The

R A P U N Z E L
C O M P L E X

- Saeriel -

- Dim Aldebaran -

Chapter Five

Speculative Fiction

"When the senses are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness, who can stand?"

William Blake

There was a temptation to stand there, dazed; but she bowed her head to Hecate and retreated to the edge of the glade. There was a particularly prominent quartz crystal, the color of the midwinter sun; she stood before it and watched, and pondered:

She assumed 'Lord Chiron' was the Chiron of the Greeks, trainer of heroes; she could not ignore such an obvious connection. Perhaps he had become disillusioned by the Hellenic movement towards the power of many versus the power of one: a trainer of heroes was little use when a hero was useless to society. No Theseus was needed in a time when politics had little to do with monsters; no Jason when gold was more readily taken for power versus glory. Perhaps he had disappeared, and brought with him his kindred, not the licentious Sabine-thieves but those with magic in their blood and stars in their eyes, moving to the forests of the world where a single soul could still be great…

But it was all speculation; and watching the pacing of the centaurs, she knew there was little she could do, for now, but wait and perhaps speculate more.

Hecate had trotted back to the glade edge, and paced her area quickly, passing between the citrine crystals like a flame. Hermione's eyes followed her; it was hard not to, with such coloring. The other chieftains were dun besides her, sandstone before the ruby. Was she the mate to Lord Chiron…? It was odd, associating the two; one an obviously legendary leader renown for his quiet wisdom, and the other a bright, belligerent flame. They had spared no particularly sentimental words, and no actions besides the brief embrace which was of the variety exchanged between brothers.

The Hecate of the Greeks was a goddess in her own right, no minor character except to the patriarchal Hellenic movement, who combined her role with other goddesses. She was a goddess of witchcraft and crossroads, and another personification of the moon alongside Selene and Artemis. Her name was used alongside that of the Furies and Nemesis as a curse.

She stretched her mind, struggling to recall any small details that could give her insight into Hecate. She was no virtuoso with mythology; though it showed up frequently in Wizarding histories, she had never made any particularly deep studies—the past interested her far less than the present.

Her mind scrabbled back to Professor Binns. The development of classical alchemy had developed largely in southern Germany, where the cult of Epona, a horse goddess, was especially rampant. Centaurs, she knew, had an intuitive grasp of herbology and organic alchemy; had it thus developed? She knew recorded history was decidedly skewed against nonhumans. Perhaps this was the herd of centaurs Hecate ruled over; and perhaps her legend had percolated to Greece, changing from centaur queen to witch goddess along the way.

She considered their acceptance of necromancy; Hecate had always been associated with the dead—

In all her classes, all her books, all her previous encounters with centaurs, there was never once any implication that the centaurs might have ties to necromancy. In fact, their worship of the natural and their abhorrence of the artificial magicks—transfiguration, arithmancy—all pointed to the very unnatural magic of raising what fate ordained deceased. She had made a blind assumption before, in seeing their own blind acceptance of Artemis' actions; but the more she thought of it, the stranger it was.

Yet what process was more natural than death?

She shivered, and brought her robes closer around her. The night was deepening; the air was colder. The centaurs were mere blurs to her, even Hecate; a smoldering ember in the gloom. Even Lord Chiron was nothing more than a shifting shadow, and Artemis a pale face, a ghost in the gloom; was he, too, dead, was that why he possessed that most fantastic of powers—?

Irreverent. She brushed those thoughts aside and improved her night vision with a touch of wandless, voiceless magic. A few centaurs—Hecate included—jerked towards her, though did not stare.

Curious. Centaurs, evidently, could detect magic, even the wandless varieties that were hell for her to trace. So little was known about centaurs, so very little—

But how had he learned so much? The thought grated on her as the centaurs wheeled around, waiting for full dusk. She had narrowed it down to some sort of contact within the centaurs, either forced or voluntary—probably voluntary, lubricated with a few bribes. Lord Voldemort was very neat in his affairs; he didn't like having to back out of anything with the danger of tripping over his messes.

Still, to memorize the idiosyncrasies of centaur etiquette was a feat. Even with her abandoned S.P.E.W., she hadn't gone that far into House Elf subculture.

Someone had outdone her; the thought grinded on her like stale cheese on a grater. Artemis had done his research, Artemis had come prepared—

But that was old Hermione—no, not even me, another, a child…

I have no need for competitiveness; pride is irrelevant.

…yet here I am.

—and across the glade, towards that elegant splinter of a man.

Yet here we are.

She turned her thoughts towards him; because he is my competitor for the centaurs' goodwill, she told herself, not because of anything else—

His face was paler, more drawn, than in the Pensieve. The crescents under his eyes were as if someone had smeared mulberries beneath them, though some small amount of cosmetic magic had gone in to disguising his condition. His eyes were thus shadowed; they were darker, deeper, and all the more compelling. She had twin difficulties: one in looking away when she met those twilight depths, and another in holding that dark, probing gaze, however irritated she might become at herself.

His hair was almost girlishly long, and had the tendency to fall in front of his eyes. His long robes, classical though impractical, were another flourish to something beyond the inner scientist; though her hormones applauded, she found such aesthetic drama silly. Long robes, even if easily shed, could get in the way in a duel. Beneath them, he appeared to be wearing a fine silk shirt, dark blue or black; either way, it matched his eyes in a likewise aesthetic touch she found irritatingly pleasing.

She tore her eyes away from his needle-of-a-figure and looked at the grove itself. They were waiting for something, obviously; she suspected it was midnight, the time of deepest magicks, though it could also be waiting for the arrival of another centaur, or even another creature entirely that formed the council (the unicorn perhaps?—they held it in such high regard…)

For now, they paced; the tension surged within her like the tide of night, watching them trace frantic circles of idleness. No words were exchanged; her thoughts turned sickly, turning to leprous ends in the heat of fever.

More to keep her own imagination in check than anything, she examined the crystals in the grove. She was no geologist, but she knew they could not have grown here naturally—though 'naturally' was a warped word in the Wizarding world. The crystals were too large, too perfect, too abundant, and the surrounding rock was not the sort of matrix in which the minerals could grow even under perfect circumstances. They had been transported here; but for what purpose?

Aesthetics were out of the question. The centaurs did not seem the sort to construct grand anythings—no temples, no tombs, no palaces. She suspected it was a sort of focus; this would be a place of great magicks where things could be created that should only find life in the imagination.

Using crystals as a focus, she knew, was a very old and practical way of doing things: Wizard architects and engineers for thousands of years had often used them for levitating larger stone slabs. While searching for a lost child, a crystal focus would often be used to scan large areas at a time for that particular presence. Great spells of blindness or sleep could be cast upon large armies, dependant on whom the spellcaster favored for victory. Even Pensieves used a sort of lesser focus to guide thoughts, often dim and half-remembered, into its depths, and to make the memories more lucid when its usage was reversed. The practice had been recorded with non-human races as well: the merpeople of the Mediterranean would use crystal focuses to magnify their voices across the sea and thus draw sailors in—until various Ministries banned the practice. The Sirens needed no more infamy in the modern world. This it struck her with little surprise that centaurs, who were as intelligent if not more so than the merpeople, might also use this powerful tool.

But what magicks would centaurs use…? Running through her mind, she could think of no magicks associated with centaurs. It was the same problem as before—though evidence pointed to a necromantic society, they had no capability for magic! She distinctly remembered a report—having done research on how the Ministry treats other nonhuman creatures for S.P.E.W.—in which a full team of zoologists had done a complete search for magical capabilities in centaurs: hypnotic voices, chameleon, etc., and had concluded that their only magical trait was a predisposition to the Sight.

What would they use a focus for, then?—it gnawed on her mind. Whatever it was, she was now quite convinced that that was what they were waiting for; some great spell, some mission that ran unspoken through the centaur council and they evidently assumed she was aware of.

—does Artemis know?

Can he read their minds, can he see their plans?—

—or does he not need to, he must know everything…

Ridiculous, no man can know everything, he simply did his research, which I clearly did not..

…but can he read their minds, can he see their plans?—

—can he see mine, can he see how infatuated I am—

She was hardly an accomplished Legilimens; Snape, in his cruel patronage of her, had insisted on lessons over the summer—if only to keep up with Potter, he had sneered. He taunted her often with that; that Potter was a natural, that perhaps he was more a wolf than her, for Potter, at least, was a challenge to read and more pleasurable to do so, that her mind was a fruit excessively tasted and had lost its sweetness, all this as he delved in and laughed—

She shook her head. She was the one who had asked Snape's patronage originally last spring after first witnessing the Death Eaters in action and feeling so very weak, hating that feeling and wanting it to go away so badly that she turned to the only Death Eater she could trust—

Even as a First Year, he had fascinated her with his deliberate malice and uncaring genius, the sarcastic, the sardonic, the sadistic. A hated and twisted fascination, perhaps: she had buried this her first few years, covering it with a thick coat of loathing for Slytherin that was only natural for a Gryffindor.

But as she got older, she learned to find the beauty of a curved knife in Snape, the way his mind had folded and curled over the years into some nameless complex. When he had first seen this fascination in her mind, he had given his typical laugh; cruel, but short enough for sophistication. No words; only the laugh. A barbed insult would have been a kinder knife.

It had been enough for shame: Harry and Ron could not comprehend her sudden sharpness with them, and in a typically petty attempt at rationalization had put it aside to her 'time of month'. Though she apologized after the emotion of the encounter with Snape had trickled deeper into her heart, it didn't keep the shame away, welling up even now, nearly six months later.

Then there had been the summer, that glorious summer with the Order at Grimmauld Place. She saw her parents twice; and during each meeting, her mind was still turning from the lessons Snape gave her, the studies, the secrets, even as they embraced her and said grace before dinner and kissed her farewell.

Can Artemis read my mind?—

—is Artemis not a wolf equal to Severus Snape? Is Artemis not a wolf who had clearly captured Voldemort's limited favor? Is Artemis not a wolf who had raised the very dead—

He can read my mind.

She shivered, turning to other thoughts. It was too dark to be thinking of such things.

It was the dark of a vampire's soul; it was the dark of the raven upon the mantel. She could see it now, how the haze of magic began to swell like a tide with approaching midnight, brightening exponentially. Fascinated, she watched the haze become particulars, streams flowing down the long striations on the tourmaline crystals; not through the crystals, but upon, each facet glimmering like a thousand falls down a mountainside on a sunny day. She could see how it all worked now; the citrine crystals directed the magic towards the tourmaline, and the striations directed downwards, deep underground to some source, some battery—the forest's very heart.

And what would happen when midnight passed and there was no discharge, nothing to siphon off the power?—

—it would explode.

Her mind spun, linking pieces together like pearls onto a string. The haze was the debris from past explosions, when the Source was emptied to its entirety, thinning out towards the edge of the Forest. Creatures could only use magic in certain forms; much like lungs and gills for oxygen, pulling it from the air and water respectively. One of Planks' few good lessons had dealt with how magical creatures got their magic: werewolves, vampires, basilisks, acromantulas and others, all fearful things, could only absorb magic slowly through them, needing a steady environment. Other, less terrible creatures, like unicorns and hippogriffs, were more adapted to pulses, like being near places of power.

If the Source could not discharge in steady pulses, it would only explode.

The predators of the Forest would flourish in the magical debris field, while the peace-loving beings would languish, their power spread out too thin for them to absorb.

In Hogwarts: A History, the Forest had been a playground for young Wizards when Hogwarts was first opened after the fall of the Roman Empire—but now it was a tomb for the curious.

The centaurs revered the necromantic arts: yet they had no magic. When they lost control of the Source, they could no longer continue their practices—

—it was two-thousand years ago Lord Chiron had fallen, and out of all the necromancers of the centaurs, none could raise him.

Merlin—

Lord Chiron was the one who controlled the Source.

And now Lord Voldemort would control the greatest well of magic in all of Britain.

It all spun together, so elegantly, like a spider's web; and here she was, entrapped, but still admiring—

—and across the glade was the spider, and he saw her look his way and smiled, smiled with that cold smile of Voldemort himself.

Lord Chiron took to the center; there was an emptiness to his expression, the sort she had seen on the faces of enchanters as they cast the most powerful of spells. He was in the Source, now; he was breathing into it control, discipline that had been so lax for two thousand years. The centaurs stood still, now; as if bracing themselves, even Hecate; she stood like a flame stilled as if in a Muggle photograph, something incomprehensible and dull to Wizards but still so beautiful.

Artemis closed his eyes, slipping into something the same; or perhaps mere thought, she could not tell. She traced the curve of his eyelids, beautifully pale in the night. He was ten strides away; she could go over now and touch them, perhaps then the eyes would open and he would see her—

Stop it, Hermione Granger! You are not some infatuated schoolgirl, you are the brightest witch of the century—

It was the tsunami that had spawned a thousand Noahs and Arks across the world; it was the greatest avalanche of the Himalayas; it was the lightning flung from God's Own Hand; it washed her away into the roiling darkness of the deep, it flung from the height of consciousness to the most primal depths of fear; it blinded and burned and boiled her very blood.

And yet she still stood.

There was a sudden clarity to the world. She could feel every part of her; feel, not just be dimly aware that yes, she still had a hand, yes, her foot was in front of her… Her magical nightvision, winding down since its casting, was suddenly reinvigorated, night turned to day as if all the trees were aflame.

Indeed, they were: magic, visible not only to her inner sight but to her eyes as well, glinting like ten-thousand fireflies from the tops, not true flame but fire nonetheless, brilliant and blinding and beautiful. The trees were no longer gnarled, antiquated things, but grand and majestic, bold and powerful, protectorates of the crystal focus. It was as it must have been two-thousand years ago: everything in the Forest was suddenly bright and beautiful, not a terrible dark thing at all. It was little wonder that the centaurs did not build temples or thrones or anything grand: they did not need to.

The centaurs had fallen: being equines, it was awkward if not painful, legs twisted beneath them like crumpled spiders. Even Lord Chiron had fallen in the ecstasy of magical fulfillment; having not been pulsing full of magic in more than a two-thousand years. Hecate was like a wilted flame.

Her mind churned for a moment, then came to a conclusion: Lord Chiron directed the stored magic of the Source towards individuals. Why the centaurs could not tap it before was simple: they were not capable of it. Lord Chiron was unique in the respect that he could reach the Source and direct its magic to centaurs hundreds of kilometers away, perhaps due to mere predisposition or perhaps due to some magical modification done to him by humans.

If Lord Chiron was the only one who could control the Source, then he could create a hierarchy to keep him in power; the other centaurs treated him as a sort of god-king because he alone could provide the magic. Those might have risen against him in the past would lose their magic. For human wizards, the most terrible thing that could be done to them would be to destroy their ability to do magic; for centaurs, it must have been much the same.

She smiled. Of course. How else could that sort of cult-worship persist for so long? Christianity had its Christ to idolize; Buddhism its Buddha; Islam its Muhammad; Hinduism its Krishna. It was not because he was a savior at all; it was a mere belief stemming from his god-like ability to provide magic, proved an example that had lasted two millenniums.

The centaurs began to rise from the ground: did they know of this? These were the chieftains; did they suspect that his ability to withhold magic was linked to a Source that they could perhaps control individually? Or were they also in on the secret, spreading his influence until his death provided a method for their own self-deification as gods and goddesses of their localities?

Hermione stared at the rising form of Lord Chiron, wondering, wondering, wondering…

I thought him like Dumbledore before. For all his fair words, he seems more like Lord Voldemort now, taking power for his own—

—perhaps they are all mere reflections of the same soul.

Something in Hermione snapped; something of her righteous Gryffindor adolescence, perhaps. Dumbledore was no Voldemort. Her speculation on Lord Chiron was just that, mere speculation; she had no right to make comparisons between them.

All the centaurs had risen by now; many gazed around in wonder, seeing something her human eyes could not tell; perhaps they now saw the world as she did, brushed with roping tendrils of magic so unlike the haze that now faded rapidly.

Lord Chiron looked about; the ecstasy of a mother providing milk for an infant child seemed to fill his smile and spill forth into laughter, full and rich and true. Hermione's heart swelled strangely, like a bowl filling with this sweetness; but no, he is a false god—and it went away. "Friends!" he cried out, his alto resonating into the glade. "We are restored!"

A sort of whinny went through the centaurs, stomping and rearing up in a grand sort of thunder. Hermione deigned not applaud; Artemis, however, seemed to radiate a sort of approval of Lord Chiron's words even though he merely stood, hands clasped behind his back.

Does he know of the Source?

…of course he does, he knows all…

She would know if she looked in his eyes; they would be smug, she knew, like Snape's.

The thought trembled in her like a violin string, sweet and singular: she might at last, have a hand over the Dark Lord! If they didn't know of the source of Lord Chiron's godhood, she could use this if they gained control of this resource: perhaps to rouse the ignorant centaurs into an uprising against the false god, or the like.

She looked across at Artemis, recalling her Legilimens. Maybe she could even slip into his mind unnoticed and see if he was truly the lover of the Dark Lord, or maybe if he even thought about her on occasion, looking across and meeting his eyes—

—and falling into them, blue depths, the roar of the sea and the calm of the sky, the cold glitter of ice and the shimmer of summer rivers, the dead depths of the sapphire and the endless reaches of night—

She felt a sweetness slip across her mind, much like honey over too little toast, easing into her thoughts irresistibly. A haze came over her; she savored this sweetness, welcoming it, even; so much better than the confusion of trying to taste subtleties.

The sweetness had an edge to it; slowly, in small connections like the lacy roots of pennyroyal, she felt it, something else sliding across her mind, the sweetness like a lubricant as it went its way, a snake, slithering—

sneakyslimy snake, slithering slytherin

Artemis the Snake, slithering on in—

The sweetness held her; but another part of her began to struggle against it, fly in the web, bird with broken bones, valiant and vain.

The sweetness remained to her; and the snake laughed, sliding through her mind, slitherslither hisssss—

Desperate, now, she began recalling Snape's lessons; how he had laughed at her, how he had scorned her petty attempts at walling off her mind from him: you want privacy from all the wrong people, he had mocked, you want me to see into your pathetic teenage mind, you want me to see how mediocre you are and you want me to pity you because you think pity will make it all better even if you hate it. What is it that you see in Weasely? Never saw much in redheads—

—besides Lily Evans? Everything you never were, wasn't she—

She remembered that glimpse of his memories: that thought, once an inferno but now mere embers, perhaps nothing more than an infatuation but still, it was there and she saw it and put this knowledge into his mind and then she, too, had laughed.

The fog: she brushed aside tendrils, but they were not to be brushed aside, corridors of her mind overgrown, so verdant with sweetness that she could scarce move through, and she couldn't uproot the bliss because then it would be scarring her own mind, and her mind was all she had—

So she pressed through, straining those tendrils but still passing through in no direction but away; bruising her own mind, maybe she'd have a headache afterwards—but she had to get through now, she had to get out and away.

—and through the haze, white, not gray: cumulus versus stratus. She walked forward, faster now through her mind until she was running, brushing the tendrils of sweetness aside until there was no sweetness except in the distance, a canopy of clouds preventing her from full consciousness.

Before her in the thinning of the fog was an amphitheater in the style of the Greeks, low and shallow, marble steps and benches unfolding out before her like a broad Welsh valley. It was a sparse sort of elegance; and it would have been peerless if not for the black silhouette, like a sable thread suspended between a tapestry of white and weaving gray tendrils.

She stepped closer, down each broad step as quietly as she could in the silence. She could see him, yes—sitting in the front row, wearing a sable suit that hugged his slim body in a tight embrace; a very Muggle look. He was intent on the stage before him: and when she saw it too, she found herself intent on her own mind.

On the stage, scenes flickered by: some for mere moments, others stretching out into aching heartbreaks:

Little girl, big dreams: A Brief History of Time sprawled out across kindergarten knees: page two blurs with the tears of her incomprehension.

Artemis watched: she came closer and she saw how he leaned forward, fascinated.

Double Dutch: she's doing it for the first time. She's so happy she's smiling. One of the girls with the ropes sees this and frowns and says: "If your mom's a dentist and your dad's a dentist, what does that make you? A freak!"

Hermione trips.

She stepped forward and down, entranced by her own history, her own past: watching the complexes tangle in her childhood, little knots that she would trip on later in life and, indeed, had already, even now—

Little red riding hood: she races to the door to be the first one to hug grandma and the door's unlocked so she goes through, but grandma isn't there to give her a hug, grandma's on the floor, sleeping. Hermione goes over and tries to wake her: but her parents say the doctors have to wake her, they have to call the ambulance so they can wake her before she can never be woken again.

He shifted his weight: for a terrible moment she thought he was bored with her mind but he remained seated, watching. He was fascinated by these dark moments, things that could be found in every mind but here, somehow in hers, he was interested.

The cradle will fall: her dad's right next to her on the bed and he's just sitting there, tucking and retucking her in, he has a bedtime story but he won't say it, no, not yet, won't tell her what happened to the dog last night when daddy was coming home with broken headlights and tired eyes—

Artemis stood and turned; not because he was bored but because he knew she was there. "Mademoiselle," he said; hearing his voice directed at her, her, set her heart fluttering.

"Monsieur," she replied; she came down a few more steps. She knew it was all her in head, that he wasn't really there but that it was his representation as he probed her mind, but she didn't care—

He gave a little bow, one a troubadour might give. She watched, watched as his hair swung forward and back again, watched as his eyes still stared right at her, she had never known cobras had blue eyes—"I hope you'll excuse me," he said.

It took a moment before she realized it was a question. "—yes, yes of course."

He smiled, cold, and faded away, wintry fog.

The haze of her mind began to evanesce: but there was only one thing going through her head now:

Artemis and Hermione, wolves together—

—wolves are not meant to be alone; it is so glorious when they are but that is not what their very instinct commands them to do—

—let us be a pack of two, let us hunt together, let us break away from our packs and make our own, let's not be alone anymore—

Her eyes opened. She was alone in the glade; the centaurs had left, and Artemis was gone.

She drew out her wand; God only knew where they had gone while she lay there sleeping, dreaming of Artemis and of the sweetness that she might have with him—

"Apparate," she whispered, and disappeared.

:i:

Heya! New chappie. Anywho, just wanted to say that I hope the centaur culture and history was interesting, since Sorry and I spent a lot of time poking at how we could make it realistic (or as realistic as a centaur society could be.) We also got Hermione out of the Forest, since she's been there for three chapters already, even if that gets her away from Artemis. I hope the end bit with Artemis was coolios. Everyone has bad childhood memories, and I'd think that that's what Artemis would be most interested in from a personal perspective, not a professional Death Eater or whatever perspective. I'll have some of my thoughts and such on my lj, not as detailed as for FDL since this is a whole lot longer.

Also, I wasn't entirely sure how to pluralize 'magic' so I made it 'magicks'. I've seen it that way before, and it just looks cooler than plain 'magics', without a 'k'. Like 'Ann' without an 'e', or 'Katherine' instead of 'Catherine'. Hehe, too much Anne Shirley, methinks.

Oh, BTW, Gumbutt was the one who suggested the extension of the wolf metaphor. Just to give credit where due.

Also: anyone here read anything by William Blake? 'tis good stuff, especially some stupid shorts from my lit class (I HATE seventh grade. All the lit stuff is so babyish after what I do in my spare time… hehe, I bet no one cares anyway.)