Duplicitous | T.N.

XLVIII • Authentic sneers

Her legs moved in a futile sprint. One foot following after the other as she raced behind her friends. No matter how many steps she could steal, or footprints she left it didn't feel like she could move at all. Instead the emerald tiled walls crushed her skeleton, confining her being to the one place.

Yes, Aurora was running. Yes she was physically moving, but it was in her mind were she stood still. Unable to break free from the trance of gut wrenching memories and sorrowful thoughts.

The Ministry of Magic was a magnificent place, the architecture was to be admired as the statues were to be treasured, yet Aurora could not appreciate the trivial matters such as aesthetic pleasure. Not when a sole memory feasted on her flesh and cuffed her sore bones.

Harry, Hermione, Ron, Luna, Ginny and Neville had never ventured the Ministry whilst it lay quiet before. They had been used to a busy workplace, a premises gushing with wizards late for work, prisoners preparing for trial and witches with places to be.

Aurora, however, was familiar with the silence. Every step, breath, and movement thrashed at the walls in a ferocious echo. Empty space hugged your lonely figure. Darkness eloped every corner and turn. Every gust of wind wailed like a tortured ghoul on Halloween, and every glance was a remainder of the absence of life, a reminder of the solidarity.

Her pace excelled as she chased after her friends, her mind oddly silent as she recalled the last time the Ministry of Magic was empty. That day loneliness haunted her like nothing else, absence became not a temporary issue but a lasting curse. It was not only the sick cry of wind that had her sensing death but her mothers lifeless figure peaking through the dainty cloth, as it rolled away on a hospital trolley.

She ran then too.

Her father received the call at approximately one fifty seven am, the entire family arrived a total of two minutes later. Spewed from a green flame that was the Floo Network, they raced through an empty Ministry of Magic with no care for the cold that tormented their bare feet. At the time their hands remained intertwined, hopeful their mother was alright, hopeful she would greet them with a firm hug and promises of her well-being.

Aurora was fifteen and clinging tightly to her elder brother Sebastian, fifteen and whimpering into his shoulder, fifteen and on her knees, begging to whoever was listening that her mother still breathed. Andrea was renounced dead at one fifty eight am. Hope was gone before the family even arrived.

She felt her brother drop her hand like poison.

As the trolley bed creaked past the family of newly four, Merlin showed them pity. A gust of wind, that cried with them, blew away the sheet that separated them and her. Andrea lay with her eyes shut and her mouth slightly ajar. She didn't even look dead, but rather in a heavy slumber, one Rory and her family knew, she would cease to awake from.

Hope had crushed her that night, and currently, as she raced through the once again vacant Ministry, there was none of it left.

Despite the writhing depressive state she was eloped in, she hid it, and she did so well, following the orders of the chosen one as he mumbled half audible instructions. Piecing together his broken sentences like a jigsaw puzzle she translated his gentle and worried commands.

'Something, something, right ahead, something.' She rendered his speech to define; 'they'd just have to continue their journey forward.' Collectively his dialogue could barely be construed as an instruction to find the Department of Mysteries. It was rumoured to be a devastatingly dark and windy hall dedicated to the collection of prophecies. Sirius Black supposedly seeking their help there.

The Department of Mysteries remained an untrustworthy myth, a mere legend. She had heard whispers of its name, guesses of its existence and predicaments of its occupants, she was ashamed to admit that the destination exited her.