Let The Dark In

9

“You’ll start with this,” Malfoy says, dropping a thin textbook in front of her as he passes her spot in the library.

Hermione snatches it up. Ethics of the Dark Arts. Inside the front cover is a stamp with the Durmstrang sigil and the words “year three.”

The entire book is not even as thick as her wand tip.

“You’re starting me with Third Year material?” she says, unable to hide her irritation. Malfoy stops and raises a condescending eyebrow. “Have you read it?”

The question is as saccharine as it is rhetorical.

Her face warms and she closes the book. “No.”

“Then read it.”

Obviously she’s going to read it, but she’d been hoping that they would start with something interesting. Something practical and exciting. Something that will make her stop feeling like she’s made the biggest mistake of her life.

She’s already suffering from enough of a moral quandary without being assigned a book on ethics.

“I was hoping we could start with something a little more — practical,” she says in a tight voice. “Isn’t ethics in the Dark Arts a bit of an oxymoron anyway?”

Malfoy is silent for a moment, his expression impassive though there’s a glimmer of something in his eyes, and Hermione suddenly gets the sense that she’s walking into a trap.

“No... I suppose there’s no point for you.” He extends his hand to take the book back. “I’ll find something else.”

That was far too easy.

As much as she wants a different book, she has a feeling that this one is important somehow. If he’s hesitant to relinquish it, then she only wants it more.

She grips it tighter. “No.”

The corner of his mouth just barely tightens. “You just said you wanted to start with something more practical.”

“Well, I’ve changed my mind,” she says, shoving the book into her satchel and standing. “If you think we should start with ethics. We’ll start with ethics.”

He looks annoyed as she hurries away, and her heart sings with triumph.

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Ethics Of The Dark Arts is the most tedious book Hermione has ever read, and she has read many books and few as eagerly as she tries to read this one. The unnamed author does not write to teach, presuming extensive knowledge on the part of the reader, and never bothering to explain anything.

The book appears to be a stream of consciousness dropped onto the page as the author has a philosophical debate with themselves about the meaning of life, the price of knowledge and power, and what constitutes a price. By the second half of the book, they enter into a spiralling form of reasoning about the Dark Arts, humanity’s place and duty to the world, and the greater good.

Hermione finishes it and immediately reads it again, wondering if she somehow missed something in her hurry. Instead, she becomes convinced that Malfoy is intentionally trying to sabotage her. She glares wrathfully at the opening paragraph of the third chapter:

“The question that magical theorists have long debated is if ‘mastery’ of the Darker Arts is possible? Can such great power be controlled? And if there is mastery, then what is the practitioner who has let the Dark in?”

Hermione stares at the words, turning them carefully over, feeling as if they are important but uncertain as to how.

The author proceeds to ramble for an entire chapter without giving an answer one way or another or coming to any conclusions, as if they just want everyone to wonder as nebulously as they apparently do. It’s like being dropped into the middle of a conversation without any context