Run Away ✧ Hogwarts Legacy

chapter eight

Say Don't Go by Taylor Swift

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Everything was cold. A stinging burning pain crawled across her skin, into in veins, bleeding through her body as if it was slowly poisoning her like venom. When Antheia Wytners looked at her hands they were solid black once more. As if they were dripped in ink that ran so deep that it would never wash away. 

Her soul was empty and dark like her hands. Poisonous.

Everything was dark around her. The sight of her hands slowly disappearing into the background. As if her body was being reclaimed by the nothingness of the night.

Her heart screamed for light. For warmth. For answers as to what had been happening.

She yelled for it, but her voice was silent. All she could hear was the demons echoing around her. "Keeper, keeper, keeper," Marceline's voice taunted her. "Hoarding secrets like a dragon in its den."

Antheia went to speak back, but her mouth was gone too. She couldn't see herself anymore in the darkness. Her hands were gone, faded into the inky night, then her body until there was nothing of her left.

"Keeper, keeper, keeper." The ghost hissed again, "How would you slay the dragon?"

Shapes began to form in the darkness around her. There was a sudden weight that appeared in her phantom hands. The sword of Gryffindor calling to her rotten palms. When she looked up toward the source of the sound, it was Godric himself staring back at her through the darkness.

"A sword could kill a dragon." His mouth moved, but the voice was not his own. Only the demon wearing the mask. His eyes reflected like a mirror. "With might and skill plenty, a sword could pierce the dragon's scales. So he forged a sword to bring down a beast. Only he could not use the sword for himself you see."

The memory of Godric picked up the sword that she had thought was in her hand only moments ago. And as he held it high above his head, the silver glimmering against the darkest, Godric began to fade into the darkness.

The blackened rot claimed his fingers first, then his arm, until it swallowed him whole. The sword is the only trace left behind.

"The dragon is too powerful to be brought down by mere silver and might. It hoarded so much that no one knew the riches in its den besides the wise. If not by the sword, then how would you slay the dragon? Perhaps by wit?"

Red was the next thing Antheia could see in the darkness of nothing. It was almost blinding her, then a woman she didn't know was staring back at her. With blue eyes like the ocean and the relic in her palms. The story she had heard was enough to realize that she was looking at the relic's creator and once the demon's lover, Vivian.

Her face looked as if it had been carved out of porcelain. The woman was fair and beautiful like an angel weighted down by a dark halo. She reached out and took Antheia's blackened hand out of the unknown of the dark and laid it with her own beneath the relic. She could only see her shape in the absence of where the relic should have been.

The relic felt as if it were pure ice. She had never touched it before, but it didn't shock her that it felt the same as the sword. They were both amplifiers after all.

Cold and draining against her skin.

"But age made the dragon wise," Marceline's voice hummed through Vivian's mouth. The inky darkness began to spread from Antheia's body to her as she spoke, leaving only the silhouette of where she should stand. "For knowledge of generations will not be buried with the living. There is no blade sharp enough to pierce the dragon and there is no mind clever enough to bring its downfall."