Under Hogwarts Lake, there is a deep grotto, and in that grotto there is a chamber, and even the merfolk will not go there. It is dark, and cold, and all of the merpeople seem to know a story of a friend of a friend who once wandered inside, and who never returned…
They know, of course, that the stories are nonsense. If a wizard were to hear the story—and a wizard did, once, though he has died now—he would probably think, and probably did think, that the grotto was the merfolk's equivalent of Hogsmeade's Shrieking Shack. Of course, there is a major difference: the Shack earned its name through horrible, horrible noises, and the grotto is… silent. Silent as the grave. Once, when a small mer-child swam too close to the entrance, hoping to hear something she could tell her friends about as proof that she'd dared to approach the cave, she swore she heard… breathing… but she had swum away far too fast to make sure it was anything but water flowing between the strange, beautiful rocks that lay scattered around the cave's entrance.
Had the child dared to venture even a step within the cave, she would have died. In this case, in deed, the old legends are true, because the Grotto of the Fallen Pearls is a cursed place. The curse has laid long upon it, since well before the days of the founders. Even the ancestors' ancestors of the ancestors of the current merfolk elders could not have recalled the days before the cave lay, silent and still, a threatening presence deep within their kingdom. Even those ancestors' ancestors could not recall the face of the woman who, with shuddering sighs, betrayed and abandoned, had turned herself into a Water Woman, and sunk beneath the surface of Hogwarts Lake to give birth to her first and only child.
The child, had she been born to a human mother, would have been one of the first witches to be conceived, born—and, probably, raised—in the grounds of Hogwarts Castle. She was a princess, a child of divine heritage—her mother was a descendant of Brigid, the Goddess of the Sacred Flames, and her father was a Celtic prince. But her mother was also a witch, and that fact was what made the girl's very existence into the stuff of prophecy.
There was a prophecy, you see. In the time before the coming of the Great Evil upon the land, the wise women had sung of a time so far distant that even the descendants of the many-times-great-grandchildren of the wise women's own great grandchildren would not know of it. They knew that, in the days soon to come, there would be a Great Evil upon the land, and all the human inhabitants of what would one day become Hogwarts Castle would die. Their deaths would purge the evil, for a little time, and in that time the mighty ones, those who would be known as The Founders, would come upon the land and think it empty from the beginning, and they would build a castle, and call it Hogwarts. A school would be built there, and many young sorcerors would come from all the British Isles to hone their craft. But the land was tainted, besmirched by the curse of the Great Evil that would never, ever quite completely fade away, and there would still be in that school a smell of death and sorrow.
In that time, sang the wise woman, a hero would rise: a brave, orphaned youth, marked with the bolt of the lightning, and armed with the sword of his sorcerous ancestors. When the Great Evil arose once more—for the fourth time, or maybe even for the fifth—this hero would, with the help of his loyal companions, destroy it, and banish it forever from the earth. He was to be the reincarnated form of the Son of the Morning Light, and for a while after his victory, there would be peace.
(The peace would not be permanent, for the simple reason that peace cannot be permanent, ever. There is always some conflict, or else the world may as well be dead.)
The wise women sang, however, that this hero should not triumph alone. Around him there would be many brave and true friends, and some of them would even seem first to be his enemies. Primary among them were three, or four, or five (depending upon which wise woman you were asking):
There was a young woman with mad hair, a woman so wise she could tell the young hero everything he needed to know, and she would be called The Wise One.
There would be a young man, who was descended from the Celtic chieftains, and his hair would be as red as the sunrise, and he would be called The Scarlet One.
There would be a maiden fresh as the morning, and brave as the hero himself, and her hair would be the same sun-red as the Scarlet One's, but she would have a part of the hero's heart for herself, forever. She was to be called, they said, The Rose.
There would be a spy, a troubled young man with hair as pale as spider-silk, and he would fall from favor but find his place again through his own valor and cleverness. He would be called the Silver Serpent, and he would win the hearts of the Wise One and the Scarlet One before they even realized their hearts were in danger. Such would be the charm, and the strangeness, of the Silver Serpent.
There was also to be a strange young man, called The Stumbling One, who would serve as the hero's foil and shadow throughout all his life. There was no clear knowledge of the final purpose of the Stumbling One, but the wise women agreed that he would have a serious part to play in the battles to follow.
When the battle finally rose in heat and ferocity, there would come a time when the forces of darkness seemed poised to win out over the Hero and his companions. There would be one, however, who would have the final power to ensure that the Dark One and his hordes were defeated.
Unfortunately, this One—who would be a beauty beyond all beautie, as wise as the Wise One and brave as the Rose, and who would come to love the Hero as woman never before loved man—she would at first be separated, insurmountably, by the boundaries of time.
It fell to the Hero and his friends to find a way to bring her to them, before their time of need became a time of death and mourning.
In the grotto beneath the dwellings of the Merfolk, the slow currents of the lake moved sluggishly through slime and silt, resting and swirling on pearls and diamonds and the remains of ruined carpets. It had been a fine dwelling, once, but when the Long-Ago Lady, the mother of the Water Woman, who had become a Water Woman herself and lived just long enough to raise her daughter to young-womanhood—when she had died, the fine and beautiful things in her dwelling had begun to crumble, and now the only things that remained fine and beautiful were the garments worn by the sleeping maiden in the center of the grotto. For much longer than a thousand years she had lain there, suspended in a piece of frozen time, and for many years more she would remain, eternally young and beautiful, unless some man (or woman) was able to one day wake her up.
She had hair the color of a moonlit sky, because all Water Women (more human and more beautiful than mermaids, and able to speak the Human Tongues and mermaid tongues alike without any difficulty) had tresses the colors of water, or of seaweed. This one's hair was like deep, cold ocean water, and glimmered like the surface of a lake under the moonlight. Though her eyes were closed, they seemed to twitch alertly as she slept. Were she awake, and were anyone in the grotto to look upon her, they would have seen that this maiden was fair beyond any human to live in many, many centuries, and that her eyes were the color of perfect golden amber. The pupils of those sleeping eyes were, too, like flecks in amber: reddish, instead of black, so that when the maiden was awake her eyes gave her a serpentine look that had always sent the merfolk scattering in the days when she was younger. She had skin the color of pale moonlight, and a curved red mouth with teeth that were pointed like a serpent's fangs. Because she was a Water Woman, this maiden could speak the language of the snakes—especially the dialect of the water snakes, and even more especially the water snakes peculiar to this very old and isolated Scottish lake. In fact, three water snakes lay in her chamber now, guarding her as she slept, though they were sleeping, too. They would wake up if anyone were to try and cross the door (and if anyone were able to make it into this small pocket of undisturbed time—which was, of course, far less likely than just a small merchild wandering into the grotto one day). If anyone ever did, this person would die immediately, unless they were the one the sea-serpents knew to wait for, the one who spoke their tongue as well as his own.
Until then, they waited, lying in coils around the body of their mistress: The Water-Woman, the Princess Alania Serenia Moonstone. As she slept, and slept, still waiting for her prince, her beautiful red mouth seemed to curve into a smile. The time, surely, must be coming closer now.
Nearby, the elders of the local tribe of merfolk suddenly all began to shiver.