Shadow of the Prophecy

Chapter 18 - It Was Not Your Fault But Mine

Theodore Sallow

January, 7th Year

There was a vague awareness of a bed beneath him, though it was not the one Theo remembered laying down in the night before.

He laid half awake in the darkness, doing his best not to breathe in the smell of decay and mildew that slithered its way through the room. He was... waiting for something. Something he had nearly forgotten, but happened to be incredibly important.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, wedged into the consciousness he just barely clung to with each heavy blink, his mind screamed that he should prepare himself. Something terrible was coming in the night, but his body refused to take the stress as a call to action. His focus continued to fade in and out where he slipped under the veil of exhaustion; the alarm lost to him in the dark of the dank room and its golden trim.

Clarity found him not much later when the bedroom door sprung open and ricocheted off the opposing wall. It made him jump and gasp, tangled in the blankets that had ended up twisted around his small body. The uncomfortable feeling of sweat-slicked clothing greeted him upon sitting up, and the warning curled and twisted in his stomach.

What Theo had needed to prepare for, why he had slept in his clothes - it had found him.

His father stood silhouetted in the doorway. The belts and buckles of his Auror uniform casting harsh outlines in the shadows on the floor, and his face unreadable where the dark of the room warred with the light filtering through.

"Get up, boy," His father commanded. "It's time."

There was no debating following his father's instruction. At that point in his life, barely old enough to have begun schooling, he was too young to be overtly defiant and stand any chance of winning out against his father. He was also too cautious of the man in the present location, an unfamiliar manor somewhere in Hogsmeade, to ignore a direct order. Dependence leaves little room for choice.

As Theo's eyes adjusted to the light and he sunk to the floor to lace his boots, he watched Simon Sallow's face carve into the familiar mask of impatience and scorn he often had for his heir.

Even when obeying outright, Theo had still somehow found a way to disappoint.

His father turned to walk away when Theo stood, confident that his son would follow, and Theo hated that his father was right.

They traveled through the maze of old rundown splendor and the halls that seemed to bleed and ooze. Further still, through the main hall with its tall statue, the storefront, and through to the cobbled streets of Hogsmeade.

"Stay close," His father ground out when the door was shut and locked behind them; the only instruction given.

Yet again, his father did not wait to make sure his son was following or safe, and Theo was forced to shake off the creeping dread and do as he was told.

The stars above them indicated it was sometime in the very early hours of the morning, and the streets were dark and eerily silent for a town so often alive with activity. All bedroom windows were shuttered, some even gated, though the lights on in the living areas followed them like eyes down the ice-slicked streets. Not a soul alive that Theo could see.

His father had told him on the way to the manor that they were in Hogsmeade hunting a Dark Wizard stalking and attacking the town's women and children in the night. So close to Hogwarts, it was imperative to find such a criminal quickly, before pureblood families demanded their children be taken out of the school. Before someone could be killed.