She halted, came to a stop, startled that someone had found his way here without her noticing. "You managed to stay alive this entire time", a voice said absentmindedly, and in awe. Now she turned to face the boy who had spoken, dark locks of silky hair framed a handsome face, his skin was pale and his dark eyes could only be described as mesmerizing. He was the first human being she'd seen in a long time. "What do you desire?" Her voice was so inhuman that he wondered how her vocal chords produced such a sound.
He took her in, she was terribly pale. Not like him, this was the paleness only a corpse could possess; yet her skin was as soft as a rose's petal. He chuckled darkly at that, the flower she took hold of and ingested with her mind a long time ago had somehow become a part of her. Her hair was still silky and looked like only cobwebs held the perfect strands of soft brown curling down her back in place. Her dress was torn by the thorns, and her bare feet were bloody, like she had walked for too long.
A few seconds passed, they looked at each other. Then, ever so slowly, the dried brambles behind him began to move, creating a seemingly sky-high barrier around them, too thick to see through. It was littered with patches of beautiful black roses, looking just as dry and dead yet beautifully alive as the girl who undoubtedly had just captured him. He was aware she was dangerous, and he was aware that he himself was in danger now. But he did not fear her, he did not fear anything. She was, though, intriguing him in more ways than she should.
She was a mystery and to most only a fairy tale, the girl who went into the forbidden forest with her friends, who fled from something and left her alone with another. When her absence was noted, search parties were sent, yet only one corpse had been found. But one person swore to have seen a girl looking just like the missing one of them, in the middle of a sea of brambles, touching a red rose before the whole plant began to shake and slowly sucked her up. The girl who had seen this had never been sane ever again, but even though she was a mad woman still some had believed her theory, that the girl became one with the roses.
The friends who left her alone and ran away disappeared one after one, each last seen near the forest. "Are you Annabelle?" He asked, of course he already knew she was. The rose barrier thickened a little, and he knew he should be afraid. He approached her though, with a charming smile. She sensed he was going to use his charm to get whatever he wanted from her. "You should know", she said, her beautiful face with the dull huge eyes still emotionless, and again the brambles trembled and moved, the sound they made sounded like furious whispers. He looked around and saw something was being pushed through the barrier, or rather carried. Skeletons, he realized, these were Skeletons. He knew just whose it were.
"Why are you here", she yet again asked, her vocal chords getting used to speaking after more than three hundred years of silence. Her voice still wasn't back to the full melodic sound it had when she ended up here, but at least there was a little hint in it that she had once been human. "I wanted to ask you a question. It is really important." He smiled a little at her, and she knew that most girls' hearts would beat faster now. A shame hers didn't beat any longer. When she didn't say anything he again spoke up. Her ears were cheering she was hearing something other than the brambles after such long silence. "I wanted to know how you gained immortality."
Her eyes were fixated on him, on the place his heart should be, the seat of the emotions she'd learned to track. She found them locked up and under the attack of insanity, the cruel side of his mind taking over the body and planning evil. Again she faced him. "I have never found the secret of immortality. I have found the secret on how to exist past your expiration date, if anything. I am not alive any longer." And with these words the brambles send out long tendrils, reaching for him to draw him into their thorny, painful eternity.
"Wait", he said, and there was no fear or plea in his voice. He reached for the inside of his pocket, drawing out a small box that contained something special to her. "Only if I leave this forest it can be opened. And it contains the thing that you need to become the perfect undead." Now, even though she'd been keen to kill him mere seconds ago without emotion on her face, he saw the longing in her eyes. A tendril, those were still extended, reached for the box and a few other tendrils lifted up the petite girl and moved her closer towards him, so she hovered in the air on a throne of thorns, a few meters above him.
"Give it to me", she almost screamed, even more inhuman than any other sound she'd uttered so far. He let go of the box and felt the pulsating power of the undead girl being focused on it, trying to open it with the incredible strong willpower of hers. The charm withstood - if it didn't, he'd surely die, and he knew that. "Tell me what your secret was and I shall make sure the box opens once I'm safely outside." The hunger on her face almost managed to scare him, but he held this - her incredible power - in his hands now.
"I had killed the girl I was trapped with. I planned on making a horcrux, I knew from my family how it worked, but then I felt this unreal need to alter the ritual. Instead of chanting 'you become me', I said 'we become one', and instead of chanting 'chained you are', 'chained we are'. The ritual will blow up and kill you, but you will survive in the way I did." Her eyes had gown wider and her expression more alive during these explanations, and she finally grabbed the box, and though the enchanted wooden walls felt the pulsating power of her wand.
"You should know I am not restricted to this forest. If the box doesn't open in three days, I will find you. You will regret the lies of yours." He was sure that the dried brambles would break if they'd moved to fast, but they appeared to be very flexible. He watched as they were literally sucked up by the ground whilst the girl melted inside of the dead, black flowers and stems of her beloved plant until only her face was left. She shot him one last warning glance before it melted like wax, was parted in the middle and disappeared into two separate flowers.
A smirking Tom Riddle left the place he'd found her in, and walked back to his school. He left the forest and the girl who had followed him manifested her upper body. The box opened up and the wand fell into her hand, and she pointed it at him. "Obliviate", she murmured and watched as his eyes turned as dull as hers for a few seconds before he looked around.
She immediately disappeared, leaving him with no memory. He would only use his powers against the world if he was like her, against a world she didn't want changed. She enjoyed being the queen of thorns, and she didn't want to be found by anyone again. It painfully reminded of the time she had been alive.
oOooOooOo
The memory of his visit did not faint for at least a few decades, but his features eventually blurred in front of her inner eye, the small that had hit her, a steely one, almost like blood and snakes, had worn off like a cologne did after a day of hard work, and his charming voice blended in with the whispers of the thorns. All in all, he slowly disappeared from me mind, and she was almost sad that she forgot.
But even though everything seemed to faint from her mind, every small memory, the wand she constantly held in her undead fingers reminded her of the time he visited. He had clearly been a talented wizard, making it past her all-seeing tendrils, and she had been sure he was evil. He had had a crooked mind – she was no less crooked or wicked, but she knew the passiveness she achieved after bonding with this plant would not be his too.
He'd seek revenge from the world, and ultimately overpower even her. But now that she had her wand, she was free, the raw power she felt when she touched it told her just how powerful she could be and become of she ever tried.
oOooOooOo
Many years later she felt a lot of people invading her forest. She usually didn't care for people to do it, but the pure number and strength made her curious. When she get close enough, she could feel hearts eaten away by hatred and insanity, and feel, yet again, a very familiar heart in range, smelled, between all these smells, a familiar one, and finally spotted the boy who'd visited her so many years ago.
At first, she almost didn't recognize him. He looked like a bizarre mix of snake and human, and there was such a small piece of soul left – he had created horcruxes, seven, if her sense didn't betray her, but she only felt a few connections left over. The majority had been destroyed, in fact she could only feel three, the wounds it had left on the only alive piece of soul, still freshly bleeding, told her it had been all recently. Someone out there was killing this evil force.
He hadn't changed one bit, he'd gotten even worse, his state of mind bordering on insanity, but a clever one. He wasn't a dumbass idiot who only wanted destruction; he wanted the world to be his.
A wave of energy seemed to hit his crushed soul, making him flinch and scream in agony. She concentrated hard on him and saw, no felt, a picture of some golden object being destroyed by a basilisk's tooth. Another horcrux connection appeared to be destroyed, the piece left to feel further damage to itself. She could sense, though, that it held some emotions other than hatred and pleasure in bringing pain. They were locked up deep inside. And with that she retreated back into her kingdom, the Forbidden Forest, to wait out his death.
Something told her it was inevitable.
oOooOooOo
Soon afterwards, a few men, including the evil one, as she named him, came near the place she chose to rest until all those souls had left. At first, she thought they'd pass silently, but they stayed. She pushed a few tendrils out of the air, and was greeted by a circle of humans, the evil one in the middle, apparently waiting for something to happen or someone to arrive. Well, they didn't greet her, they didn't even notice the brambles that were all around them now, eager for the foreseen event to happen, nor did they notice the very small shift of the ground as the thousands of brambles waited patiently only centimeters beneath the earth, eager to feel anything.
A boy approached, a little lanky, probably about 18 years old, and she felt the purest, most genuine soul of all she ever encountered, and she felt ethereal beings around him, invisible and hard to get a hold on, like cobwebs, yet extremely sticking, like cobwebs. They reminded her of ghosts, but these souls were bond to the boy's soul and definitively summoned back into existence from wherever souls went after their bodies died. Hers, obviously, had never left.
Thinking about this, she missed all the talk, only saw how the boy, seemingly, was killed. The soul indeed left the body, but like a split soul's pieces in horcruxes had a tie to the origin piece staying in the body, his soul and body were still connected somehow. The evil one also fell to the ground, and yet another horcrux tie seemed to be destroyed. The boy's soul had obviously been one, and now both of them left into the afterlife. But the good one's soul would come back eventually, unless he decided to stay, whilst the evil one's soul piece was lost forever.
The evil one collapsed, the wand left his hands, and her tendrils approached his back that was pressed against the earth. Shocked murmurs rose from the persons around as the evil one fell, whilst thorny tendrils, invisible to them made their way into his heart, or at least her willpower did, taking yet another piece – the feeling one, and only left madness inside the shell. With this important piece of soul, carefully held in the brambles that contained it, she made her way to the school she'd been dreading for so long, her old home when she was human.
'Fate has its ways', she thought as she crawled beneath the gates, and reappeared back on the campus she hadn't seen for such a long time. Knowing she was invulnerable, she was nearly unaware of the battle raging around her, and looked around for a dead body. When she found a corpse fitting the purpose – a red-haired guy, with freckles and dirty, worn-off clothing, open and glass eyes, she took him and transported the corpse into the core of the woods, a place infiltrated with her power, and placed him, patiently waiting, hovering over the body all warmth had left already.
Her patient wait was rewarded, for the evil one died, she sensed it, and she held the last piece of his mind, the only part that had been good and human about him, and put it into the dead body, praying it was enough and he would wake up. When his beautiful eyes, which she had closed, fluttered open, they weren't those of the corpses. No, the boy in front of her was slowly transforming into the boy she'd met so many years ago, and only now she realized that she had missed him. That she needed him.
A person, the good one, appeared somewhere in the forest. He Held something that shone like the sun to her, and threw it into the brambles which immediatly icked it up and brought it to their Queen, the Queen of thorns. She instantly felt the powers inside of the Stone and knew just what to do with this reviving energy, whose life to secure into another thorny plant with beautiful blossoms.
oOooOooOo
The dead born flowers in her brambles would soon mix up with dead-born bougainvillea, the dried rose flower stems would mix up with the spiky, thinner and woodier stems of bougainvillea, and the smaller thorns of the latter would mingle with the larger thorns of the former, as both Tom and Annabelle spent life in eternity, no longer alone.
oOooOooOo
A/N: My very first and probably last one-shot, and admittedly, a spur-of-the-moment-thingy. I don't really know how to explain, i just thought that the Forbidden Forest holds so many creatures, the place could've easily been home of a cursed, split soul. I decided she was probably a pureblood, and making horcruxes was a family's knowledge. Anyway, let me know what you think ^.^ I don't need it to update - this will stay a one-shot even though I might write a fanfiction containing a very similar character sometimes in the future - but it would be nice to know what you think of it :)