A Song Of Hope And Sorrows
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter names, characters and locations belong to J.K. Rowling. I own nothing that you recognize.
Written for Amber's Weekly Drabble competition, week 2
Difficulty level: easy / write about a canon Ravenclaw. No other restrictions.
A/N: This is just a little thing written for my mother. I saw the prompt and immediately thought of her.
They say that you're supposed to celebrate death and cry at birth, because the world is cruel and unforgiving, and those who enter are faced with the many struggles of existence. Death is a release, an escape from the shackles of humanity. But what about those who are forced to stay behind?
Those who carry on must find other means of existence. Some of them choose to linger on the edge, embracing the finality of life. This was the path chosen by little Luna Lovegood, not because she was strange or unusual, but because she could see the truth and had chosen to accept it.
She learned to walk in silence, hoofbeats following footsteps, erasing her doubt, obliterating her fear. In the twilight she reached out, and felt the cold emanating from its leathery wings, running her fingers along the groves in its spine.
She became a walker in between, seeing the thestral's blank stare as an echo of eternity. In time she would gather her mother's belongings, her father lifting her up and helping her hang the photographs on the wall. But her memories were always brighter, sharper and more well defined, when gazing into the lifeless eyes of a thestral.
Those eyes were a reflection of the many things she felt: happiness when she and her mother went on a picnic, sadness when she sat beside the bed, holding her dying mother's hand.
In the end she realized that we are all accompanied by a shadow of death. Not everyone will see it, not everyone will acknowledge its presence, or greet it like an old friend at the end of a long journey.
Rather than brushing it aside, Luna Lovegood found comfort in knowing that she wasn't alone, allowing the thestral to lead her down the winding path into the setting sun. From here they would continue on together, until that final moment when she would be reunited with the past.