'She walks in beauty, like the night...' Lord Byron
His father had told him that if he didn't like her it was all right, and Viktor clung to it as he walked through the Floo, helping Mother as she stepped out, dusting soot from his tunic, afraid to look up.
Finally he did, and saw her, and the world, which had been going on much as it always did, stopped entirely. There was nothing in it but her, and she was so beautiful it hurt, so beautiful that a kind of brilliant numbness stole over everything and held it in a perfect embrace for what seemed like an eternity of seconds.
Her eyes, he thought, stuck in place like a bug in amber. Her eyes were as soft as a dog's, big and brown and kind. She would never be interested in him. He knew it with religious fervour, with certainty as hard as diamonds.
Then she smiled at him. 'Do you like books, Mr. Krum?'
His heart started to beat again. He nodded, trying to formulate something to say to her, this girl he could feel himself liking already.
'I-ah-you speak Bulgarian?'
By the time she took him to see the library, he knew something else; that this was how the world ends, drowning and wanting to.