Chapter Thirteen
The Snake Dream
"Harry! Ron! Hermione!" Llewellyn appeared at the lunch table, followed by a girl their age clutching a pile of school books and looking flushed with excitement. "Rosalind was sorted earlier today - she's in Gryffindor, too! I was just helping her settle in at the dorm. "Roz," she continued, looking towards her friend, "this is Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, Dean Thomas, Seamus Finnigan, Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, Ginny Weasley, Fred and George Weasley...." Llewellyn introduced Rosalind to everyone that she had befriended or spent time with over the last four months who was at the table, Rosalind looking a little annoyed at the quantity of names her friend was dumping on her. "Hi. I'm Rosalind Sidereus, nice to meet you," she said simply, and sat down to lunch, to worry about names later. After all, it's not every day that you cross the Atlantic, get Sorted, become suddenly plunged into a castle in the middle of a country you've never been to before, and have major exams to worry about in four months.
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The hissing this time was nearly melodic as, yet again, she crawled on half- human hands and a snakelike body through the evil, dark labyrinth. Something about it this time seemed different, almost in a comforting way. She moved her dream hands over the floor underneath the hordes of snakes that littered the maze and found it to be hard, cold, yet yielding and magical earth, as opposed to the dead, frozen stone she remembered from dreams previous. The walls were of earth, too, and even now, she had the feeling that the labyrinth was different from the one she had stumbled through while sleeping so many nights before. And yet, things still felt the same - the low hissing and the sounds of hundreds of snakes moving around her own strange dream body, the dark, the quiet desperation and confusion. I've been through this dream so many times, she said to herself. But I still can't find what it means to me or even how this dream ends. She willed herself to stay asleep, to keep herself in the dream, to try and make sense of the nightmare that had plagued her since the beginning of the year. The broken broadsword lay before her. Tempted again, she reached out to hold its mirror-like surface to herself, and then pulled her hand back. The answers to this mystery did not lie in that sliver of metal. She willed herself through the dimly lit earthen tunnel, around a gradual bend...and then she knew she was not alone. There were hooded and cloaked figures there that towered over her in the maze, but as she had no clue as to her actual size, she could not tell if they were human or not. She wondered if she should try to retreat from the figures in the wall or run back from where she came from as she raised her head. Before she knew what was happening, a sword glared in the dim light of the tunnel from beneath a cloak. A fiery, godless pain blossomed in her eyes, causing her to scream - a hoarse, evil sound, guttural and ear-splitting at the same time. Had she not been subjected to the horrendous torture of having both her eyes cut in two, she would have realized it was the first sound she had ever made in her dreams. She curled up in a fetal position on the floor, rocking back and forth and wracked with pain, and felt the snakes crawl all around her, hissing loudly. They would be that last thing she would hear as she slowly felt herself dying. Who were those...those things who had done this to her? She was whimpering now, a low, croaky, pitiful noise...why wouldn't those figures attack her again so she could die quickly, not in this agony, trapped in an underground den of snakes? But even the snakes weren't so bad...she could almost imagine them sympathizing with her, giving her words of comfort and healing and peace.... "ATTACK THEM!" she suddenly shouted with her last reserves of strength. "ATTACK THEM AND KILL THEM AND AVENGE ME!" The walls and ceiling began to shake. The snakes were moving, like a tsunami of scales and sinew, and the last thing Llewellyn's dream self could remember feeling was the horde of snakes slithering around her dying body and seeking her revenge.
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Llewellyn woke up in her real, human, lying in a Gryffindor four-poster body then. It was strange - she was having a hard time opening her eyes. She rubbed them and yawned, and felt something strange beneath her fingers - hard, and gritty, and a strange metallic smell pervaded her nose. Finally, she managed to get her left eye open, and looked down at her hands. Her breath caught in her chest. That could be none other than dried blood. Frantic, she ran to the girls' bathroom and washed both her eye sockets out with hot water. She peered into the mirror, wondering what state her eyes would be in. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was like she had never woken up with both eyes caked in blood. She took a deep breath and found she was shaking. After a few moments of staring down at the tile, she walked back to the dormitory. It was empty, but as it was later Sunday morning, Llewellyn didn't think much of it. She did notice, however, as she was changing out of her nightgown, that the four-posters all seemed like their occupants had left them in a hurry. However, she heard the usual buzz of the weekend common room coming from downstairs, and so was pretty sure that she wasn't missing something or doing something wrong. When she went down to the common room, some people gave her strange looks, but Llewellyn was looking for her friends. Seeing no one, not even Hermione in her corner, she decided to head down to breakfast in the Great Hall. Harry and Ron were there, although Hermione and Rosalind weren't. She grabbed a seat next to the two boys. "Boy, did you get lucky," greeted Ron through a mouthful of cereal. Llewellyn looked at him quizzically. "All the girls in your room came down last night with dragon pox or something," explained Harry. Llewellyn looked aghast. "What? Where are they? Are they okay?" "They've got the shivers and the shakes," answered Ron. "They're in the hospital wing. Harry and I are going to go visit them after breakfast." "I'm joining you." Llewellyn took a banana from a pile on the table, but didn't eat it.
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"These girls need rest and relaxation and silence and you're not going to give it to them!" whispered Madame Pomfrey loudly through the door. "Can we go in one at a time, then?" countered Harry exasperatedly. Madame Pomfrey pursed her lips. "Dragon pox is highly contagious if never exposed to it before, that's why they all have it at once." "I had it when I was a little girl," lied Llewellyn. "That's why I didn't get it, and I'm in the girl's dorms." "Oh, all right, you can come in," resigned Pomfrey. "For five minutes. But they're all asleep and I want to keep it that way." "Thanks." Llewellyn slipped through the door, but Madame Pomfrey stopped Harry and Ron. "Where do you think you're going?" she said. "Unless you'd like to start an epidemic, I'd suggest you stay outside." She shut the door. "But what if I do want to start an epidemic?" Ron argued jokingly to no one. "Well, if they're asleep, and Madame Pomfrey's still there, Llewellyn'll be out in less than thirty seconds." They were silent for a moment, just looking at the floor. "How do you think four girls suddenly came down with dragon pox?" said Harry suddenly. "I don't think it's dragon pox," admitted Ron. "There's always a lot of nasty coughing with dragon pox - Charlie had it, and Mum put him in a quarantine hut she and Dad made in the back yard so the rest of us wouldn't catch it." "What do you think it is, then?" asked Harry, suddenly worried. Ron thought for a moment. Just then, the door opened, and Llewellyn came out of the hospital wing. "How are they?" the boys asked. Llewellyn shrugged. "Asleep," was all she said. She was afraid that if she continued, she would suddenly shout what was playing again and again in her mind: Those pox marks weren't pox marks... They were snakebites.
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Llewellyn, Ron, and Harry spent most of the rest of the day in silence, studying yet again. Ron and Harry were rather worried about the girls and their mysterious condition, but in comparison to Llewellyn, they were completely indifferent. She kept grilling Ron about magical ailments - Harry, of course, had very little experience in the subject. Somehow, she managed to sneak in two additional visits to Madame Pomfrey's that day, during which one of them most of the girls were awake and supposed to be having lunch. Sadly, she reported to her friends back in the common room, they all seemed to have a reasonless feeling of despair and a loss of appetite. All three of them wondered what could have struck four out of five perfectly healthy students in one night, and Harry couldn't help but have a image flash in his head of someone casting a curse on the dormitory. But, why not Llewellyn? his brain shot back. Why not Llewellyn? Harry looked at her, her black hair obscuring her face as she scanned through a book on wizarding sicknesses, and wondered exactly what was going through her mind. He brought himself down to his senses. It was probably nothing more than a strange strain of dragon pox, or something even more uncommon, that she had encountered before. Even so, he and Ron found conversation with her clipped and restrained that day, and no one complained when she announced that she would be going to bed very early that night. Ron and Harry watched her as she went up the stairs in silence, and then immediately turned to each other. "Something's not right here," said Ron quickly, as if he had been meaning to say it all day. Harry agreed with him. But for the time being, they could only hope that Hermione, Rosalind, Lavender, and Parvati would get better, and soon.
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Llewellyn threw herself onto her four-poster and sighed angrily. First the whole Dark Mark thing at Columbia, then the snake dream, then this. She ran the events of the last few weeks over and over in her mind. As if she had siphoned them off into a Pensieve, she almost thought she could see a pattern between the seemingly hopeless tangles of episodes in her life. But the connection soon faded, and her mind cleared, save for a dull, grey ache that had been lurking in her head for the whole day. She felt tired, but for some reason her body wouldn't let her get to sleep. She realized that she may be unconsciously frightened of having the snake dream again. Yawning and sitting up, she willed herself to fall asleep the moment she fell backwards and her head hit the pillow. She tried it. It didn't work. Desperate, she flung her arms out, trying to get herself comfortable. She hit something metal, which surprised her, as she thought she would possibly come in contact with Hermione's wooden wardrobe. Putting her hand down, she discovered the metal was circular in shape, and mounted to something hard, neither wood or metal. She found the edge of the thing, ascertained it to be a book, and brought it over to herself and the four-poster. She didn't need her glasses or a brighter light than the dim moon outside to realize that the metal circle under her finger was a coil of the three- headed snake on the Handbook of Modern Dark Magic. Strange. She noticed something odd about the head facing left. She put on her glasses and held up the book to the moonlight. The mouth seemed unnaturally large, a much wider space than she remembered. Then, she realized that the mouth seemed wider that usual because something dark was painting the inside of it. The light was poor, but Llewellyn thought right away of what the substance was. As she lit the lantern, her suspicions were confirmed...it was blood. Something was not right there.
Although she fretted away half the night over what had happened to her friends and if she were somehow the cause, her consciousness finally decided it couldn't take all the fretting and gave up at about one in the morning. Llewellyn consequently woke up later than usual, and noted with dismay the empty dormitory. She changed again, into the school robes this time, and went down to a quick breakfast before her lessons and possibly a quick run to the hospital wing. But, she needn't have bothered. With an immense feeling of both relief and bewilderment, she saw that all four of the other girls were back on their feet and enjoying their meal. Not a single pox mark, or snake bite, or whatever, was on their skin. Llewellyn greeted them, and was glad to see that no one seemed to be very worried about the girls anymore. After all, it had to be one of those twenty-four hours bugs that came and went faster than you could say "Pepperup". In fact, Hermione and Rosalind seemed very happy that they had only lost one day of studying, and a weekend day to boot. In fact, only one person still saw the ailment as a very strange thing, and she was the only Gryffindor fifth-year girl who hadn't gotten the illness. In fact, the illness troubled her as much or even more than the snake dream, which was interesting, because she couldn't shake the feeling that the two were related. The only relief that she found in this was that she was sure she wouldn't have the snake dream the way she did two nights previous. She actually would never have the snake dream again, but pieces of the last one would suddenly appear when she was awake, and sometimes during strange and unlikely activities for sudden recall.
The Snake Dream
"Harry! Ron! Hermione!" Llewellyn appeared at the lunch table, followed by a girl their age clutching a pile of school books and looking flushed with excitement. "Rosalind was sorted earlier today - she's in Gryffindor, too! I was just helping her settle in at the dorm. "Roz," she continued, looking towards her friend, "this is Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Neville Longbottom, Dean Thomas, Seamus Finnigan, Lavender Brown, Parvati Patil, Ginny Weasley, Fred and George Weasley...." Llewellyn introduced Rosalind to everyone that she had befriended or spent time with over the last four months who was at the table, Rosalind looking a little annoyed at the quantity of names her friend was dumping on her. "Hi. I'm Rosalind Sidereus, nice to meet you," she said simply, and sat down to lunch, to worry about names later. After all, it's not every day that you cross the Atlantic, get Sorted, become suddenly plunged into a castle in the middle of a country you've never been to before, and have major exams to worry about in four months.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The hissing this time was nearly melodic as, yet again, she crawled on half- human hands and a snakelike body through the evil, dark labyrinth. Something about it this time seemed different, almost in a comforting way. She moved her dream hands over the floor underneath the hordes of snakes that littered the maze and found it to be hard, cold, yet yielding and magical earth, as opposed to the dead, frozen stone she remembered from dreams previous. The walls were of earth, too, and even now, she had the feeling that the labyrinth was different from the one she had stumbled through while sleeping so many nights before. And yet, things still felt the same - the low hissing and the sounds of hundreds of snakes moving around her own strange dream body, the dark, the quiet desperation and confusion. I've been through this dream so many times, she said to herself. But I still can't find what it means to me or even how this dream ends. She willed herself to stay asleep, to keep herself in the dream, to try and make sense of the nightmare that had plagued her since the beginning of the year. The broken broadsword lay before her. Tempted again, she reached out to hold its mirror-like surface to herself, and then pulled her hand back. The answers to this mystery did not lie in that sliver of metal. She willed herself through the dimly lit earthen tunnel, around a gradual bend...and then she knew she was not alone. There were hooded and cloaked figures there that towered over her in the maze, but as she had no clue as to her actual size, she could not tell if they were human or not. She wondered if she should try to retreat from the figures in the wall or run back from where she came from as she raised her head. Before she knew what was happening, a sword glared in the dim light of the tunnel from beneath a cloak. A fiery, godless pain blossomed in her eyes, causing her to scream - a hoarse, evil sound, guttural and ear-splitting at the same time. Had she not been subjected to the horrendous torture of having both her eyes cut in two, she would have realized it was the first sound she had ever made in her dreams. She curled up in a fetal position on the floor, rocking back and forth and wracked with pain, and felt the snakes crawl all around her, hissing loudly. They would be that last thing she would hear as she slowly felt herself dying. Who were those...those things who had done this to her? She was whimpering now, a low, croaky, pitiful noise...why wouldn't those figures attack her again so she could die quickly, not in this agony, trapped in an underground den of snakes? But even the snakes weren't so bad...she could almost imagine them sympathizing with her, giving her words of comfort and healing and peace.... "ATTACK THEM!" she suddenly shouted with her last reserves of strength. "ATTACK THEM AND KILL THEM AND AVENGE ME!" The walls and ceiling began to shake. The snakes were moving, like a tsunami of scales and sinew, and the last thing Llewellyn's dream self could remember feeling was the horde of snakes slithering around her dying body and seeking her revenge.
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Llewellyn woke up in her real, human, lying in a Gryffindor four-poster body then. It was strange - she was having a hard time opening her eyes. She rubbed them and yawned, and felt something strange beneath her fingers - hard, and gritty, and a strange metallic smell pervaded her nose. Finally, she managed to get her left eye open, and looked down at her hands. Her breath caught in her chest. That could be none other than dried blood. Frantic, she ran to the girls' bathroom and washed both her eye sockets out with hot water. She peered into the mirror, wondering what state her eyes would be in. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was like she had never woken up with both eyes caked in blood. She took a deep breath and found she was shaking. After a few moments of staring down at the tile, she walked back to the dormitory. It was empty, but as it was later Sunday morning, Llewellyn didn't think much of it. She did notice, however, as she was changing out of her nightgown, that the four-posters all seemed like their occupants had left them in a hurry. However, she heard the usual buzz of the weekend common room coming from downstairs, and so was pretty sure that she wasn't missing something or doing something wrong. When she went down to the common room, some people gave her strange looks, but Llewellyn was looking for her friends. Seeing no one, not even Hermione in her corner, she decided to head down to breakfast in the Great Hall. Harry and Ron were there, although Hermione and Rosalind weren't. She grabbed a seat next to the two boys. "Boy, did you get lucky," greeted Ron through a mouthful of cereal. Llewellyn looked at him quizzically. "All the girls in your room came down last night with dragon pox or something," explained Harry. Llewellyn looked aghast. "What? Where are they? Are they okay?" "They've got the shivers and the shakes," answered Ron. "They're in the hospital wing. Harry and I are going to go visit them after breakfast." "I'm joining you." Llewellyn took a banana from a pile on the table, but didn't eat it.
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"These girls need rest and relaxation and silence and you're not going to give it to them!" whispered Madame Pomfrey loudly through the door. "Can we go in one at a time, then?" countered Harry exasperatedly. Madame Pomfrey pursed her lips. "Dragon pox is highly contagious if never exposed to it before, that's why they all have it at once." "I had it when I was a little girl," lied Llewellyn. "That's why I didn't get it, and I'm in the girl's dorms." "Oh, all right, you can come in," resigned Pomfrey. "For five minutes. But they're all asleep and I want to keep it that way." "Thanks." Llewellyn slipped through the door, but Madame Pomfrey stopped Harry and Ron. "Where do you think you're going?" she said. "Unless you'd like to start an epidemic, I'd suggest you stay outside." She shut the door. "But what if I do want to start an epidemic?" Ron argued jokingly to no one. "Well, if they're asleep, and Madame Pomfrey's still there, Llewellyn'll be out in less than thirty seconds." They were silent for a moment, just looking at the floor. "How do you think four girls suddenly came down with dragon pox?" said Harry suddenly. "I don't think it's dragon pox," admitted Ron. "There's always a lot of nasty coughing with dragon pox - Charlie had it, and Mum put him in a quarantine hut she and Dad made in the back yard so the rest of us wouldn't catch it." "What do you think it is, then?" asked Harry, suddenly worried. Ron thought for a moment. Just then, the door opened, and Llewellyn came out of the hospital wing. "How are they?" the boys asked. Llewellyn shrugged. "Asleep," was all she said. She was afraid that if she continued, she would suddenly shout what was playing again and again in her mind: Those pox marks weren't pox marks... They were snakebites.
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Llewellyn, Ron, and Harry spent most of the rest of the day in silence, studying yet again. Ron and Harry were rather worried about the girls and their mysterious condition, but in comparison to Llewellyn, they were completely indifferent. She kept grilling Ron about magical ailments - Harry, of course, had very little experience in the subject. Somehow, she managed to sneak in two additional visits to Madame Pomfrey's that day, during which one of them most of the girls were awake and supposed to be having lunch. Sadly, she reported to her friends back in the common room, they all seemed to have a reasonless feeling of despair and a loss of appetite. All three of them wondered what could have struck four out of five perfectly healthy students in one night, and Harry couldn't help but have a image flash in his head of someone casting a curse on the dormitory. But, why not Llewellyn? his brain shot back. Why not Llewellyn? Harry looked at her, her black hair obscuring her face as she scanned through a book on wizarding sicknesses, and wondered exactly what was going through her mind. He brought himself down to his senses. It was probably nothing more than a strange strain of dragon pox, or something even more uncommon, that she had encountered before. Even so, he and Ron found conversation with her clipped and restrained that day, and no one complained when she announced that she would be going to bed very early that night. Ron and Harry watched her as she went up the stairs in silence, and then immediately turned to each other. "Something's not right here," said Ron quickly, as if he had been meaning to say it all day. Harry agreed with him. But for the time being, they could only hope that Hermione, Rosalind, Lavender, and Parvati would get better, and soon.
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Llewellyn threw herself onto her four-poster and sighed angrily. First the whole Dark Mark thing at Columbia, then the snake dream, then this. She ran the events of the last few weeks over and over in her mind. As if she had siphoned them off into a Pensieve, she almost thought she could see a pattern between the seemingly hopeless tangles of episodes in her life. But the connection soon faded, and her mind cleared, save for a dull, grey ache that had been lurking in her head for the whole day. She felt tired, but for some reason her body wouldn't let her get to sleep. She realized that she may be unconsciously frightened of having the snake dream again. Yawning and sitting up, she willed herself to fall asleep the moment she fell backwards and her head hit the pillow. She tried it. It didn't work. Desperate, she flung her arms out, trying to get herself comfortable. She hit something metal, which surprised her, as she thought she would possibly come in contact with Hermione's wooden wardrobe. Putting her hand down, she discovered the metal was circular in shape, and mounted to something hard, neither wood or metal. She found the edge of the thing, ascertained it to be a book, and brought it over to herself and the four-poster. She didn't need her glasses or a brighter light than the dim moon outside to realize that the metal circle under her finger was a coil of the three- headed snake on the Handbook of Modern Dark Magic. Strange. She noticed something odd about the head facing left. She put on her glasses and held up the book to the moonlight. The mouth seemed unnaturally large, a much wider space than she remembered. Then, she realized that the mouth seemed wider that usual because something dark was painting the inside of it. The light was poor, but Llewellyn thought right away of what the substance was. As she lit the lantern, her suspicions were confirmed...it was blood. Something was not right there.
Although she fretted away half the night over what had happened to her friends and if she were somehow the cause, her consciousness finally decided it couldn't take all the fretting and gave up at about one in the morning. Llewellyn consequently woke up later than usual, and noted with dismay the empty dormitory. She changed again, into the school robes this time, and went down to a quick breakfast before her lessons and possibly a quick run to the hospital wing. But, she needn't have bothered. With an immense feeling of both relief and bewilderment, she saw that all four of the other girls were back on their feet and enjoying their meal. Not a single pox mark, or snake bite, or whatever, was on their skin. Llewellyn greeted them, and was glad to see that no one seemed to be very worried about the girls anymore. After all, it had to be one of those twenty-four hours bugs that came and went faster than you could say "Pepperup". In fact, Hermione and Rosalind seemed very happy that they had only lost one day of studying, and a weekend day to boot. In fact, only one person still saw the ailment as a very strange thing, and she was the only Gryffindor fifth-year girl who hadn't gotten the illness. In fact, the illness troubled her as much or even more than the snake dream, which was interesting, because she couldn't shake the feeling that the two were related. The only relief that she found in this was that she was sure she wouldn't have the snake dream the way she did two nights previous. She actually would never have the snake dream again, but pieces of the last one would suddenly appear when she was awake, and sometimes during strange and unlikely activities for sudden recall.