the night realms ✰ 𝓽𝓸𝓶 𝓻𝓲𝓭𝓭𝓵𝓮

one - pretty enough for the infamous tom riddle

While some perceive the sudden and unknowable demise of the House of Gaunt to be weakness, do not fall into the mien of the foolish. Heed the warning of the gods, the whisper of the wind as it dances around the carnage that was once the most dominant and mystical of all the houses. This is no weak creature that has had its last vengeful taste of blood.

The Gaunts have always been snakes. There are just some too blind and human-eyed to see that until the purebloods unhinge their jaws and go for the throat.

- Poems of Wizarding History, Lorcan McLaird

𝐅𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐌𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐕𝐄𝐍𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐁𝐋𝐄 old tutors who come to our hollow, dusty glass-jewel-gold prison of a manor say it is pureblood to have a straight back. And, apparently, also on the long list of twisted, elusive things that I'm not even though I've tried desperately to be, it is also pure blood to be "a glass-dagger-sharp kind of perfect" (Mother's words).

Father also says a witch should not be so attached to the feral, monstrous skeleton of cold forest wretch that my reclusive Carrow family inhabits, whenever he drags me away from staring at the stars. He always says that the stars are useless, and the blessed gifts the wild half-witch goddesses gave us so long ago no longer obey the beguiling pulls of the stars and the lunar phases. His carelessness towards the threads of raw old magic that are woven into our family and coil about the reclusive spaces and ley lines we settle upon, never deters me from straining to feel the sharp, piercing tug of the magic beckoning to my soul when the moon is at its waning crescent.

But I never feel anything.

And Mother says I shouldn't be so reckless and have such a temper.

In short, to them, a noble, pureblood witch like me in her sixth year should be kept obediently silent and marry someone who will bring power to her family.

As I breathe in the enchanted cigarette smoke, the soft-musky-sharp of sweat, cologne, and perfume, and the smell of wine, I can't help but think that Father would not approve of this after-curfew Slytherin party.

The lights are quite bright, almost blindingly so. I'm surrounded by flushed, dancing Slytherins, and, of course, my cousin Anna is nowhere to be seen. She's one of the few noble purebloods who was wealthy enough to show up with a striking, well-trained snake coiled about her slim forearm, a symbol of nobility and power. It was her house snake, of course: a king cobra. 

Bowls of Chocolate Frogs, Cauldron Cakes, and Ginger Newts line the wooden tables. The lights are green-tinted, a classic, and the magnificent Rosiers are dancing in front of them, shadowed, alluring splendors of beauty and monstrosity combined within their skeletons and their hollow souls. Some days they strike me as eerie. Twisted, masquerading boy performers who thirst for the moon and the stars and girls. If I give in to the whispers of seductive, beckoning magic that coils outwards from the skeleton of my chest, family sorcery craft that my father says has been carefully harboured and woven with patient finger bones by every Carrow before me, I could dip into the magic sense and see them as they are in their form of pure, raw, uncontained wild witchcraft - dusted and slightly blurred at the edges like starlight, their eyes hollow and a milky white like the freak witch occultists who managed to devour a wisp of the old magic, dark, bloodstained long claws poised wanderingly at the ends of six arms as their monstrous faces lie cloaked in darkness and sins. Father, who trained me in the ways of the magic sense that he says only a few pureblood families still possess, yet another blessing from the lunar witches who bestowed upon us our poison art, says the darker and less visible a face is, the more terrible their soul.