Emerson Wilmore was an exemplary Ravenclaw student, known for her unwavering dedication to academics and an unyielding moral compass. However, things took a twisted and deviated turn in her life after her boyfriend, Cedric Diggory, was murdered by L...
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Consciousness returned to Emerson in pieces, each sensation arriving before the thought that might explain it.
The cold came first, already working its way through her clothes and settling against her skin. It was there long enough to become part of her before she was awake enough to recognise it. Her legs were freezing, particularly where the backs of her thighs met damp fabric, and when she tried instinctively to shift away from whatever she was lying against, pain flared through both wrists.
Emerson stopped moving.
For several seconds, she kept her eyes closed, allowing the darkness behind her lids to remain simpler than whatever waited beyond it. Her head felt impossibly heavy, as though someone filled her skull with wet sand, while a dull ache pulsed behind her temples whenever she tried to gather a coherent thought. Her tongue felt thick and unpleasantly dry against the roof of her mouth, and the strange numbness lingering throughout her limbs immediately brought back the last fractured pieces of memory with Alecto cursing her from behind.
Her eyes opened, but nothing made sense at first.
Darkness surrounded her, although it was not complete. Several feet ahead, she could make out enormous vertical shapes, black against deeper shades of grey, while something pale clung to the ground in patches that her blurred vision initially mistook for smoke.
Her first breath came too quickly, and then the smell reached her: wet soil, moss, pine, and leaves beginning to decay beneath winter.
Emerson's heartbeat changed. She tried to straighten, and the pain in her wrists returned, harsher this time. Something rough bit into the skin beneath both sleeves, pulling her shoulders backwards until the truth became impossible to misunderstand.
She was tied up, her back pressed against the ridged trunk of a tree.
For one awful moment, panic threatened to swallow everything else. She twisted instinctively, testing whatever bound her, and the rope tightened immediately, scraping bark painfully against her shoulder blades through the thick material covering them.
Emerson looked down at her clothes. Mattheo's hoodie was somehow still on her and somehow, she could hear his voice with such clarity that, for half a second, she could almost imagine him beside her.
'Panic makes you stupid, Emie. Doesn't matter how clever you are the rest of the time. If someone's got you cornered, they want you frightened because frightened people stop noticing things.'
He said it months ago during one of their many Occlumency lessons after Emerson complained that his idea of teaching apparently involved attacking her without warning. She could still remember glaring at him while he only smirked.
'So notice everything, darling.'
Emerson drew a slow breath through her nose, forcing her shoulders to relax as much as the bindings allowed before looking properly at her surroundings.
