"Trust me, you shouldn't want anyone like me on your back."
"Maybe I don't want anyone like you on my back," His eyes darkened as he stepped closer, confining me tighter into barely any space as my back pressed against the wall.
"Maybe I want you. U...
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CHAPTER SIX
MAGIC WAS THE SOURCE of the world, and those wise enough, knew it. It was embedded in cores of wands, in the threads of the universe, and in the blood of some like an all encompassing mist clinging and spreading.
Heuristics, that was what that old lady had told me when I went to see her under the cover of the night-a night of desperate actions, intentions. A night of my fifth year at Beauxbatons. That was what it was called, the woman had said, with her skin weary and loose, her back hunched, her wild gray hair falling over her wild yellow eyes. That was what the magic that came out of skin was called.
But there hadn't been a witch or wizard capable of heuristics for centuries, she had emphasized, growing anxious and flitty, her large eyes looking at me as though I was a poisonous weed growing amidst a colony of roses. She had grabbed my hand when I had wished to leave, her boney long fingers wrapping tightly around my wrist to the point that I felt my cursed blood halt in my veins underneath her grip. I had yanked myself free, and then I had made her sleep. For she had intended to tell, to reveal this secret I had trusted her to explain and hide. She had done neither for me.
I had been told the old lady was crazy, that witch or not, she was off her mind. I should've listened, then I wouldn't have gone and hurt her. But at least now I knew that it had a name, what I could do without my wand, the spells I could cast with my hands, my chants and the powerful symbols I could draw, it all had a name. Heuristics. And that wasn't an answer, but it was the start of one. The old woman will be alright, I knew that as I left her sleeping. She would wake up with no memory of me, or of anything else in her life. But she would be alright, she would be alive. That was all that mattered, wasn't it?
The sun rose over the Greylock mountains, and it bled into the sky like melting lead. Its blood was red, warm and orange, and it seemed to seep into everything in its sight. I had risen before it, having seated myself at the glass paned window of our new dorm at Ilvermorny.
The darkness of the walls, and the plainness of the window was unnerving, unsettling. But in a peculiar sense, it was calming. The castle felt strong in all its darkness, and where Beauxbatons had been bold in its light, Ilvermorny seemed to be content hiding.
