Marauders - Always - Part One

CXL: The Goblet of Fire

Krum had read the legend of the Goblet of Fire so long ago that he wasn't entirely sure that he remembered where he'd read it. Back home, he had shelves of books in his bedroom, books stacked upon books upon books. A lot of them had been about horses, sure, but the ones that weren't were full of exciting mythology and legends - stories of Slavic gods of the olden days, of the Greek, Roman, and Norse gods, too, and fairy stories and elven lore and pirates and loads and loads of different fantastic, dramatic adventures that had formed and shaped the mind of the young Viktor Krum. They were stories that had made him believe in things like fate, destiny, and love. Things that Oskar Krum, his father, now seemed keen to stamp out of him.

But no one can remove the things that hold residence in the soul.

If he recalled correctly, the legend of the Goblet of Fire was that there had once been a seer, so many centuries ago, who had lived on a Grecian island and travelled day and night by boat into Bulgaria and climbed the most famous mountain, Musala, which was known as a peak "near the gods", a place where the prayers of the Bulgarians had long been heard. The seer had been given a vision to go to the Rila mountains and climb to the peak of Musala to receive a gift.

The gift had been revealed to the seer as well - it would be starfire, given to the seer by the god Svarog, along with a powerful promise  that whomever Svarog gave this starlight to, the greatest god - Perun - would protect for all eternity against the seer's great nemesis. The starfire, then, could be used to divine things with the knowledge of the very stars themselves...

On his way to collect the starfire, the seer had encountered many dangers - which had made up the bulk of the excitement of the story. Viktor remembered being unable to put the book down as he read about the seer's harrowing experiences being shipwrecked, washed upon the shore of a bloodthirsty cannibalistic island where he read the bones and entrails of other long-dead victims in order to divine his way of escape. The seer had been met with torrential downpours, nearly lost his life in a bog of sinking sands that had swallowed up the horse and much of his personal belongings, and been chased by ravenous wolves into the thick of the forest. The seer had nearly died many times - from starvation, from freezing cold temperatures, from attacks of wild beasts - but he had seen that he would make it to the peak of Musala and so he pressed on, no matter how hopeless his cause had been. He lost everything - including his wand, for the seer was a wizard as well - and by the time he'd arrived at Musala, it had been with an empty hand, with no way to carry the gift of the starfire that would be offered to him by the great god.

In his desperation, the seer had searched the mountain for three days and nights, looking for any tree which might contain bowtruckles to indicate a wandwood tree, but he did not find a single one on the mountain. Finally, he settled for a single oak that he found, which he'd located on a shelf of the mountain. How the seer had cut down the oak and managed to whittle a goblet from the wood, the story did not specify. Viktor had always imagined the seer sitting on a cliffside watching the sunset with the wood block and a particularly sharp rock, scraping wood shavings away that fell away into the valley below like brown flecks of snow... but that was Viktor's own head that had added those details. Whatever the way the goblet had been created, the rough hewn shape of it made sense.

The seer had then brought his wooden goblet to the peak to meet Svarog that night.

It was said that if the seer was not blind, he would have been when Svarog came to greet him for Svarog's light would steal the vision of any who looked upon him. But as the case was, the seer was blind already and it was the only reason that the Svarog had bestowed the starfire upon the seer's lowly goblet. For Svarog had a thing for the hopeless, for the men who sought light to fight against darkness. The starfire, then, was put into the goblet and had burned for nearly 3,000 years by this time.