Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Amaranth. I entreat you to read it and review it. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated. It has taken me five chapters to find the plot I was looking for, and I'm not giving up now! Enjoy! --Dathomir
"An escar dewetha an a vyn na bós dystrewys yú mernans."
Amaranth
By M.M. Bratrud, aka Dathomir
The bench in Rowantwaithe's garden was ancient. Whatever finish it might have had was eroded by decades upon decades of tempestuous coastal weather. The iron structure had rusted to a deep, dark red, and the ivy that strangled the crooked red brick wall behind it was slowly conquering the bench as well. During the frantic spring growth, it sometimes appeared that the bench was part of the ivy; a minor wrinkle in its leafy fabric.
The walled garden around the bench was haphazard, but still beautiful in its own way. Roses and poppies knitted their way around the perimeter, with various other flowering plants abounding in the interior. Several fruit trees stood against the east side of the garden, old and drooping. Ferns had taken hold under them. In the southwest corner, there was a Pendant Amaranth (Amaranthus Caudatus), luscious and tall. In summer, the Amaranth was awash with its deep-red, complicated blossoms.
The house attached to this garden was also old, small, and slightly haphazard. Like the wall of the garden, it was red brick, with tidy white window frames. It had two stories and an attic, but it was low and wide, and as it rested in a depression it seemed to be part of the ground; an impression heightened by the swaths of ivy that covered it.
The house was old. Very old. No one knew exactly how old, but to the people who lived in the house, it seemed to be ageless. An indelible part of the landscape that had been there since time immemorial, and would still be there with the sounding of the last trumpet. The house itself was rather unassuming; nothing really set it apart from other dwellings except for a small plaque of sandstone that read "Rowantwaithe House," and above it a curious triangular symbol, also of sandstone. The triangle followed the natural slope of the roof above the door, and inside it was a line, running from the topmost point of the triangle to the bottom, with a circle around it in the middle. Few who saw it marveled at it, and fewer still of those knew what it signified: the Hallows Quest. For Rowantwaithe was old enough to recall the days in which the Quests were not harmless, hapless diversions, but life-journeys, often with real reward at the end.
There were a few trees around Rowantwaithe, but it was largely bare. It was set fifty yards from the Rame Head Cliff, on a small headland, with sweeping views of the vast Atlantic from practically every window. When the wind blew, the children were not allowed to play outside, and sometimes when it stormed the house would creak ominously.
The residents of Rowantwaithe were far from normal, befitting their eclectic dwelling in the maw of the elements. The Potters were, in fact, as far from normal as was humanly possible.
However, the Potters had managed to find, of all the homes in Britain, perhaps the only one that really equaled them in absence from normality. Every so often one of the children would come screaming that a new room had been discovered; for it was that kind of house. And that was not the extent of it. In the garden, somewhere amid the devolving bench and the resplendent ivy and the roses and peonies and the great Amaranth, was a secret. A secret men had been seeking for millennia.
In fact, Rowantwaithe House was not just tied to the famous Hallows Quest, but to the even more renowned Whylas dyworth Hanaf Sans—the Quest for the Holy Grail.