Prologue
«Please, Sybill. It's just for a week».
«But, I-»
«I know. I know, and I understand what kind of sacrifice you will be making, but this might be our only chance. Their only chance. We don´t have much time. The curse has already progressed quite far.»
The woman´s face leaks of her inner turmoil. Pleading blue eyes are waiting with a look of apprehension in the reflection of the two-way-mirror. There are lines tracing the corners of her mouth, and permanent cracks marring the space between her arched eyebrows. Her teeth are no longer as shiny as Sybill remembered them to be. Nor does her eyes carry their usual twinkle. Her brown curls are streaked with grey.
It's been years, Sybill realizes of a sudden.
The sun glows softly. Light gleams through the ever moving gaps between the thousands of leaves that cling loyally to the tall birch-tree standing in the centre of her small garden. A small show of flickering lights has been created just for her. The sky is slowly turning red at the edges, and clouds are gathering in the horizon. Dusk approaches readily.
Bleeding skies, hopeful blue eyes, and her aching heart which has now been split in two.
She needs to think, but is momentarily distracted by a distant sound. «Yip, Yip» is the repeated chorus of the unknown source.
She lays down the two-way-mirror and the decision she must make, and approaches the area where the sound is coming from. Distantly, she can hear her sister calling for her through the mirror.
It lies helplessly squeaking on its back by the foot of tree. It's a baby swallow.
How terrible.
It must have fallen down from it's nest. It won't last long here, the little thing.
What an end; to lie on unforgiving, cold and wet ground, with only stars as company as soon as the sun dives behind the horizon. Night is only a breath of a moment away. So is death.
She grabs her wand and gently levitates the sad thing back where it belongs. Safe again. How easily life is fixed with magic, and how ruthlessly it can suddenly become destroyed.
She watches the nest and its little occupant for a few moments before returning to the mirror, and the bench and her grey reality. She draws her feet up, and lets her chin rest on her knee.
Life is such a fickle thing, Sybill thinks. One moment you´re relaxing in your nest, safe from all dangers, and then, suddenly a burst of wind, or perhaps the breath of Destiny shakes your entire world, and you fall, fall to the ground. Helplessly.
Sybill laughs silently at her own gloomy musings. And it´s only Tuesday!
A heavy sigh escapes her chapped lips. She picks up the mirror, and knows there is no more point in delaying the inevitable.
«I'll be there,» says Sybill and tries to ignore how her heart suddenly feels like it is made out of lead. The words are surprisingly difficult to utter.
«Thank, you! Oh, thank you so much!».
The rest of the conversation is a mist of thank you's and a thorough explanation of the how's and what's and when's. Her chest feels as if it has punctured. Sybill listens with half an ear.
Her mind has drifted away.
Because she knows, knows it in her very bones and in the hush of the leaves as they fall from the trees, that she will get the post as a teacher if she goes to that interview. Her dream, her life, barely an inch away from being realized. A week from now, and she'll be appointed. Now, it shall forever remain a fantasy, a question of what might have been.
Even more so, she knows that the coming days are glazed in importance, and an egoistical part of her wants to make sure that she stays where she is, in Scotland, so that she can witness it when it happens.
The flowers in her garden promise a happening of great magnitude, with their bowed and defeated heads nodding off in agreement with each other. Even the rain patters on about it in the late of evening. It must be quite a sight to behold, this coming event. She does not know what will happen, but is convinced that it will be great.
But no. Fate, she muses, has decided to seize control over her life, despite her being one of fate's own beacons, a mouthpiece of otherworldly knowledge. A treasured tool, she had always thought. Perhaps not. Perhaps only a tool.
Despite her great reluctance, and the ramifications her choice will have for her own life, Sybill finds herself in France a few days later. Because she is not completely heartless, and her support is well over-due.
In the mean time nature sings of great change and her bones cry of a future yet to be born.
She is to take care of the children of her only sister, who have become terribly ill after a visit to the pyramids in Egypt a couple of weeks ago. The old Egyptians were diligent with their curses. Even the places that have been declared safe, are sometimes still burdened by a remaining curse or two, ready to leech the life out of the unlucky souls that stumble upon it. In this case; her niece and nephew.
The funny thing was that Sybill even helped to pay for their trip, with the last of her savings no less. Not out of the goodness of her heart, but rather because she had just received news that she had gotten an interview with none other than Albus Dumbledore, and had been quite assured of a stable income in the future…
So much for that…
She also did it to relieve her sister of some of the stress of being a single mother…
Or rather…
To release herself of the guilt of never being there for the children and her sister before.
Fat lot of good that did.
She knows that Agatha has to return back to Egypt. She is to meet a man who supposedly is in possession of the cure for the strange, magical disease that has started to suck the life out of young Rebecca and Edgar.
Yet, she wishes she could be there, back in Scotland, in the middle of the storm. Where she belongs…
But then there is that rotten feeling in her stomach that refuses to go away as long as she keeps thinking of going back.
She carefully follows Agatha's instructions on how to deal with Edgar and Rebeccas needs, which she barely managed to write down on a scrap of paper before making her way to Egypt in a hurry. Time flows by in a hurry between cooking food, changing bandages and thinking of new creative ways to make them swallow their medicine.
On that fateful night, when in another world a prophecy is born, wrecking havoc on every day that comes after the day it is first spoken, it his heard neither by the elderly man named Albus Dumbledore, nor by the young Severus Snape.
Fate's big wheel turns, and the world is forever changed.
None of the coming students of Hogwarts will ever know the name «Sybill Trelawny». All because of a lively breeze that suddenly turned and blew a brochure that told of the wonders of Egypt, and the many family adventures that were to be found there, into the hands of Agatha Trelawny as she walked down Diagon Alley on a delightfully warm day in early August.
A butterfly flaps it wings and somewhere far across the oceans, a storm begins to brew…
How strange is life.
Miles and miles away from the tavern called the Hog´s head, a young woman with long brown hair, and a pair of thick glasses, enlarging her eyes to give her a bug-like appearance, seizes up while her huge eyes become glassy and unfocused.
In a small cottage in northern France, the most important prophecy of the era becomes meaningless as the powerful message is lost on the uncomprehending ears of its three sole witnesses: a sleeping two-year-old girl with sunken cheeks and huge blisters marring her grey-like skin, a fever sick four-year-old boy with the same coloring as his younger sister and their deaf, old cat, who was creatively named, Dog.
Sybill's voice rattled hoarsely through the room, and none was the wiser.
Dog's only response to the life-changing news was a deep:«Meow!».
And thus Harry Potter´s life changes forever.
It's been quite a while since I last wrote a story on this site, but inspiration grabbed me. If you have any ideas or inputs, please tell me. I decided to make my own take on Sybill. Hope you liked it.
English is not my mother tongue, so please comment if you see any misspellings.