Land of Confusion
It's funny how many wizards couldn't decide between taking side with either the Ministry or the Dark Lord. The former was incompetent and the latter, too competent.
As the war was waging on between the different parties, I was wandering around the country in my moving castle. One conversation I had with a young kid didn't really mark me at the time but when I look back at it in my pensieve, our little chat disturbed me just a little.
The boy had come on an errand for his single mother who could not spare the time to come see me in person. The potion she wanted needed to sit for a good hour before being bottled so I gave him some sweets and we waited on my front porch, enjoying the cool breeze of the afternoon.
I was slouching on the stairs. The brown-haired boy with the striking black eyes—one of the reasons I remembered him—was sitting cross-legged on the grass and fiddling with a long-stemmed pink tulip.
"Hey, don't pull too hard on the stem, you'll break it," I warned him. Nature, I discovered in my later years, was precious—especially the sort I had to coax into growing. "You know, it took me almost three years to get my tulips that size?"
The kid grinned sheepishly. "I'm sorry, Mr. Harry, I wasn't trying to crush it," the boy said. "I was just wondering what the flower was thinking."
"Think you're some kind of plant mind-reader, don't you, kid?" I chuckled him. "That could be potentially useful."
"Oh it is," the boy said. "The plants tell me things."
"Really?" I humored him while silently chuckling at the depth of children's imagination. "What do they say to you? Gossip? News?"
"Plants will tell me if the ground's been poisoned," the boy said. "Or they just tell me if a fruit is ripe."
He looked at me, completely serious and said: "Sometimes, the grass shivers when it senses bad people approaching."
"I see, and do the trees send ripples in their leaves just before a big storm?" I said, joining his story.
"Oh no, Mr. Harry, the trees aren't strong enough for that!" exclaimed the boy. "They say that the ground is so sick that they cannot bear fruit or grow leaves anymore."
I was being lulled away by the cool breeze.
"Mmm, and why's that?" I asked, almost sleepily. "Is the ground too dry?"
The boy raised his head and looked straight into my eyes, his brilliant ebony eyes meeting my half-closed green ones. "The trees, they—" he looked around him. "The trees say that the ground is soaked in blood!"
"Just one tree?"
"All of them, Mr. Harry," the boy said, his eyes wide. "They say that their roots are drowning in terrible terrible crimson liquid."
I almost laughed at this. Imagine, trees complaining about the bloodshed occurring between the different parties of the war.
The boy brushed against the tulip once again. The tulip turned a black color.
"You see, Mr. Harry, flowers don't like what's happening either," he said.
I was too startled by the black tulip to pay attention to what the boy was saying. I got up and kneeled in front of the black flower.
"Amazing! Did you just do that, kid?" I asked. It was truly amazing. Even spells couldn't have colored the tulip that way.
"No," the boy said. "That's nature acting."
I didn't hear a word he said, busy as I was trying to harvest the unique tulip. I was already trying to think of the new avenues I could explore with the black tulip's properties. Magically enhanced flowers were difficult to come by as most didn't survive the transformation in order to be used in potions.
I glanced once more at the tulip and headed inside. I bottled the boy's potion and handed it to him.
"How much, Mr. Harry?" the boy asked.
"Free of charge," I said waving my hand at him, my mind completely taken over by the black tulip. "I've never seen anything like this!"
The boy just smiled and left a galleon on the stairs.
"Do something about the war, ok, Mr. Harry?" he said as he headed towards the road that led to the village.
"Mm?" I continued to poke at the flower, completely absorbed in the discovery of a new plant. "Wait, I want to ask you how you changed the tulip."
But the boy was already gone.
When I went into the village the next day and asked about the boy with the brilliant black eyes, I was told there was no such boy. I then asked about a single mother and her boy and was told that the youngest boy was around was sixteen.
Astounded, I just trotted back to my moving castle. The boy might not have lived in the village.
To this day, I still believe that the boy was an apparition, a physical manifestation of what we know as Death. He was warning me. Me, who had the power and the influence to do something in the war.
I still have the black tulip. I couldn't cut it up, neither could I harvest it. It lies there, never fading, waiting for its master to claim it once again. And when the master comes, I'll know it'll also be my time to go too.
But for now, I try to do what I can to stop this bloody war in this not quite god-forsaken world.
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