The Curse of a Name
Daphne Greengrass turned seventeen on the 20th of August. She awoke with the sun streaming in through her windows, warming her legs and illuminating her small room. She'd moved rooms from the larger one down the hall several years ago, much to her mother's confusion. She just liked feeling neat and contained, she'd tried to explain, and her old room was too big for that. Sharing a dormitory at Hogwarts was stressful for that reason, but she only had one year of it left.
She let herself relax for a little while, luxuriating in the light and the feeling of adulthood. Seventeen! Her Trace would be broken: she could legally do magic away from Hogwarts now! Just for the pleasure of it, she reached to her side table for her wand and charmed the books on her shelf to float up and dance through the air before having them return to their spots, all neat and snug in a row, just so. Smiling, she pushed her blankets off and started getting ready for the day. Nightgown replaced by blouse and skirt, face washed, hair brushed and braided, and wand secure in her pocket, she went down the stairs and into the kitchen, fully expecting her parents to be there waiting to wish her happy birthday.
And they were there. But they were sitting at the table in their rumpled dressing gowns, looking dreadfully forlorn and unhappy. And there was another man there too, a man more beautiful than anything she'd ever seen, with springy curling hair of golden brown and skin so even and tanned it looked unreal and eyes that glowed and sparkled when he turned them on her. "Ah…." he said, and his voice was smooth and dark and rich and unlike anything she'd ever heard, like the wind at night and a perfectly tuned cello and a lover's sigh all at once. "Daphne."
She had stopped dead in the doorway when she saw her parents' posture, but the sound of the man saying her name somehow brought her a step further into the room. But she stopped herself from moving further. Whatever this strange man's attraction meant, she wouldn't let it overwhelm her. Instead she turned her eyes to her mother and father, and saw they were looking back at her, their faces pathetic with guilt and unhappiness. "Daphne…" her mother whispered, and the sound loosed her from whatever hold the other man's voice had laid on her.
"Mother?" she said. "What's going on?" She was glad her voice didn't tremble, glad her composure was that good at least.
But it was her father who answered: "Daphne, we… we're so sorry, my dear."
"If we had known," her mother said. "If we had known, we never would have…" Tears collected on her lids and spilled out down her cheeks, and she covered her face with her hands and wept.
Alarmed now, Daphne took another step forward and said more strongly, "What is happening?"
Her father's mouth worked for a few moments, but then tears began falling down his face too. But this, paradoxically, seemed to galvanize him, and he glared at the splendid man and snarled, "Well? You're the one doing this to her! You explain!" And then he put his arm around his wife's shaking shoulders and lowered his head.
Full of trepidation, Daphne turned to the stranger and looked at him half expectantly, half fearfully. He smiled at her, and the smile held sunlight. She thought of her little room upstairs, the warmth of the sun on her legs as she'd lain in bed not fifteen minutes ago. "Daphne," he said again, so graciously it seemed he was bowing to her. "I'm sure this is all very disorienting. I am the god Apollo. From this day forward, you are to be mine."
She stared at him. "I'm to be what?" she asked blankly. Her mother moaned.
The man (he'd said god, but how could that be? What did he mean? Apollo from the legends?) sighed. "Now I don't want you to be tiresome about this. When you were born and named, your parents, unknowingly yes, but still, invoked an ancient binding on you. One they would have known of had they paid better mind to the myth they named you for."
Daphne blinked. "The… the nymph who became a tree?" she asked. She knew that's where her name was from, but she'd never paid very much attention to the old story.
"I suppose that is the long and short of it, yes." Despite the neutrality of the words, something crackled under his voice, a silent strike of lightning, and she felt a shiver of fear, that she had accidentally made him angry. "Had they looked deeper than the surface story, they would have found that when I lost the object of my love to her transformation, I laid a law upon all mortals, that any woman named in her memory would become mine once she entered her majority. As you have just done, my dear Daphne." He stood from the table and held out his hand to her, clearly expecting her to take it.
The realization of what he meant, and that he was serious, was like a douse of cold water over her head. She took a step away from him, her heart pounding so hard she could hardly hear herself when she said, "Mother, Father, this isn't… this can't… It's not true, is it?"
Her father's face was drawn and pinched, and he looked at the tabletop rather than her. "I'm so sorry, my dear." His voice was soft and broken.
She looked wildly to the splendid man. "What do you mean? What exactly do you mean, 'I'm yours'? Am I to go with you? Where? Will I survive? What do you want with me?"
"Of course you're to come with me," he said, almost patiently. She heard the edge of that patience with a shudder of fear. "As for where, well… there are no words in your puny language I could use to express that. 'Another realm', I suppose, though that is woefully lacking. As for survival, well…" He tipped his head to and fro. When he finally said, "Yes," she was not at all convinced.
She had to take a minute to steady her breathing before she could ask, "And if I don't go with you?"
At once his face darkened, and something about him, his aura or nimbus or spirit, grew huge and foreboding and sucked all the air from the room. The cheery sunlight from the windows over the sink vanished, the well scrubbed-table and floors warped and twisted, and upstairs, she somehow knew, were no longer the bedrooms and studies and family library she knew like her own hands, but rather a great sucking void of darkness. Into this, the dark splendid man spoke: "Then your parents have broken a god's law, little mortal, and their suffering will be eternal." His voice now was as huge and terrible as a storm the size of a galaxy, and at once she understood her own impossibly small size when compared against this power. The tidy life she'd planned so happily for herself, the graduation from Hogwarts, the job that would become a career, the husband and children she wondered about and hoped for, all of that came apart in an instant and scattered.
"Alright!" she screamed. "Alright!" she cried. "I go with you! Don't hurt them!"
And the sunlight was back, and the table and floors were good solid wood once again, her parents sobbing and clinging to one another, and upstairs she could faintly hear Astoria shouting, "What's happening! Father? Mother! Daph?"
The splendid man—no, she had to say Apollo now, there was no doubting anymore—was smiling at her, such a smile as she'd never seen, so full of satisfaction and pleasure. "I'm so glad," he said, and there was never an oath more heartfelt.
She could hear Astoria banging down the hallway overhead, going for the stairs, and panic seized her: if she saw her sister all her resolve would melt away and she would scream and cry and cling to her and never leave her side and then her parents would suffer endlessly. "Let's go," she said harshly, reaching out her hand. Beaming, Apollo reached back, and when their fingers touched, there was a sound like no other sound in the world and a blast of light and she just barely had time to look back at her parents, cowering, tears streaming, helpless agony in every line of their bodies. And then they were gone.
A/N
This story exists because I read The Orangery by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and got inspired. (If you like mythology and/or fantasy, look it up, it was nominated for Best Novelette at the Nebulas last year and is super super thought-provoking)
I don't have any plans for how this should continue, but if you want to give me ideas I might be interested in writing more!
Harry Potter characters are owned by J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros. Apollo's, uh, his own, I guess.
E.I. signing out