Consuming Darkness: Sebastian Sallow

Prologue: 6th Year

Summary of 6th Year, and the summer following:

    My first morning at Hogwarts I walked into the Slytherin common room and the first person I noticed was a boy who was around my age. He had wavy brown hair and light skin spattered with freckles. His eyes were fiercely trained on a book as he paced in front of the fireplace. Something in me was drawn to him, needing to know at least his name. I said hello and introduced myself. His eyes were a beautiful golden brown and as we talked, even though it was brief, his cocky attitude and crooked smile pulled me in. Sebastian Sallow. 

   Then I saw him again in my Defense Against the Dark Arts class. We were called on to duel each other. He was not aware of much real-life practice I had gotten with Professor Figg and thought that I was only a muggle-born who had no clue about magic. While that would have been true a few months prior, I was now determined to make a memorable first impression. I knocked him off the dueling table flat on his back. Offering my hand and an apology with a cocky grin.

  "No need to apologize. That was rather impressive," he smirked as I helped him up and my heart leapt as our hands touched. "Next time I'll know what to expect, and I won't lose." He laughed as he teased me.

   "We'll see, Sallow," I shot back with a chuckle.

   After that we became inseparable. I couldn't stay away and frankly didn't want to. He seemed to be just as drawn to me. We had great banter and he made me laugh. I enjoyed challenging him, teasing him and he returned it.

   He helped me with my path to discovering my ancient magic but his sister was sick, cursed with a seemingly incurable curse. When we first became friends he was driven to find a cure but as the year progressed his drive evolved into obsession. I stood by him as much as I could, even as he delved into dark magic. He was so desperate and depressed that I followed him down any path he chose to go down. I felt helpless, my ancient magic unable to assist in the way that they needed it to. His thought process that a dark curse would need to be healed with dark magic made sense to me so I continued to support, and try my best to reign him in when I could along with his best friend Ominis Gaunt. 

   I had grown to care for him far more deeply than I was willing to admit to myself. And when he killed his uncle with the unforgivable curse I convinced Ominis and Anne to spare Sebastian from Azkaban. I couldn't bear the thought of him there. I also could tell that he was going to be putting himself through hell after killing his Uncle and Anne's decision to cut communication, might have been a fate worse than Azkaban for Sebastian. He had gone too far, but he was only a boy trying to heal his sick sister. 

   I tried to reach out to him after but he was unreachable, and I got so busy with dealing Ranrok, Harlow, and Rookwood. Then the school year ended. Everything seemed to come to a resolution in a neat bow. Sebastian went home with Ominis. I had no where to call home and no one to go home to. Natty wanted me to stay with her and her mother at Hogwarts but one look from her mother told me that it was best to take Poppy up on her offer to stay with her and her Gran for the summer.

   The summer went by agonizingly slow. There were fewer things to distract my thoughts, and therefore I was forced to sit with them, and there in my thoughts and memories, I found so much pain, regret, guilt, remorse, and darkness that I felt as if it would swallow me up entirely. The nightmares began to come even while I was awake. Reliving Professor Figg's death. Watching Natty take the Cruciatus curse for me. Sebastian's face when he killed his Uncle. Then there were the nightmares that my mind conjured from my experiences like tormented animals, everyone I cared for dying and watching myself become a dark wizard. It was hard to hide how much I was struggling from Poppy, especially when we shared a room and I woke up screaming from nightmares nearly every night. I tried to talk to her, but there was so much that I couldn't tell her and so much that I was ashamed to tell her. She was so kind and was there even when I did not want her to be.

   It all began to feel suffocating and I found a spot an hour away from Poppy's house where I could train. I set up training dummies and would practice for hours, working out my anger and practicing my spells as well as trying to hone my use of ancient magic. Despite the Outstandings I'd received on my O.W.L.'s at the end of the year I was still five years behind everyone else with only the past year as an exposure to the wizarding world. I brought my Thestral, Nightwing, that I had bonded with last year along with me and I would spend hours flying with her or on my broom.  I was trying anything in an attempt to gain control over my spiraling thoughts and the depression that threatened to consume me. I felt like something was pulling at my magic sometimes, even though I would not be able to find traces of magic nearby. I did not know what it meant and the information regarding ancient magic was so limited. I needed to be able to go back to Hogwarts and see if there was something that I had missed, something more that I could learn.