Book 4: Astoria Greengrass and the Curse of Quennell Park
Song rec: "Misery Loves Company" by Emilie Autumn
"What do you see now?
—— Globes of red, yellow, purple.
Just a moment! And now?
—— My father and mother and sisters.
Very well, we'll make the glasses accordingly."
-"Dippold the Optician," E. L. Masters
The portal above disappeared, and Astoria lost sight of the slumped Professor Sinistra. Astoria threw curses on the way down, and none of them hit the way she hit the floor. Her elbows, arms, knees, and legs all mangled, but she slid to her side with her wand up. The dark room was moving, and it was impossible to see. She could feel Rabastan ahead of her, but there was nothing else to say of her surroundings. Astoria feared Professor Sinistra may have fallen in at another distance and decided against casting the Killing Curse. That decision cost her, though. She soon had to parry Rabastan's onslaught of magic and entered a duel which she would inevitably lose. The light from his spells was blinding in the dimness, and it shot colours straight to the backs of her retinae. Duelling Rabastan was not like the fights she had overcome on the night-swept Hogwarts grounds where everyone was at one disadvantage or another. Here, she was fighting a sword with a feather.
"Petrificus totalus," Rabastan sneaked through the bigger curses.
You creep.
Astoria dropped her wand and fell, frozen, to the floor. Unlike the paralysis he had set into her at the funeral parlour, there was a way to get out of this particular bind. It was something about fully relaxing the body, yet it was impossible to relax. Rabastan's footsteps clicked towards her head, and the leather of his whip dragged along the floor. Astoria held her breath. Any number of the Killing Curses Alecto had fired could have killed her. It seemed so unfair to have missed all those only to die now. It would have been better to die by Alecto's grief. Rabastan didn't have a reason like that. He just liked to watch bodies get maimed.
His voice dripped eagerly, "Karabastu Karabasan," and based on his smile, Professor Sinistra had been hit. Somewhere above, the professor was hallucinating in the midst of sleep paralysis. Rabastan conjured up a lamp of flickering flame and hovered over Astoria. Trembling as he scratched a red patch on his wrist, he addressed her in perfect French.
"You really fucked me up, Astoria. They say I'll never be the same again."
"Returning the favour," she spat in the same tongue.
"I want your opinion on something."
"No you don't."
"I do, love, I do," Rabastan chuckled. "I want to know why Aurora left the house unlocked for me. Do you know? No? Can you think of any reasons?"
Astoria struggled against the spell. She knew she ought to be doing the opposite. She knew she ought to relax. But her whole body, her whole mind, was in a vicious cycle of remembering her last encounter with Rabastan and trying to react to the current one.
"You aren't very talkative now that it's just the two of us," Rabastan said with a fake whine. "You know what I gathered? Aurora didn't plan for you to come here. You interrupted us. She wanted to be alone with me…"
"Yeah, to kill you," snarled Astoria.
"Oh? A little death never hurt…" Rabastan chuckled.
He scratched his neck, leaving nail marks and a new patch of red.
"This is extremely uncomfortable," he laughed. "It almost seems like you enjoy watching me suffer. Is that true, Astoria? You want to see me suffer? You're secretly a sadist. How uncouth."
Rabastan's Legilimency was scratching her eyes. She looked away, but didn't dare shut them, since he might get ideas to curse them open permanently. Rabastan rubbed his face and spoke at length in English.
"I know what's between me and Aurora baffles you, but it's simple. She hurt me, and I want to hurt her back. She's hurt me for years. She's known how much I wanted her, and she's done nothing but reject me. I've tried everything. Everything. I've had it, though. The only way to have her is through the Dementor's Kiss. And then maybe I can write a book like she did and talk about her 'response rate.' I guess it has to be done. You know, Muggles used 'lobotomies' to get their housewives under control. Same principle! They used ice picks in the brain. I had one, but I left it upstairs. Oh yes! See, there's that side of you I love, Astoria. Alecto did some good in you after all! You don't like Muggles. Our little musical activist is a fraud."
"Shut up!" Astoria erupted.
Rabastan raised his arched eyebrows and cracked a smile.
"Why Astoria! When you speak, you match whatever language I speak," he cooed. "Does that mean you admire me after all? Would you like to reach a Legilimency wavelength with me again, and, ah… forego the talking? I can arrange that."
Having been inside Rabastan's mind before, that was one of the last things Astoria wanted. She desperately tried to distract his entertainment away from Legilimency.
"Just shut up about Muggle Studies," she said with all of the fake teenage bitterness she could muster. "Alecto's dead."
It was only her emotion driving the conversation. She knew the news would not bother Rabastan or change his plans in the long run. The Carrows had been too far below his rank, and even if they weren't, the only person Rabastan cared for was himself.
"Oh wonderful, I'll let dear brother Amycus have you once you start to bore me," Rabastan smiled mordantly.
"He's dead, too," Astoria said.
"My, my, how perfectly poetic! They left this world as they came into it!" Rabastan laughed coldheartedly. "Can't say I'd be much disposed to follow Rodolphus to the grave — he's a real moron… he'll probably Splinch his dick off one day and die of embarrassment!"
He paused. His body winced again.
"You're not laughing, ma voyeuse. You murdered the Carrows, didn't you? Is that why you're so quick to announce it? You want to make me proud, don't you? To prove you're a witch? Oh, what a witch you are, indeed. My little angel of death."
Rabastan sauntered closer and placed his sweaty hands on her face.
"You have a sister, don't you?" he asked, but he already knew all of Astoria's answers. "That's right, you do. I'm her boggart. Now tell me, Astoria. Why am I your sister's boggart and not yours? Didn't we have something, you and I? I wonder what I must do to become your boggart."
Astoria couldn't spit in his eye fast enough as he kneaded the skin of her cheeks and rubbed the edge of her bones.
"Oh, you have a nice skull," he said, and she grimaced. "Why are you looking at me that way? I'm only saying you have a nice skull. Not everyone does, you know. What a pretty shape. I don't often find specimens so petite. I don't often want to be someone's boggart this badly…"
His fingers traced the outline of her eye sockets and made them itch with the powder under his nails.
"Do you want to know who else is dead, ma voyeuse?" Rabastan whispered. "Go on, ask me. Yes, go on. I won't tell you unless you ask me. I know you want to know."
Astoria stayed silent for only a short time. She couldn't bear to imagine who else she might have lost, and on top of that, as long as Rabastan was occupied with talking, he wasn't doing anything more than kneading her jaw and her brow.
"Fine, Rabastan, who else is dead?"
"That's Mr Lestrange to you," he said, and he pinched her cheek. Another horrible itch grew from the contact with his nails. She was unable to move to scratch it.
"You know he's calling. Your master," she returned boldly.
Rabastan flexed his left arm and dolefully looked at the Dark Mark.
"My master? Astoria, I learnt something about my master because of you," Rabastan crooned. "He's no god at all. His resurrection was earthly. He doesn't know I know… but we know, don't we, love? He must be a Horcrux user like your Quennell. He found Horcruxes necessary because he is weak enough to die. That's what a Horcrux is, right? Oh, Astoria, you stirred a conflict within me with that information… but now I'm enlightened. We teach each other so much, don't we?"
Rabastan pressed his hot Dark Mark against Astoria's cheek and laughed. When he started trembling again, he backed away and rolled his shoulders. She could hear the low tone of their crack.
"You like me without a shirt, Astoria? Does this Dark Mark remind you of Draco's? How pathetic you are. My skin still smells like his to you? Do you know what it smells like to me? Aurora's scent. Nothing else mixed in, only her. And, you know, Amortentia ought to have drawn her to me, too… it's a very powerful potion."
Rabastan hovered inches from Astoria. She had never seen a Dark Mark writhe so angrily before, whether in person or through memories. Not even Nott Sr's Mark had been emitting the heat. But Rabastan was far gone from the Dark Lord.
"Doesn't this smell make you feel right at home? You must be getting horribly close with Draco, then, right? Oh, but he's not here… He's not here, Astoria — I am," Rabastan laughed.
Astoria ignored him and said, "Horcruxes or not, if I were a Death Eater, I wouldn't ignore the call."
Rabastan cracked his whip on her face, and she hoped that, if nothing else, her screams would wake Professor Sinistra from the sleep paralysis before the dementor came back to her.
"If you were a Death Eater, Greengrass, you'd have to learn your bloody place. You know who just did the hard way? The man who's been harassing my witch! Severus Snape! Severus Snape is dead!"
Rabastan made target practice out of Astoria all whilst she tried to process the news of another needless death. Snape had chosen his ways in days long gone, yet even his small actions meant that Astoria and her friends had survived… up to this point, anyway.
"Crucio!"
There went all trains of thought. Astoria seared with pain so bad that she felt the need to black out, to cease herself and disconnect the feeling… But then Rabastan let her go. The relief of the body was so sudden and complete that Astoria naturally relaxed out of the Full-Body Bind Curse.
When she opened her eyes, she saw Rabastan looking all over the place. His wand whirled everywhere, as if trying to follow a mouse crawling through the walls. She did not want Rabastan to know she was free, but her wand had dropped too far away. Any move towards it would give him more than enough time to maim or kill her. Every once in a while, though, during his frantic motions, the very tip of the whip would fly above Astoria's hand. It tempted her badly, but she knew she did not have the arm strength to pull it away from him.
Professor Sinistra was obviously back on her feet, since there was nobody else who could possibly breach the house. Rabastan tried to move the rooms surrounding them, but the unnecessary extension on his wand was not made for the task. It slowed him. He was unable to track the magic rooms that now loudly chafed against the outside of their current walls. Rabastan began whipping new rooms up out of nowhere. What was he so afraid of? Anything that scared Rabastan had to be good news. Astoria waited for the next opportunity. His whip flailed gracelessly, and it would come back round.
SMACK.
Astoria swatted the whip's end onto the floor like a centipede under a shoe and grabbed it tightly. Rabastan would be able to pull it from her, and of course, he held the wand end, but there were at least two spells that she knew would cast successfully when the whip-wand was in contact with the skin of both of them. One was a blood curse, and the other…
"LEGILIMENS!"
Unlike when Rabastan had held the wand to her neck and inadvertently entered a wavelength with her, this time, he was all hers to explore. Rabastan was thrown by the intensity of her spell, and she picked his brain with everything she had. Decades of obsession, lust, entitlement, and ill will towards Professor Sinistra oozed out, but there was a large piece that struck Astoria with independent power:-
Bellatrix, my sister-in-law, does not have sex with my brother. Their marriage was arranged. They are affectionate, long-time friends, and their concord with each other is enviable even in the absence of any expression of the body. The agreement to live this way was mutual between them, so long as no extramarital affairs became public. That would tarnish the names of Lestrange and Black. However, the lack of children became a source of mockery. After all, Druella Rosier only had one viable grandchild, and our own mother died before ever seeing a single one.
Bellatrix coveted Narcissa for her son. Yet Bellatrix and Rodolphus are uninterested in each other, and the pressure to have a child was not as strong as the urge to avoid the act. Years passed, and with our time in Azkaban, the issue was long forgotten.
So why did Bellatrix spend so many months setting heavy transfiguration upon her body? She was carrying a child she is not allowed to disclose. Unlike Rodolphus's ordinary affair with our ally Euphemia Rowle, Bellatrix sought and bore a child with the Dark Lord.
On the twenty-sixth of February. I prepared a room so that no sound would come from it. My brother and I knelt on either side of Bellatrix. Euphemia, though unworthy, was given the task of delivering the child safely. The Malfoys don't know a thing, as Bellatrix had been diligent in transfiguring her appearance. It was more than the pain of labour causing her wails, though. I was curious, and my Legilimency caught Bellatrix in her vulnerable state. Bellatrix wanted Narcissa here rather than Euphemia. She wanted Alecto Carrow rather than Rodolphus. Most of all, she wanted the Dark Lord present rather than me. Our Lord was only downstairs, and quite aware of what proceeded. Yet he cared naught for the birth, and why should he? Bellatrix had won his favour at the time of the child's conception, but she and the rest of us are not so pleasing to him anymore. We must deal with this — and the child — ourselves.
Bellatrix knew that her presence is never missed by the Malfoys, and she spent her time in our wing of the manor with her newborn daughter. Unable to elicit even a name suggestion from the Dark Lord, Bellatrix chose the child's name alone: Delphini Megaera Riddle. This was not recorded, as nothing of the child is to be documented. I imagine Delphini will have to go by our own surname when she enters the world. I have seen Bellatrix pen enormous letters about the baby to Alecto that she burns upon completion, never to be sent, never to be read. She cries so much upon the parchment that I am surprised it still burns.
Begrudgingly, Bellatrix parted with the child upon being ordered to resume her duties. Seeing that the Dark Lord is entirely detached from the child, Euphemia demanded gold as compensation for the care of Delphini. Yet again I watched my family's vault tapped by Bellatrix. She and Rodolphus take the long way home after each search-mission, stopping at Rowle Ridge. Bellatrix for her daughter. Rodolphus for Euphemia. I am left alone. I am always alone.
On account of the Ciel family systematically snubbing us, there are very few Lestranges left in France. It is much like the Blacks were rejected by the Greengrasses, and it all melds together in this one officious brat, Astoria. Rodolphus and I are the last Lestranges in Britain, and Euphemia will not bear him children. I have chosen Aurora Sinistra to be the fruit to our famine, but she is too proud and won't have me. Even after Crouch and Snape are both dead, she still will not have me! And now, she has escaped my spell.
I've spent too much time mulling over what Astoria Greengrass could become. Her mind is so much like Aurora's that it's taxing me. But she's not the real Aurora. She's only a mirage. A siren, simulation, decoy, distraction! The real Aurora — my Aurora — is trying to bring a room to me. I know what's inside of it. I know Aurora's ache for revenge. I must make more rooms. I have to twist and manipulate the space between us. Yet Aurora knows more than I do in this field of magic, and the rooms are becoming even more confusing than her delicious mind.
By using Legilimency, Astoria bought Professor Sinistra a minute of time, and large, deep cracks beat into the walls of the current prison. Astoria tried to yank Rabastan's wand away from him, but it backfired. Being distracted by the crumbling walls round her, she lost her hold of Legilimency, and Rabastan responded with physical force. Astoria clambered for her own wand as he rose to crack his, and then felt herself sliding. With a loud snap, her half of the room split from Rabastan's. Suddenly, Rabastan ran up to her and banged his fists on nothing, as though he were a mime.
"Astoria!"
She and the professor were now protected by a magic, translucent wall. Rabastan looked like he was in a container for a pet reptile. Astoria cried out as he raised his wand towards them, but several of his curses ended up ricocheting in his room. Some of them disappeared entirely as Professor Sinistra's wand continued to weave.
"Professor!" Astoria exclaimed. "C-Can I help? What's going on?"
"I would like for you to cast an incorporeal Patronus, dear," Professor Sinistra said calmly, as though it were for nothing more than bonus credit on an assignment.
"Incorporeal?"
Professor Sinistra gave her a squeeze on the shoulder. Astoria was bewildered.
"Yes, dear, not the whole thing. Just an incorporeal one round us, in case Rabastan gets clever. Let's think of something happy, shall we? I enjoy cutting up parchment for the underclassmen's star charts with you because we put on music and lock the Carrows out. Remember when you had star charts, too?"
"What?" Astoria blubbered.
Something happy? Something happy? Everyone was either injured or dead, and they were floating in an abyss somewhere with Rabastan Lestrange!
"I also really enjoyed our little Christmas tree. I think it had personality," Professor Sinistra said warmly.
"Professor, I don't understand—"
"Yes you do, dear. You've cast beautiful Patronuses before. Scale it back a bit. All we may need is a Shield. I, however, can't even do that much. I need you to try, Astoria."
It wasn't any of the memories Professor Sinistra suggested, but rather her words of confidence that Astoria held on to.
"Expecto Patronum!"
Streams of glittering silver-blue magic spread out from Astoria's wand, and Astoria tried to shape them into a large, round Shield around her and Professor Sinistra. It was actually working! Astoria had no idea how she was casting at a time like this, but it was working!
"Well done, Astoria!"
Astoria had almost forgotten that Rabastan was across them in a magically held room, still trembling and sending out curses. His curses came unglued, though. Another one hit a wall and came back to him, knocking him down. Professor Sinistra weaved her wand again after having paused for Astoria's Patronus. There was great pressure round them, as if they were ascending too high on a broom ride.
"I would simply Vanish him and the room along with it if I could," Professor Sinistra explained, "but since he fought me so vigorously once I recovered from sleep paralysis, he has created quite the situation for himself. You see, Rabastan doesn't know how to properly use dimensional magic. He knows how to create space and move it. But when he felt me trying to come down to rescue you, he panicked and created even more space within space, in the sense of a fourth-dimension! This is beyond his grasp now. He'll never figure this one out. Tell me, Astoria, do you know what a tesseract is?"
"Er, yes, that's going to be on my N.E.W.T., if there still are N.E.W.T.s…" she replied. "It's, er, a fourth-dimensional cube. So if you sort of unfold it all, it would actually be more cubes, since they all exist within each other."
Astoria felt embarrassed that she wasn't able to reproduce the same eloquent lesson Professor Vector had so carefully given her in class, but Professor Sinistra didn't take offence at Astoria's wording.
"That's right. They all exist within each other! Now, when Rabastan started creating space in between the space I was moving, he created a tesseract between the two of our spells."
"That doesn't sound very good," Astoria inferred, since that was about the breadth of her understanding.
"It's not, because I can't Vanish anything without Vanishing all of us. We need to get rid of him before we can exit safely."
"That doesn't sound very good, either! Er, how are we going to get him, then?"
"Ask him! He's the one who came up with the idea!" Professor Sinistra sang.
Astoria realised what she was maintaining a Patronus for. Rabastan had accidentally converged too much space. His half of the split room was open on the far side, fragmented into strange, geometric bits of darkness. Astoria finally understood: Rabastan's frantic spells had combined the space holding a certain hungry dementor that had been promised food a long time ago. Its hands were reaching through the black fragments of space behind Rabastan.
Tired of excuses, the dementor slipped fully into view and hovered over Rabastan. If that dementor had been left in Voldemort's care, after all, it likely would have had something to feed upon by now. Rabastan cowered in every corner, his sweaty, skinny, and hive-ridden body stumbling everywhere to avoid the monster's grasp. He wasn't giving up — not in the face of a fate so terrible.
"Why didn't you save your precious husband if you could do this‽" Rabastan snapped loudly, trying to keep his cool as he attempted Dark magic on the dementor.
"Dementors cannot be Vanished unless the space surrounding them is!" Professor Sinistra shouted back. "And are you not discovering it's impossible to gain control over dementors that have made up their minds? That is because they are created from the cruellest predator of all –– humans."
Rabastan tried to manipulate the space surrounding the dementor, but he was unable to divide the space further in the puzzle he created. It would take someone far less panicked than him to send the dementor to where the witches were, and even if he figured it out, Astoria's Patronus was ready.
"Aurora, you can't do this!" he bellowed.
"I certainly can! If it were not for you, and your manipulation of my husband, and your evildoing, I would have never seen my husband sent to Azkaban in the first place, much less Kissed! And you, who proclaimed your so-called love for me, would give me the same fate, all to have my body! You are the most disgusting person I know! Attacking my students! Of course I can do this! And I must! You've imprisoned us all in spacetime! Oh, Rabastan, I let you into this house to kill you easily: to trap you and Vanish you! But you didn't come to destroy Jonah's office like I expected. You went to my bedroom! I thought you might try something there, hence the itching powder… but I wasn't standing guard outside of it. And now look where we are… You could have gone the easy way, Rabastan! You did this to yourself!"
Rabastan was in mortal danger, and he began to shift his attention to Astoria, whom he knew that, in spite of her trials, was younger, warmer, and weaker than Aurora Sinistra. His sweaty palms pressed against the clear, conjured glass that separated them, a horrible sight.
"Astoria, you can't let her do this to me! Don't you want to save me‽ I'll die if you don't get me out, Astoria! You don't want to see me Kissed! We had a wavelength, Astoria!"
Astoria was petrified at his cries. She would not betray Professor Sinistra regardless, but what Rabastan failed to realise was how much she hated him independently.
You hurt me so badly, she thought in terror as he continued to cry for her and pound the wall. I'll never be the same. You've hurt so many people.
Astoria never did respond to him, and he turned back to the woman he had terrorised for decades.
"FINE THEN, YOU STUPID SLUT! I'LL GLADLY TAKE US ALL WITH THIS PLACE! THAT COSY LITTLE PATRONUS WON'T SAVE YOU FROM A BOMB, AURORA!" Rabastan threatened, more spit flying out of him as he shuddered.
"EVEN THEN, YOU WILL DIE ALONE!" Professor Sinistra raged.
With the Dementor's Kiss imminent, Rabastan meant to blow the whole unit of space up. The dementor, though, was powerfully famished. It grabbed Rabastan firmly, hindering him from making the necessary motions for quite the level of destructive spell he desired. Professor Sinistra watched closely, her breath held, in wonder of whether Rabastan even had a soul to consume.
Astoria couldn't look away, either. She wanted to make sure Rabastan got his due after all of the torture she had been through. He was almost right about her liking his pain. It wasn't that she wanted him to suffer; it was that she wanted him to pay.
Astoria had seen the Dementor's Kiss second-hand through Legilimency, the memory of one of many times Professor Sinistra had lost her husband. It ranked amongst the most terrible things Astoria had ever seen, but if she'd had to see it happen to someone she didn't exactly hate, she should have been allowed to see it for Rabastan Lestrange. In the dementor's arms, Rabastan was growing so pale that even the red patches of his skin were turning to a sickly yellow. He had no other option.
"Expecto Patronum," Rabastan said.
"ASTORIA, DON'T LOOK!" Professor Sinistra screamed at once.
Astoria didn't know what to do except obey and shut her eyes. Even if she hadn't, though, Professor Sinistra's hand came tightly over her face so that she might not see the events playing out before them. Something didn't make sense, though. People who were Kissed were always silenced by the dementor's mouth upon them, and Rabastan made such blood-curdling screams. She opened her eyes to see only the professor's hand.
"Professor?" she dared to ask once the screams finally stopped.
"He is dead," Professor Sinistra answered. "His own spell killed him."
"What?"
Professor Sinistra removed her hands. Astoria saw the dementor swooping about the space before them, and beneath its cloak was a huge pool of… what the hell was that?
She looked closer at the moving pool. It seemed like an entire person-sized bag of rice had spilled into the room. But it wasn't anything of that sort. Astoria's Patronus flickered out at the sight. It was insects. Little maggots. And beneath their wriggling, Astoria saw a skeleton emerge. Rabastan Lestrange had been picked to the bone in a matter of minutes. Astoria held her hand to her mouth.
"We can safely leave now," said the professor quietly.
She began to open portals behind them. Astoria screamed in protest.
"WAIT! I need that wand!"
"What‽ Are you out of your mind‽"
"No — It's my wand!"
"Astoria, that chamber is filled with maggots and the dementor—"
"That wand belongs to me!" Astoria insisted. "I Disarmed him the very first time he chased me in school! It's worked for me ever since — the blood magic, the Legilimency wavelength, and the Legilimens spell itself! You said so, too! The wand that defeated Rabastan is mine! Please, Professor, open up the glass between us! Just enough for the wand!"
Professor Sinistra was so keen to be out of the environment and away from the view that she listened to Astoria rather than argued. With round, black strokes, Professor Sinistra carved through both glass and space, only enough to try to retrieve the wand with magic. The paranormal maggots began to devour one another, and Astoria got a view of the long, leather braid that had conjured them. A Summoning Charm would not work on the wand itself, but as the supercilious whip had done Rabastan great disservice to his ownership of the wand, it would shame him again in death.
"Accio whip!"
The leather threatened to tear from the wand on the way across the space because the wand was not meant to be Summoned, but Astoria snatched the cord through the opening, released the Summoning Charm, and pulled the item through. Silver lime and dragon heartstring, a wand hewn for Legilimency. It had killed its first owner with the same degree of violence he had loved using it for, and it yielded now to its new sorceress.
Professor Sinistra opened a rectangular, glowing portal to the side, and they stepped through it without being pursued. They were in blackness, but Astoria could see the outlines of the fantastical shape of the fateful rooms in front of them.
"Evanesco," said Professor Sinistra.
The entire system of rooms — the fake Azkaban maze, the room that held Rabastan's skeleton, the split-off portion, and many rooms he had made in haste to hold off Professor Sinistra and the dementor — flickered and folded into themselves, Vanishing forever. Astoria took Professor Sinistra's hand so as not to lose her in the darkness.
"Mutata room," said Professor Sinistra, and it worked properly this time.
The room they appeared in had a dirt floor but an incredible ceiling. Astoria looked upwards in awe. They were standing under an enormous, stained glass skylight with every colour of the rainbow, more intricate than both the windows of a church or the lamps of art-nouveau designers.
"Professor… what is this? There's light above."
"A gift from Jonah," Professor Sinistra responded, admiring the view as well. "This was added to the Ministry of Magic building in 1910 with fake lights above to make it feel like it was not underground. When the Ministry building went through remodelling in the 1970s, they took this out because they had to start paying people to maintain it. And you know how the Ministry feels about paying people. Well, Jonah managed to finagle this out of there with a Shrinking Charm and a price. I once had big dreams to open up an observatory and make this the entrance hall, but with no observatory and nothing else to our names, we had no good place to put it, and thus began our track record of tax evasion. We learnt dimensional magic to give this piece a proper home. As you can see, there is my main portal right here."
An observatory…
Astoria didn't want to leave the rudimentary room on account of not having studied every last corner of the magnificent ceiling, but she took the hint and followed Professor Sinistra through another portal, which placed them near the red-curtained living area with the odd outdoor deck above. They walked out of the cavernous fireplace back into the real world. They climbed the tightly winding stairs, went through the door to the bizarre deck, and climbed again. After another hall, they were back in the still room.
Professor Sinistra gave Astoria a cream to thwart the itching powder. As Astoria was applying a Plasterleaf to her knee, she suddenly remembered that there was a war outside. Things still existed beyond the vanquishing of Rabastan Lestrange.
"With that all said and done, I am a bit upset with you," said the Professor closely. "I can't believe you came in here! And y-you've been out there fighting! You're underage — no, forget that — you would not understand to keep yourself safe for my sake? What should I have done if I lost you out there? Or in here?"
"I… I just couldn't sit and…" Astoria started to say, but it was hardly coming out right. "And when I saw you walk in alone, I…"
Professor Sinistra sighed.
"You are truly an astounding witch, Astoria."
Astoria choked down the rushing emotion. If only her parents could see. She had not one, but two stupid wands now, and someone who really believed in her.
"My mother is like the bright light in the sky. She is the morning star, shining even at noon-time. She is precious cornelian, a topaz from Marhaci."
- "Message," Lu-diĝira