1.2 ARTEMIS | James Sirius Potter

prologue

prologue

        Malfoy Manor has always been a place of doom and gloom. Since the day it was built, Malfoy Manor was made to look and feel like all of the happiness had been sucked out of the world.

For generations the Malfoy family resided in their family home, usually with personalities as hollow and miserable as the manor itself.

In previous years, the manor was used as a headquarters for a cult of horrific witches and wizards. Malfoy Manor had seen murder and torture in a wide variety of trepidatious brutal attacks. Especially on the innocent.

There was so much blood in the manor—so much—from all of its unfortunate victims, some of the stains from muggles, yet some from the witches and wizards who fought for good.

Draco Malfoy, the only heir to the manor after being the only child of Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy, scrubbed the manor clean himself. From what used to be the dungeons downstairs, to the attic. Every single room had been cleaned by hand and wand, not once, but very many times. Every time he'd get a night terror about the past, the screams, the blood—

        No matter the methods he used. No matter how many times he spent scrubbing. There's no potion, muggle method or spell strong enough to rid the manor of the blood spilled.

        When Draco looks down at his pale hands, he sees blood there, too.

        Spilled blood runs in the family, in the roots of the manor itself—the very ground it was built on, a bloodbath.

        After all these years, Draco can still see the blood. He can feel the ickiness of it, crawling over his skin.

        Still, after all these years, Draco can't bring himself to sell it. Abandon it. His home.

        In most recent years, however, Malfoy Manor had been a brighter and more hopeful place to live. With the birth of Draco and Astoria's first child, Artemis Narcissa Malfoy, he suddenly turned the manor into a home. A home fir for children to live in. He even went to the extent of painting dining hall, kitchen and living room bright shades of green.

For Draco, the house was warmer and the night terrors subsided. Further still, along came their second child, Scorpius Hyperion Malfoy, a couple of years separating the siblings.

       Life for Draco Malfoy had never been so full of excitement and hope. Even the birds started to sing outside the manor again, the days looked brighter and the manor seemed to thrive with the happiness the children brought.

         It had been seventeen wonderful years since Draco had felt that helpless pit in his gut, the terror at night when he sleeps, when everything's gone quiet and he can hear the screams again from when he was seventeen.

        Draco curled his white fingers tighter around his wife's, holding his breath for a quick moment to stop his shoulders from shaking.

        All he could feel since her passing was helplessness. What was he to do now? How is he to carry on? When she brought all the colours into his life in bold and striking ways.

       On the opposite side of the bed sat his eldest, Artemis, whose intake of breath was short, rapid and harsh. Her eyes, exactly like his own, stared heartbrokenly at her mother.

        A good father would've kept his daughter away from the horrors of death. One too many times Draco had witnessed this, came close himself plenty a times to shake hands with Death. How could he have let his daughter witness her own mother take her last ever breath?