A Ballad of Snakes and Shadows // A Dark Sebastian Sallow Romance

Chapter Fifty One: Cult Leader

It was only a day later that I'd arrived back at Hogwarts. It wasn't that I had truly wanted to leave Sebastian's chambers, nor the hands that never seemed far removed from me. More so much that the end of the semester was coming to a close and winter break was starting.

That and Sebastian had stated he was leaving the country for a few days.

So rather than waiting for him in a place that held more danger than intrigue, I opted for the return back to school. It would give me some much needed time to catch up on my studies and tend to my plants, and perhaps spend more time with my beasts.

Poor Deek must've been up in arms trying to take care of them all on his own.

Yet as soon as Sebastian had apparated us back to the Room, a heavy sadness had replaced the blissful peace that had kept my heart warm over the past two days. When he kissed my lips, taking far longer than he should have to say goodbye, I wanted to beg him not to go.

It felt foolish to want him to stay.

But there had been something so enthralling about the connection Sebastian and I had formed over the past few months, something that seemed to grow in place of the one we'd shared when we were younger. Or perhaps it had only been the foundation of this new thing we've found ourselves a part of. Like an ever growing wall of ivy, branching and spreading, and consuming everything in its path.

It had only taken this new Sebastian such little time to make me look past all of the things that had made me loathe him. There was still that touch of madness, the lack of mercy in his hands, and that look of wicked starvation in his eyes.

However there was something that had softened him around the edges. He caressed me when he believed me to be asleep, or kissed me hard, but held my face in the palms of his hands as he did.

His eyes never left mine, not for a second - whether that was when we were close to each other, or he was touching me, or if he was simply just inside of me.

And now rather than calling me little savior or something that felt mildly humiliating, Sebastian had called me angel.

Just the sound of it in the ears of my memories was enough to make my stomach grow warm and my heart flutter about my chest. It wasn't just from the affection that was laced in each letter of the word, but because of what perhaps that name meant to him.

It filled me with a strange form of hope that I did not fully understand.

Did Sebastian see me as some kind of heaven sent creature?

Was he grasping at the idea of salvation that only I could bring to him?

Could we be more than a pair of doomed souls that had been intertwined down to the last atom?

"It's the same hell you've damned me to, little savior. There's no redemption for the likes of us."

It was the kind of hope that was meant for fools, that's all it was.

Sebastian had made something incredibly clear since the start of our strange relationship, and that was that I had damned his immortal soul. And mine along with it - so what kind of redemption, or salvation, or even a future did we stand a chance at obtaining?

I sighed as I flipped through another page of the book in front of me. Retaining the information on the page was going to be a pain if I kept letting my thoughts linger in the forest of 'what if's', 'maybes', and all the other monstrous questions. I needed to remain grounded in the chair, in the library, at school, as a student.