its owner. It was the very same object that she used to torture Hermione Granger, another powerful witch who I strongly wanted to bring over to my side.
The silhouette that was morphing into her body stood not far from me. As the silhouette nearly finished transforming into the new body of the dark witch I felt the remote in my hand begin to transform as well. The object began to radiate powerful conjuration magic into the air around me and transformed over the course of a few seconds into a long wand, not unlike Bellatrix's foot-long artifact in appearance.
I could sense my control over the artifact improving as the object took on a form more familiar to Bellatrix even as her eyes began to form. Her eyes were among the last of her features to form, and when they did she took her first, long breath and immediately opened her eyes.
The moment that Bellatrix Lestrange opened her eyes in the world of Mareth was not the very first moment that the woman regained consciousness. The woman spent what felt like a long time in the transitory space between consciousness and unconsciousness, but the instant that her eyes began to form from the full-bodied silhouette that had been created in the forest she had been called to was the moment she truly regained her awareness.
Prior to that her mind slowly but surely came back to her, her senses filling her with some sort of awareness of her surroundings. She could smell a mixture of things that surrounded her, many of which were just natural things such as the scent of fresh grass. She could hear an array of sounds such as the soft noises of falling leaves and the gentle shuffling of people prostrating themselves before someone. She was intimately aware of that second sound, having heard it often while serving Lord Voldemort.
She could feel and hear crushed leaves underneath her feet. She could taste the freshness of the air, a freshness that even the wizarding portions of Scotland lacked, a sort of primeval wildness to the air that civilization tended to still and drain away. One of the unnatural scents that filled her nose was something more than unnatural; it was intoxicating.
Unbeknownst to her, Bellatrix was more than close enough to her master to smell his pheromones. The mighty archdemon and grand adonis was an archetypically powerful entity whose mere presence was enough to bring even fanatics to their knees in both surrender and submission.
When the dark witch finally opened her eyes the very first thing she saw that attracted her attention was her new master. She recognized him immediately, despite the vast differences between his current form and the form she had seen him take. In the depths of her soul she recognized her new master's power, aura, and brilliance, as well as the feelings of love welling up within her at her mere proximity to him.
She fell to her knees as she gazed at her master, a fully entrapped victim of his even passive charisma. As she did he smiled at her, and she felt her body heat up in ways that it never had before. The love she felt for her master outshined even the love she had felt for Delphini, her secret daughter by her former master born during the final year of her life on the Earth she had lived in.
She found his "human" form to be equally and in some ways perhaps even more beautiful than his other form. There was an approachability that Fohion's vaguely "human" form that his more perfected and truer form lacked. Fohion's true form was beautiful in the same way as a star was, like an unstoppable force of nature, not in the ways that living beings could be beautiful.
Beyond Fohion's raw beauty, however, was his power. Fohion radiated power in the same way that a feverishly ill person might radiate heat. He radiated a brilliant aura of magical power, as though he were a wand that was casting some sort of spell, as fully illuminated and alive as any wand that Bellatrix had ever seen casting a spell.
Bellatrix's ability to see this at all was due to her nature as a magical human, something akin to a mutant offshoot of her world's version of humanity, allowing her to physically see magic which was strengthened by the peculiar nature of her resurrection. This, coupled with her master's "Metamagnus" ability and his nature as a god of deception worked to grant him small passive boosts to his appearance that manifested in unique ways depending on who was looking at him.
To Bellatrix magic was beautiful and so was power and those two facets of her personality mixed together seamlessly. That was why she was so obsessed with her old master, as very very few wizards in all of that Earth's history could compare in power to him. Fohion was laughably beyond Lord Voldemort in power.
Her master approached her, and as he did she looked up adoringly at him. He smiled down at her and his hand began to move towards her kneeling form. When his hand closed in on her head it went to her forehead and he lightly pressed his thumb against it. As he did he gave her what he considered to be a gift; the Blacklight Virus. He also, for the first time consciously, gave Bellatrix the "Superhuman Durability" power that had allowed his other minions to survive the initial trauma that stemmed from being infected by the virus.
The cellular organisms that spread the virus surged out of Fohion and into Bellatrix. As they did they commenced their vile purpose of repurposing her cellular makeup and granting it the sort of sentience that all of his "Evolved" minions possessed. Bellatrix felt portions of her mind fade away as her mind was overcome and partially assimilated into the vast gestalt consciousness that the Blacklight Virus itself possessed, as both a portion of Fohion's grander mind and as an almost separate, subservient entity that fulfilled his will.
Like all of the "Evolved" that Fohion had created to date, she retained her own true consciousness that would exist within her mind and allow her a degree of independence while also remaining tethered and subservient to the grander Blacklight mind that was even now making its presence known. The gestalt consciousness within the mental landscape of anyone and everyone infected by the potent virus was a tyrannical force second only to Fohion as far as the pressure it exerted went.
Bellatrix felt an immense curiosity about the nature of her new powers and was quite grateful when her master presented her with a mental "Powerpedia" of her own that fully detailed the Blacklight Virus and outlined her newfound abilities. He did this without uttering a single word, and visibly shivered in front of her as even this simple act of generosity empowered him further.
"Power feeds power..." He uttered his voice a thing of cold beauty and perfection. He was now beginning to feel the effects of perks like "Gotta have power to get power" a potent perk that boosted his power based on how much power he possessed in an array of senses. These perks were powerful and synergistic and their presence within the mighty Living God who possessed them bolstered him further still, building on his already tremendous foundations of potential to create a mighty feedback loop every time he used his powers.
A second after he spoke Bellatrix attempted to make use of her shapeshifting and effortlessly caused her left arm to turn black and begin to change. Her arm shifted and both the witch herself and Fohion watched as it momentarily became an eldritch mass of tentacles before flashing and taking on a more defined, less maddening shape in the form of a gigantic red blade made of flesh, muscle, and bone, almost as if mocking the more natural appendage it replaced; an arm.
The sight of the gigantic blade made Fohion smile, and internally Bellatrix felt her own mastery over her powers and her body taking on shades of the sort of qualities her master possessed with regards to his own powers and body. She felt her skills at manipulating herself increase and gained a keen awareness of the creativity she could display in shapeshifting. All she needed was time, and biomass, and she'd be able to make herself look however she wanted and that brought a smile to her face.
"Master... This power is amazing!" She whispered, in awe of the power now coursing through her and binding her mind to the minds of hundreds of other entities all equally devoted to Fohion.
Unbeknownst to her, on a conscious level anyway, the Blacklight Virus was taking in her genetic material and adapting to it. Her genetic material included her keen abilities with regards to mysticism and by taking it in the Blacklight Virus gained greater powers related to magic and arcane might. Bellatrix benefitted from the virus because it empowered her physically, but she benefited the virus because she gave it greater power to induce magical and magic-based mutations.
I felt Bellatrix's genetic material be incorporated into the grander cellular megastructure of the virus. I could feel her genetic material being studied by the lesser gestalt mind of the contagion, and as it was studied and absorbed by my virus I felt the gestalt mind begin to feel an interesting new desire; to infect and study other powerfully mutated beings such as the X-Men, and to infect other beings that weren't human, elves, more natural animals, or minions.
The desire was a powerful one and I knew how it'd benefit me to indulge it. If I gave the virus more material to study, copy, and consume it'd grow in power and be able to further empower those infected by it. Even now my infected servants were feeling a sudden and powerful wellspring of magic surging within them due to my own powers as a divinity of disease allowing the virus to spread new and improved variants of itself with those it infected. If not for my nature as a divinity of disease I'd need to reinfect my minions, but since I was a mighty Living God my powers were simply greater than such paltry limitations.
I did have a significant advantage with regards to fulfilling this mission though... I had the remote. I could use it to summon beings ranging from divinities to Kryptonians and infect them all with the Blacklight Virus which would give the mighty virus more adaptability and material to study. And each infection would only make the virus, and myself even stronger. As all of that knowledge came together in my mind I felt a sinister excitement begin to well up within me.
"Now this... is power." I proclaimed, even as I began to consider which of mighty creature to summon next. I was also conscious of how this was an application of a powerful feat known as "King of Fouls" which granted me abilities, feats, and items that were broken, figuratively, in the sense that they upset any sort of narrative balance and allowed me to grow in power at absurd rates. It was fun to have such a power, especially considering how well it paired up with "Gotta have power to get power". It allowed me to gain power at comically absurd rates.
