I: Machiavellianism.

The Slytherin Dormitories were a labyrinthine complex of converted dungeon cells that were undivided by age but separated by gender. Although most former cells had been cobbled together and knocked through to accommodate vulgar green four-poster beds, the spaces still felt slightly claustrophobic and dim; despite, in some cases, the students' attempts to liven them up. Seneca's section was one of the more desirable of the dormitory spaces, which she was grateful for.

Her belongings were neatly formatted and arranged. Her possessions were modest and numbered; she'd never liked to be excessive. She kept her standard issue four-poster bed made basically; as she hated the way the house elves folded and plumped it so ostentatiously.

On the mahogany surface of her dark-wood bedside table, three bound books were stacked neatly on the lateral nearest the bed: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was the first; stacked on top of it, was Perfume by Patrick Süskind and finally, on top of that, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Other than this tryptic of novellas, which Seneca read over and over as if they shared the same paracosmic continuity, no possessions disturbed the minimalism of the unattractive and densely dark nightstand.

A leather-bound trunk containing a violin, her potions making equipment and her makeup and vanity set lay directly beneath her headboard, under the distasteful green four-poster bed. Next to it, her Nimbus 2001 gathered a layer of dust. She was a Beater and played socially with some of her friends but never made the cut for the Slytherin Quidditch Team; the line she'd usually hear was: 'you've got more of a Seeker's build' and the positions would go to some brawny set of well-built aggressive idiots. After a few years of disappointing try-outs, she'd decided to give up, but still found herself attending them annually anyway. Never being accepted, she only rarely played. With her NEWT exams approaching, however, she'd been struggling to find the time.

Across from Seneca's side of the room, another girl, Valeria Sayre, shared. Her end of the room was messier and more chaotic, with a moving Weird Sisters poster and a charmed Ballycastle Bats Quidditch team banner, along with several bewitched polaroid photos of her and her family. Clothes lay in a little mound on the floor next to her bed and the air smelled a slightly stale. Valeria was a plainer girl than Seneca with dirty blond hair and a peachy complexion, her features weren't particularly defined and her personality fitted the 'Slytherin Bitch' stereotype the other houses had invented.

Seneca sat on her bed. She was staring listlessly at Advanced Potion-Making by Libatius Borage and her eyes were struggling to focus on the 24-inch essay she had to write for Professor Slughorn on the alchemical properties of something or other. Her thoughts blurred in her head, she felt vulnerable and unprepared. The image of Saccharine's squirming tattoo writhed in her mind, as it had on his arm. The Dark Mark just seemed so permanent to her; before she'd always felt that she could opt out if she got a fright. But she'd played her part well, so far.

Befriending the Malfoy boy in the year below had been a matter of pandering to his inflated ego and wearing her school shirts a size too small. He was an idiot, plain and simple. She'd let him treat her to a clumsy and pretend sticky fumbling in a girl's bathroom stall, tampering with his sexuality and had made all the appropriate comments after. She stroked his ego almost as indelicately as he'd stroked her in those five minutes of indecency that she spent sexually underwhelmed and holding up her pleated Madam Malkin's school skirt. Draco's sweaty palm had cupped unsubtly between her white thighs, his inexperienced, bony fingers occasionally moving up to treat her clitoris like a fat lip that could burst. She'd had to guide his humid hand with her own after a minute of this.

She'd then spent a few more minutes using her practiced and steady middle and ring fingers to make the come-here movement inside of herself, while her left hand wrapped around Draco's skinny wrist; urging him to clumsily embellish her self-pleasure with sporadic, jabbing clitoral stimulation, which did more to hinder than help. When Seneca had finally reached an orgasm, she made a show of it; utilising a fake cooing voice, which she praised Draco generically with. She then rewarded him by taking her purple nail-varnished fingers in her mouth and sucking off the briny lubricant that glistened on it, swallowing and making a soft and breathy suspiration noise that she copied from a pornographic film, much to his wide-eyed adolescent delight.

Afterwards, she'd simply pulled up her light grey underwear, kissed him on a hard cheekbone and gone to Defence Against the Dark Arts in accordance to her timetable; leaving him without mutual sexual gratification in the female bathroom stall. He'd been keenly trying to assert himself as a brooding and mysterious viable contender for her approval and affection, slowly revealing himself as connected to the Death Eaters by more than just blood through childish, drawling boasts and gloats.

She maintained her image in his eyes as an equally mysterious older girl who was tameable only by his vastly superior character. This she decided on in the following period; sitting cross-legged to comfort her usual post-coital throbbing in her blister-like clitoris. Draco's valetudinarian hypochondriac's nature contrasted with her own personality, which had made this difficult, however, not impossible.

Despite the irritation that Draco was to her, he had led her to Nott, Goyle and Crabbe—who'd turned out to be a waste of her time; they were sympathisers of the Dark Lord but kept themselves out of the affairs of their parents. Then he'd introduced her to Saccharine, who was the crucial last link. That greasy, red-lipped creep of a Prefect had gotten her directly noticed the circle of Death Eaters that were responsible for recruiting, or so she'd hoped, anyway. It all came down to what would happen tonight.

Up until now, it had been a game to her; be Snape's little senseless apprentice; a loose cannon, a kid on the edge with nothing to lose, spying and coercing into the circles of potential Death Eater children at Hogwarts. But now, the vision of the Dark Mark curling on Saccharine's arm in her mind's eye, she was scared. She was realising that as of midnight tonight, a much more serious commitment was going to have to be made.

But for what? A voice whispered in her brain, a nagging splinter too deep for her to pull out with the metaphorical tweezers of her half-hearted oath to Snape. Why are you doing this? Snape couldn't give a shit about you. You're his plaything. You're expendable. If an Auror catches you, they'll kill you or lock you in Azkaban. Snape will just find another pretty Slytherin. He'll want you to go further next time. He'll make you a killer. Then the Order, if they even exist, won't want you and you'll be on your own.

The thought of death terrified her, Azkaban was worse. She still remembered her fourth year when Sirius Black had been on the loose and Dementors had been stationed in the Hogwarts Grounds. The eerie way they floated like black-shrouded and drowned bodies against a permeant gunmetal sky had petrified her. To think of them touching her made her feel an itch all over her body. They filled her with a nihilism and depression that she'd never naturally experienced. When she saw them, she saw only her father's belt hanging over her child self, dark memories of her childhood that filled her with despair.

She knew that she needed a distraction, it was best to play this by ear, she thought. She reached under her bed for her trunk, pushing aside her dusty Nimbus 2001 to pull her heavy leather-bound case from its hiding place. She opened it.

Inside lay her violin and its bow, which she removed gently. Not unlike her Quidditch playing, her tendency to practice had fallen out of habit, however this had happened far before her Quidditch playing had been put on hold. Seneca plucked at the strings; the instrument proved to be wildly out of tune so she tuned it from memory, humming the D, G, A and E notes softly as a reference. She took the bow in her hand and treated it with a bar of greasy rosin that she kept next to the violin in a polished, mahogany box. Now lubricated properly, Seneca drew the bow over the D string and added vibrato with her other hand. The sound brought back a memory that she hadn't wanted to revisit as she progressed slowly into her best efforts at a half-remembered Bach's Chaconne.

Seneca was taken back to her first year at Hogwarts. 1990. She remembered befriending a girl on the Hogwarts Express whose name was Dolores Urquhart. Seneca had liked Dolores almost upon meeting her, back then Dolores had been a dark-eyed girl with two mousey-brown French plaits and pinkish cheeks who was interested in jinxes and had told Seneca all about them. They'd both used their newly acquired wands to try and cast some made-up ones on some Chocolate Frogs that Dolores had bought. Seneca had told Dolores about her mother being a Ravenclaw student and, to her delight, Dolores had said that her mother had also been one, while her father had been in Slytherin. Seneca embarrassedly told Dolores that her father wasn't a wizard, which had made her wrinkle her nose.

Dolores had gone on to say that houses tended to run in the family, which meant they'd be able to see each other a lot if they were both sorted how they should be. In Seneca's juvenile excitement she'd jumped at the opportunity of a friend in the dauntingly new and intimidatingly strange wizarding world. Just as Dolores had predicted, they'd both been sorted into the same house, the Sorting Hat taking only a second to decide. However, as the ceremony went in alphabetical order, Seneca was sorted first and into Slytherin, much to her confusion. Dolores looked equally perplexed as they had exchanged a furtive glance while she walked uncertainly to the Slytherin House table. To Seneca's glee however, Dolores was also sorted into Slytherin and all was forgotten; Dolores putting it down to Seneca's mother and saying that 'cunning was very close to cleverness' as they shook hands with their housemates over supper.

Elated, the two eleven-year-old girls had chatted excitedly as they followed their Prefect down into their new Common Room. Once finally alone together in the adjoining dormitories, Seneca had said she wanted to show Dolores something special and had opened her new and heavy leather-bound case to produce her violin which she began to play. She'd mainly improvised and tried to express how excited she was, a few mistakes punctuated her ballad but she worked with them and progressed naturally, integrating them carefully into the song as to hide them. Seneca remembered how she played until the tips of her fingers were numb and she had to stop. She remembered looking up at Dolores, grinning, whose indifferent face showed no appreciation.

'Did your muggle father teach you that?' She'd asked, laughing. Seneca had been taken aback. Picking up her new long-pointed wand, Dolores flicked it at the violin in Seneca's numb hands. 'Specisus sonus auribus.' She'd recited eloquently and the violin jumped into life, playing itself far more beautifully than Seneca could ever have hoped to play it. 'This is what my father taught me.' Tears had stung in her eyes then as she looked at Dolores Urquhart's face; that sneer of cold command as if lifted from Shelly's Ozymandias as she'd listened to the perfect and mournful bars of the superior violin song. 'Why don't you just use a wand?' Dolores had giggled over the din of unblemished, constant vibrato, as if using a spell had been the most straightforward answer to a desire for music. Seneca's father's years of careful lessons had been made completely redundant by Dolores' one, simple incantation. It was then that the eleven-year-old Seneca had cried, letting go of the violin which stayed fixed in the air, playing a beautifully slow piece, that Seneca would have taken years to perfect by muggle means, as if to be parodic soundtrack for her redundancy. Dolores had become bored with Seneca and had walked off as she sobbed, as if their whole day of budding friendship had been a meaningless exchange of pleasantries at a social function. The violin didn't stop playing without error until Seneca had gone and found a Prefect who came into her dormitory to disenchant it. After that, all Seneca had wanted to do was go home and not be sitting in a cold, dungeon room in a world that had no need for her and her unnecessary non-magical skills. She remembered getting angry and smashing her newly unpacked VHS tapes on the hard stone floor. What was she going to watch them on anyway? Presently, Seneca's violin playing mirrored the notes she recalled from that unhappy first night at Hogwarts. Now more upset, Seneca replaced the violin back in her dusty trunk. She altered the position of her potions-making kit to better accommodate the violin and her hand brushed against something that lay underneath it. She pushed the kit aside to see what it was. Not recognising the item, she drew it out of the trunk. It was a shallow lidded Tupperware container straight out of a 1980s-muggle kitchen. She undid the kitsch synthetic clasps and opened it. Inside lay a pile of broken black plastic shards which were interspersed with spools of videotape. On top of these, an art-gallery postcard of a Degas ballerina lay. She turned it over in her pale hands. On the other side, a message was written in a harshly slanted black font.

Seneca,

I know that you're going to be difficult about this so I'm letting you know now that I will not be reading your reply to this letter. You won't be coming back to London this Christmas. I'm afraid that I've got a lot of work coming up and I'd prefer not to have to look after you. Please notify your housemaster that you won't be leaving school. I will see you at the end of the year. I trust you can make your way home by yourself. Do not let your violin playing slip, you have been progressing recently.

The postcard made Seneca feel a lump form in her oesophagus. A tight choking

feeling was forming that came with wanting to cry. Her father's briefness had made her lip tremble then as it did now.

Her mother had died before Seneca could was old enough to remember her face. But her muggle father had always said that Seneca was identical to her, which had made her feel unsettled, like she couldn't be her own person and was only a manifestation of her mother's memory. A ghost. Because her father had been so in love with her mother, every time he'd pointed out how alike they looked and how 'proper' and 'grown up' Seneca looked, commenting indirectly and perhaps unintentionally on her budding breasts and painted lips, she couldn't help but wonder if her father was also attracted to her, which made her feel uncomfortable.

Maybe that's why you never want to see me.

Perhaps it was because he couldn't stand the torment of her mother's shade maturing into the mirror of her mother's body, so well mapped and known by him—seen in such private contexts. Maybe he harboured a perversion that he could not help. How vicious it must seem for his most loved and mourned to appear before him again: the same posture, mannerisms, habits, voice, body, breasts, back and nape. But she was a fruit of a tree that's seed he had sown himself; and thus, could not ever pluck and eat. Instead, he would have to endure watching it being eaten by some undeserving other or wilt and die and fall from the branch of its own design. The longing he would feel would be so shameful. But these thoughts disturbed Seneca deeply and she reassured herself in the ambiguity of her purposefully under-thought guesswork.

She hadn't had the heart to disappoint her father by saying that she'd been sorted into Slytherin. Seneca had lied and told him she was a Ravenclaw until her father had found her Slytherin uniform neatly folded in her trunk when she'd been away from home. When she returned to their generous and lonely London home, she'd cried and apologised only for him to taker his belt to the backs of her twelve-year-old legs for lying. Seneca could remember seeing the disappointment in his eyes shift to anger. She wondered if he was disappointed and angry because she'd lied or because she had broken the immersion of his fantasy that she was a perfect replica of his poor, lost bride.

Seneca dropped the letter onto the floor, a few unwanted tears blurring her sight a little. She drew her wand; a long and thin ebony shaft, adorned with very delicate carved runes. The dragon heartstring core seemed to almost hum with her emotion.

'Incendio.' She cast, her voice cracking and the postcard caught fire. The ballerina on the cover curled as the flames consumed it. The brief fire flickering out as soon as the flames had reduced the postcard to charred grey flakes. She looked back at the raped Tupperware that lay open on the side of her bed; the mound of smashed black plastic and videotape lay there still. She remembered now, that the box had housed the lunch she'd made for her first journey to Hogwarts. And the smashed VHS tapes were the pile of broken plastic and film, from after she'd shattered them on her first night. Now she sat with her wand in her hand, the violin by her feet and the destroyed videos on her left. All things that reminded her that she had no one; she was a half-breed prostituting her sexuality for passage into a world and an organisation that meant nothing to her. She had been under the illusion that Snape had been grooming her for his apprentice because she stood out; because she was special. Now she saw what Snape must have seen: a lonely girl with no family that mattered, no friends that would go to any measures for her, no morals, no self-respect and a talent for holding onto anything that made her feel like she had a meaning. This time her stinging eyes gave way and she wept out of repressed self-hatred and the realisation that she was alone. Salted tears streamed down her made-up face, smearing her makeup so it ran together and came away in her hands, ruining yet another of her things.