The Boggart by TheRogueLibrarian

Chapter 11

Luna stood at the edge of the forest, looking in like someone looking in through a window. It was another world out there. Full of wild beasts and docile screams. Running rivers and sentient trees. She was always destined to visit. Perhaps not always now, but always eventually. Whether it was at eight years old when she stole her father's broom and flew across the country to visit. Or whether she was fourteen, just met Harry Potter, and made her way to the forest to consult his destiny. Or whether she never met him, but Luna made her way anyway eventually, at thirty, as the journalist for the Quibbler, questioning her own reality with ones so cryptic and unbiased that they rivalled her own touch of insanity.

For knowing the possibilities of the future can make something think and do peculiar things.

She stood, staring out into the darkness of the trees, listening as the sounds of nocturnal animals faded shiftlessly across the wooded moors. It was the night of the full moon, the eve before they left for home, and wild werewolves prowled the forest, their instincts keeping them away from the dangers of the castle. Luna waited, turning her green gem stone over and over in her fingers. Feeling the buzz of its protective magic.

She looked up to the night sky, the blanket of stars staring down at her. If only the centaurs taught their magic, she could have read them. But, Luna didn't need the stars to read. She could already read the dreaded lines of fate. Every choice she made, or helped others make, led to a different path. And meeting Harry Potter in third year, two years early, changed fate tremendously. Luna knew she had angered the centaurs, for doing something so taboo and unthinkable as messing with the stars wisdom.

It was only customary that she explain her 'misgivings'. Not that she had done anything wrong.

The sounds of hooves, many hooves, clattering around her, shook Luna out of her stupor. She lowered her gaze to the centaurs around her, their coats glistening like water in the moonlight. Luna bowed deeply to them, making a low growling sound in her throat, and waited for them to return in kind. She looked up to their leader, Black Hoof of the Storm Coats. His human name Fiore.

Luna lifted herself and spoke,

"Star Gazers, let your fate be followed and truths ring steadily. I be Little Moon of the Council of the Cerberus. Your audience lightens my heart true, and I you?"

Little Snout, his human name Bane, snorted derisively,

"Luna Lovegood be a human. Fiore, you cannot really be accepting? She is one who muddles the waters of fate! We must follow it true no matter where it leads. She may have destroyed our world!"

Black Hoof glared at Little Snout, he spoke deeply,

"Bane, you forget your title, do you not? Little Snout? Who are you to speak when I am addressed? Be gone, nigh you let your prejudice destroy the bonds of Sight!"

Little Snout lowered his head in shame and trotted off quickly into the forest. The other centaurs stared at Black Hoof in respect, and held their tongues with pride. Black Hoof turned to look at Luna, analysing her greatly,

"Child of the Stars, Little Moon as you name yourself, I honour your heart and hold it close."

Luna let out a sigh of relief. The meeting had not been for certain. Black Hoof nodded his head in understanding before saying,

"Child, you can see as well as one looking at the night unclouded. You possess the gift often sought and lost through the twirling winds of time. Yet, knowing of fate, you choose to disregard your path? To meet the third man before your chosen time? What plea you, to decide whether you deserve magic's blessing?"

Luna narrowed her eyes and said,

"One with the shiniest hooves, I plea common! Fate had not been followed truly. Fate had been ignored, a different path chosen, when the third man faced his boggart and the chained wolf did not interrupt. You know as well as I, as every hooved seer here, you do not see fate with hooded eyes and clouded vision, that fate does not follow a single path."