Return of Sebastian Sallow | 10 Yr After Hogwarts

Chapter 133: Duality

My fingers run across the title page, the Braille rising to meet my touch and a chill runs down my spine to begin the full report Sebastian has prepared for the Minister for Magic.

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Duality: A Study of Light and Dark
Sebastian M. Sallow | 1900
Mahoutokoro Graduate | Upāsaka, Hemis Monastery | Unspeakable for the Ministry of Magic | Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

I, Sebastian Sallow, having been tasked by Minister Faris Spavin to compile a report of my findings and recommendations from my years of education and research, in no small part upon the recommendation and support of Hogwarts' Professor Aesop Sharp, do hereby verify this report as the fullest extent of my current knowledge and expertise.
– Sebastian Sallow, October 31

~ 'Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Suffering follows an evil thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves.' -Dhammapada ~

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"Penny? They took this book from him?" I ask the house elf urgently, the weight of the implication of it pressing down upon my shoulders the way storm clouds press into one's lungs before rain.

"Yes, Mister Gaunt. Penny believes this is what they wanted."

I read on.

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Though unusual, I feel I ought to begin with a summary of my personal story, as it informs where I have been and what I have conquered. In the sacred Dhammapada, the Buddha wrote, "one who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers a thousand times a thousand men on the battlefield. Be victorious over yourself and not over others. When you attain victory over yourself, not even the gods can turn it into defeat."

The notion of self-reliance is one I began to chase in childhood, taught to me by my mother and father who provided a happy home of love and learning for my twin sister, Anne, and I. After they passed, self-reliance became a necessity, growing stronger within me every day that I lived with my uncle Solomon, who was abusive to me in both word and action.

Self-reliance was again taught to me by the likes of Professors Aesop Sharp, Dinah Hecat, and Abraham Ronan (to name but a few) when I began as a student at Hogwarts at age eleven. And at age fourteen, the subject became an obsession when my sister was cursed for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time by a man who's name is and will forever remain unimportant.

Anne's suffering, and the lack of support we received in the wake of her curse, nearly drove me into a madness that resulted in more than an obsession, but in an addiction to what I will label 'volatile magic' of which I found remnants in derelict sites around the hamlets that surround Hogwarts, in various ancient relics, and within the magical abilities of a fellow student who came into my life at the start of my fifth year of school, soon after Anne was cursed.

April Collins' name is in the history books as the Defender of Hogwarts. From the fall of 1890 to the spring of 1891, the school was under threat from the goblin Ranrok, the aforementioned criminal whose name does not deserve utterance, and their minions who sought to take for themselves a repository of Ancient Magic of a most volatile nature, being a collection of magic sourced from the experimental work of Hogwarts alumnus, Isadora Morganarch, of Feldcroft.

In subsequent years, through the curiosity and thorough research efforts of my sister, Anne, I have come to learn that Isadora Morganarch is a distant relative of ours, through our mother's lineage. This is, perhaps, one explanation as to why I found myself responsive to April Collin's magic. Another theory, perhaps, attributed to Professor Aesop Sharp, is that the chasm left within me in the wake of my parents' death, compounded by my uncle's abuse and my sister's curse, yearned to be filled with the love my parents had so readily supplied and which I desperately missed – the same kind of unconditional love that, he believes, fuels April's magical gifts and abilities.