It was midnight and Dorcas was alone in her room. She was tired and starting to get annoyed. After staring at the book for an hour, she wanted to give up.
This didn't make any sense. No rhyme, no reason. The letters had always come clear to her, always. She couldn't remember a time when she couldn't read, and now the letters were running away from her. As soon as she could read a word it ran away, dissolved. Like a game of hide-and-go-seek which she couldn't win.
"Stop!" she whispered tensely. "Stop!"
Dorcas stabbed her wand onto the page and venomously uttered the strongest freezing spell she knew. The letters froze for a fraction of a second and then, all at once, dripped off the side of the paper, leaving her with nothing but a blank yellowed page
Her fingers hastily danced over the paper, trying to dig the letters out again, and when that didn't work she started flipping the pages. Ripping at the corners she chased the black figures, which always ran just out of her reach. When she reached the last page, they started running the other way through the book.
"No! Come back here!"
Grabbing each cover in her hands, Dorcas picked up the book and shook it upside down viciously. It slipped and fell on the ground, slamming shut.
What is wrong with me? Dorcas wondered. It's only a book. That's all. A magical book, but at its heart, only a book..
She crouched down to touch the cover and traced over the faded golden symbols just visible on the black cover, and blood oozed into the cloth. Dorcas turned her hands over and realized all of her fingertips were bleeding. Drawing a sharp intake of breath she pressed her hands into her robes to staunch the flow of blood, and looked away as her white nightgown turned dark red.
She needed a spell. She could handle this. Blood dripped down her legs. A moment of panic had caught her off guard and she racked her brain for the healing spell. The spell. She knew it. She grappled for the wand she'd dropped a minute before and dropped it again, its handle wet.
Calm down. You're not going to die of a few paper cuts.
"M-medeorus!" she stuttered, the spell coming back to her in a flash. "Please," she added, whispering. Though she told herself otherwise, this could be bad, very bad. The bleeding might not stop, her skin might keep ripping and shredding until it dissolved. She'd heard of these things happening, horror stories told in the first year dormitories – your arm would disappear layer by layer until the bones fell to the ground. She squeezed her eyes shut and let a moment pass.
Dorcas wiped her fingers and looked at them. The skin had healed, but she could see traces of the injuries. A single red scar, looking very much like a normal paper cut, marked each finger. On her left ring finger there were two. She shivered: eleven scars.
Breathing rapidly she changed her nightdress hurriedly, turned off her light and walked to the bed, burying herself in the covers.
Besides stuffing it into a bag, Dorcas didn't look at the book again until a week later, when Regulus noticed that the gold writing on the front had resolved into spiky, spindly letters:
HORCRUCIOUS
It took her another week to notice there was no longer a bloodstain.