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CHAPTER ONE —— dearly departed...
( London, England )
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Dearly departed, we are gathered here today to honour the end of Verity Bellova's sanity, wherein the world will finally learn that she hears the voices that speak to her, the voices of you, the six foot deep, buried in the ground to repurpose and rot with the soil people who are essentially, well no, literally...dead. What a day it is where the rest of the world finally finds out that Verity Bellova — extraordinary witch, superstar student, fantastical kisser — is insane, bonkers, mad, rocketing with lunacy.
Verity wants everybody know that she's not a lunatic — she swears she isn't. She knows plenty of people who are nearing lunacy, and she is certainly not one of them. Bellatrix Lestrange is a lunatic, she has this mad glint in her eyes in every picture that's ever taken of her. For a while, Sirius Black was considered to be insane — turns out he's just falsely accused and painted by the media as a psychopath with no morals or empathy. The first thing the St. Mungo's guide to lunacy (because of course, the stigma around mental health remains the same, despite major progressions in the muggle world, the wizarding world cannot catch on) is feeling presences around you. Check, Verity feels the presences of the dead around her all the time — they're like haunting ghosts that creep up behind her in the shadows, they're bodies blending in with the curve of the stony path she takes from her evening walk around town every day as they lurk and linger. The second sign that Verity once read as indicated was a feeling of doom and utter despair in your gut, not one of nervousness or even anxiety, but one like you felt the reckoning was coming anytime soon, the apocalyptic end. Check, the feeling in Verity's gut does not sway one bit from the moment she first feels insane at nine years old — it remains the same foreboding feeling of brooding darkness wafting around her like a heavy brick has been set to weigh upon her shoulders (she's not sure if that's what causes her back pain, or just because she slouches in Potions to stick her head in her work). The third sign of insanity that Verity once read was one of hearing voices — something that's found to be bad both in the wizarding and muggle world. Check, Verity hears voices like the sounds of bells chiming in her ears — they're not quite clear and concorde but understandable enough that she knows what they're trying to say, what they're pleading she'll hear. Sometimes they're nice things, like songs or poems or advice on how to go about situations, other times they feel like a burning, stinging headache as they scream for their souls to be saved.
