Good or bad, does it matter?{HP}

Shifting through Robin's memories, Severus found himself on a stone bridge leading to a dilapidated castle with one high tower.

The castle was without any windows or even a roof, and in the walls that were supposed to protect it from outside invasions, there were dozens of holes, not to mention the moss covering almost every brick.

In all appearance, this place screamed that it was 100 years old ruins, and it was not wrong.

This castle, surrounded by disgusting wasteland and swamp, was once abandoned, but due to the huge amount of death energy hovering on its territory, it attracted the attention of a community of necromancers and because of this they decided to settle here, making this place the main spot of their community, where only the best of the best in their path gathered.

Snape learned about this from the memories of the "young talent", who only five years ago moved to this place and became a student of the head of the community because of his enormous talent and great ambitions.

"How can they even live here...?" Nagini hissed with disgust, not even daring to sample the air using her tongue, already imagining how "fragrant" this swamp was, and Lucky's reaction, holding his nose with his paws, already spoke for how he was feeling.

"~Meeeeew…" he meowed plaintively, because his sense of smell was at an incredible level, the surrounding were especially grim for him, suffocating him with the air.

"It doesn't stink that much here…" the Prince looked at his companions with a mocking smile, who glanced angrily in his direction, promising the most terrible punishments if he didn't come up with something.

"Okay, okay, my sissies," snapping his fingers, the wizard created an air bubble around their heads, and then calmly headed towards the castle with nostalgic memories of how he once had to hide in a real swamp for four whole days from his enemies, and then, with the same pleasure, drowned them in it five years later, "Oh…..good times…"

"By the way, why didn't we move inside right away?"

"Because of the barrier above the castle, I don't know how good it is, and the risk in this "operation" is not justified, we'll do everything quietly," Severus calmly explained, finally approaching the first layer, hidden from view and holding out his hand, he used analyzing charms and after a dozen seconds, having found a small loophole, he temporarily added himself and his companions to the exceptions, and then calmly walked through it.

"Well, I shouldn't have expected anything else, the barrier turned out to be not so simple, and besides this, most likely, this place has a core with an artificial consciousness, so we only have two hours before we are discovered and my bookmark flies off, although the fact that all three barriers were powered from one source was the worst possible idea, but it turned out to be advantageous for us."

"Of course, I didn't understand everything, but I'm glad that you succeeded, and now ...?"

"Now we are on the 'list' and can move freely around this place without attracting much attention," he replied, continuing on his way and overcoming the next two barriers, reaching the huge gates, where they were met by two giants about five meters tall, in silver armor with huge swords stuck in the ground, and at the very entrance, on the other side, stood two men in robes and whispered about something.

"They…" the snake looked at them with undisguised admiration.

"I doubt that anyone here can subjugate such undead, and even their leader is not capable of such a thing, although…" one artifact that he wanted to look at surfaced in his memory, "If that is the case, then it is quite possible, but I can not feel magic in their bodies, and in order to control them, a huge amount of magic is required, and at the same time, additional magic is spent to keep them under control…..so even with that artifact, it is quite impossible." he shook his head, calmly walking past the two dark wizards who did not even look in his direction, using the stupid logic that if he was allowed through the barrier, then it means he is one of them.

The place they found themselves in reminded Severus of a very ordinary village: pleasant-looking half-timbered buildings with tiled roofs, a small well, barrels lying outside, if of course you don't count the wandering suspicious wizards, some of whom were followed by skeletons and dead people, houses decorated with real skulls, and small shops with potions and artifacts, calmly selling human and animal bodies and organs, individual parts and even some living creatures... relatively living.

And the cloudy weather especially well emphasized this "fairytale" place. For the first time, even the eternally self-confident Lucky decided to dive under the Prince's mantle to be on the safe side, and Nagini generally tried not to show her lovely face, so "happy" were they to find themselves in such a "pleasing" to the eye "village".

Snape, of course, did not buy anything in this place, because he himself was not particularly interested in dark magic and similar artifacts, and he had enough poisonous ingredients, and thanks to the supplies from the "Magical Jungle", he could even open his own store to sell herbs.

Calmly passing through the "village", he went up the slope and came out to a large building, reminiscent of a half-ruined temple, to which a huge roofless tower was attached. In front of the building, to the left of the entrance lay the very missing part of the tower, and a little ahead, on the sides of the path, there were two statues of gargoyles.

But Severus was not the only one who went to this place, a small procession of eight dark wizards was heading towards the building as well, holding staff in their hands and whispering something.

Snape wasn't particularly interested in the rituals of these people, so using the spell of distraction and illusion, he calmly walked past them, and entering the building, which inside exactly resembled an ordinary church, except for the absence of icons and any statues of deities, he immediately headed to the passage that led to the tower.

Although Robin knew almost nothing about the thing he was looking for, the Prince did not need this, because he himself had already found it due to the stupid decision in the form of one source of "power" for all the charms and the barrier.

And he was ninety percent sure that the artefact that he was searching for was located in the very place where this source was, and all the ligatures of the runes led towards the tower, so he headed in its direction.

Nagini herself could not look at the parts of human skeletons lying here and there without trembling, not to mention the heavy presence of the nasty magic hovering in this place.

Once she had already asked him to remove the air bubble and regretted it very much.

Having absorbed the local magic, the snake immediately felt dirty, spoiled, as if she had to dive headlong into that very swamp and taste its contents, and the kitten had long since completely wrapped himself in Severus's mantle and generally tried not to look out once again, because of how disgusted he was with this place, after all, he was a creature belonging to the "light" category and could hardly bear the energy of death.

Severus did not stay long on the first floor of the tower and almost immediately found the stairs, going down, he found a huge library, which could be visited by all members of the community.

As for Robin and Xardas, they were both at the top of this tower and at this moment, Xardas was explaining to Robin the importance of the ritual of "cutting off connections".

The ritual was aimed at breaking the connection with lost parts of the body, such as: hair, nails, saliva and skin, which, if fell into the wrong hands, could turn the owner's life into a real hell.

After all, in addition to the usual polyjuice potion, they could even be used for curses, which were very difficult to remove, unless of course the victim kicked the bucket ahead of time.

As soon as he climbed the last step, Severus's gaze opened up to an incredibly beautiful sight: a long corridor illuminated by a cold, dark blue light with bookshelves, dozens, maybe even hundreds of bookshelves, the height of which was at least twenty meters, not to mention the stairs on the right leading down, where other books were located.

In addition to Snape himself, there were other wizards in this place, but to his surprise, there were only ten wizards in this place and for some reason no one else visited this place, which truly surprised him.

After all, if he himself were a member of this community, he would not leave the library at all, and instead would just love in this library.

But no matter how much he wanted to stay in this place for a couple of days, their time was limited, so, with a heavy burden on his heart, he had to turn around and head to the reading room, which was a small room in green tones, in which, in addition to the fireplace, there were thirty tables with chairs and about a dozen small sofas along the walls.

There were no people in this place, no matter how strange it may sound. The hall was completely empty and therefore he did not waste his chance and rather quickly found a secret passage, thanks to the same runes and without any problems opened it.

Looking inside, Severus was again met by a long staircase leading somewhere down, on which he stepped without any fear and continued the descent, but this time, in a much more careful manner, because it was unknown what could await him further, since Robin did not even know about the existence of this place.

The staircase itself was much longer than the Prince had expected, so in addition to going down, he also studied the drawings on the walls, which somehow reminded him of a story about the exploits of some necromancer, although it was more like fiction: in one painting he defeated a huge snake; in another, a dragon; in the third, he destroyed a castle using the dragon and the snake as his undeads, and in the last painting, he was sitting infront of his subjects on a throne made of bones. In this painting he did not look human at all, he was half skeleton and half man.

But although the story looked quite fascinating, the Prince did not focus on it much, and he had already seen the last creature quite recently, so it did not surprise him much.

As soon as the wizard went down and left the stairs, his gaze immediately caught on the altar of bones in the center of the stone room, on which lay a book with a black cover, and above it hovered a black skull, in the eye sockets of which two blood-red lights shone.

"Who…." a menacing, old voice echoed throughout the room, but Severus didn't even let him finish.

As soon as Severus heard the voice, a bottle of dark red ink appeared in his hand, which he splashed out and they suddenly turned into symbols, surrounded the altar and, landing on the floor, began to shine.

All this happened in just one second and the lights in the skull's eye sockets slowly began to fade until they completely disappeared.

"It's naive to assume that I'll just listen to your speech and give you time to prepare. You can't take me like that," Severus looked at the skull with a contemptuous grin, but did not approach the altar, and first pulled out another bottle with a mixture of dragon blood and ink.

Although Snape had already temporarily blocked the core's ability to control all the castle's functions and access to the magic that made it work at all, he decided to strengthen the runes he had laid down with another layer just in case.

After all, with such "things" that contained such dangerous artifacts, it was simply impossible to be frivolous with his current strength...

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