The Keepers' Evil

Diary Five: I must continue my work alone

Song- Dark days: Punch Brothers

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽༓☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

Quiet, it had become unusual, a little unsettling to the ears that had withstood weeks of painful screams and days of a thunderous was. I had returned months prior, but it still had caught me off guard to feel the silence hang from my body peacefully.

Silence had become a statement, it had been the body that my father had lugged around on a leash, it had become what caused me to gnaw at my nails until they cracked just so a noise somewhere could be heard. Silence was what drove people mad, it was almost a sickness in itself to those who craved the noise. Perhaps sound reminded me of the living whilst the quietude resembled what I had lost, those who had escaped the grasp of the living.

I had promptly returned to Hogwarts, taken the position in the Defence Against the Dark Arts tower that had almost rightfully belonged to me and the skill that I had developed since being away, and it had replaced the house that sat in Feldcroft, because Hogwarts was never silent, and that felt more like home than home truly did.

My heart had dropped into my stomach as though gravity suddenly applied to my bones and my limbs, my internal organs too, when the eyes of the Keepers had spun to find me within the room that they had once watched me exist in as just a student. I had shed the vulnerability like a butterfly would evolve into such a beautiful creature, and the evolution of my power had been something that they had not known in that moment.

When I smiled towards them as they invited me into their quarters for the first time since my return, they responded with one of their own.

When I had spoken to invite them into the carefully devised plan that I had wanted them to see with their own eyes, they had spoken back with a yes.

When my eyes had glistened with all that was strong, theirs had glazed with that same fear, because they had never freed their souls from the shackles of their timidity.

That had been the first time since I had known them, the first time since the magic had spluttered from my veins after years of simply nestling within my bloodstream, that I had been the one that held the cards that they had used to build their house, and they hadn't yet realised that the pile in my pocket simply was the deconstruction of their house of cards, that I was going to rebuild it into a castle.

The foundations of convincing them to see the beauty and strength behind the magic that they feared and knew too little of had been laid, they were to visit the house of silence on the hope of understanding the travels that they had heard so much of, unknowing of how their minds would be changed upon the knowledge of what they couldn't yet see. I had crafted magic that could take away pain when they had told me that it was not for me to do, there was not a choice for them not to see the goodness behind my wand.

I had seemingly rid my father of a fraction of his pain, taking what ailed him and stowing it far away from him, and whilst it had restored his ability to find me through the thick layer of silence in the air, it had not been enough, it would never be enough until he found himself again. Even I could not see my hands when I held them before my face when I resided at home, that glaze of impenetrable fog a damaging atmosphere that stung like shards of glass against skin. It needed to go, I needed to take more pain, more and more, until his words were strong enough to crack the fog and rinse the air clean with his voice, and I would do so before the Keepers.