Disclaimer: If you know it then J. K. Rowling probably owns it.

Challenge: Title Challenge

Challenge Issuer: -The Danger Pony-

Where?: Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges forum

Challenge: Pick a number, be given a title then write a fic with that title.

A/N: Well, this is nerve-racking. Not only is it my first challenge response in years, but it's also... well, I'm completely aware that my poetry is dreadful, and my writing skill is eclectic to say the least. So this is scary - and I would really appreciate people's comments. Please review, even if you hate it or don't have much to say, though I hope that you enjoy~

Bask in It

and they said that it would make you crazy

that power becomes a fall.

they said that basking in sane thoughts, if only hazy

should keep you resisting immortality's sweet call.

Books. Tomes. Musty and thick, heavy with the knowledge they will bring me. They haven't been touched in years but I will read them, absorb them, because this is a goal that my enemies shall never touch. (Dumbledore will never know what true power is. He may watch but he will never see.)

Immortality. (How sweet on my tongue.)

Any price. (Any price at all.)

It's madness.

No, not madness. Clarity.

Can you truly live if you can't die?

Yes, of course. You'll live forever and see all you want to see, do all you want to do.

Drunk on power.

No. Yes. No. You can't be drunk–controlled–if you have power over all.

Forever damaged...

Perhaps. But what is a soul to one with no chinks in his armour?

Madness.

No. Clarity.

Slughorn is horrified and I cannot understand why.

He knows. Knows when he hears the way I almost whisper 'seven'.

Soft like a rose's petals.

Piercing his comfortable life like its thorns.

He knows.

But of course he won't stop me.

It's not simple. Because beautiful, deadly magic never is.

But it is simple, too.

Death.

That's simple enough.

Any price.

Any price at all.

I see into their eyes, their frenzied, confused eyes, and I think that perhaps it is madness.

Only someone who believes themselves to be innocent could look so brokenly bewildered, so frail upon meeting their son, disowned in rags of heavy cloth and made to bear life's burden on his own.

I am the son, but I am also the avenger.

My mother died because of this man's callous dismissals; he is not innocent, but the higher power who did not exist until this moment seems to think differently.

And so his soul, dead by my hands, releases an answering part of my own soul into... darkness.

I raise my hands and catch it. Encase it in rough, bound paper, where it will stay. My soul won't fly again.

It does not feel like it is torn asunder from my body. This part of me that I did not feel until this moment merely slips quietly away and its absence is a nothing, not a torn out part of my chest.

Only when I wake up–was I sleeping?–do I start to feel that torn and forever damaged part that is my ragged soul.

I would scream if I could.

But, the voice of my pounding ears whispers through it all, this is the price.

The price of madness.

And now I'll burn forever.

But brightly.

Books. Tomes. And I tear them to shreds because this is my path and my path alone. They are as torn as I am now, those which brought me here, and I will tear this world apart so that it shall know my name and what I am. (Slughorn knows but it will do him no good; because his knowledge is what I have done, not what I have become.)

This is losing sight of yourself.

Yes. It doesn't matter because I have never lost sight of my goal: my goal is all I am and all I have to give.

To purge and destroy?

Yes. You might not call it a gift but it is what this world needs.

Hate?

Yes. It's simple.

Yet beautiful.

You don't know what beauty is.

Screams from bloodied throats.

but what they didn't know was this:

this power over all.

and lost in this feeling I barely feel forever's burning kiss.

it's they who were the fools.