the seven virtues [tom riddle]

chapter two

"One of these days a comin', I'm gonna take that boy's crown

There's a serpent in these still waters, lying deep down"

a little wicked — valerie broussard

CHAPTER TWO

The witch had deemed once that good things came to good people, and that the reason her life was a perpetual succession of desolation and grief was that she was the personification of equivocal morals.

Certainly, fate had dealt her a wretched deck of cards, and amongst all was the shinning sonorous enthuse of Death, the figure thirteen in a deck of tarot cards. It tarried her along every bifurcation of destiny, clasping at the sand she jolted with her steady soles, always balancing on her obscuration like a prodigious omen.

Now, she conceded it was not her death— because she got to savor an eternity of revulsion at what she had become— but that of those who surrounded her. A wall of featureless faces she regarded whenever she let eyelids flutter shut with somnolence, that wailed at her in nightmares regardless of having no mouth.

Sometimes, the witch would revisit that ghastly antechamber in the Nott manor in her dreams, where the demon had prophesied death and despair. There, one body hung from the ceiling as the wind rapped at reverberating windows. She would gawk endlessly at the cadaver until her mind would fool her into discerning features— sometimes, it had Felix's whimsical simper, or Icarus' scarred cheek, even Elladora's flaming hair.

One thing stood clear amongst a mound of uncertainty— it had not been Ivy Trouche's death that she had dreamed of. No, because Ivy's body was splattered on the wooden floorboards, and her cerebellum seeped through every crack as if it had not putrified long ago. Varya had ached to remember her as she had been at the funeral, a feeble form of flowery cheeks and golden curls, yet her mind had decided to shatter the bit of peace she had gotten from the event.

And even when all had forgotten months later, the girl still found herself tormented by her friend's death, especially during prolonged nights, when her rotten body dragged itself across the floor of the Nott Manor, and skeletal fingers wrapped agilely around Varya's throat and squeezed, and squeezed, and squeezed.