For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Dark Triad

Two storms arrived and unleashed their wrath upon the wizarding village of Hogsmeade that night—one fathering indigo skies and silken streams of spring rain, the mother of new life, greenery and growth.

And the other—a malevolent hurricane that ripped the soil from the ground and the stars from the sky, the dark of night that poured around the earth like a curled collar around the neck. It was the unrelenting roots of treacherous weeds and waves of the unharvested sea, the bathing grounds of chaos and misery and terrible things. The very own violent, destructive waters of Acheron, of River Styx, and Cocytus—the humidity that licked the hellish air like the heavy panting of the Hound of Hades.

The shriek that escaped the lips of Gwendolyn Gawmdrey was nothing short of soul-splitting. To the residents of Hogsmeade, an abnormally sleepy township, the scream would live within the memory of the most impressionable residents for years to come. Some would swear that the dreadful cry was a curse upon the village, realists would blame the rumbling thunder, others would insist that the mournful wail still echoed throughout the night some decades later.

Traditionally, it was the rain that grew flowers, not thunder.

But magic did not follow the Laws of Nature as one might anticipate, and so, the thunderous sob of Gwendolyn Gawmdrey caused an erratic burst of brilliant blue flames, the color of moonlight and the shape of the sun, to craft brambles of midnight black flowers, thick with thorns and vines, to overtake the abandoned shack that was her shelter against the eyes observant to underage apparition. The wayward flames ate at the wood, brick and mortar until there was nothing left but a gothic thicket, the empty nest of a grieving, forlorn girl.

And when she opened her eyes, the color of the frothing sea and the faucet of the ocean, she stared into the nothingness, the dissipated walls and the empty, achiness in her stomach, at all that she had destroyed.

***

"Are you sure you want a room here?"

The barman had long, stringy, strawberry-blond hair with an unkept beard to match. Behind the dirty spectacles that sat on his thin nose, eyes of a piercing blue stared down at her with belittled judgement.

There was something peculiar about his irises, but Gwen was simply not in the mood to deal with sexist pigs that smelled of goat feces and ran a flea-infested bar. She felt her temper flare.

"Did I stutter?" She pushed the money closer to him on the countertop with untethered, snappish cheek. "Or have your disgusting dreadlocks clogged your ears and made you deaf?"

Begrudgingly, with narrowed eyes, the man scooped the money toward himself and handed her a key.

"Room seven." He spit on the floor.

"Thank you." The words were iced with sarcastic venom.

The Hog's Head Inn was a small, extraordinarily dirty and strewn with sawdust tavern with windows nearly opaque and the floor all but invisible beneath the dirt. It was the type of establishment people of questionable morals frequented and gigolos made home.

It was perhaps the foulest place Gwen had ever slept, but it was better than nothing since she felt unfit to return to Hogwarts and feared being hunted down by Valdrin. The Inn's scuzzy décor, complete with a talking enchanted head of a hog, attracted interesting clientele and made it the perfect hideout for those who didn't want to be found—many of the patrons went as far as hiding their face when seated at the bar.

With some forward thinking, Gwen had stashed a majority of the money that she had brought with her to Hogwarts in her trunk before her trip to Nurmenguard—there was enough galleons to give her the week or so she needed to formulate her next move and grieve.