Written for the Ultimate Battle! Competition, with the prompt "Write about one of Lamia's OCs."
Temperance, also known as Lilith, is completely the property of the lovely Lamia of the Dark. Find her in stories such as "Temperance," "With Me, Into the Dark," and "In Memoriam."
The day of her trial, Alastor excuses himself from the Auror Hall of the Ministry and rides the lift down, down, down to the rooms in which the judges shall sentence her, he knows, to Azkaban.
He does not quite know what has compelled him to come. He knows the outcome already. Temperance – Lilith is her true name, but he will always know her otherwise – will not deny her lord for the great reward of freedom, and she will waste away, lost and alone, beside her demented mentors and twisted friends. Still, the trial has drawn him to itself; perhaps his hour will be wasted, and yet Alastor cannot find it in himself to mind.
Temperance is gaunt as she is beautiful, folded into herself on the room's only chair, ashen hair and pale skin providing a stark contrast to the dull, dark stone of the walls and the judges' black satin robes. Her fate has not yet become her. A deck of cards emerges from her pocket as she draws her hand from it, and she selects three, revealing the faces of each one. Alastor suspects that she has already known the prediction of the chosen cards – and yet her reaction to them unnerves him. He watches her expressions changing like clockwork: first confusion, then repulsion, and finally a steady, resigned glare at the judges sitting upon their black wooden benches.
She will never be free from the judges, but moreso, she will never be free from the cards.