the seven virtues [tom riddle]

chapter thirty-one

THE ANATOMY OF LYDIA DIMITROV - THE WEATHERCASTER

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

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The first blast had destroyed the walls of the Lestrange Manor, having them crumble over every piece of furniture that adorned the common area. The tapestries of carmine had been shredded to pieces, bricks fallen in stacks over the leathered couches and bookshelves toppled over. Hours after the impact, the dust still navigated the air, unsettled by the bitter wind that pushed through the shattered side of the house.

Felixius Parkin woke up under the debris, head pounding and a metallic taste invading his mouth. His sense of direction had been affected by the undoubted turns of clocks that had had him unconscious, and he suspected the second attack had knocked him out. With dirt underneath and dirt above, he spat out, and when the gravity had the saliva fall back on his face, he knew which way was up.

A faint odor of something unnatural irked his nose, and in a moment of perplexion, he twisted in his tiny hole to glance around and search for the source. Horror dawned upon his face like a razor as he gazed at Della Beauchamp's decaying corpse, and his stomach churned as all will to escape left his body. Tears flowed like the Styx river down his sooty cheeks, forming ducts in the dirt, and Felixius could not even breathe. He had been stuck with her carcass in the same spot for hours. She had begun rotting right beside him.

Lucidity struck him like a poisonous arrow in the thin walls of his deformed heart, and Parkin remembered the last moments of clarity before the blast. There had been no time to drag Della's body away, and so he had thrown himself over it in an attempt to preserve it—foolish instinct, the dead felt no pain.

"Collect yourself," he mumbled weakly and tried to grasp the loose threads of his awareness and knot them into the sharp mind of the former Head-Boy everyone knew. Felix wiggled in the small cavity that had been formed by his probable protection spell before a second blast had surprised him and knocked him out. His hand reached out to search for his wand but to no avail.

He twisted in his spot again, mind tangled, vision unclear. Spots had started covering his view as claustrophobia gnawed at his fissured psyche. Still, the wizard tried to push the bile down his throat, to soothe the quiver in his hands, and glanced around the space. Only a small ray of light slipped through the cracks of bricks and concrete, and he used it to adjust his sight to his surroundings before spotting his weapon—right on the other side of Della's body.

Tears prickled his eyes, but Felix forced himself to crawl through the space and near her until his nose almost touched her jaundiced skin, as if sunflowers had settled underneath her epidermis, coloring her in morbid hues of decaying sunshine. The odor was that which the mind could not imagine; it was something so nauseating that turned the belly inside out and made the intestines tighten. The cold had slowed down the process of death, and putrefaction had yet to begin, but Parkin's mind seemed to almost play tricks on him. Della did not smell like midsummer gardens and factory soap anymore; there was something odious about it.