author's note: I know... I know... I know. It's been so many months. This story has been living in my brain the whole time, seething at me for not working on it. Unfortunately, my real life has been extremely hectic the for the majority of the last calendar year. With another promotion at work comes more responsibilities, and less energy after dealing with direct reports who did not want anyone to hold them accountable for doing their jobs... Enough of that ranting!

The plot thickens here!

Playlist for this chapter:

Blood Hands by Royal Blood

Third Eye by Florence + The Machine

The Curse by Agnes Obel

Murder Song (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) - Acoustic by AURORA

chapter 4: like a mantle

The next day, Ginny awoke to a drizzly, grey morning. Her eyes burned as she drearily looked around her bedroom, annoyed with the appearance of the drab daylight.

She'd continued to have those dreams all night, tossing and turning in her bed to escape them. Ginny groaned, thinking to herself that she may as well have stayed awake for the amount of rest she'd gotten. As she undressed to shower, Ginny could not shake the feeling of being watched.

It was as if there were eyes burning into the skin on the nape of her neck.

She shook her head at herself and pulled back the shower curtain to step into the clawfoot tub.

The water burned as it touched her skin. It was like when she'd been little, and she and Ron had been playing outside in the snow, and they would come in, numb from the cold. They would run to the loo together and turn the faucet as hot as they could get it, both placing their hands under the water, hands stiff.

It was the same sensation now as she stood under the hot spray of her shower. Her body was creaky, stiff. Ginny tried to relax into the warmth, but no amount of burning heat against the chill of her skin warmed her.

So much for that damned Pepper-Up potion, she thought to herself.

As she combed through her wet hair, shivering, Ginny tried to envision the day ahead of her. She wanted to drop by the museum she had visited with Harry and Cicero the day before to see if there was a curator she could speak to about the Morgana exhibit.

She thought the surprise of it must have been what had caused her creepy dreams all night. That knot in her belly from the day before hadn't lessened at all.

She wanted to put that worry behind her—talking to the curator would hopefully do the trick.

She thought she could do it on the company dime, as well, by discussing Excalibur with him.

After the trip to the museum, Ginny would need to head into the office so they could do more research on the last-known location of the sword and find a way to tie it to the Gates of Alexander.

She thought of Shambhala longingly. It somehow already seemed like a distant memory. Ginny wondered if it might be a lost cause. Should she even bother with it? She could always do more research later. After all, no one else seemed like they were scrambling to find it. But Merlin, the history she could help uncover there! There were so many legends and myths she had heard from fellow curse-breakers that were only rivaled by Atlantis.

Shaking her head of her daydream, Ginny performed a drying spell on her hair and then the tooth-brushing spell. She reached for her bag of makeup in the cupboard and pulled out the under-eye potion that would hide the evidence of her sleepless night.

Merlin, that was much better, she thought.

Ginny tried to keep herself warm by dressing in a jumper, knit skirt, and tights with boots. She knew she would get some odd looks, as it was late August and still warm outside, but she needed all the warmth she could get.

Once she was ready, she headed to the Apparition point nearest her flat and with a twist of her wand, reappeared in the Apparition bay of the museum.

It was overcast today. Ginny thought it matched her inner world marvelously. She marched across the viaduct and into the museum.

"Is the curator in?" she asked the witch at the reception desk.

"Erm, let me check. Do you have an appointment, Miss…?"

"Weasley. Ginny Weasley with the Magical Historical Society of England. I needed to ask him about an exhibit that I helped excavate."

The witch's brows rose up immediately, but she nodded as she turned to look at a calendar.

"It looks like he is in a meeting right now. I could pencil you in for a later time?"

Ginny considered. "Pencil me in immediately after this meeting is over, please. He can find me at the Morgana exhibit."

"I'll get it taken care of, Miss Weasley."

"Thank you," Ginny tried to smile. She didn't have the heart in her to smile fully, though, so after a few painful seconds, she gave up and turned in the direction of the Morgana exhibit.

The cold, dreadful feeling was growing worse with every step she took. And that sad feeling she had felt was back, tightening in her chest like a broken heart.

Ginny's legs felt so heavy.

When she finally made it to the exhibit, she had to take a seat on the bench inside the room. She shouldn't feel like this—she kept in fairly decent shape! She worried she may have some sort of fever.

Damn it, Ginny thought. She didn't want to have to take time off to go to the Healer. She could maybe call in a favor to Angelina, maybe, if she reminded her that she was her sister-in-law. If Ginny had been asked while she and Angelina (then Johnson) had been at Hogwarts, she never would have guessed that Angelina would have become a healer. The war had changed everyone, though, Ginny thought, the melancholy of her memories mixing with the strange melancholy that this exhibit brought to her.

It wasn't so strange, though, Ginny tried to reason with herself. If this truly was from the excavation of the Parisian catacombs, it would stand to reason that she would sense it and feel the grief of her experience there.

Merlin, she had wanted to forget about that first excavation entirely. It had seemed like a dream first job when she had been assigned there. Until it wasn't.

Seneca's wide, blank stare appeared unbidden in her mind's eye.

No, Ginny, she told herself. Now was not the time. She couldn't get so emotional before she had a chance to meet with the curator. She'd die of embarrassment if she was caught crying in a fucking museum of all places.

Ginny strengthened her mental barriers against her emotions.

When she felt she'd been sitting too long, she finally stood up from the bench and found herself walking about the exhibit, examining the artefacts.

Yesterday, she hadn't given herself a chance to read the informational plaques posted everywhere in the room. Today, it seemed she had endless amounts of time to read the information provided about the artefacts that she most likely found.

It should have been her doing the research on what these finds were, she thought bitterly. Why had no one given her the chance? Were they afraid that she would be too fragile after what had happened to her team?

Ginny's fingers followed along with the words as she read the introductory sign.

Morgana, known commonly to Muggles as Morgan Le Fay, was the stepsister of King Arthur of Camelot. Morgana was known in Camelot for her use of dark magic in the court. There are many legends that tell of her various plots to kill and usurp her stepbrother. While there is no evidence of these plots, there is a multitude of evidence that Merlin banished Morgana from England for her treason. Her sarcophagus was found in the catacombs beneath Paris in the year 2000.

Beneath these words was an illustration of a beautiful witch in medieval wizarding garb that had been commonplace in that time period.

A few centuries behind Muggle fashion and seeming much closer to the "Dark Ages," Wizarding clothing in the few art pieces of King Arthur, Merlin, and all their cohort that had made it to the Muggle world has led the Muggles to believe that Camelot existed much earlier than its true inception, the sign read.

Ginny was fascinated, but her patience was wearing thin. She pulled out the pocket watch her parents had given her for her seventeenth birthday and glanced at the time. She'd already been waiting for the curator for an hour. She couldn't stay away from the office much longer without suspicion from Ariadne Greycombe about her research methods.

Just as she was about to leave, Ginny heard footsteps and turned to find someone who had to be the curator of the museum, given the insignia on his museum-issued robes.

"Miss Weasley," he greeted, holding out his hand.

Ginny took his hand, grasping it tightly in her own as they shook.

"Mr…?"

"Oh, apologies. My name is Lysander Smith. I'm the head curator of the museum."

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith," Ginny smiled tightly. "We could have a seat on the bench, if you'd like?" she gestured to the bench she'd spent the better part of the last hour on. Despite the fact that she'd sat for so long, her body was growing weak feeling once again. She really needed to talk to Angelina.

"I just had a few questions about this exhibit, then wanted to probe your knowledge about another, somewhat unrelated, artefact."

"We can sit, then," Mr. Smith agreed.

Once they were seated, Ginny began. "Were these artefacts recovered by the joint excavation of the Parisian catacombs that involved the Magical Historical Societies of England and other European nations?"

Mr. Smith tugged at his tie, slightly uncomfortably. "Yes, they were. I understand you were on the team that uncovered everything in this exhibit?"

Ginny nodded. "I was. It was an… ah… interesting excavation. Nothing textbook about it."

"There were rumours of various deaths of curse-breakers," Mr. Smith probed curiously.

"Yes, almost my whole team was killed down there. I'm still not sure what did it—a creature, a curse we failed to detect, or even something… else." The final word came out of Ginny's mouth as if it were poison.

"I wouldn't be surprised if Morgana herself had somehow found a way to curse her gravesite," Mr. Smith told her. "The texts all point to her being quite, ah… vengeful."

Ginny raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for him to elaborate. When he didn't, she frowned in thought. She was trying not to let her memories pull her in, as they sometimes did, like quicksand, or devil's snare. She could feel their slimy tendrils wrapping around her even as she tried to remember why she had come to ask him about this to begin with. Oh, yes, that was right, Ginny remembered, shrugging the memories away again.

"Do you know why I wasn't asked to consult with you on the exhibit?" Ginny asked. "Or why the Society didn't even mention to me what we had found?" She realized for the first time that she was feeling angry about it.

All this time, she had thought nothing notable had come from her first excavation, and that all the death and pain had been for naught. She'd known that there was something there, of course, because otherwise there would have been no curses, no tragedy, no… insanely absolute reality. But Ginny hadn't thought they'd found it. She'd thought maybe they'd been stopped before they found whatever everything had been in place to protect.

Suddenly she wasn't cold at all. The collar of her jumper was feeling tight and altogether too warm around Ginny's neck.

Mr. Smith seemed to be struggling to find the answer to Ginny's question, because he had stayed silent through all of Ginny's introspection. She wondered if he had an answer at all—or if he did have an answer, if it was one he knew she wouldn't like.

"Well?" She asked, breaking the silence.

"Erm…" The curator swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down visibly as he tugged at his own collar, as if he suddenly was quite warm, as well.

Ginny stared at him in expectation, raising a single eyebrow inquiringly.

He swallowed again, and then told her, "They implied that every curse breaker on the team who discovered this had perished or gone mad after the discovery, while still on site."

"Who is 'they?'" Ginny asked.

"It was another curse breaker who'd been on another team at the Parisian catacomb excavation," Mr. Smith explained. "A witch. Her first name was… Ariadne. I remember her first name, because it reminded me of the story of Ariadne leading Theseus out of the Labyrinth, and how fitting it seemed to be that she had participated in an excavation of another Labyrinth, and how the she had been the one to find Seneca Hopkirk in that state and rescue him."

"That is a very detailed explanation for something you didn't remember a few moments ago," Ginny noted.

The curator grimaced. "Well, you know… most curators don't like to discover they've been misled and that they haven't given credit where credit is due in an exhibit."

Ginny chuckled darkly. "I honestly had thought that had been the habit of most curators for quite a while after the Egyptology crazy began between wizards and Muggles alike." How many museums trafficked in stolen artefacts and relics, after all? She thought to herself.

Mr. Smith chuckled along with her, though Ginny sensed a nervous edge in it. But she was not angry with Mr. Smith. No, not with him at all. Rather, she found her anger was being directed in Ariadne Greycombe's direction. How dare she?

Ginny had known that Ariadne had never seemed keen on her, and had seemed even less so after the catacombs, but to purposefully mislead a museum curator about something that Ginny had risked her life to find, that her teammates had died in the attempt to find… It was more calculating than Ginny had credited the witch to be, though she had known the witch was calculating.

Normally, too, Ginny loved to admit how much she loved the idea of being a calculating witch, herself. But this… It stung.

Ariadne didn't owe Ginny anything. Ginny had thought she had at least earned her respect, though, even if not her admiration.

Pulling herself out of her reverie, Ginny smiled at the curator, though she wondered how the smile looked from his perspective. Was her smile cold, or tight, or did it seem feral? Oh, well.

"Thank you," Ginny told him. "For being willing to answer my questions. I had some other questions I was hoping to ask you that didn't actually have to do with this exhibit or Morgana at all."

Mr. Smith finally began to look a little more at ease, relaxing into the bench a bit more. As she watched him sag down, Ginny realized that she hadn't noticed how stiff he'd been sitting. Was there more that he was hiding from her? She didn't think he'd reveal anything further about all of that today. Perhaps another visit would loosen the curator up.

He smiled at her as she was cataloguing the entirety of the interaction into her memory. "What was your question regarding?"

Ginny smiled as sweetly as she could at Mr. Smith. "Caliburnus and its last rumoured location. I noticed on my visit with my teammates the other day that there was a plaque at its exhibit stating that the artefact hadn't been located in quite a while, so it could not be placed for display."

"Yes, that's right," Mr. Smith told her much more confidently than he'd been previously. "Excalibur has truly been lost in the mists of time. There are quite a few legends, of course, of both its whereabouts and purported powers, but nothing has been proven. We're not even sure it truly ever existed."

"I'm well aware of the scarcity of verifiable facts with any Arthurian artefact, Mr. Smith," Ginny said, feeling her annoyance grow with the man once again. "What I wanted to know were any rumours you may have heard."

He looked uncomfortable once again. "I don't concern myself with rumour," the curator told her. "That is more where you lot come in, isn't it? The museum and its historians discern the truth and empirical fact from your findings, and you lot do the finding."

Ginny barely kept herself from rolling her eyes. He was nearly telling her he saw everyone in her field as nothing more than graverobbers who went adventuring for the sake of adventure and glory. Ginny knew that was in fact how curse-breaking had begun, but there was so much more to it than that.

Truly, she spent more of her time researching than adventuring and plundering. Most curse-breakers ended up spending their whole career behind a desk or in a library. His condescension stung Ginny, and she decided that their conversation would go nowhere useful.

Abruptly, she stood up. "Thank you for your time, Mr. Smith. I won't keep you any longer. I hope you have a pleasant day," Ginny smiled at him. She didn't bother to shake his hand before she began to walk away.

Ginny stopped at the door leading out of the exhibit and turned back to face the curator, tilting her head just the smallest bit and smiling as sweetly as she could. "Oh, and I may be back with a solicitor about getting credit for my work." She gave him a small wave and turned back to walk away.

Her boots clacked satisfyingly on the flagstone floor of the museum as she left without looking back at the curator. She could almost feel him sweating beneath the jumper and vest he'd been wearing.

She held in her giggles as she passed the reception desk and made her way back into the Apparition bay. With a wave of her wand, Ginny disappeared from the museum.

* Gates * Gates * Gates *

Ginny walked through the foyer of the Society's office with the same forcefulness as she had at the museum. Her fatigue had disappeared with the creation of her icy anger. She felt reinvigorated, more purposeful.

Her feet steered her to Ariadne Greycombe's personal office.

When she arrived at Ariadne's door, she found Ariadne sitting at her desk, peering over a roll of parchment, brows furrowed in what looked to Ginny like consternation.

Ariadne glanced up from her reading, her face now a mask of boredom. "Did you finally deign it time to come to work, Weasley?"

Ginny fought back a growl. "No, actually, I've been working off-site," she told her superior through gritted teeth. "Which is actually what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Oh?" Ariadne asked, still seemingly bored. Ginny had been feeling fonder of the witch until what that smug curator had revealed to her, and now she couldn't help but think she'd been right all along. She should have known better, Ginny scolded herself.

"I know about the Morgana exhibit."

"And?" Ariadne asked.

"I know it was you that kept me from getting proper credit, along with the rest of my team, for the artefacts we discovered in the catacombs."

"Oh, is that what's got you marching in here in such a strop?" Ariadne asked, picking at a—probably imaginary—piece of lent on her fitted navy robes. "Seneca had told me he was the one who had discovered that whole sarcophagus room and had shown you all how to disarm the curses and sent the artefacts back himself to the lab."

Ginny hadn't thought she could get any angrier, but she had been wrong.

"Fucking bloody hell, Greycombe. Why don't you just say that you liked to reside inside Seneca's arse and get on with it so we can all be honest with ourselves here?" As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Ginny knew they were the wrong ones. Still, she relished the brief flash of pain in Ariadne's eyes and the way that she physically drew back away from Ginny as if she hadn't considered Ginny capable of such acidic words.

Ginny hoped they'd hurt more than she could even see.

She opened her mouth and began to speak again before Ariadne could reply. "Are you still too busy being up his arse, even now, when he's practically gone, wasting away because of that fucking place? Or are you just too far up your own twat?"

Ariadne stood up abruptly, the roll of parchment flying away and her ink well spilling over onto the desk.

Ginny's wand was in her hand before she even had a chance to think to draw it.

"Are you looking for a fight, Weasley?" Ariadne asked, her own hand twitching in the direction of her wand on the desk.

Unfortunately for Ariadne, her hand was too slow on the draw, and the wand was too far.

In another life, Ginny had been a child soldier. And she had survived the experience for a reason.

"Yeah, I am," Ginny told her, raising her wand in the blink of an eye. "Sectumsempra!" she shouted, pointing at Ariadne and slashing her wand quickly down, a flash of white light flying towards the other witch.

Ginny watched in satisfaction as the spell hit Ariadne and the blood began to blossom onto the front of her dark robes like a black narcissus.

Ariadne crumpled to the ground, paler than Ginny had ever seen her.

As Ginny stared at her prone form on the ground, the blood pooling around her body, she realized what she had done. She thought she heard a scream from somewhere that reminded her of a banshee's, and she then realized it was her own.

Ginny fell down to her knees, looking on in growing horror. Bile rose in her throat and Ginny swallowed it down, relishing the way it burned its way back down her esophagus. As she stared on, she couldn't hold in her own anguished scream.