Assignment 1: Mythology, Task 7 - Sekhmet: Write about a headstrong and fierce woman who men fear.
...
Rowena is born in the wilds of Scotland.
Her parents are soulmates, the kind who meet as children, who never stop ageing at all.
Her Aunt, who is four years older than her mum, still looks the same as she did when she was twenty. She stopped ageing, so that she had time to look for her soulmate.
Because that's how their world works. Time stops, physically, until the other half of a soul is found.
For most, it's not even noticeable. It's less than a decade, just enough to find the one.
For others, it's closer to a century.
Rowena's parents hold her tight and wish the best for her, but in the end, she isn't like them. She isn't content. She's made for bigger things.
By the time she's twenty-five, it's clear she's not ageing, and she wants to see the world. So she goes.
And she finds Helga, and then Godric, and then Salazar — each of them just over forty but looking not a day over twenty. And they come together with similar ideals and they form a school, because it's needed, and not one of them can let that go.
And then Godric and Salazar start getting older.
Helga is the first to notice, because Godric's face has a wrinkle at his smile line that didn't use to be there. And then Salazar notices his hairline is just a little higher than it used to be.
They look so happy together, and Rowena is so happy for them, but she's also all too aware that she's rapidly approaching fifty years old and she hasn't the slightest inkling when she's going to start physically ageing again.
But it doesn't matter. She throws herself into her studies and her teaching, and she watches her friends grow old together.
Thirty years later, Helga meets a Muggle man named James and starts ageing again.
And Rowena is happy for her.
But now Rowena is the only one of them stuck at age twenty for who-knows-how-long.
…
She outlives her parents.
She outlives her Aunt, who found her soulmate when Rowena was twenty-three.
She outlives Godric and Salazar.
She outlives Helga, too.
And she still hasn't started ageing.
By the time she loses Helga, she has lived one hundred and eighty three years.
And she is tired.
She is alone, and she is tired.
So she leaves. She leaves, because this is what she does when the buzzing under her skin gets bad enough. Hogwarts will be okay without her. She needs to see the world — more of it than she's seen before.
So she travels, and she learns. She learns spiritual magics from all over the world — India, Africa, Australia, China, Japan.
She falls in love. Deep in the heart of Africa, she meets a man who is tall and steady and clever and treats her right, with respect. She learns his language and she talks with him late into the nights and she is charmed.
She falls in love and she watches him find a new wrinkle and she thinks this is it. He is the one. And so she settles down to live out the rest of her days here in the heart of Africa. She bears him a child, a beautiful baby girl with a riot of fuzzy hair and skin almost as dark as her father's. They name her Makiese, which means happiness, and Rowena feels great joy.
Except that Makiese grows, and Rowena still looks just the same.
The day she accepts that she isn't ageing, she breaks down and cries. She doesn't want this curse. She wants to grow old with the man she loves.
But she can't.
He finds her there, and he wraps his arms around her, and he says nothing, because Rowena knows that he can see it just as well as she can.
Except that he is ageing, which means his soulmate is here. His soulmate is here and Rowena cannot bear to keep him from them. Even though she has married him, she feels like she is the mistress here.
"You have to find your real soulmate," she tells him.
He strokes her cheek, gently.
"Rowena, I love you," he says.
She sniffs. "I know. And I you. But I am not the one."
"You deserve so much more than this," he tells her.
Maybe he's right. Rowena is nearing three hundred years old — she's never met anyone who was so old before. The oldest she ever knew was Merlin, one of her students, but he had sent her an owl almost a century ago to tell her, with great joy, that he had begun to age.
But it doesn't matter what she deserves. This is what she has.
And so she lets him go. She lets him find a love even greater than theirs. And she raises her daughter and teaches her magic of all kinds, from all parts of the world. She ensures that her daughter will grow up wise and strong and beautiful.
And she watches Makiese begin to age.
She watches her child grow old. She watches her have children of her own, and then grandchildren, and then great grandchildren.
She outlives her daughter.
She outlives her son-in-law.
She outlives her first grandchild before she cannot bear it any longer. She loves her family, loves them with all the love that she has to give, loves them to the depths of her soul, but she cannot watch them age and die while she remains unchanging.
She is tired, and her skin is buzzing and she cannot stay any longer.
…
She comes back to Europe in time to hear rumours of a man so insane he thinks to sail a boat the wrong way 'round the world.
And she wants to know if he's right, if the world really is that small. Or if he's wrong, and they'll find new land altogether.
So she boards the boat with him.
He tries to refuse her passage, because to be honest, he's kind of an asshole, but Rowena has been alive for over five hundred years now and she is not going to be refused passage by some poncy upstart with only forty years to his name.
She gets on the boat.
The first night at sea, a man tries to sneak into her cabin.
The hand that reaches out to touch her — Rowena severs it clean off, watching it drip red. He screams, but she grabs the collar of his shirt and tugs him closer. "Know this," she hisses. "I am not some helpless maiden. I have lived more years than you will ever see, especially if you ever try to touch me again. Count yourself lucky it was just your hand." She takes a breath, knowing that her eyes are blazing, but she has five hundred years of experience with this particular brand of entitlement and she will not let it stand. "Let this be a message," she says. "If anyone so much as lays a finger on me, they will lose that finger."
The man whimpers. She scowls. "You're pathetic," she says, shoving him back. "Get out of my sight."
The man scrambles backwards with another pathetic noise. The door to her quarters slams behind him.
She takes a deep breath. It was a temper tantrum worthy of Godric, but she suspects she will not regret it's effectiveness.
She locks her door with every spell she knows, but it still takes her a while to drift off to sleep.
…
Word travels quickly. By the next morning, not one man on the Santa Maria will meet her eyes.
Perhaps she should feel guilty. But she doesn't.
…
When the boat finds land, Columbus declares they've found India.
Rowena knows better. She's been to India. She speaks several of their languages. This is not India.
At first, she thinks to let him make a fool of himself.
But then he tries to take captives. He speaks about how easily subjugated they are. He plans to take them as slaves, to steal from them and slaughter them should they resist.
Rowena will not stand for that.
She has seen what happens when people think themselves above others. She has seen the burnings, the fear, the anger that spreads. She has seen what it does.
She will not let that happen here, to these people.
So, in the darkness of night, she creeps off the boats the night before they are to take prisoners and launch, and she creates a crack in the foundations of the largest boat, and she shoves it out to sea, and she watches it fill with water.
She thinks about the soldiers on board. Some of them were just following orders.
But if Columbus never returns, these people will be safe.
She cracks the hull of the second boat and coaxes the current to take it into the depths.
The third boat has a guard, but he has dozed through all of this. When she pushes his boat out with the currents, though, the movement wakes him, and he yells.
And Rowena knows that this is not enough.
She must ensure that no one survives to tell this tale.
She raises her wand, and she pulls the water up, up, up, into a massive wall, and then she lets it crash over all three boats, sucking them down into the depths.
She knows exactly how many people just died by her hand.
She can only hope she saved more.
She turns back to the city, hoping that they will allow her rest and respite before she tries to make her way anywhere else, and she sees a child, a small boy of perhaps six, staring at her in the light of the moon, gaping, open-mouthed.
She blinks at him.
"Are you a god?" he asks, and her grasp of their language is only just good enough to pick it up.
She laughs. "No," she says, but she can see in his eyes that he doesn't believe her. "I need rest," she tells him, or, at least, she thinks she does.
"Come," he says, and she follows him.
…
The next day, she wakes up to find a celebration in her honour. The boy's story has spread. They call her a god. They call her a hero. They look at her with hopeful eyes and tell her that she has vanquished their enemy and she can only ask them in return to tell her their stories.
And so she stays, and when some of them fall ill with familiar diseases, she heals them, and they call her a shaman and thank her again.
The small boy, whose name turns out to be Hadali, guides her to the local shaman — a wizard who lives on the outskirts of town.
She learns from him, and he learns from her. He is nearly eighty years old and still just as frozen as she is, and Rowena wonders if maybe this why she's been waiting so long. Maybe she needed a whole new continent to be discovered.
His name is Uini, and he values wisdom and kindness. He reminds her of Helga, at times — the same righteous loyalty, the same innate love to share. She falls for him.
But she does not age.
She watches Hadali grow up and find his soul and fall in love, but she and Uini stay the same.
Uini holds her with tenderness and kisses her softly and tells her the stories of his people. He asks about her adventures all over the world.
When she discovers she is pregnant, she weeps, because she cannot do this again. She cannot outlive another child.
But she tells Uini and he smiles like the sun Hadali was named for, and she cannot take this from him.
The child is a boy. He has deep brown hair and smooth brown skin and his father's smile. They name him Kati, for the moon that has watched over them.
Kati is seventeen years old when his father begins to age again. A woman from a nearby village had come to them for help, for healing.
Rowena watches the conflict in Uini's eyes, and she shakes her head.
"This was never going to last forever," she tells him. "Go. Be happy. Be free. Raise our son to be a good man, wise and strong and kind, as you are. It is time I return home."
And she goes, leaving her heir behind.
When technology advances and someone else decides to try Columbus's dangerous journey, she goes with them as well, because she is determined to make this interaction go smoothly. It is 1687, and she knows she cannot keep an entire continent hidden forever. More than that, she shouldn't.
So she comes, and she helps the sailors learn the language, and she helps them trade, and she ensures that they know that the native people are not weak, nor helpless.
These are not her people — her son is not here, and they have not heard of her — but that does not mean she will not protect them with all that she is. Even if she has to sink another boat to do it.
She doesn't. Instead, they open up trade routes — even for gold, which the native people have in abundance.
And when the boat leaves, Rowena stays, and she makes her way back to the village she once saved.
They know her from stories, though it has been almost a century and a half since she was here, so very few remember her in person.
Until an old man with clouded eyes hobbles out to greet her, and she looks at him closely, and she smiles.
Because even a hundred and fifty years later, she can recognize her son.
Kati is feeling his age, and his soulmate has already left this world, but he beams at her with his father's smile and he introduces her to his children, and his grandchildren, and his great grandchildren.
And then he falls to his knees and he takes in a shuddering breath and his children carry him to his bed, where his eyes slip closed.
She wonders if it will ever stop hurting to watch the people she loves die. To watch her children die.
She vows that she will not fall in love again. Not until she's sure.
…
She goes back to Hogwarts. Back home.
Except then she learns that people are being torn from their homes in Africa. Colonization is attempting to take over and Rowena is exhausted but she remembers Makiese, her daughter, who was bold and bright and beautiful, and who loved the world. She thinks of her grandchildren, and her great grandchildren, and it doesn't matter how tired she is. She cannot let this happen.
So she amasses like-minded people and she goes to Africa and she sinks boats and stops carriages and relocates supplies — giving them to the native people in some cases, in other cases giving them back.
She burns boats designed to carry people across the ocean, away from their homes. She spreads her influence up and down the coast, and recruits witches and wizards from Africa, including a large delegation from the heart of a region called Kongo — a region she knows all too well.
These are her descendants, and this will be her legacy.
They believed that Africa would be cheap, because they would not fight back.
Rowena proves them wrong.
She drives the coast up, decimates their supplies, their troops. She makes it impossible to sustain.
And they turn back.
She knows that if they ever come back, the people that remain will have no problem handling it.
She watches her descendants establish trade routes and defend their people, and she has never been more proud.
…
She goes home. She rests. She hears her name whispered in the halls in a tone of reverence and fear.
She never set out to be a hero — that was an accident. She only wanted to do what was right, and defend her family.
Her family, which now spans continents and centuries.
She is nearly eight hundred years old and she is so, so tired.
She takes her office back, and she accepts the History of Magic position, and she teaches her students of the world outside their island. She teaches them that theirs is only one way to do magic, that many exist, and that value judgments are hard to make.
She tells them of Muggles who change magic forever and how magic affects Muggles too, and how the world is so interconnected.
She lives through wars and famines and disasters of all kinds. She helps the world heal, in every way that she can.
Muggles know her as the oldest woman alive — old enough to sail to the New World and treaty there, old enough that no one knows when she was born. Old enough to be feared.
Wizards know all that she is capable of.
She terrifies most of them.
She is nine hundred and fifty years old when she meets a man who believes in the Greater Good so much it scares her.
His name is Albus, and he soaks up her lessons with a fervour but his essays are always just a little off, a little… too passionate.
She decides to keep an eye on him.
Little does she know, it isn't Albus who will turn out to be the problem.
Albus has a friend named Gellert who reminds Rowena too much of Columbus. He has the same fierce ambition, and the same disregard for anyone who gets in his way. It's a deadly combination.
She watches Gellert befriend a man named Adolf, whisper in his ear, and Rowena knows this can only end badly.
She is less hot-headed than she once was, and she wants to give them time to prove her wrong, but then it all happens so fast. People are being rounded up and taken away and marked for slaughter and Rowena doesn't understand how it all happened without her noticing.
But there are those that will still respond to her call.
And she is not too hot-headed for this.
She rounds up those who respect her words — smiling softly at the large group from the Kongo and the large group from the Bahamas — and she marches into Germany. She releases people and burns buildings and gives speeches.
And when she reaches Berlin, she finds Adolf and Gellert trembling, and she knows they have heard of her.
She smiles, sharp, letting it reflect one thousand years of doing what she thinks is best.
Gellert tries to Apparate away, as though she wouldn't have predicted that. He is trapped. They both are.
Gellert ends up in Nurmengard. Adolf kills himself while they are duelling.
The year is 1940.
Rowena Ravenclaw is one thousand, six years old.
She is exhausted, and she is victorious, and she still doesn't look a day over twenty.
She goes home.
Not to Hogwarts, but to the wilds of Scotland, where she was born.
She tells herself that the world is not her responsibility, but she knows that won't matter when people need her help.
She wonders if she will live forever.
The oldest person she ever met died at four hundred and thirty two. She has doubled that. She has loved and lost, and she still has not found the other half of her soul.
She stays in Scotland for thirty years, until a man calling himself Voldemort rises on a quest to be immortal.
It's not as glamorous as it seems.
She begins to hunt him down, but before she can, he vanishes, leaving an orphan boy and a lot of confusion.
Rowena has long since known how to tell if someone was under the Imperius Curse, and she helps them sort out the aftermath, sending Death Eaters to prison and letting the rare, actually Imperiused ones go free.
The orphaned Potter boy, Albus says, shall go to his Aunt and Uncle, except that Rowena takes one look at them and decides that's a terrible idea for all parties.
She interrogates his godfather, instead.
She ensures that Sirius Black goes free and is given custody, and a man named Peter Pettigrew is found hiding as an illegal Animagus. He goes to prison.
Rowena returns to teach again, for a decade, but she leaves the year before the Potter boy is to arrive. She cannot look at his face and know she was not fast enough to save his parents.
She goes back to India, because it has been many years. She spends three decades there, before something in her heart calls her home.
And there, on the grounds of Hogwarts, she meets a woman, just past forty but not looking a day over twenty, who is on the grounds to visit a friend — Neville Longbottom, the school's Herbology professor.
The woman introduces herself as Hermione Granger. She works as an Unspeakable for the Ministry of Magic, and her eyes light up as she speaks about discovering new magics and old magics and everything else.
She knows who Rowena is, but when she asks about Rowena's life, it's not about the wars or the righteous anger or any of the things people usually ask.
She asks about the people. She asks about the knowledge Rowena has gained, the things she's learned, the people she's met.
She asks about the things that are sacred to Rowena herself.
And when Neville arrives, Rowena finds herself reluctant to let the conversation go.
They owl each other and then they start going out for tea and then dinner and then trips to Rowena's favourite used bookshop and then Hermione comes to her home and Rowena cooks her dinner, and the light catches her brown eyes just right and Rowena thinks, not again.
Because she swore she would never fall in love again.
It has been over five centuries since she met Uini, almost four since she lost her son, but she still remembers the way she felt stripped bare, flayed raw, knowing that they were ageing without her.
She cannot do this again.
She closes herself off. She stops answer Hermione's owls, moves so that Hermione will not know where she lives, and disappears off the map. She's good at that, by now.
She does not cry.
She will not.
She is done getting her hopes up.
Except that then, five years later, she finds small smile lines at the corners of her eyes.
Lines that were not there before.
Lines that do not show on her twenty year old body.
She is ageing.
She sinks to the floor and she weeps in joy, for the moment she never thought would come.
And then, she hauls herself to her feet, packs her bags, and goes back to Britain.
Hermione's apartment still looks just the same. Rowena's key still fits in the lock.
When Hermione comes home, Rowena is seated on the couch, holding a bouquet of flowers. Hermione pauses, stares at her.
Rowena smiles, bittersweet and sheepish.
"You can't just…" Hermione says, and then trails off.
"I know," Rowena says, taking in the lines at Hermione's mouth, knowing that she was right. "I know. I'm sorry. But I've… I've been wrong so many times."
Hermione sighs. "I know," she says, because she does. Rowena has told her.
"I'll spend the next eighty years making it up to you, if you'll let me," Rowena says.
Hermione steps forward. "You could start with a hug," she says. "It's been five years, you jerk."
Rowena stands up and throws herself at Hermione, beaming. She hugs her tightly, fiercely, with all the strength that she has because this is it.
After a millennium, Rowena has finally found the other half of her soul. The person she will grow old with. Her soulmate. Her Hermione.
…
Rowena Ravenclaw dies at age one thousand, two hundred and twenty seven. Her hair is pure white, and her skin is translucent and wrinkled.
When she dies, she dies surrounded by three families worth of descendants, and her beautiful wife is at her side.
She dies smiling.
…
Writing Month/Dragons: 4039
Auction: colour: white (400 coins)
Romance Awareness: Day 3 - You stop aging at a certain age, until you meet your soulmate and grow old together.
Holmes:
Fortnightly: Women: (relationship) mother, femslash; Chocolate: Bittersweet - write a fic with a bittersweet ending.
Seasonal: Days of the Year: Old Maid's Day: Write about someone over the age of sixty. / Element: (quote) "Touch me, and you'll burn." - Margaret Atwood / Shay's Musical Challenge: Book of Mormon - write about travelling away from home for a long time / Gryffindor Themed Prompts: Hermione
Character Appreciation: 12. reuniting with family / Disney Challenge: C5: Winnifred Banks - write about a woman in power, or a woman who is fighting for power. / Trope of the Month: Cross-gen; Character: Hermione / Cookie's Crafty Corner: Cast On: Write about characters meeting for the first time. / Book Club: Offred: (scenario) the other woman, (word) mistress, (colour) red / Showtime: 8. Man Up - (emotion) Joy / Amber's Attic: S1: Traditional- originated on the high seas among sailors: Write a fic set in/on the water. / Count Your Buttons: W1: accident / Lyric Alley: 11. I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out / Ami's Audio Admirations: 15. One Million - Write about someone who is one-in-a-million. / Sophie's Shelf: 78. RowenaHermione / Em's Emporium: 14. Sophie (Screaming Faeries): Write about an absolute boss. / Angel's Arcade: 8. Lui Kang: (color) red, (word) hero, (emotion) determined / Lo's Lowdown: Q2: "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." - Robert Frost / Bex's Bazaar: D2: [Character] Mrs Jumbo - write about a mother missing her child. / Film Festival: 46. Red. 57. (word) Brilliant
Tea: bouquet
Gobstones: Silver Stone - Death; A: (word) Heir; P: (au) Medieval; T: (word) Drift
Insane House: Sal/Godric