Legacy Disowned - Book 2

Chapter 1 - This is my Family

Sebastian's gaze ran along the ancient lines of another dusty tome, his frustration mounting with each useless sentence. This corner of the Room of Requirement had been transformed into a chaotic mess. The blackboards brought up from the undercroft were lined against the wall and piles of books on ancient runes were scattered about.

After much debate they had decided to re-access Slythierin's Scriptorium from the entrance near the common room and relieve it of every book on runes they could find. Gone was the reverence Sebastian once held for the tomes; now, he ripped out pages without hesitation adding them to the chaotic mural that surrounded him.

"Damn it all," he muttered under his breath, slamming the current book shut. His eyes scanned the jumble of information pasted to the walls, searching for something, anything, that might hold the answers they sought. He had hoped that by now, they would have made more progress, but it seemed as though they were chasing shadows.

Though they had been able to determine how the architecture and mechanisms the Keepers had used in the trials were made, they had yet to find anything that might help deal with the repository. Nothing that might indicate how to destroy it, explain it's increase in size or give them a clue to the potential dangers that magic posed to those who were exposed to it. In short, nothing that would help protect his friend.

Sebastian's gaze drifted from the scribbles on the blackboards to Darling, who was fast asleep nearby on an emerald chaise. It wasn't unusual for them to sleep in the room; they had discovered early into the summer that sleep was hard to find in the suffocating silence of an empty dorm.

He had shared a room with Anne all his life, while Darling had been accustomed to cramped hotel beds or huddling together under the stars with her 'family.' The presence of someone else in the room provided a certain comfort. Whether in the Room of Requirement or on the couches in the common room, they sought solace in each other's company.

The peaceful rise and fall of Darling's chest in rhythm with her soft breaths seemed to defy the chaos of the research surrounding them. His eyes lingered on her peaceful face before returning to the frantic scribbles Isadora had left behind.

"Wǎter... strēm... stǭn," he muttered under his breath, tracing the flame-shaped rune with his finger. Turned out it wasn't a flame at all, no, quite the opposite. It was an interesting concept, the three strokes actually indicated a natural flow penetrating that which was physical and seemingly immovable.

"Darling, look at this," he had said when they first discovered the meaning behind the rune. She had regarded it with a sad kind of smile, muttering to herself, "That which offers no resistance can enter where there is no space..."

She had not elaborated, her gaze drifting away from the symbols towards something unseen. It was moments like these that reminded Sebastian how little he truly knew about her.

Their bond had undoubtedly grown stronger over the summer, forged by late-night conversations, the exhilaration of raiding Ashwinder camps, and the frustration of deciphering Isadora's notes. They had become nearly inseparable, and Sebastian found it hard to imagine a time when Darling wasn't a part of his life. Despite that though, she was still Darling, still enigmatic and hard to pin down. And that came with it's own set of challenges.

He recalled just three days into their break, after Ominis had set off to stay with Anne, Sebastian had awoken to find Darling... gone. Panic had surged through him as he searched the castle and its surrounding areas, flying from one hamlet to another in a desperate attempt to find her.

It was only when he had been halfway through writing the headmaster to inform him that she was missing that she sauntered into the common room in tattered clothes, laughing heartily with the ghost of Richard Jackdaw.