Hell's Last Lantern | A Severus Snape x OC Romance

Chapter Thirty

Cold.

Damp.

Rough.

Exposed.

Earth.

Woods.

Her eyes fluttered open to treetops and grey sky overhead.

Tennessee pines, their tops dancing in the wind, the needles on the ground prickled against her naked skin.

Low voices were...singing?

It was cold. She was shivering.

Chanting, not singing.

Hooded figures encircling her, their eyes cast to heaven, a man in white holding something small and precious in cupped hands over her body.

Arms and legs bound.

Struggle, to no avail.

Sharp pain.

Blinding light.

A scream.

Vela woke with a start, her heart racing, a bead of sweat on her brow, and her head pounding. Hearing the splattering of liquid to her left, she glanced over at the shattered glass on her nightstand. Water was leaking across its surface and down the sides, dripping onto the stone floor.

She quickly snatched up her CD player from the nightstand and cast a drying charm on it before taking care of the rest of the mess too. She breathed a sigh of relief when she heard Thom Yorke's mournful tone feeding through the headphones of her somehow still-functional device.

Picking up the shards of glass, she recounted her dream.

Though she was no stranger to nightmares, every night this week, Vela had had snippets of the same one. The first night, she thought it was nothing more than a disturbing dream she'd forget as the day carried on. But the second night, she took special notice of her nightmare, recognizing it as having been connected to the first. She wrote down what she could remember of it, intending to ask Severus about it later. Perhaps there was a kind of dark magic that could cause such dreams.

The unusual part was that each night, her mind conjured different pieces of the same story, all in the wrong order.

By the third night, she knew it was significant. Each night exposed a new piece of the puzzle, like jumbled up scenes from a film. She didn't know the plot, the characters, or the story. Only the sensations, the dialogue, and the fear. But after six nights, she'd created a sequence of events in a linear order.

Taking a pencil and notebook in hand, she wrote out the full chant, now that she'd made out the words.

"Breath of the mothers,

Fire of the fathers

To thee we entrust this virgin child

Until the time of reckoning

In her, place your sacred might

And we, thine humble servants

Shall receive thine holy power."

"Creepy as hell..." she murmured to herself, rubbing her brow as she tried to make sense of the strange words. Maybe she was overthinking it. Maybe her mind was just coming up with creepy shit because of what was going on with Harry. Until now, all she knew was what George had mentioned to her in the hall in passing.