Descent - Mattheo Riddle

Prologue

Can you remember your days as a child, when everything seemed so weightless and carefree? When you were free from everyday worries and the stress of growing up?

Everything was simple, life was beautiful and open in its countless mysteries and possibilities.

Can you still remember how your parents, siblings or other relatives who were close to you told you stories? Stories about fairytale princesses who were rescued by their princes, animals you could talk to and who had incredible adventures ahead of them, dwarves who shared a little house, seven of them. All kinds of stories that delighted children all over the world.

In the wizarding world, too, young aspiring witches and wizards were told stories that were supposed to teach them important lessons and get their fanaticism going. As in the stories told to muggle children, wickedness was usually punished, and virtue rewarded. However, there were also notable differences between the stories told to Muggles and those told to children by wizards and witches.

In Muggle stories, the witches and wizards were usually the evil ones who poisoned the princess or cursed the prince. They were portrayed as the bad ones, the ones to stay away from. Not so in the all-too-familiar "Tales of Beedle the Bard". The fairy tales that put a smile on the faces of children of all ages in the wizarding world and allowed the odd adult to take a little trip into their imagination, too.

Yes, in the stories of Beedle the Bard, witches and wizards were the heroes who skillfully and cleverly used their magic to make the best of the task at hand.

Furthermore, the stories of Beedle the Bard, although they were also collected and written in the very early years of history, were very feminist in nature, unlike those of the Muggle world. In these stories no princess had to be rescued by her prince, as the witches proved themselves strong and confident, witty and smart. They took their fate into their own hands instead of relying on someone else to rescue them.

These stories helped to create a few strong independent witches in the wizarding world who could act without the help of a self-absorbed, arrogant idiot.

However, the stories of Beedle the Bard today were not what they used to be.

Many of the pureblood wizards gradually fell into pureblood superiority, if they hadn't been behind it before. If you take the first story of many told to wizarding children around the world as they grew up, called "The Wizard and the Bouncing Cauldron", you immediately have the perfect example of a story that has been changed by purebloods.

The moral of the story should have been that muggles could be something like allies, to be helped in times of need. But purebloods, especially the muggle haters of course, were against it. As were those who suffered from witchcraft persecution in the early years of history.

No matter how beautifully the stories of Beedle the Bard were told, and no matter how instructive and important a moral they preached, at the end of the day they were just stories that could be re-modelled at will and re-told in their own interpretations.

All just made-up fairy tales, nothing real behind them, right?

Well, let's take a look at another story that was summarized and written down by Beedle the Bard. It's called "The Tale of the Three Brothers". One of the most famous and exciting stories of the wizarding world, one of the stories that is still admired by adults today.

This story tells of three brothers who wandered along a path until they came to a lake. It was so wide and so deep that anyone who tried to cross it had to face death. But the three brothers were well versed in magic, and so they were able to use it to form a bridge that could easily carry them across the dangers.