Book 4: Astoria Greengrass and the Curse of Quennell Park
Song rec: "The Waves Have Come" by Chelsea Wolfe

"What do they long for, as I long for,—
Starting up in my inland bed,
Beating the narrow walls, and finding
Neither a window nor a door,
Screaming to God for death by drowning,—
One salt taste of the sea once more?"
- "Inland," Edna St. Vincent Millay

Alecto wriggled in McGonagall's net like an aggressive species in some unlucky ethologist's trap. She spotted where the rug had been disturbed and quickly figured out that her nieces were invisible. Astoria stood perfectly still. Alecto didn't know she was there yet. Once Hestia stopped screaming for her father, it became clear that the situation was not in their favour.

"Aban, look at me! ABAN! Look at your sister! Get us down!" Alecto shouted.

Aban Carrow, Flora and Hestia's father, looked heavily Imperiused. He had been looking round in response to Hestia's calls, but not as a father would. His search had been mere curiosity. It didn't make sense how he could be Imperiused with both of his older siblings wandless, yet he looked back up and moved his wand again to aid them…

"Expelliarmus!" Flora shouted from a new corner.

Aban's wand flipped out of his hand and out of sight. All three girls dived to find it. But Flora had not been quick enough to Disarm him. Aban had already unwoven McGonagall's spell enough to cut the magical net that bound the fiends.

The net gave way on one side only, allowing Alecto to swing like a trapeze artist. She was still bound to an unconscious Amycus with silvery rope, but she used this to her advantage, with all her limbs free during descent. She moved their combined weight with net's fast momentum, making her an impossible target for Flora's and Hestia's curses.

As the net swung to the wall, Alecto kicked off against the stone and landed on a couch, with Amycus's head bobbing uselessly against her shoulder. Alecto had no intention of using him as a human Shield, though, and instantly sprang back up.

Though invisible, Astoria and the girls had left quite a trail of messed rugs and furniture as they ransacked the common room for Aban's wand. Hestia said, "Accio wand" for good measure, but like any good wand, it had an Anti-Theft Charm imbued in it. Essentially their enemy, Aban searched for his wand as well. Astoria took the liberty to lock Aban's legs, but in the interim, Alecto dived sideways to the floor. Even whilst encumbered with her twin, Alecto had been sharp enough to find Aban's wand. She was now armed.

In no time at all, Amycus was awake and detached. Like Aban, though, he did not seem himself. Under fire, Alecto cast a glaringly bright Shield round herself and Amycus. She left Aban defenceless — a combination of knowing the girls would not hurt their own father and a lack of care.

"Amycus, how silly, you're Imperiused," Alecto giggled as though the triad of curses trying to crack her Shield were mere snowballs.

"Am, you dolt. Come out of it already!"

Amycus did not come out of it; in flashes of light from her curses, Astoria saw his face inexpressive and glassy-eyed.

"Bad one, eh?" Alecto sighed. "Come on, Amycus. Snap out of it. It's Allie."

Alecto poked him in the gut. He startled into consciousness, which was great for Alecto and bad for everyone else.

"That filthy old hag!" Amycus declared of Professor McGonagall. "I'll kill her, Alecto, I swear— Fuck! Potter, he's gone! D'you have any idea what a stink you've caused‽"

"I do, I do," said Alecto, trying to play the part of the calm one, which was far from the truth. The Carrows' mountainous level of strain made them all the more frightening.

"Potter was just here!" Amycus insisted, having lost his concept of time. "In here, just like you signalled, Allie! He was invisible, the coward! He Cruciated me, and—"

"Then I will kill him myself," Alecto intercalated coldly.

"The Dark Lord says Potter's gotta be brought to him alive! You know that, Alecto!"

"How could I not? It's been years! Years of nothing but this boy! I'm sick of it. I'll kill Potter, and the Dark Lord can just keep his body to make sure it rots dead!" Alecto shouted, unhinging.

Her rage at Potter rubbed off on Amycus's anger at McGonagall. He spun round in exasperation but had nowhere to go due to Alecto's Shield protecting him from Hestia's fiery comets.

"Minerva, that bloody old shrew! Damn it! This all coulda been over! Merlin, I'm sorry I wasn't out of it sooner, Allie! I played dumb so she'd miss the threat, and we'd get Potter from under her nose, and the bitch got away—"

"If you'd not played dumb, she'd have set a much stronger Imperius in you," Alecto noted. "We gotta deal with the situation at hand first, right? It's personal…"

"Like sweet, red hell it is," Amycus growled, viewing his nieces' magic against him. "Finally decided to come out, have you, Hestia? Flora? Sounds like you two've brought the Greengrass somewhere, too. Real interesting how you'd let us all die, actin' this way at a time like this! You know how important this is to our family! Flora, I'm disappointed in you most of all."

"Then I must be doing something right for once," Flora spat, and her next curse shattered the elder twins' Shield at last.

With magical strength, Alecto instantly wrenched Amycus behind her. She pelted foggy curses, released Aban from the leg-lock, and sneaked out a Revealing Spell. Astoria saw her hands again and knew she had been hit. When Flora came into view, she was lying motionless on the ground.

"FLORA!"

Amycus grabbed Flora's wand and kicked her in the face, right in the same spot Alecto's face had been scalded with Fiendfyre heat.

"STUPEFY!" Hestia cast right at Amycus's head, but he bent just in time, and a vase atop the Ravenclaw fireplace busted. The glass hit Flora, causing Hestia to cry.

Astoria did not understand how Aban was Imperiused in the first place if the Carrows had been wandless. Some other Death Eater must have Imperiused him to go help the Carrows, but how did Aban get into the castle? Were more Death Eaters already here? Was this all for nothing?

Aban was wandless, but he had a knife, and he came after Astoria.

"DEPULSO!" she shouted, and he flew backwards.

His knife went everywhere in the air. It could land on Flora. One step ahead, Hestia shouted, "ACCIO KNIFE!" and quickly set an Anti-Summoning Charm on it, stuffing it into her pocket as Amycus fired colourless curses at her.

The room was so small for a battle that it was impossible not to crash into things. Alecto parried every spell Astoria fired, so Astoria gave up on casting directly and Levitated a heavy chair in the air, throwing it on Alecto. Amycus Reducted the chair mid-air and tried to kill Astoria with the same spell. Astoria screamed at the magic coming her way, and it busted a wall so hard it vibrated through the floor.

"Why didn't you just kill me in class if you're gonna try now‽" Astoria shouted at him. "We didn't come here to fight to the death, Amycus!"

"I said it before, you little rat. Snape said no dead students. But he's gone and scarpered. I'm headmaster in his absence," Amycus jeered. "Aban, now."

Aban grabbed Hestia from behind and held her in place, an easy target for the elder siblings. The sight enraged Astoria, and she had to focus hard to cast a Shield over both Aban and Hestia instead of something at Aban's skull. It was so easy to harm an immediate threat, and so dreadful a task to save one. The Imperius Curse could be fought off, and Aban could not even do that to save his own children! Astoria was so angry that she barely missed the three curses zipping next to her.

Three?

Hestia screamed from behind Astoria's Shield. Her father had begun to strangle her, and her sister was now Imperiused, a huge mark from Amycus's boot still on her face.

Flora was wandless like Aban, but she was not without magic. As Astoria struggled across the sea of damaged furniture in the circular room, Alecto etched spells from across the room, lighting up Flora's hands and arms with isotoxal decagrams and thick written script. Astoria didn't know what to do — the body-modification curses in the Dark arts books she had studied made her uncomfortable, and now she was facing one. She remembered how Adamina had been turned into a live bomb and could only hope the same would not be true for Flora as Astoria released her Shield to get to Hestia.

"Somnodurus!" Astoria cast between Aban's eyes, and he fell backwards.

Hestia's white face flooded pink again, and she sent a broken bust of some long-forgotten professor at Alecto. Again, Amycus intercepted it perfectly with a Reductor Curse. The girls couldn't figure out what to do with Flora, whose arms were now covered in glowing white symbols. She had been loaded with Dark magic. Astoria pushed Hestia over a couch accidentally to get her out of the line of fire. Right from her hands, Flora hit Astoria with a Gouging Spell, and she fell in pain. Another moment was lost.

"HANDS UP, OR FLORA KILLS DADDY!" Amycus said from nowhere.

The whole room changed under the weight of Amycus's words, and all the chaos turned to quiet. As Astoria clutched her bleeding wound, Hestia emerged from the couch with her hands held high, her wand rolling across the floor. Astoria wheeled round on her knees and saw Flora's dangerous, glowing hands above Aban's sleeping head. Hestia pleaded at rapid speed, "Please, Astoria, drop your wand. My dad. Please. My dad."

Astoria let go of her wand resentfully and watched Amycus pick it out of her own splatters of blood on the floor. He used the wand he had stolen from Flora to Cruciate her, and Astoria lost track of everything except the pain. When she came to, it was not Amycus with Flora's wand in her face, but rather Alecto with Astoria's.

"Wake Aban and give him his wand back," Alecto instructed Amycus, holding the cherry wand beneath Astoria's chin. "I much prefer Astoria's own wand to kill her."

A simple Killing Curse would have spared Astoria the pain, but it would not fall in line with Alecto's vendetta against the world. A bad curse, a warm-up, fizzed on Astoria's face, and she cried onto the hands that held her.

"You bleat like a little lamb, Astoria," Alecto sighed. "Just like I remember. Oh, I'll miss all our fun together, but you're a failed experiment. I tried so hard and thought you'd changed. You made me feel right special when you wondered why I'd left you to Lestrange. You looked so betrayed it's almost like you loved me."

Loved you? Loved you?

"But you lied to me, Astoria. You're a blood-traitor and a blasphemer. It's a shame things have to end this way for us. Maybe in the next life we'll be friends, eh? But for now, I'll bring the Lestranges your head on a plate."

Hestia was fighting like crazy as the Carrow brothers cursed her, though she was much weaker than Astoria had last seen her, and she was losing. Astoria swung a fist for her life, but Alecto caught it and hoisted her by the wrist. Astoria kicked and kicked, but Alecto was magically stronger. Hestia screamed somewhere behind her, getting cursed out of her wits by her uncle, father, and sister. Yet none of Flitwick's forces above could hear her; whatever battle was happening between the Order and the assault on Hogwarts, it was shaking the tower. The windows suddenly all shattered, and the floor cracked like Alecto and Amycus's reasoning as Hestia stopped slapping helplessly with her bare hands and started slitting Amycus with the knife she carried. Fresh blood beaded out of his face and arms, and he went so blind with rage that he pocketed his wand and started thrashing Hestia to a pulp with vein-popped fists.

"THIS IS WHAT YOU DO TO ME, HESTIA‽ TO ME‽ AFTER I FED YOU, CLOTHED YOU, AND TAUGHT YOU EVERYTHING‽ YOU — MANKY — FUCKING — FREAK!"

Hestia's knife dropped out of her hand and her bloodied face became increasingly unrecognisable. Parts of her face would break the way Amycus beat her.

Astoria's kicks did nothing, but Alecto suddenly threw Astoria down and screamed to her twin in tears. Amycus wouldn't stop on his own, but he would obey Alecto's commandment. For one last moment, Astoria hoped something better for Alecto, a mere essence of goodness.

Astoria exhaled too soon.

Alecto's cries had nothing to do with Hestia's welfare. Rather, she had spotted a dangerous cut on Amycus's neck that he had yet to notice. It was the first time Astoria had seen Alecto use healing magic and likely the only time she ever would. Amycus's wounds began to close; he paused his demolition of Hestia to press his hand against the lifesaving magic in his arteries. Alecto was not trying to stop Amycus at all. She called out to justify and support him, maybe even help him.

"If Hestia's taking arms against us, she'll take arms against our superiors, Am! We can't keep this up anymore — we've already tested his patience! If she gets out acting like this, we'll all die! W-We've done all we could! She's nothin' but a Mud-licking disgrace! I know she is! Sh-Sh-She's unclean!" Alecto shook out in sobs, saying it without saying it.

Amycus now viewed Hestia's defiance of Voldemort as a danger to Alecto's life. He swooped one arm to the floor to grab the knife Hestia had taken against him, as if beating her to death was too slow to appease his feeling of pungent betrayal.

He'll kill Hestia.

Astoria stumbled upward and tried to get the crushed Hestia out of the grip of the Carrow brothers, but Flora hit her with a terrible curse from her magic-infused arms. It felt like huge needles were sewing their way through her spine, and she fell again, splintering her hands on the busted, sloped floor. Uncle Faunus's pipe cracked in her robes under her knee.

Hestia, please hold on, please don't die.

Astoria slapped her hand on the broken floor to get back up and felt something else. Hestia's wand.

Even if just one small, key artery is cut, the whole animal will die in minutes…

Astoria was sorry to put it out of its misery, but she was not sorry enough to let her friends become devoured prey. She was not sorry enough for the spell to fail. She felt it bubbling up from her stomach, turning to pins and needles in her fingertips. From the ground, Astoria did what she could do, fully knowing it could be the last thing she ever did.

"Avada Kedavra."

Amycus dropped, and Alecto screamed with a sound incomparable to anything in the natural world, as if Astoria was forced to hear the parting soul pass through the body still standing. Astoria had to roll, clamber, and dive away from the Killing Curses now firing from Alecto. Green flames lit up the furniture, and the smoke put off a bizarre, heavy smell of brine.

Shamefully Imperiused, Aban tried to lift Hestia's unconscious body out from under Amycus's corpse in order to put her in firing range, but he was frailer than his older brother. His marionette arms were weak from underuse. Astoria had no time to aim anything at Aban. Alecto was sending Killing Curses at her like hail from sky to abyss. She started mispronouncing the spell once the snot clogged her voice. In the split-second lull whilst Alecto blew her nose in her sleeve to clear her speaking ability, Astoria aimed to deliver the coup de grâce, but Flora was too close behind the woman…

"AVADA KEDAVRA!" Alecto shouted with her wand in a new direction. The curse went right over Hestia, who had merely opened her swollen eyes. The first and the only thing the injured Hestia did was scream for her sister.

Then something extraordinary happened. Flora leapt onto Alecto's back and snatched Astoria's wand out of her stubby hands.

"You've hurt my sister for the last time," Flora said, and she placed her curse-armed hand onto Alecto's face.

Alecto's cries of pain were the only hint of the level of magic Flora had been carrying in her body. She broke away from Flora, holding her face.

"THAT'S WHAT YOU WANTED ME TO DO TO THEM!" Flora screamed as Alecto stumbled, oozing blood. "YOU'D KILL THEM TO KEEP THE DARK LORD HAPPY! HAVE A TASTE OF YOUR OWN SPELL, SICKO!"

Alecto kept wailing, blindly stumbling, with blood going all over the blue and bronze decorations. Flora blasted Astoria's wand at the window, but nothing happened. Flora tried again and succeeded, animating the curtains to tie like pythons round her father and threw him aside to the floor, away from Hestia. The castle trembled terribly from a battle that was not yet theirs.

"Am, Amycus," Alecto wailed. "Amycus!"

"HE'S DEAD AS DIRT!" Flora screamed. "HE'S WAITING FOR YOU IN HELL!"

"Am, Am," Alecto called in deluded pain, "It's me. Amycus, please wake up. It's Allie. Please come back. The Dark Lord! The Dark Lord… Amycus, please! TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE! WE PROMISED, AMYCUS! DON'T GO WITHOUT ME! PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME! WE PROMISED!"

Alecto's desperate pleas rang out in conjunction with her searing pain. The wounds erupting from Alecto were so terrible that Astoria was glad the room was smoky and poorly lit. But Alecto would use the girls' own father as a weapon to kill Hestia. Alecto was not salvageable.

She landed on Amycus, bleeding all over him, and she shook him even though he was more than several minutes gone. The castle shook in time with his corpse, with rubble hitting the floor in dusty trails. Flora's wand was on Amycus somewhere, and Astoria could no longer be a spectator of Flora's curse-casting.

Astoria and Alecto raised wands they did not own in each other's faces. But Astoria couldn't cast a spell even if it were Heimliched out of her. And Alecto, the unceasing Fury, had completely given up.

Alecto lowered her wand away from Astoria and towards her free hand. Astoria, however, didn't dare lower her wand despite Alecto's apparent defeat. She watched the Dark witch with bated breath.

"Emmeno," Alecto wept into her palm before resting it where Amycus's pulse had once beat in his neck.

A Permanent Sticking Charm… to a corpse? Astoria cringed.

But then her senses clicked into place. The anathema in Alecto's eyes made them very different from Flora and Hestia's, but they had the same shade, and Astoria suddenly drowned in them. If she wasn't mistaken, she had been invited. Perhaps begged.

In the front of Alecto's grubby brain, the death of Amycus played again and again like an avalanche. Alecto had been the one to call You-Know-Who and bore the responsibility of Harry Potter getting away from her, a crime for which there was no hope of forgiveness. Further in, Astoria uncovered that Aban had been under the Imperius Curse for the twins' entire lives, with Alecto and Amycus merely trading off the spell.

Aban had been ordered by Alecto to come to the castle last night after Flora and Hestia Cruciated Amycus in class. Alecto had planned to use their own father against them in some evil way before the order came down from Voldemort for her to stay in Ravenclaw Tower. Nevertheless, Aban had been tripled with Imperius curses rather than his usual one. Amycus and Alecto both lost their wands to McGonagall, but patrolling Death Eater Selwyn had not. Therefore, Aban was working according to Selwyn's curse, but his orders included obeying any Death Eater.

In deeper corners of Alecto's conscious, Astoria exhumed many things she did not want to see and mentally elbowed her way through it. She knew Alecto had manipulated, controlled, and abused her nieces for years and years. What she didn't know was that Mabily Blodwyn, the twins' mother, had not died and left the Carrow family with the burden of more mouths to feed — she had been murdered.

Alecto and Amycus had set curses into Mabily so she would not survive giving birth, and they could raise her girls how they wanted. Mabily, though pure-blood, was not a witch of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, nor was she a blood supremacist. Above all, Mabily had rejected the House of Carrow. Anticipating further rejection, Alecto and Amycus had taken the simplest of cries from their infant nieces personally from day one. By conflating love with ownership, they created a self-fulfilling prophecy of resentment, and they had never won their nieces' admiration.

Astoria felt like the ground she stood on was tipping as she sank further in Alecto's mind. There was nowhere else for her to go except over the edge of a dreary memory…

Mum taught — no. Mum made me learn how to read when I was small, saying "You ain't pretty, but you ain't gonna be stupid on top of it." I caught on and learnt to read. Amycus couldn't because he was afraid of her. So I taught him once I knew how.

"Mum's dead wrong about you," he told me.

"Dad's dead wrong about you," I said.

Other kids at Durmstrang got homesick. We usually tried to avoid going home. This time we don't get a choice. We can't go back. We can't possibly go home, either.

The sun sets on our long ship ride. I point out the brilliant colours and move my head away from the window so Amycus can see. He looks out the window peacefully, like we didn't just have the conversation we just had.

We don't want to die on our parents' terms. We can die on our own without their input. So when there's no more sunset, we step out to the ship's deck, our minds made up.

"It's really cold," I remark, like we're going for a stroll instead of out to die. And like it's gonna matter, Amycus gives me his coat right then and there, trying to big-brother me. I laugh at him. He laughs at himself.

We pile on the Sticking Charms once we're at the edge. Our luggage goes to our legs like anchors. Our wands adhere vertically between our chests like funeral flowers. Our arms lock with magic so the ocean's tides can't deposit us on separate sands.

It's hard to tell the hiss of the wind from the crash of the waves. It's late at night, so it's hard to tell the sea from the sky, too. Nobody will see us. It will be fine.

Just as I reassure myself, two yellow lights start sweeping across the deck, searching. Of course, right? Of course.

The yellow lights just miss us. Must have been the ship's lookout. Amycus gives me an ironic smile.

"I'll sink this whole ship if someone fucks with us."

"That'd give Mum and Dad the satisfaction of knowing we were mad."

"They ain't gonna cry either way, Alliecat."

I shut my stinging eyes because he's right. They won't. They'll be glad we're not their problem anymore. They didn't have to beat it into us, but they did — they've said it themselves. Over and over and over: they didn't want us, it's just what you have to do.

I start wondering how long we're gonna stand here, but I refuse to be the one who moves first. I can only do this because it's our joint idea. But if I start it, he'll follow my lead, and that'd be like me killing him. He's thinking the same thing, 'It can't be me. It can't be me.' We have to do this together.

"Well, this was lousy," Amycus remarks about our luckless fifteen years.

I almost laugh, "Yeah."

"I got big plans for the next life, though."

"You do?"

"M-hm. Big plans."

I haven't fantasised much beyond hitting the water and escaping all of this. I try to imagine a better world. I'm not too creative, I guess. I ask him what his big plans are. He tells me.

And as he tells me, I can picture it beneath these waves. It's even better than the bedtime storybooks I nicked from shops to read for him when we were children. Because back then he couldn't. And our parents wouldn't. Storybook endings are something only others get to have. But he tells me it's down there for us, too.

It's still there, Amycus! Astoria's not your murderer… she's our psychopomp! Right? The Dark Lord would kill us if she'd not come for us! See? See? Everything's still there for us, away from him! Away from everybody!

As Amycus narrates our next life in full-colour, I don't even feel that cold, wet wind anymore. We will have it all. It's just not up here. This was all just a cruel test we couldn't pass.

"Are you scared, Alecto?"

Am I scared now, Amycus?

I squeeze his hand.

"How could I be?"

How could I be?

We sink into the North Sea in the frozen dead of winter. But the water is bath-warm…

Alecto's whole mind capsized, and as Astoria shook free, she could swear that Alecto's eyes had already begun to cloud.

"It'll be all right now, Amycus," Alecto panted, on the brink of shock from the blood loss. "Avada Kedavra."

Alecto fell upon her brother, not unlike how the trio had found her, and the castle shook more rubble on top of them.

"The amphisbaena grows twin heads, one in the proper place, and the other where the tail should be. For this reason the snake glides in a circular shape, as the heads, contrary to what is right, strain from both ends."

- Solinus