spiritbubbles
The rest of Hogwarts sees Liesel Ollivander as a prodigy. A girl with perfect posture and remarkably steady hands. But beneath the neat wool of her uniform, she is quietly dissolving, her mind slipping through the damp cracks in the floorboards.
Cedric's death sinks into her skin, diluting her blood with the moss of the maze. Her parents have escaped Azkaban to serve the Voldemort once again, turning the Ollivander name back into a bleeding target for the Ministry. To survive the whispers, Liesel builds a hollow shell. She stands beside Harry Potter in the light, but when the corridors go quiet, she is digging into the rotting roots of the castle, searching for an answer to the strange ancient magic buried in her blood.
Draco Malfoy is collapsing from the inside out, his ruin dragging her down by a heavy childhood tether. As she splits her own seams trying to keep him human, Harry drifts further out of reach, and the edges of her reality begin to turn to rot. Suffocating under her family's legacy and a grief she refuses to look at, Liesel is forced toward a single, irreversible spell.
Sometimes, the only way to endure the dark is to forget the sun ever existed.