the night realms ✰ 𝓽𝓸𝓶 𝓻𝓲𝓭𝓭𝓵𝓮

two - two weeks notice

Grindelwald's reign of terror lasted for nearly three years. Though he was defeated and brought to a remote magical prison last summer by Albus Dumbledore, there are rumours that he has risen again, although the Ministry of Magic has dismissed these as nonsense...

-The Reign Of Grindelwald, Matilda Morbottons

𝐀𝐒 𝐈 𝐖𝐀𝐋𝐊 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐎 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐓 𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐋, I'm hit with a wave of pleasant warmth and the cacophony of mealtime.

Breakfast is the usual ordeal, a chaos of laughter, jumbled jokes, and warm bodies. Warm sunlight streams in through the massively tall windows of stained glass and gold that adorn the walls of the ancient hall, a gilded wonderwork of bewitched wood, glass shards in all colours, and high ceilings of the beautifully carved ancient stone that my noble family's small, lore-steeped ancestral castle is sinking in, as it falls into disrepair and the caress of oblivion. Once, it would've been magnificent and glorious. But now its finely-wrought, many-fingered towers of weathered stone and jewelled studs stink of the old magic once practised there, left in disrepair, and it no longer knows the touch of its refined, indifferent masters, instead drawing on the malicious, rotting spirits that infest the dangerous Night Realm districts close by.

Sitting at their long table, the orphaned boys and girls of Gryffindor crimson are few and scarce, limned with the terror of their families' brutal, malicious demise. How hopeful and fearless those noble, carmine witch-girls and orphan boys are! Even on the brink of death, their hands full of caring for their sickly, rotting siblings who have all but sold their organs and their souls to the deceitful con men who run the Ministry's orphanages, they brave past the poverty and hunger that graces their every broken, shuffling step.

As I pass lithely by, I can't resist the laughter that spills out of me at William Potter. He dances the tango on top of the beaten table. Whistling at me, he grins arrogantly and puffs up like only a little, immature boy playing the role of the hero can be, boldly pulling fellow carmine magicians onto the worn, spell-drenched wood with him.

Even the professors from their high table laugh. It's said that confident, reckless Gryffindor is the favourite amongst all of the houses, pitied as the most broken, because there is only a handful of stragglers and wanderers left who survived Grindelwald's brutally ruthless attacks - or, if Abraxas Malfoy's to be believed, as the terrifying, nightmare-spun folklore of the widows and the broken Mudblood families call him, the Ruin-Eater. The name is spoken with both fear and reverence, like the stories of the magic-devouring imps mothers used to speak of to the children too wild and forest-born and in need of a good slapping. The rest of the crimson magicians are corpses and carcasses now left for dead by Grindelwald in the harsh, unforgiving earth of the cold Night Realms, the most malformed, depraved reaches of the dirty criminal slums.

The Gryffindors brim with the vulnerability that came with the move to the grimy, struggling ghost-things of the cold warehouse orphanages the Ministry has to conjure up more of every month in the Realms, and the beyond-recognition, misshapen bodies of their fathers' ruins, left for the abandoned, star-crossed children to bury with their own frozen, flea-ridden bone hands in yet another hole in the Realms' many starless, hoarfrost-claimed little graveyards manned by ragged crews of grim orphan boys. I've seen three with my own eyes before, watched as an angry boy named Rio threw a rock at a blind, sewer-rat henchman who cursed him when Rio begged for a coin so he could buy pretty stones for his father's grave. He was brutally slaughtered. And the other scrawny, ash-stained boys in the crew, sweet and reverie-eyed, who told me where to buy cloths and food in the Realms and had been scheming about leading a protesting riot against the Ministry like their murdered fathers had been doing before them, they slunk away with their pockets picked clean after the henchman (Evander, his name was) beat them senseless. No terrible loss, Father would have said. Like he knew anything.