Song- Alien Blues: Vundabar
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Violent voices twisted around my ears, forging images of their own in my eyes' path. Blood popped in burst bubbles from the sordid cracks in my lips like the earth would split in the extreme heat. Daggers of flames burned my chest, leaving an unruly ache in the place of their tomb as they warped around each of my ribs until the pain subsided entirely.
As my mind began to shed the haze to wake for the scream of my name in the midst of the rough shake of fingers against my cheek, the burning began to feel familiar, a pillar of comfort in the discomfort of my spine against the floor. What was merely warm was mistaken for a burn just as what was healing was mistaken for pain, and the realisation of the hurt as the magic forced each lick of fire to simmer back into my body where it belonged.
My head throbbed angrily, and I could imagine that if I could identify and converse with all of the parts of myself that made up me, they would all be cursing my name to the stars above. I could feel no burn, no mark, no physical sore, pressed to the strands of my hair, no blood to evidence where I had hit my head as I had presumably fallen, but I could feel the unresolved, the remained hurt, and it did not emanate from my own heart.
I remembered my wand's connect to the soldier's barely beating heart, how the emotional damage was thick, like a bundle of parasitic hurt above the centre of his heart. I had not known it possible to feel one's damage as your own, not until the magic had pleaded with me, told me that not even the devil would leave him to die from his sadness.
My eyes fluttered open and the rush of air forced my throat to gasp as if to jumpstart my body, to remind those confused colleagues around me that the magic had not taken me this time, or rather, that I had not been subject to a deathly illness caused by the soldier's weeping wounds. As if carved into me by the timeline that we lived within, a panic in my brain settled in a hope that it still was not the Black Death disguised as something that I wanted it to be.
"W-What happened?" I pulled myself to a sit, the floor still beneath me, my head still throbbing with a pain that I could not identify. The magic had not felt this way before, it had not forced me to stumble nor to fall, but rather only to build me up to a platform to heal, to save.
Young nurses held their fingers to my head, muggle ways of testing bodily temperature for fevers and hidden signs of internal illness, but I suspected that they could not find what had caused my unconscious spell, because it was not the nature of their world to understand. Their hands helped me stand, stand before where I had fallen to see that the soldier held a smile.
"You fell, hit your head maybe." One of the other nurses spoke, her voice timid with a confusion that was not unwarranted. The soldier was laughing with another of my colleagues, his eyes radiant with a newfound happiness, a lack of pain. My wand no longer begged for something, my fingers no longer drowned with the need to utilise the magic around him, because he had no more pain to take.
I had taken away his pain.
An internal smile felt more like a smirk, a retaliation against those that had branded me wrong, a comfort in the thought of my father. If I could take away the pain of a fractured man, one distanced from his child by the thunder of war, I could take away the hurt of a man distanced from his son by the miles between land and the sky.
But it did not explain how I had become victim to gravity, why the magic had forced me to fall beneath it. Something had changed, something had differed from the first time that I had attempted and failed to take the soldier's pain. In the error of the failure, I had let the magic snap away with my lack of understanding and force, I had let it reign superiority over me and doubted my ability. But the second time, I had found the strength to silence the voices and let the euphoric feeling of emptying the soul of pain become a priority.
When the magic had won the fistfight over the pain to leave a mixture of blues and greys, the man had shuddered and gasped with the desperate attempt to cling to what was wrongfully familiar, until the strands and wisps of hurt had lingered to the end of my wand in a strange bubble of pulsed terror combined with the force of my magic. I had held the concoction for a moment, wondering why it had been so difficult to begin with, and I had taken a breath of relief.
That deep breath had been the last thing I remembered, other than the soldier's eyes that had been finally freed of the torment in which he had been subjected to.
That deep breath had caused me to fall, thrown me into a drowning, felt like a swarm of bees that buzzed inside my throat.
Had I accidentally inhaled the pain perhaps?
Though there was a smile present on the soldier's lips, the longer that I looked, the more I began to notice the nothingness, the sheer emptiness, that I had mistaken for a lack of pain. His eyes had a similar watery sheen that my head had felt when I had began to wake, as though the pain had become a centralised pillar, a way to keep himself upright. Pain was always given far too much power, and if I had been able to choose, I would have been void of life before I allowed the hurt that my brother had left for me to feel take over my limbs.
There was a deep need to journalise what I had done, what I had seen happen to this man. My professors rode on logic, on belief, they chose to thrive on the certain and the definitive. Fear itself was what they chose to cling to, they wanted something to be scared of so that it balanced out their inability to believe that I could take away the pain of all of those around us. There was a deep need to journalise what I had done, because they could not deny what I had discovered if it had evidence.
I scurried from the space before the soldier, back into the room where the ruined bookcases sat, the room that held me as I tucked back into it, parchment not far from my fingertips. As the blunt quill began to race sight into words, memory into reality, power into truth, the realisation too began to carve a verity that my professors would still fear what they didn't want to believe, that if they could not find a reason to trust the magic that they all knew too little about, that it would dissipate one day with time.
As the words took place on the page before me, my fingers creating sentences of a very real truth that had not been given the time it deserved, I began to wonder why it had been me to inherit such a power, why it had been Rackham too. I doubted that the magic would end with me, that another may fall into its place one day with the lack of skill that had been bestowed upon me. It was unjust, immoral even perhaps, to leave the future of our magic to one without a mentor, or one as naive as my professors had been.
My title was to join them as a professor, to live in the lavish safety of their lives within the castle, but my mind would never be tied to the objectives of teaching, it would forever sit with my father and the stars that needed to be saved. The more words that formed on my page, the more I began to think of a plan, one that would secure the nature of the magic and its desire to heal.
I would create a room, a space within the supposed safety of the school, somewhere that was hidden but close enough that it would one day be discovered. I would hold my research in differing spaces in any attempt to leave pieces of myself on each pathway to create just one singular journey back to Hogwarts. I knew not of where this research would lead me, nor what the ability to breathe in the magic would allow me to do, but it did not matter if people were to be free of their pain.
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The Keepers' Evil
Fanfiction"That's where Sebastian's guilt met my guilt and, oh, what a dangerous form of amortentia it was." Ranrok was killed, Rookwood was dead, and the repository was opened. Madeleine had done her part, she had done everything asked of her. But whilst Mad...
