The Keepers' Evil

Diary Seven: She, like the others, is blind to the possibilities

Song- Make up your mind: Florence + The Machine

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Professor Fitzgerald was a woman of a signature kind of strength, a pillar of support that protected the dreams of girls and crushed the patriarchal leadership that the school seemed to follow. She had broken this view, this lens that the earth looked through, that men had to be in the positions of power. She was a headmistress that fought for its students, for its teachers, for the society around them. She was a reminder of the founders, she yanked us back to a time where it had been equal. I believed that Niamh would support me, because I was hers to support.

"Isidora, what you did for your father was... remarkable." The pause in her words had somewhat startled me, forced my heart to pause as though I held the pain myself, but the use of her words had only fuelled the strength that I felt within my bones, the strength that was suddenly just like hers. It was equal, a state of equilibrium.

Fitzgerald walked beside me slowly, a meaningful meander through the outer grounds of the school, a time to share an open view, an outside view perhaps, a wider scope, on life that occurred outside of simply teaching students to levitate feathers. Her eyes seemed to flicker between the greying sky, the clouds that tumbled in gentle puffs around the emerging stars, and the trees that briskly whistled their leaves in the breeze, but also me. I could feel her soft gaze brush past me from the corner of my eye, her protection and belief in her people was sometimes just simply a look followed by a smile.

"Wasn't it?" I exclaimed with an excitable chaos, the magic too twinkling underneath my skin in a shared frantic happiness for the acceptance it had only sought since the very start. "And Percival needn't worry about the strands of emotion or the traces this magic leaves. I've found a way to contain all of it."

But as my words grew lighter, Fitzgerald's steps grew too heavy to continue, her expression dropping into one of a solemn worry, and I thought it to be a consequence of her constantly running mind as headmistress. She stopped suddenly, halting me to follow her to drain the final words of my sentence into our apparent shared interest into the capabilities of this magic.

I could feel it, how strong success felt after all these years, how powerful the wonders of your own magic truly felt when you had proven the strongest as weaker.

"You haven't stopped." It was merely a sentence, more of a statement kicked into her stomach by a shard of ice. Niamh spoke as though she could not quite express all of the words that she needed, some of her syllables becoming hushed like a whisper that was trying so hard to be present and awake.

Confusion disallowed me to truly understand what she was saying, and so I continued, choosing to ignore and siphon away what she had said as simply just disbelief that there was a way to contain the magic, not a wish that I had truly stopped.

"Goblin silver." I pricked my finger up into the air before the professor, a strong combination of pride and excitement unmistakable in the curve of my wide smile. I turned slightly to set my eyes on the headmistress, to find her happiness too for the success of a former student, but also in the ability to help and heal and find power for ourselves. There was not a scenario in which this could not be strong and good and healing, but her eyebrows furrowed, her head sulking into a clear frown.

"You spoke to a Goblin about this?" The highlight of the word Goblin struck me before I understood her disapproval. She was a figure for the people, she was supposed to be here for the world and accumulate understanding, yet she was enunciating the word out of disapproval?