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 Slytherin's Scriptorium from the entrance near the common room and relieve it of every book on runes and archaic magic they could find. He'd spent the summer searching it for anything that might help him decipher Isadora's notes. But gone was the reverence Sebastian once held for the founder's tomes. Now, he didn't think twice about ripping out relevant pages and pasting them to the walls, drawing lines to the blackboards where he thought they might fit, creating a chaotic mural that was about as organized as his thoughts.

"Useless," he grumbled, slamming the book in front of him shut. His eyes flitted up to the jumble of information pasted to the walls, searching for something, anything, that he might have missed. He'd hoped that by now, they would have made more progress, but the summer break was nearly over and Sebastian hardly felt any wiser than when it had began.

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'd shared a room with Anne all his life, and Darling had grown up sleeping in cramped hotel beds or huddling close under the stars with her 'family.' For both of them, the mere presence of another person provided a certain comfort. Whether in the Room of Requirement or on the couches in the common room, they found they slept much sounder in each other's company.

Just looking at her now seemed to calm Sebastian's nerves, the gentle rise and fall of her chest slowly coaxing his frazzled thoughts down into something more organized. He let his eyes linger on her peaceful face for a moment longer before returning to his collected research.

"Wǎter... strēm... stǭn," he muttered, tracing the flame-shaped rune with his finger for what must've been the thousandth time. Turned out it wasn't a flame at all, no, quite the opposite. The three strokes actually indicated a natural flow penetrating that which was tangible and seemingly immovable.

Darling's reaction when Sebastian had told her about this discovery had been nearly as vexing as the rune itself. She'd simply regarded it with a sad kind of smile whilst quietly murmuring to herself, "That which offers no resistance can enter where there is no space..."

She had not elaborated on this strange, cryptic comment. Rather, she'd just trailed off, her gaze drifting far away, towards something in a past he couldn't see. Moments like these frustrated Sebastian to no end, irksome reminders of how little he still 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.