The Keepers' Evil

Thirty-Six: Another pensieve?

Song- something in the orange: Zach Bryan

"Another pensieve?"

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Isidora's pages struck through my hand with a stung pain from the sharp edges of the paper. I thrummed each piece of old parchment through my fingers as though it was just a mirage, another lie, a tactic of a cruel manipulation that Marvolo had taken from my mind.

We had left Isidora's memories with us in a place of peace that we had destroyed with the frazzled curse of Avada Kedavra, the serene turned solemn at our hands once more. I recalled the devastation that had caused Sebastian's happy ending to tear, and I could still feel my skin ridged along my arm where the terror of the world had met my determination. Where the keepers had met my power.

The last memory had left Isidora with a warning, a plea to leave a power that had rightfully belonged to her. The last memory had left Isidora with a warning, which had too left us with one of our own.

"How did he even get this book? What did you do with it before we went to Feldcroft?" I let the pages fall from my fingers back onto the stoned floor, running my hand over my cheekbones with a frustration that I couldn't quite place. Was it right to be upset with Sebastian, or was it just right to be upset with the people that had started this in the first place? Isidora had knowledge that the world needed, to rid the sickest of their pain and restore the hope to those they loved. She had the knowledge I needed to save Anne somewhere within the confines of her memories, yet to know was to give it up to the Gaunts.

"I hid it." Sebastian slapped the table as he remembered, nodding with a proud smile as his eyes stuck to my squint. My frown was deep, attempting to work out the impossible from someone who too didn't know any better.

"Apparently not very well, Sebastian! What does that even mean, where did you hide it?" Sebastian crossed his arms, his eye-line finding the ceiling as his pupils dashed around the uninviting sight, as though he was thinking harder than his brain possibly could allow.

"I don't know, love." There was a portentous look of melancholy that seemed to force Sebastian's smile into hiding. His eyes flooded mine as they fixated onto me, reminding me of what Sebastian truly represented.

Me.

"Oh, right." You only say what I believe. You're not real.

Sebastian's wand almost felt foreign beside me, like it had become mismatched with my soul, as though all of our tears had tested its magical abilities to keep me safe. It had been but mere days, yet the disconnect felt as though it had been years. I hadn't needed it for what Marvolo wanted me to do, but it gave me just enough found strength to rise to what Isidora had always wanted me to find.

Things felt dangerous- Sebastian felt like a danger to my mind, my wand felt distant from my hand, Isidora felt forgotten. But my magic was the true danger that had become missing within me, yet placing the next page of Isidora's story within the book that had been the first place Sebastian and I had truly realised each other, seemed to stir a familiar reaction from my fingertips.

The book swallowed Isidora's next chapter, binding it to the spine that was a simple display of her life as a whole that I needed to repair. There was a confused notion of coming home paired with the strenuous misunderstanding of never being home in the first place. The magic was never going to be a tranquil being, but it was a part of me that was always going to be there. It begged the question of where was home violently within my mind and I began to wonder if Isidora had ever been able to call anywhere home for herself.

The page bubbled with the glittered strands of silver that swamped in the middle of the creased pages, toppling gently into the pensieve to sink like oil within water. A nervousness began to creep into my system, slowly, unassuming, yet clinging to the mental image of Isidora's pain. I had become displaced from her, from the connection that we had once shared through the similarity of secrets and fear, magic and misunderstanding.

Sebastian hovered gently beside the pensieve as my arms looped over the side, my fingertips tapping against the stone as though the memory required an invitation I didn't already possess. I couldn't see the starlight that had protected my skies since my childhood, but perhaps it had never been starlight at all. Hope was the more appropriate word, and it coruscated from Isidora's life in the fireworks of realisation that came from her memories.

"You left the diary in the mines, where we found one of the pieces of the triptych. Marvolo read my mind, he knew that's where we had to go next and where we had to re-search after." Sebastian had hidden the book because it had scared him. He had hidden it because in his mind it had been a sure way for us to die. He had hidden it because it was the unknown, because the power it represented had been too strong and he had panicked.

I wasn't entirely sure I could blame Sebastian.

"You are rather smart, my love. I wonder if Marvolo had to deal with any violent magical entities to get these pages." I chuckled quietly with the weak strength I was forced to find, a brief hope that Isidora had somewhat injured him, but it was soon dimmed with the memory of death. It had taken me to come too close to finding and acquainting death and a blanket of a thousand lies to have gained the pages. Marvolo would have died in seconds had he faced the same, status didn't hold up too well in the past world of the Keepers.

"We are going to help Anne, you are going to get out of jail, I am going to get out of here, we will get Ominis out of this life. We will all be happy, Seb, one day we will all be happy." I doubted it more than I believed it and the trail of Sebastian's heart hadn't followed me this time. There was no string attaching our hearts, nothing to remember him by other than a figment of my imagination. It felt so scary, too scary, but perhaps it forced me into hope where there was none.

I let my hair topple over my face as my cheeks hit the lukewarm water first, allowing myself to submerge entirely into the liquid. It felt like falling, but not down. It was like momentarily drowning, only to be saved, except when I was pulled to the shore, I was no longer looking at me.