PART I - EVIGILO MORS
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
-William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Chapter One
Elia
Death slouches over the edge of my bed, licking his lips as he caresses my thighs. He sings for me, a voice of screeching cicadas and mosquito wings, and the words rattle on the inside of my head.
A rope necklace of souls waiting to be freed
Hanging soft on the branches of a shadow tree
Bodies of the traitors littered in the weeds
This is our world as made by you and me...
My mind throbs with sound as insects gnaw at the skin beneath my nails. I can practically feel my world unraveling, as if someone pulled a single strand of time and suddenly was buried in a massive tangle of threads. I turn to look at Death again. "Why are you here?" As usual, he smiles but speaks no reply.
He is a rude houseguest with yellow teeth, straggly hair, and sallow skin who makes a nightly feast of my sanity and refuses to leave.
Rather than torture myself by sitting in bed, I rise and walk to the window. It is September and the leaves have already turned, hanging limp like flags of surrender off of the twigs. Moonlight bleaches the landscape I see through the narrow window, bone-white and silent. I'd like to go out to the field and do some knife-throw practicing, but Filch has been particularly troublesome in his patrols this year, and if he gave me any trouble I might wind up turning him into my target. There are a few hundred knives and other sharp projectiles in my trunk - I collect them. There are knives, shuriken, throwing stars, throwing axes, arrows, bolts, daggers, and other such materials, as well as a bow, a crossbow that my dad gave me for my birthday last year, a slingshot, and some targets that I use for practice. Moving towards my trunk, I pick one of the projectiles up - a shuriken, made to be concealed in the hand until the last minute before it is thrown. The blade opens easily in my hand. I set my gaze on the old man brick, which sticks out oddly on the far wall of the dorm and frankly looks like the profile of an old man.
Too big a target. The "nose" might work though. The shuriken has four edges and I calculate that the one with the bent tip will hit the nose.
Ready, aim...bull's eye.
Rather than yank it from the wall I pick up a knife and aim at the "eye", and strike directly on point as usual. Five throws later, I realize I'm running out of targets on that brick.
Time for another target.
I yank all seven blades out of the brick and look for something a bit more challenging. This is a classic sleepless night for me. My fifth in a row tonight, I am beginning to question how long I can keep going like this. It's easy enough to go insane. Like I wasn't already. It's harder when people start noticing. Start asking me why they don't see me in the mornings, why I never seem to be in the dormitories at night, why I just seem to not be sleeping at all. And maybe then someone notices that a page has been torn out of the library's copy of Most Potente Potions, the page that bore the instructions for creating Evigilo Mors - a forbidden potion that eliminates the user's need for sleep, but can be extremely painful, or even deadly, when it runs out. I sometimes joke with Allen that I could pour it in a cemetery and the dead would all wake up and start walking around again.
I can joke about waking the dead all I want…but as they say, when the dead walk, the living fill the coffins.
My name is Elia Shacklebolt. I am sixteen years old. I have dark, curly hair, olive skin, and silver-blue eyes. I am the daughter of Kingsley Shacklebolt, an Auror, and his wife, Eliana, who died giving birth to me. I take after my mother in looks, but after my father in skill. I am a sixth-year Ravenclaw and a Prefect at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and I may very well be on the road to being Head Girl next year, if I keep my anger in check. This is who I am, and this is who I have always been. At least, that's what they tell me. That's what I tell myself. Death tells me otherwise.
They say it was a dream, but I know what I saw.
I saw her eyes, sunken into her face like a Jack O'Lantern left out in the rain for too long. She watched me through long, dark, matted curls, stretching her skeletal hands towards me. Her voice cut through the drone of the heavy wind like a knife piercing my skin, the sound of a frantic insect caught on flypaper struggling to escape. "My beautiful daughter. I have waited so long for you." There is a blinding light. Chains spring from her fingertips, the rusted color of dried blood. They snatch at me and though I struggle, they ensnare me, binding me to the spot. I thrash wildly, trying to escape, and wake up moments later entangled in bed sheets, the chains that are trying to drag me back into my nightmares of Azkaban.
These are dreams they say. Your mother is dead. You wake up and it all disappears. You live your life and you forget your nightmares. They go back to Hell, you wake up and continue living on Earth. This is what they say. But they're wrong. I know what I saw.
And I haven't slept since.
As the clock strikes 4am, I give up any notion of rest and sneak down to the potions room. There is a closet that is kept stocked with all of the tools I need to concoct some Evigilo Mors. And the Room of Requirement provides the ingredients and a safe place to brew it. Once I have collected my supplies, I make my way to the third floor. The Room of Requirement awaits, and Allen should already be there.
Allen Marchena is a sixth-year Gryffindor whom I first met on Platform 9 3/4, first day of my first year. He is a head taller than me with brown hair and sharp eyes of such a pale green that, looking into them, it is easy to forget what you were about to say. He and I have been allies since that first day, when a group of upperclassmen years were taking a crack at me and he stood up for me. A week later, when a second-year pulled his wand on Allen, I tossed one of my smaller throwing stars and pinned his wand to the wall, effectively ending any bullying we experienced.
As the door opens, Allen is lounging in a corner, twirling his wand. "Well, well." He grins, looking up at me. "Something wicked this way comes."
"Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble." I smirk. Since he and I actually paid attention in Muggle Studies, we have made a joke of reciting Shakespeare lines as greetings. The Macbeth quote is an old favorite. He laughs and rises from his seat to greet me.
"Such it is, Elia Shacklebolt. What wickedry shalt it be this morn?"
"You aren't Shakespeare. The joke is over. We can speak normally now." I roll my eyes. "Besides, you know the routine. Evigilo Mors, right?"
His smile fades. "Right. Let's get started."
As we work over the cauldron, he seems distant, bothered. "What is it?" I finally ask.
"I think you know, Elia." He shakes his head. "You need to cut back on the Evigilo Mors. You'll be one of the dead you wake soon, keep going like this."
"Right." I shake it off.
"Really though. Why do you feel the need to use it so much? You'll drive yourself insane…"
"I just don't want to sleep." I try to shut the images out of my mind, the images of Azkaban.
"What is it?"
"I just don't like the dreams. That's all. I don't like sleeping."
He stares at me, long and hard. "Shall I slip some Veritaserum in this batch? Or will you tell me what's really going on?"
I shrug, fingering the blade I have been using to chop up dried beetles for the potion. "It's just a dream I keep having." A fly whizzes through the air, taunting me with the beating of its wings. I swat it away and continue chopping the beetles.
"What kind of dream?"
"Just…" I think hard about how to phrase it. "Something about my mom. I guess."
"Oh, right. She died giving birth to you…is that why? You just wonder since you never got to meet her?"
The fly is back, and I am in no mood to swat it away again. I chuck the knife at it hard and fast, pinning the fly's lifeless body to the opposite wall. "Not exactly." I mutter, moving across the room to retrieve the knife.
His eyes are wide. "How did you do that?"
"Do what?"
"The knife. You threw it at the fly and caught it right on the body. My throws aren't that good-bloody hell, not even Ollie Wood could throw like that, and he's captain of the Gryffindor Quidditch team." Pause. "Oh, and that wall is made out of brick. You hit the wall in between the bricks, and it stuck there."
I pause. I never knew where my fascination or skill with knives came from. It's a strange question I've just never been asked. "Practice, I suppose…"
He seems unconvinced. But the knife is back in my hand, and I can see he has chosen to let go of it rather than pursue the question and risk being the next thing I pin to the wall.
"I don't know." He says at last, a final attempt to get an answer from me. "I saw you with that pointy star-thing - "
"Throwing star."
"Throwing star, right - years ago. But this is something else. I don't know how you did that."
"Maybe it's best you don't know."
Evigilo Mors takes ten hours to mature, so I bottle up the most recent batch and put the bottles in a clutch that I have a charmed so that it can hold 200 times its own volume. I also take out the last bottle of last week's batch and drink it in two long gulps. It'll hold me over until the next batch matures.
Allen mockingly salutes me as we clean up. "I'd best be off, before Prudey gets back to the dormitory and notices I'm out."
I chuckle. "You're sure, now, he's related to the Weasley twins? Knowing those two it hardly seems possible."
"I hardly believe it myself, but he almost seems to go easy on them. And did you know their little brother started Hogwarts this year?"
I think back to the Sorting Ceremony. Yes, there was a lanky, freckled, ginger-haired boy who fit the profile of a Weasley. "Was it...Donald?"
"Something like that. I think Ronald actually."
"Does he seem more Fred-and-George or Percy to you?"
"Can't tell yet, he barely says a word. But he's good friends with Harry Potter, so that's something."
I drop my knife. "Harry Potter? You mean, the Harry Potter?"
"Yeah."
I raise my eyebrows. "That is something." Then I think back again to the first day of term, to Professor Dumbledore's announcement just before the start-of-term banquet. "Hey, Allen. What do you think that was all about? What Dumbledore said about that forbidden corridor?"
"I thought to ask you. Since you're a Prefect. Maybe it's privileged information."
I roll my eyes. "Obviously I don't know, or I wouldn't ask you."
"I don't know anything, Elia."
"Are you curious? I mean, would you check it out?"
"Come on, Elia. I may be a Gryffindor, but 'brave' does not mean 'suicidal.' I'm in no hurry to die, thanks."
I roll my eyes and smirk at him. But inside, I know he's right. The last time somebody disobeyed one of Dumbledore's warnings was during our first year. We were told to stay away from the lake, that something unwelcome had taken up residence there. A second-year Slytherin didn't listen, taking a dare from his friends to poke the water with a stick, and later on, three of his fingers, an ear, and a foot floated up to the surface of the lake. We never found out what happened to the rest of him. Dumbledore had said, with a grave expression, "Let this be a lesson to all of you."
"Alright, everything appears in order here...what's your first class, Elia?"
"N.E.W.T. Transfiguration. Then double Defense Against the Dark Arts, and double Potions with Brett in the afternoon. How about you?"
"First thing? Naptime." he snorts. I know what he means - History of Magic class - and I laugh too.
He checks through a keyhole in the door. "Corridor's clear. Shall we, Ms. Shacklebolt?"
"Call me Elia, Allen. I hear Shacklebolt and I think my dad's standing behind me." I laugh. We pick up our bags and exit carefully.
As I say goodbye to Allen and head down to breakfast, I feel the shudder of warmth sliding down my spine - the Evigilo Mors has taken effect. The clouds of exhaustion hovering around my head slowly clear.
I can keep going like this for as long as it takes. I can totally do it...no, I have to do it.
I have to.