Equinox

seven

Lilith and I sat in my room for the remainder of the morning.

She sat at my desk while I wrapped a blanket around my body on my bed. I simply watch as she flips through my parchments full of research. It was a strange sight, seeing her do mundane tasks, she had a quill in one hand and a book in the other. Two things I'd never seen her in the same room as, until now.

"Corvus mislead you," she says with her back facing me. "The languages he suggested are far from what you are meant to translate."

I straighten. "You recognize the language that page is written in?"

Lilith simply peers at me from over her shoulder. "It's far more ancient of language than what Corvus assumed. It took a couple of guesses, but it's a dialect of Sanskrit, but not the muggle form, it's Pagan Sanskrit."

I stand up and swiftly walk over to her side, I lean over the desk to see the same books and parchments I'd stared at for weeks. Only now, they're translated.

"You're lucky to have this translator book," she says flipping through its contents. "There is a cypher for Pagan Sanskrit."

"So, it's translated?" I nearly squealed like a hog with excitement.

Lilith nods flatly like it was that simple.

"Merlin's grey beard," I gasp as she hands me the parchment with the translation. She was right. Everything I'd worked to understand was solved in a matter of an hour. All because my friend was bored and was itching for a challenge.

"Where did you learn to do that?" I asked in astonishment.

Lilith rests her folded arms on top of the desk and looks at me. "Being brought up the people I was, you become resourceful." She tells me. "Only my mother ran off after my father's love curse wore off. Quite the Gaunt family tradition."

I set the parchment down and drag over the chair Corvus left in my room last week. "You never told me what happened with your father."

"Because it's such a prairie walk for me," she says with flat sarcasm.

Lilith knew as much about me as I did. We were both under the impression that we'd be the last people we ever knew. With such a mindset, your darkest thoughts, become the lightest conversations.

"Considering the point that you are the only person I'll ever wholly trust," she confesses, "it's a piece of my past that I find tragic to the point I lock away." She tucks her hair behind her ears and rolls her jaw. "My grandfather disowned my father, and my father disowned me. He couldn't bear the sight of me after my mother disappeared. I carry more of her physical Korean traits than the Gaunt traits, and thus I reminded him of her. He sent me away to the darkest wizards in Britain he knew. He thought if I was groomed under the same people who shared his ideologies, he'd overlook my resemblance to my mother. That was seven years ago, and after those years I'd finally found a way to leave that hellscape when they found me again."

I bite the inside of my cheek. "Is that why you were put in the cell?"

She's no longer looking at me. Her eyes are entranced by the wall next to me as if she's trapped in a memory. I wondered if that was what I looked like when I got stuck in remembering those months.

Suddenly, she's shaking her head and blinking back to reality. "You should read the translation." She urges me and dismisses the conversation.

I pick up the parchment and read.

...a receptacle prepared by dark magic in which a dark wizard has intentionally hidden a fragment of their soul for the purpose of attaining immortality...