𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℙ𝕦𝕣𝕚𝕥𝕪 𝕋𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕝𝕤 | 𝔻.𝕄.

༻﴾ 1 | A Nauseating Cyclops ﴿༺

The rain in Spain might stay mainly in the plain, but in Wales, it tended to arrive in the form of a ubiquitous and violent downpour.

Such was the case that remarkable Sunday morning of October the twenty-fourth, 1999. 

An elderly wooden sign upheld by two cracked oak piers dribbled with droplets through the frenzied thunderstorm. Upon it's face was painted the Celtic scripture 'Abaty Rhiwddolion'. To those not familiar with Welsh terminology it translated to 'Rhiwddolion Abbey', and it was an orphanage for magical children.

Behind the sign loomed the building in question; an ecclesiastical structure denoting medieval and religious expressions throughout it's stony design. 

Having once been awarded an abbey to the fifteenth century roman Celtics, the property had retained a rather soulful and cumbersome energy over the centuries. 

The air hung thick and nebulous, the vines were incorrigibly invasive, and one was often left with the sensation of being watched from behind when wandering the sprawling gardens. The place possessed the ability to procure a chill across the spine unexplained, a raise of hairs upon the neck for no obvious purpose...

Now that it housed magical children, well...this circumstance did very little to deflect such ominous oddity. 

In fact, the residents of the nearby rural hamlet of Rhiwddolion in Gwynedd, Wales, were terrifically convinced that the abbey was entirely haunted. And they were not by any stretch of the imagination incorrect. It was haunted, not only by witches and wizards, but by other forces unseen.

But this was all well and done, as the lone female squib who ran the joint preferred the least amount of attention possible be spared on the operation occurring there. 

Madame Sylvie was in the business of rescuing a particularly helpless variety of orphans - those with magical abilities who could not simply amalgamate into the larger muggle society. 

The magical society was tremendously smaller in comparison, and such supports existed at a fractional comparison. These were children with great power in their veins, and one could not misplace the disastrous events that dominated at Wool's Orphanage in London several decades prior...

One of the rather unfortunately emancipated magicals which lived at Rhiwddolion Abby stood with a golden umbrella held overhead, watching as Madame Sylvie struggled to reverse her aquamarine Oldsmobile in the mucky port without dinging it off of the front stoop. 

Of course, this effort went to the chickens, and a dismal metallic reverberation confirmed that Sylvie had once again banged the car boot off the antediluvian stone stairs before straightening the vehicle in place. 

Genevieve walked unseriously to the passenger's doorway and collapsed the umbrella, fighting with herself not to comment on the sizable impress which was only worsening by the day on the backside of the Oldsmobile. 

As they ambled down a rickety lane sprouting a mohawk of feathery grass, Sylvie was the one to call out her own nonsense in her choppy French twine, as if the silence between them was recklessly biting her in the rump, "Well eet es an old piece of garbage. No value to et anymore, dent or not."

Genevieve glanced sideways at the middle-aged squib who had raised her from the age of two, and who, for obvious reasons, now felt more like a mother to her than anything else, "The vehicle yes, but the abbey is priceless. Perhaps a bollard would be best erected for you to run into versus the Grecian rock balusters."

Sylvie's presentation matched her particular nuances well; she was spectacularly silly yet traditional, and often darned far too many layers for the weather, selecting articles which were reminiscent of the Victorian era.