This day did not start like most did during summer vacation for Asher Erised.
Most days, her father woke her with a gentle shake and a kiss on the forehead and a teasing, "Good morning, Blessed One!" She would swim up from her slumber to the scent of bacon and coffee, wiping the sleep from her eyes and blinking furiously at the daylight streaming through her windows. She would stagger down the narrow stone steps that led to the kitchen, then sit heavily on her favorite oaken chair, attempting to wake up as her father served her a plate of eggs and bacon slices- though sometimes it was biscuits with gravy and grapefruit- a glass of orange juice, and a mug of coffee. Her mother was sometimes present, sometimes not. It depended on her "moods." They would sit at the table, casually munching on their breakfast, and her father would open the mysteriously appropriated local paper and look for the most entertaining or interesting Muggle news story before reading it aloud. Then they would go to his lab and he would teach her about a new potion or ingredient, and after her head felt full to bursting, she would be turned free for the day to do whatever she pleased. It was the typical day in Asher's household, and she found it vastly comforting.
But today she woke slowly, alone, opening her sand-filled eyelids and finding that the light didn't hurt her eyes. After careful examination of the windows, parting the blinds to look out on the snowy, mountainous terrain, Asher determined that it was noon or after, and that her father had let her sleep in, which was unusual; he was punctilious about her lessons. After all, she needed to know about potions, especially since puberty had attacked.
Asher stretched and set her feet on the worn wooden floorboards, which were still cold, even partway through the daylight hours, and recoiled at the chill. She quickly located her slippers and nudged her feet inside, found her thick terrycloth robe, and shrugged into it as she made her way down the stairs.
The second thing that struck her as odd was the lack of warmth. Her father usually had a steady fire going this time of day; he had to rekindle the embers from the night before to make his coffee, which was his top priority first thing in the morning. When she reached the kitchen, Asher realized that the fire had been allowed to burn out completely, and the hearth held only ashes and fragments of logs from the day before. She even held a hand over it to check: no heat. It was at this moment that she realized something was profoundly wrong.
Asher examined the kitchen table for a note saying they had gone out, but there wasn't one. If they went somewhere, they always left a note. Her sense of unease deepened. Grabbing the old-fashioned iron poker from the base of the fireplace, she wished she had taken her wand from her bedside table. Underage witches weren't permitted to use magic outside of school unless under supervision of a parent, and her dad made her feel so safe she had gotten into the habit of leaving it in her room unless she left the house without him. However, something was telling her she might need it.
But Asher didn't dare go back; she felt a sense of danger, and her instinct told her that if she went back, whatever was threatening her would certainly notice. She had to catch whatever it was by surprise. She crept through the kitchen, mindful of the open doorway leading to the cozy living room, and did a quick scan. No movement; nothing out of place. The house was silent.
She continued through the second doorway, which opened onto a hallway that led to her parents' room, the guest bathroom, and the door to her dad's underground laboratory. The bathroom door was wide open, and since the door had to be halted by a doorstop to be prevented from hitting the wall, she knew it was empty. The basement door was fastened on the outside by a padlock only her father could open. He secured it every night before bed and whenever he left it, so she knew there was no one down there now.
Asher's eyes fell on the door to her parents' bedroom, which was closed. Memories of hiding under their covers between two of them on stormy nights came to her, because when she was a child, she had regarded it as the safest place in the house. She approached it with a heavy feeling in her limbs and a light sensation in her head. She felt that her head was several feet behind her body, resisting its movement and only kept going by the fact that it was attached to her neck, which felt very tight. She reached for the doorknob, but her hand didn't seem to want to grasp it, so she paused to listen. Beyond the whisper of the trees in the wind outside, she heard nothing.
Gingerly, Asher closed her fingers around the metal knob, then slowly turned it, her muscles seeming to turn to shifting sand. There was no resistance to the movement, but she winced when the mechanism inside made a jarring click-thunk. Deciding that her cover was blown anyway, she wrenched the knob the rest of the way and shoved the door open, bursting through the doorway.
After a short inspection for movement, Asher's eyes drifted to the bed, where her parents were. Her mother lay curled around her father, black curly locks tickling his neck and shoulders, dead asleep and breathing evenly. Her pale skin seemed to glow in the twilight created by the drawn curtains, and she looked content.
She slid her gaze to her father. His features were slack under his straight brown hair, his eyes open and sightless. His back was to his wife, and his shoulders seemed collapsed, his arms slightly bent where they had fallen to the side of the bed. A grey pallor had come over what Asher could see of his skin, and he wasn't moving, not even to breathe. She felt the urge to run to his side, and then the urge to run out of the house, but she was frozen, the poker in her hand forgotten, unable to act in the face of the indisputable truth before her.
Asher's dad was dead, and looking at her mother, calm and asleep and curled around her father's body, she wondered... Pieces of conversations flew to mind, hints and evasions, forming a picture in her mind. Her father, exclaiming, "She can control herself, I'm helping her!" to his doubtful brother, who so rarely wrote or called. And her uncle replying, "She's a time bomb, Darius. You know what she wants, and she can take it at the drop of a hat. The fact that you are man and wife means nothing." The meeting with the Headmaster of Asher's prospective school- only half of which she had been allowed to attend- where her father had to present a case of why she should be allowed. She had never examined the two memories together before, and now it seemed that having to persuade a Headmaster to accept a student in a private meeting was not such a normal occurrence. Was her mother a bad witch? Was this what they were afraid Asher would become?
It was a devastating thought for any person. But for a fourteen-year-old, and more importantly, for Asher Erised, it would become a curse.