AN: This chapter contains a mentioned miscarriage - it doesn't happen on screen.
As the May days grew hotter and longer, Luna lived more and more in her mind. She was now adept at controlling the direction, current, and pace of her thoughts, conjuring waves and drowning inconvenient feelings and memories as she saw fit. In fact, the more tumultuous and unpleasant her life, the easier Luna found it to surround herself in memories both real and imagined. She fabricated dozens of memories with her father, stitching together her conversations with Ginny about the Elder Wand, her walks with Andromeda, and her birthday trip to the Bryn Gwyn standing stones until she had a veritable catalog of moments she wished she and Xenophilius had experienced together. Eventually she became so skilled at tucking the inconvenient incongruities neatly away and suppressing the original memories from which she had stolen details that the seams hardly showed at all. Sometimes Luna herself forgot which of the memories were rooted in reality and which were born of her own yearning.
Mastering Occlumency proved to be a welcome distraction from the chaos of the Circle. It was unnerving witnessing worlds colliding: seeing Professor McGonagall, Cressida, Eudora, and the others in the same room as Bellatrix Lestrange, talking about Occlumency with Narcissa Malfoy moments before working in the laboratory with Ginny or weaving with her mother. Luna had worked very hard to keep these spheres of her life, these different versions of herself, separate. But now they were colliding; they needed to collide. Everything depended on it.
When it all got to be a bit much, it was a blessed relief to steady her breathing, close her eyes, and slip into a corner of her mind where there was peace and quiet, the smell of freshly-turned soil, a platter of steaming hot pasties, her father's company, and no one asking her opinion about anything at all. The closest Luna could get to this imagined paradise was when she stole a pasty from the kitchen, Flooed to the Rook, threw open the windows, and sat among her father's books. She liked to look over his research notes and use his old typewriter to write ciphered letters to Aberforth, Gwenog, and Draco.
She was doing just this one day in late May, alternating between writing a letter and skimming an old book about bilingnum wands, which were made out of two types of wood. Then the B key of the typewriter came off in her hand with a magnificent popping noise. Luna sighed and pressed it back into place. Like clockwork, the L key came shooting off of the keyboard, apparently of its own volition, as Luna had not touched it.
"Bloody hell," Luna swore as she crawled on her hands and knees in search of the rogue key.
By the time she found it, the machine was smoking. And despite her best efforts to secure the keys in place on the keyboard, they would not stay put. The typewriter kept biting her fingers and sending worryingly bent pieces of metal richoteting around the room.
"I'm trying to help you, you stupid thing!" But it only sputtered, emitted blue sparks, and finally fell menacingly silent.
"No, no! Come on, come on, come on," Luna muttered, slapping it like she had seen her father do hundreds of times. Nothing happened.
She had known this day was coming; the tempestuous typewriter had been on its last leg for months. Luna prodded it with her wand for a few minutes, but her heart wasn't truly in it, for she knew its days as a functional typewriter were over. Tears welled in Luna's eyes and before she could suppress or numb it with one of Narcissa's Occlumency tricks, she was overwhelmed with grief.
Luna wept until her chest hurt and she struggled to breathe. Xenophilius's office suddenly felt claustrophobic, full of books he would never read again and a typewriter that would never clack again and stacks of half-finished articles and notes he would never work on again. She fumbled to the fireplace and chucked in enough Floo Powder for the entire Wizengamot.
Luna's lungs were still burning when she emerged coughing and sputtering into the laboratory at the Circle, one of the busted typewriter keys clutched in her fist. Hot, sticky tears clung to Luna's eyelashes and she was sure her face must be horribly red and puffy. She collapsed on the nearest bench and buried her head in her hands, resigned to a good, long cry until she could compose herself.
A sharp scraping noise pierced the silence and Luna jumped and flushed at the realization that she was not alone. Someone was seated at one of the workbenches nearby. Whoever it was had clearly been hoping to sneak out of the room unnoticed, but had been foiled by the creaky old wood of the benches.
"Who's there?" Luna asked as she wiped away her tears and squinted into the dim room, "Listen, please don't tell the others."
"I don't think you have to worry about that," Bellatrix said.
"Oh, it's you."
The woman pursed her lips and made a disdainful humming sound. Luna wondered if Bellatrix was annoyed because she had not been told there was a Floo-enabled fireplace at the Circle. It was technically illegal, a closed network that only linked the Circle to the Rook and the Burrow. But Bellatrix could have used it to escape all the same, so they all had an unspoken agreement not to mention its existence in her presence.
"Sorry, that probably sounded rude. It's just my dad's…" Luna dissolved into tears before she could finish her sentence.
"I'll fetch your mother, shall I?" Bellatrix made to stand. Luna winced again at the ungodly sound the bench made scraping against the flagstone floor.
"No! No, please don't. It would just upset her for no reason. It's silly, really. It's just my dad's typewriter broke and it's sort of the last thing I have of his. He's had it for as long as I can remember and it's always been half-broken but now it's broken for real." Luna let the typewriter key fall to the table and began fiddling with it, turning it round and round with her finger like a top.
"Ah," Bellatrix would not look her niece directly in the eye. Her eyes darted about the room as if looking for another way out.
"I know it's silly," Luna repeated, "I just really, really miss him." The tears came again, quieter this time.
Bellatrix said nothing.
"You can go if you want. Just please don't tell my mum or the others."
Bellatrix was still silent, but stood up again and kept rocking the bench back and forth.
"Trust me, it's for your own good. Mum thinks your lot killed my dad. If you mention him in front of her, she'll go for your throat. Or worse."
"Ha!" Bellatrix barked, "What would the Dark Lord want with him ?'"
Luna had no idea why she found the derision in her aunt's voice so deeply offensive, but she did. Soon she was blubbering again, but this time they were angry tears, hot and acidic in the back of her throat.
"Daddy wasn't...he wasn't nothing ," she snapped.
"I didn't say he was." Bellatrix cocked her head to one side. Why wasn't she leaving? Even worse, she dragged the bench back out and sat down again. Luna had never felt quite at ease in Bellatrix's presence, much as she pretended to be whimsical and unruffled. It was only because of Luna's word that the Death Eaters were tolerated at all, and she felt some responsibility to extend an olive branch. So she dutifully sat next to Bellatrix at meals and occasionally gave her one-on-one tutelage in the basics of blood magic. It was difficult not to find her aunt's intense attention and interest in blood magic flattering and a little endearing, but it was unnerving all the same.
"You're lucky to have a father worth missing, you know. When mine died, it was a relief. I'm sure your mother's told you." Bellatrix observed, gazing determinedly at a flask of dark liquid on the table in front of her. Luna noticed that her voice had the same light, carefully casual tone as Cressida's on the rare occasion her mother reminisced about her childhood.
"She's only told me a little," Luna sniffled, "I'm - I'm sorry, it sounds so awful."
"Bah," Bellatrix waved away her niece's sympathy with a flap of her bony hand, "I don't think he looked twice at me, or any of us, after the mediwitch told him we were girls. Hardly the sort of man you wanted to love you, anyway. Our mother on the other hand…" She trailed off. Her hands cupped her belly and tapped a meditative rhythm.
"My dad was wonderful. When I was little, I thought he could move heaven and earth for me. Sometimes I still think that. I keep expecting him to turn up, like through sheer force of will he can find his way to me again. He'd...he'd hug me, and tell me he missed me and loved me," Luna closed her eyes. She had attempted to concoct a dozen versions of this memory, but none of them ever rang true. There was usually a soft buzzing noise in the background, and the edges were always blurred, both tell-tale signs of a fabricated memory.
"And he'd ask me how the Deathly Hallows research was going, and I'd have to admit that I've done nothing, I've failed him, his one dream in life and I can't even give him that," Luna croaked, her voice growing higher and throatier the harder she tried not to cry.
"Failed him? Cressida never shuts up about how bloody brilliant you are and all the breakthroughs you're making," Bellatrix said, sounding almost accusatory, as if she suspected Luna was lying or feigning modesty.
"I still haven't managed to craft even one of the Hallows, let alone all three! I've gotten some elder wood for the Wand but finding something for the core is a different story. And decent gemstones for the Resurrection Stone are out of the question, they're just too expensive. Mum's been in charge of the Cloak and at this rate she'll finish it before I make any progress at all with the Wand and Stone. Sometimes I think I should just give up and let her…"
"Too expensive?"
"Yeah, I know it's like a foreign concept to you lot. You see, there's this thing called money, and if you don't have enough of it, you can't buy things."
"Hush, child," her aunt hissed, her hand gravitating to the handle of her wand.
"Er, sorry," Luna said. How could she have forgotten, even for a moment, that she was talking to a murderer? How could she have tried to joke with Bellatrix Lestrange as if she were Ginny or Lavender?
"And what are these expensive supplies anyway?"
"Well, for the Resurrection Stone I need gems with a certain degree of ambient magic, preferably something large so it can be recut to maximize and refract the magical currents. Even crappy onyx and topaz stones are too expensive, let alone opals or diamonds. And all the legends say that Antioch Peverell's elder wand had a core of thestral tail hair. But thestrals are so rare I don't know where I'd find one, let alone be able to afford even one hair."
"Cissy could have gotten all that for you and more. Why didn't you say something? You have been told that we have money? Money, you know what money means?" Bellatrix adopted a sickly sweet tone, as if speaking to a toddler. She narrowed her dark eyes. Two could play at that game, she seemed to be saying.
"Y-yes, I know what money is," Luna stammered.
"Well, then." Her aunt shrugged and stood again. Her movements were always jerky and abrupt, like a feral cat.
"Wait, does that mean you'll get all that stuff for me? I...I don't know what to say."
"I think expressing thanks is usually customary." Bellatrix said.
"Yes, yes! Thank you! It will make such a difference, you have no idea…"
"Mm," the pregnant woman said as she began to tidy the bottles and jars scattered in front of her. Apparently she judged the conversation to be over, because she acted as if her niece was no longer there. Luna noticed the clutter on the workbench for the first time as she watched her aunt at work. There were dozens of containers of every size and shape; some resembled odd alchemical devices while others looked like they might have once held luxury perfume, butterbeer, and Morgana knew what else. Each held a small quantity of what looked like blood. Bellatrix handled them carefully as she bundled them away into a bag.
"That isn't all your blood, is it?"
Silence, not even a shrug.
"That can't be good for the baby, collecting that much blood! And what do you even need that much blood for, anyway?"
Bellatrix was already gone, the door blowing quietly shut behind her. The only evidence of her presence was a slight disturbance in the air.
Luna watched Bellatrix closely after that. Her aunt only seemed to take a moderate amount of her own blood, and her scars did not look particularly worrying. But based on the sheer quantity of blood Luna had seen in bottles in the laboratory, she suspected that her aunt must be letting more of her own blood in secret, perhaps from her legs or somewhere where the scars were not so noticeable.
Luna reasoned that perhaps if her aunt could observe others practicing blood magic, her curiosity could be sated without having to spill so much of her own blood and by extension, the child's. So she convinced the others to allow Bellatrix to attend circle meetings. The others at the Circle continued to ignore her, but Bellatrix did not seem to mind. She usually sat at the back and watched the proceedings in silence. Occasionally she asked a question, and she always volunteered to stay afterwards to clean the cauldrons and tidy away the materials.
It was an odd state of affairs, but ultimately tolerable. They might have continued with that uneasy arrangement for quite some time, except that a few weeks after arriving at the Circle of Peloresow, Bellatrix lost her child.
Luna had not quite believed her aunt that day in the laboratory when Bellatrix claimed she had never mourned anyone before. But in the aftermath of her loss, it was clear that Bellatrix was telling the truth: she did not know how to grieve. She refused all expressions of sympathy and preferred to carry on as if nothing had happened, attending meals and circle meetings like usual. She only acknowledged the pregnancy once, when she demanded some of the blood she had shed during the miscarriage. None of them had the faintest idea why she would want such a thing. The mere thought of using it for some kind of spell or experiment turned Luna's stomach, but they felt obligated to comply with her only request.
So entrenched was her denial that when, a few days after the miscarriage, Bellatrix's breasts began leaking milk, she let it soak unchecked through her robes. The rawness of her tragedy softened her in the eyes of many of the women and girls of the Circle. However, she lashed out so violently at anyone who mentioned the loss that she evidently wished they would all go back to ignoring her. Despite her best efforts to repel their niceties, the others began going out of their way to make her comfortable, leaving hot meals at her bedside and finding excuses to give her flowers or other pretty trinkets. She ignored these offerings, as she seemed to ignore most things that did not interest her.
They all knew that Bellatrix's facade was only skin-deep. At night they could hear her wild keening, like an animal caught in a trap. And her beautiful black hair began to fall out, or perhaps she was ripping it out during her midnight fits. Bellatrix Lestrange was coming apart at the seams, and they could only stand helplessly by and watch whether she would pull herself back from the edge or plummet into the abyss.
Aberforth was asleep when he heard the tapping on his window. At first he thought it was an owl come to deliver the latest issue of The Daily Prophet or The Quibbler, but when he rolled over to fetch his coin purse, he saw that it was three o'clock in the morning. And then he saw that the creature outside his window was not an owl at all, but a cat with peculiar square markings around her eyes.
"Minerva?" he whispered as he opened the window wide enough to admit her. But McGonagall did not come inside; she did not even bother to return to her human form. The cat only dropped a small scrap of parchment she had been carrying in her mouth, twitched her tail at him, and scampered away. The note was written in Minerva's neat, narrow script:
He's found it. Go to him as soon as you can. I'm going to Devon to fetch her.
Aberforth took one of the secret tunnels into the castle, padding along nearly silently in his threadbare bathrobe and worn slippers. Albus must have been pacing just on the other side of the door to the headmaster's office, because the brothers nearly collided when Aberforth came galloping into the room.
"Aberforth? What are you..." Albus said, his voice sounding smaller and younger than Aberforth had heard it in years.
"Where is it? The horcrux?"
"Oh, Aberforth, it's worse than I imagined. I am tempted mightily."
"Tempted? To destroy it?"
"No," Albus's lip trembled, "To use it."
"I don't understand. How would you use a horcrux?"
"It's not only a horcrux. It's a ring, and the stone is the Resurrection Stone. After all these years, Aberforth, I've finally found it. I can bring them back."
"Albus, what have you done? Where is the ring?" His eyes darted around the dimly lit room. Albus's hands were empty and nearly every surface in the office was covered in books, papers, and magical devices. His brother could have secreted the horcrux anywhere at Hogwarts. For all Aberforth knew, Albus had stashed the ring somewhere else entirely, at Gringotts or the old house at Godric's Hollow. The portraits on the wall were watching them, some peering out from half-lidded eyes as they pretended to sleep.
Albus refused to answer, pacing the room in long strides that made the office feel much smaller than it was.
"Albus, remember The Tale of the Three Brothers . You would not truly be bringing them back. It would only be a trace of them. After all these years, let them rest in peace."
"You only want it for yourself! You'd use the Stone to bring Mother and Ariana back, to turn them against me. Just like you always wanted!" Albus sputtered, his pale eyes glinting dark. The muscles in Aberforth's hand twitched, straining towards his wand before he stopped himself.
"You know that's not true."
Albus took a steadying breath, nodded, and slowly backed himself against a bookcase.
"I know. I apologize."
Aberforth shrugged away the apology. He did not want to have to pretend to accept it.
"This is why the ring must be destroyed, and the Stone with it. Just like the Philosopher's Stone. It cannot be allowed to tempt anyone else. Lord Voldemort cannot be allowed to hurt anyone else."
"But the horcruxes are not only objects, Albus. At least not all of them. If what you told me about the Potter boy is true, there are people's lives at stake."
"Yes, I am afraid I now have even more reason to believe that what I suspected is true." Albus reached into his pocket and retrieved the ring, and his brother watched his face contort with curiosity, disgust, admiration, and desperate desire. In that moment, Aberforth saw his brother as both the hopeful young boy who had craved the Hallows more than anything and the care-worn old man who would do anything to defeat Voldemort. Even destroy the Resurrection Stone. Even kill a child.
"Listen to me carefully. If we start destroying the horcruxes, he will do his best to destroy us first, and it's a race we might lose. There is another way. Luna has discovered that the horcruxes can be tempered, perhaps neutralized. If we can turn his own horcruxes against him, we can weaken him. He can stand trial for his crimes, like Gellert. We can all begin to heal."
"W-what?"
"Minerva and I have seen it. The diary is almost unrecognizable. There is another way. Harry doesn't have to die, Albus."
The headmaster sank slowly to the floor, clutching the ring to his chest. His narrow frame was wracked with sobs.
"I have failed. Mother and Ariana and Gellert and now Harry…"
"No, no," Aberforth stooped to give his brother an awkward pat on the shoulder, "You have done everything in your power. You could not have known, none of us could have. But now that we know, we must change our plans accordingly. We must do the right thing, as you say, to prevent even more suffering and bloodshed."
"What do I need to do?"
"Minerva is fetching Luna now. And Harry will need to be told."
Luna stood in her father's office clutching the Resurrection Stone, surrounded by his books and research notes and that goddamn broken typewriter. For one blissful, tortuous moment she untethered all the memories and thoughts she had suppressed for months and allowed them to wash over her. Then Luna wiped her tears away and pushed it all back down again. Memory by memory, she bricked up that part of her mind and built a mental dam that she hoped would challenge even the most adept Legilimens. Luna could not afford to be so overwhelmed by emotions that she could not fully utilize the Stone. She had work to do.
Of course Luna knew that the entire moral of The Tale of the Three Brothers was that the mere existence of the Resurrection Stone was a folly, that it did more harm than good, that it was better to accept death. But she was not doing this because she wanted to see her father again. Or she was not doing this only because she wanted to see her father again, at least. The Hogwarts end of term feast at the end of June was looming large and Luna still had no idea how to put a stop to the Dark Lord and his horcruxes once and for all. Xenophilius knew more about arcane artifacts and obscure magic than anyone she knew; he might hold the key to everything.
Besides, Luna told herself, depending on the sort of magic they needed to perform on the horcrux ring, the Resurrection Stone might be broken beyond repair, reduced to a mundane stone without the power to raise the dead. In the end, despite their best efforts, they might even need to outright destroy it. This might be Luna's last chance to use the Stone.
The Resurrection Stone felt heavy in her hand as Luna turned it over three times. She took a shuddering breath. Then Xenophilius appeared in front of her, in a patch of air where a moment before there had been nothing but a beam of sunlight. Just like Cadmus Peverell's lady love in the story, he was hazy and not quite solid. Luna knew he wouldn't be exactly like he had been in life; it would not really be her father. But a piece of him was there, a bigger piece than she had seen in months, translucent and weeping at the sight of her. He felt wispy and cold to the touch, but at least she could hug him and bury her face in his chest just like when she was a child.
"Daddy," she sobbed, her resolution to remain aloof immediately evaporated.
"My precious girl."
"I miss you," she said, barely able to choke out the words.
"I've missed you, too. Now let me have a look at you." Xenophilius took a step back and cupped his daughter's face in his hands. Luna suppressed a shiver at his icy touch. She would happily freeze to death if it meant she could live in this moment forever.
"Another of those odd white streaks in your hair!" He held a strand of her hair between his fingers.
"I got it when you...when I found out you had…"
"Ah," he stroked the top of her head, "Well, I think it suits you. One could even say it makes you look more like your old man!"
"I always thought I looked more like you, dark hair aside," Luna said as she reached to clutch one of her father's hands in both of her own.
"You didn't always have dark hair! When you were born, you were my spitting image. Merlin, I can still remember that day like it was yesterday. You had a shock of white-blonde hair like all the Lovegoods, did you know that? It stayed like that for a while before it turned darker. It seemed like it became black overnight! As you got older I think you started favoring Mummy more. When I see you now, I mostly see her."
Luna made a noncommittal noise and wriggled out of Xenophilius's embrace.
"When you were born, everyone told me time would fly like a thestral, that you'd grow up so fast," her father mused, "And it turns out everyone always says that because it's true. How did I go from holding my baby daughter in my arms to the last time I saw you, looking at you through glass?"
"What do you mean?"
"Mmm?" Xenophilius looked stricken, pulled out of his reverie by the realization that he had said more than he meant to.
"You said you saw me through glass. The last time I saw you was when we threw you that going away party before you left on your sabbatical, wasn't it?"
"It's nothing, dear. Just an old man's musings."
"No, don't brush me off like Mum always does! I'm not a little kid anymore. This is probably my only chance to talk to you again. Tell me, please."
"I didn't want to have to tell you this, Lu. Trust me. Can we talk about something else? I could murder a cuppa. Reckon it would work if you made me one and set it there on the desk so it could waft in my direction?"
Luna pressed her lips together and shook her head, refusing to be taken in. Xenophilius sighed.
"Alright, alright. Stubborn, just like your mother. Well, you know I have my fair share of enemies and I've never been quiet about it. I don't know exactly how it happened, but when I was on my way to Albania I was captured, I'm not sure by who. They wouldn't let me see where I was, but we must have been traveling for days and days. I think I eventually ended up at the Ministry, judging by the accents and the uniforms I caught a glimpse of."
"The Ministry of Magic? The British Ministry of Magic, you mean?"
Xenophilius nodded. Then, in an attempt to head off more questions, he began pacing the room and pretending to look at the spines of books.
"Did they t-torture you?" Luna's lip wobbled.
"Don't worry yourself. I wrote one too many of those incendiary editorials, I suppose. They were convinced I had some kind of confidential knowledge, perhaps they thought I was a spy! I'm afraid I was a terrible disappointment to them." He chuckled, but Luna was still too horrified to be distracted by his jesting.
"And if you will insist on knowing, that's where I saw you for the last time. I always wondered why you were there. It seemed like it was after hours, and I had never seen anyone but Ministry employees before. But then I saw you and Lavender. At first I thought it was a dream."
"After hours? Me and Lavender? Do you mean when we went to the Department of Mysteries?"
"Ah! I was in the Department of Mysteries, of course! I should have known."
"Oh my God," Luna inhaled sharply, "You said you saw me through glass. You were that brain! That brain in the tank tapping on the glass!"
"You didn't realize it was me. At that point I hardly realized I was me, but when I saw you it all came rushing back to me," Xenophilius said, his voice quiet, abandoning all attempts to cajole and tease his daughter away from that tank in the Department of Mysteries where he had spent his final days.
"I spent so much time worrying about what had happened to you, and you were right in front of me and I didn't even know it was you! And they were doing things to your...to your brain !" Luna was crying so hard that her chest twinged with each gasping inhale and shuddering exhale. Xeno abandoned the books and came floating back to hold his daughter in his semi-corporeal, ice-cold arms.
"But I knew it was you, and it made all the difference."
"You're...such...a...softie," Luna sniffled through her sobs, and Xenophilius laughed one of his hearty belly laughs.
"Come, now. Tell me what you've been up to! How's Mummy and everyone at the Circle?"
Luna shrugged. She was still trying to catch her breath and didn't feel inclined to fill him in about Cressida, Bellatrix, or any of the other recent crises at the Circle. Xeno sensed this, and he looked around the room again until his eyes alighted on the broken typewriter.
"Old Faithful finally gave up the ghost, eh? No pun intended," he gestured to his transparent self with a chuckle. Luna conceded the joke with a weak snort.
"I actually kept it going for a while! I used all the tricks you used to show me. It only died...er, I mean, stopped working recently. I could deal with all the biting, but it kept spitting the keys everywhere. And eventually it just caught fire."
"Cantankerous old bastard," Xenophilius slapped the side of the machine, but not even the miraculous touch of its deceased former owner could bring the typewriter back to life. Luna's breathing finally steadied and she chuckled and wiped her eyes, so Xeno resumed his inspection of his old office. He rifled through stacks of his notes, which Luna had carefully organized and cross-referenced. There were only a few scraps of paper with her handwriting, which mostly seemed to be commentaries on or clarifications of his own theories.
"How are the Hallows going? It looks like you've organized my notes about the Resurrection Stone, but I don't see anything here about how you actually made it."
"Ginny and I have mostly been working on the Wand. And Mum's made good progress with the Cloak. To be honest sourcing materials for the Stone has been a huge hassle. Er, actually, I ended up finding a Resurrection Stone totally by accident. It's the only reason I was able to bring you back."
"You found one?" Xenophilius's eyes lit up, "Did it belong to the Peverells?"
"I have no idea of the provenance, to be honest. It looks old. But listen, there's something else I want to talk to you about."
Luna took a deep breath and did her best to reconstruct the Occlumency wall she had built in her mind minutes before. She needed to focus on the task at hand, explaining horcruxes as comprehensively and succinctly as she could, not on the sickly green hue of the fluid in the tank which held her father's brain. Not the fleshy tentacles of his mind reaching out to tap the glass, and of her turning away and ignoring him as if he were just another curiosity in the Department of Mysteries. No, no. She musn't allow herself to even entertain the thought, not until the apparition of her father was gone and she was safely tucked up in bed with an entire night ahead of her to hold her tears.
"I've never heard of anything like that before. It sounds like very ancient dark magic. Very dark. I don't have many books on the Dark Arts, it's not my area of interest, you know. I assume you've already read all of Adastros and Thurkettle?" Xenophilius said, gesturing to a stack of books about the Dark Arts that Luna had recently pored over in search of even a whiff of horcruxes.
"Yes, I didn't find anything."
"Then I'm afraid I can't be of much help. Of course, it's always possible that others have written about this sort of thing without calling them horcruxes."
"What do you mean? Like texts in other languages? How do you even translate a word like horcrux? It's not in any dictionary I've found."
"That's not quite what I mean. Maybe it would be helpful to think about how someone would describe a horcrux if they didn't fully understand what a horcrux was. For instance, what did you think when you discovered the Dark Lord's diary, but you didn't know there was any such thing as a horcrux?"
Luna considered this.
"I suppose I thought it was just an ordinary object that had been cursed. Or just some sort of dark artifact I hadn't seen before. But I've read everything I can find. I don't know where else I'd look."
"Do you remember that list of rabbit holes we made together? What ever happened to that? Maybe researching something else for a while would get you out of this rut, shake something loose," Xenophilius suggested.
"The rabbit holes? Yes, I remember," Luna said slowly. The entire point of that list was to stop her from getting distracted by every stray question and factoid; she didn't necessarily see how a jumble of idle interests could help her now that she was working to a tight deadline with so much at stake.
"It must be around here somewhere…." Luna rifled through stacks of papers on the desk and floor before finally unsticking the folded, crumpled paper from the bottom of a candlestick on the mantelpiece, where it had been covered in candle wax.
"I see the fairy librarian hasn't stopped his mischief," Xeno chuckled. Luna did not answer, scanning the list.
"I dunno...there's a lot of stuff about experimental charms and wandlore, but I don't see anything. Wait, hold on."
15th century Italy, possibly possessed child tortured by demon, "defiled himself" (obscurial?) - midwife used mother's milk to "heal the tear."
Luna sprinted across the room to retrieve the book and check the citation. As she read the midwife's diary, the specifics of the story came rushing back to her - someone named Stefano, terrified neighbors, a failed exorcism, witch bottles. On a second reading it didn't sound like a child at all, for Stefano had been terrorizing the village and eluding capture for some time. And upon closer examination, the midwife mentioned a strange necklace that Stefano had worn ever since his reign of terror began.
Mother's milk to heal the tear...
AN: Ahh this chapter has so many important scenes and I spent ages tweaking it to try to make it perfect! I hope you like it. The next chapter is also a big one, I'm currently trying to finalize that draft and should be able to keep up with my biweekly update schedule. Let me know what you think in the comments!