Valyn Alain Malfoy was curled up in a first-class seat on a Muggle airplane, terrified. She absolutely hated heights; she couldn't even fly a broom. Now, she was thousands of miles above the Atlantic ocean, shaking.
She wished that Uncle Abraxas had just arranged for a boat to take her. She thought about him for a moment, though it was hard; she'd never seen him a day in her life.
She knew he was her father's twin brother, so she knew his face, more or less. But everything else... That was what made a person themselves. Their face was nothing. For instance, her uncle and her father both had nearly translucent, pale skin, small, piercing chartreuse eyes, and straight, thick golden white hair. They were both approximately six foot tall, and had long arms and legs and long, thin fingers. They had wide mouths and long teeth.
But her father, Belial Hyperion Malfoy, tied his hair up in loose buns. Her father hardly took the time to shave, so his face usually carried a few millimeters of harsh stubble. He wore lots of dark, heavy layers, and had many scars from his profession of choice. He had wicked grins and silent expressions. He was dark and light and once, crisp and filthy simultaneously, good and evil all at once. It was a trait Valyn was proud to have inherited, albeit she wore it much differently.
But Abraxas Draconium Malfoy was the heir to the Malfoy name. He was not a disowned runaway with a bastard daughter and strong ties to No-Mages and Dragon black-markets. Abraxas Malfoy would have his long, gleaming mane neat and in a low, loose ponytail down his back. His face would never show the hints of a shadow, and he would wear many layers of tense, pressed white layers of only the most expensive of wizard wear. The undersides of his fingernails would not be dirty. His facial expressions would be mild and restrained. He would be cold and bright in the worst of ways.
Valyn was a pureblood herself, but she'd never really liked any of the ones she met. Of course, she had never actually liked any person, with the exception of exactly three people; her father, Druella Alanson, and Thiago Quintana.
Valyn. She never usually put much thought to herself. She wasn't much to think about. She was just over five foot seven and weighed little more than a hundred pounds. She had a long, thin face, golden and translucent, with shimmering chartreuse eyes and long, wispy white hair. She had high, pronounced cheekbones, a small, upturned, pointed nose, and a small, pointed chin. She was very pretty, to most people, though the effect was lost on herself. She was thin, her bones very visible, with a relatively small bosom, a tiny waist, and ample hips. Her legs, however, were long and thin, and she had ugly, knobby knees. She had small feets and hands.
Her mother was dead. She'd died before Valyn had even been born; her father had had to cut his baby out. The first thing Valyn had ever done was kill her mother. She'd never forgiven herself for it, and a part of her father never had, either.
Her mother had been a descendant of Rionach Steward, who'd had a secret baby with a pureblood. Rionach had been halfblood, but Wizarding law said that Valyn was pureblood because every other person in her line had been pure; any other blood had been waned out of the family line. Even Abraxas Malfoy, a very prude pureblood supremacist, recognized Valyn as pureblood.
Perhaps, of course, it had a little to do with her being a descendant of none other than Salazar Slytherin, and someone lucky enough to speak Parseltongue.
Valyn loved being a Parselmouth. It was one of the few things she did, indeed, like about herself; she could do something rare, something that other people could not. She was special. Not only that, her ability had been the biggest reason she and her father had survived. It had gotten them money back; it had renewed her father's long-dead pride.
Abraxas and Belial had been the only children of Septimus Malfoy and Zanna Rosier. When they had been eleven, they'd been sent off to Hogwarts, as any British pureblood would have been. Abraxas had, of course, been Sorted into Slytherin, but Belial Malfoy, named for the devil himself, was Sorted into Hufflepuff.
He'd been disowned immediately. His first year's tuition at Hogwarts had been paid, and so he went, but he was miserable. Afterwards, however, he'd had no way of staying at Hogwarts. He had had no choice but to leave.
He'd spent the summer working odd jobs for strangers, mostly Muggles. Soon after his second year at Hogwarts would have started, however, human traffickers picked him up.
Valyn's father never told her much about the three years after that. He said only that he'd been made to work very hard for very long, and slept and ate very little.
When he was fifteen, he was bought by an American witch named Druella Alanson, who turned out to be a professor at Ilvermorny, the American Wizarding school.
Belial had started going there, then. He was Sorted into Wampus, the House of the body.
He soon fell in love with an American girl called Alain Boot, the daughter of the Headmaster at the time, a Pukwudgie.
Alain had had long, golden hair, big, green eyes, and pretty, caramel skin. She'd been five foot three and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. According to Belial, she was the most beautiful girl who'd ever existed.
Two years later, in their final year at Ilvermorny, the Headmaster had found out, banned them from the school, and tried to kill them. He was sent to Azkaban, in Britain, and replaced, but the ban stood strong. Neither Belial nor Alain could ever set foot on the grounds of Ilvermorny again.
Belial and Alain were left poor, but proud. They moved to the forest, where Belial built them a small house on the edge of a clearing. Alanson often visited, and helped as much as she could. She encouraged them to stay away from the Wizarding World; advice they took happily. In fact, they kept to themselves.
A few years later, Alain became pregnant, but no doctors would help; they were all very loyal to Alain's father. The pregnancy was hard, especially with their hard lifestyle, and Alain died of complications soon after going into labor.
Belial had to remove their daughter fast or he would lose them both. He'd cut the baby girl free and washed her. The baby was healthy. Belial named her Valyn, a Latin name meaning strong.
The first few years was hard, Belial said. She was colic for a year, and hated being anywhere but someone's arms. After that, she was simply impossible to control, until the age of about four and a half. Suddenly, for no reason, she'd calmed down.
That was when she'd discovered she could talk to snakes. She made many friends in their home in the woods. Alanson was the first person she'd told, and then Alanson had relayed it to another professor, and so on, until everyone in America knew of the descendant of Isolt Sayre with the ability to talk to snakes. Reporters were at their house every single day, asking to report on her. A Parselmouth had not appeared in America in over a hundred years.
They'd gotten money after that. Belial had the opportunity to work for a dragon tamer in Romania and he took it; whenever he was away, she was left with Alanson. The reporters stopped coming as much; she was no longer new news.
When she was nine, her father had enough money, experience, and reputation to open his own dragon reserve. He did so in Australia, and every weekend, he Apparated home. One week every month, he'd Apparate Valyn to the reserve to see the dragons.
Right before her tenth birthday, a pregnant Antipodean Opaleye escaped. Her father let Valyn accompany him to search.
They found her dead in the desert, unhatched eggs beside her. One was a fifth the size of the others; a pygmy. Her father let her keep it.
The other eggs were sent to the reserve's incubating place, and the mother's hide was stripped and made into clothing for Valyn; not many people like bright pink dragonhide, as was the mother's coloring. Her heartstrings were harvested and Valyn got her wand from it, made special by a friend of her father's, Thiago Quintana, as a favor to Belial. Quintana was born in 1899, but he used magic to keep himself at the young and extraordinarily handsome age of twenty five. Valyn swore she was in love with him, and he promised to marry her as soon as she turned seventeen. He was to make her a wand of dogwood, nineteen inches long, with a dragon heartstring core. Dogwood, Quintana said, because of Valyn's quirky playfulness and her tendency to be outrageously loud. Nineteen inches, Quintana said, because of her big personality and dramatic way. Dragon heartstring, however, was a waste of her potential. She would be best fit, he claimed, with the hair of a veela; she was beautiful, and deadly, and would fit well with the usually temperamental wand. Reluctantly, they came to the compromise of a double-core wand; Quintana wrapped one hair from a veela (which he apparently had stored) around the dragon heartstring and made the wand.
Valyn's pygmy dragon hatched on her tenth birthday; June 12th, 1970. He had a sleek pearlescent hide and was about a foot long with a wingspan of one foot. He had a long neck and a long tail that accounted for most of his body. He was deformed, as many pygmies were, and his front arms were connected to his wings. His crop, where most dragons kept their flame box, was empty.
Valyn discovered several interesting things about her dragon. He had long fangs connected to purple gums, which were extremely poisonous to everything. For this, she dubbed him Attor, which means venom. He was silly and clingy, and liked to store water in his crop which he spat like any other dragon would spit fire. He refused to go anywhere without Valyn and never let her go anywhere without him.
However, the most peculiar thing about Attor was that he, too, spoke Parseltongue. It was a secret she never told anyone; not Belial, not Alanson, not Quintana. Attor didn't speak much; he was a simple thing, really, and quite lovely too. He was very, very sad when Valyn went off to Ilvermorny a year later, leaving Attor in the care of her father.
She was Sorted into Thunderbird, the House of the soul. She had no friends, and spent her free time in the woods or the mountains, or dancing around Slytherin's Tree. She got all O's in all her classes, and never once got anything less.
Now, she was sixteen. She'd just finished her fifth year at Hogwarts, and her father was dead. It hurt to think about, so she didn't. Instead of going to her godmother, Druella Alanson, law said that she had to live with Abraxas Malfoy, lest he relinquish custody. To Valyn's surprise, he had not, and now here she was, flying on a plane to England, to live in the Malfoy Manor in Wiltshire, England, with her estranged Uncle Abraxas, his wife Leonora, and his son, Lucius.
Attor was in her magical purse, hidden away. She felt sick as the plane flew, and wished only to be at home, in the quiet Massachusetts forest, tucked quietly beside her father, reading a book by the crackling fireplace. Her eyes stung from unshed tears.