CHAPTER 4: EPHIALTES

Lyra

A viscous substance was clinging to the soles of her bare feet as she trudged along the dingy pathway rather clumsily.

She felt dirty, as if she had not bathed in months and the only remnants of hygiene ever existing were far-off memories from long ago that she struggled to even recall. She was drenched in sweat, the perspiration dripping down from the tip of her nose to the edge of her chin, her hair matted and stuck to her forehead, adhering to the back of her neck.

Her skin was moist and unnaturally ridged, covered in scars and cuts she had no memory of ever receiving and stripped of any color that might have been there once upon a time. It was dull, almost grey despite the sheen of sweat that hinted at some sort of body heat, the surface covered in goosebumps that sent shivers down her spine.

Her bones felt weak and fragile as the ones in her legs attempted to sludge their way through the eerily warm liquid pooling at her feet and undoubtedly getting under her grimy toe-nails. Her cheeks were especially hollow, making each one of her shallow breaths sound like puffs of smoke exhaling from decaying pipes.

She could scarcely make out any shapes through her unusually blurry vision, the only sign of life in them being her dilating pupils that altered between small and large in an effort to adjust to her dim surroundings.

She was shaking, trembling mainly, probably from some sort of chill in the air, a conclusion she couldn't confirm however due to her brain's inability to accurately decipher the temperature at that moment.

Her mind seemed to be functioning correctly in terms of reaching a destination, be that as it may a destination that was consciously unknown to her.

Yes...her feet certainly had a mind of their own and it seemed it would be a while before she found out exactly where they were taking her.

Unfortunately, that would not be the case when in a trice, a rattling, or more accurately a hissing sound echoed in the surrounding atmosphere causing her mind to seep into a faintly aloof state. It was as though an unidentified preternatural creature was calling for its meal, and she was the unsuspecting prey answering it's hypnotizing calls.

No matter how hard she struggled against its hold, it was relentless in its attempt and frankly, she never stood a chance. Eventually, she gave up the mental struggle and let the creature's calls lead her along the dark and unfamiliar path towards Godric knows what.

Soon, the room, which she now realized resembled the black tiled Ministry of Magic complete with an elaborate throne forged of bones directly in its center, became illuminated by green flames posted on the walls. They were strange in the sense they did not warm their surroundings, but made the temperature drop significantly.

Looking down, she registered that the sticky substance she had been trudging in was sanguine in color.

Blood, thick and curdling with her movements.

Put off by the rusty smell in the air, she inhaled through her mouth. She was now aware that the disturbing hissing had ceased and she could relax the muscles that had been unconsciously clenching.

She cracked her knuckles and stretched her spine in an attempt to reduce some of the tension, and finally, her now clear gaze drifted towards the assembly of hard white tissue that formed the throne.

In it, sat a small and wrinkly creature. It was whimpering and twitching as if in unbearable pain and it resembled a human baby, though definitely not as appealing. Perhaps this…thing was what had been making the noises.

Very confused by her surroundings, she stepped forward, leaving a trail of blood in her wake. Before she could reach the throne however, the squat creature started to tremble and form into a different shape, finally transforming into a lengthier version of itself.

Voldemort.

"Well hello darling," the words slithered from his mouth and his tongue flickered out with his strange pronunciation of the locution.

"Let us see what she can tell us….hm," he spoke to a hidden assembly of Death Eaters.

She had not seen the Death Eaters that surrounded her and Voldemort before, but now they were all making their presences known with shrieking and sardonic laughter that vibrated the very ground she was standing on.

One of the Death Eaters started to approach her from behind, never ceasing his maniacal snickers, his black boots making their way through the blood on the floor that had started to boil with his contact.

Once he was all but a foot away from her trembling form, he grabbed her head in a strong grip, turning it back towards his master.

Her watering eyes met with the ghastly red ones of her greatest nightmare, and before she could put up any defense, Voldemort was plunging into her mind with vicious claws that scrapped at her insides leaving nothing behind other than her severed remains.

He was searching for something specific in her memories. First he watched as she, Hermione, Ron, and Harry set up camp in the Black Forest and were reciting the protection spells that would encase the clearing in invisibility.

Voldemort watched as she prepared her weapons in case of an unexpected encounter with snatchers, and then abruptly slashed at the memory with unbearable force. She shrieked.

He then moved on to the time the snatchers had somehow been able to capture them, even with two of her daggers lodged into one of their feet, and the other with an arrow going straight through his abdomen. This time, she could feel her emotions at that moment. Her desperation, her guilt, her fear.

He lacerated that memory as well, bringing out another of her chiming screeches.

Voldemort skipped ahead to when Dobby had saved them all by apparating them out of the manor and causing the chandelier to come crashing down. Dobby was dying all over again. Voldemort laughed in her mind. He left the reminder of Dobby's death untouched.

It was execrable. If she did not concentrate too hard on monitoring what Voldemort was witnessing, she could hear her own screams back in the place that resembled the Ministry.

She could feel her muscles giving out and her body crumbling onto the floor while seizing. She could listen to the ongoing laughter of the surrounding Death Eaters.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't get her Occlumency to work and it was all too much.

She was dying at the hands of Voldemort and no one was coming to save her.

Routinely, when Lyra awoke from a nightmare, she jolted up pin straight in her bed, the coils screeching with her sharp movement, and her mind acutely aware of her surroundings.

Once she disentangled her nightmare from her reality, she would be unsurprised to find her hand clasping around the handle of her dagger, and her body positioned for a fight. Her casting hand would be held defensively in front of her body for wandless magic, though her wand would not be far from her reach.

It was routine. Habit. A recurring regimen.

Yet this time, when she woke up in the dead of night, her eyes were dazed; she remained huddled up in a clammy ball under the sheets, severely lacking in cognizance.

Her throat was burning from the strain of her screams and her figure was trembling violently with fright. Surprisingly, she had not awakened the rest of the castle thanks to her dorm's remoteness from the primary Gryffindor dormitories.

Still under the weight of the duvet, Lyra focused on the vehement gusts of wind that knocked on her darkened window, begging for entrance, and thought of a piano tune that would compliment such a demanding tone of nature.

Preoccupied with the beguiling task of her own distraction, the dark figure approaching her bed went unnoticed.

Two things occurred in quick succession; the figure stood over her, casting a shadow over her bed, and grasped her jaw firmly.

Her vision was still blurry from the tears she had not managed to blink away, making it impossible to clearly see who was gripping her so harshly and pinching her nose, tipping a flask against her gasping lips.

The last thing she felt before her eyes shut were strong calloused hands loosening their grip, sweeping away a stray strand of hair, and a weight that dented her bed, causing her body to lean into the unknown threat.

The thick substance from the flask poured down her unwilling throat and she was once again swept into a sedative state.

It was freezing.

That was her first thought after waking up that morning in her dorm.

Groaning, she stretched her sore muscles and noticed that the confining feeling of her sheets did not accompany the motion. No wonder, her duvet had crumpled onto the floor along with her wrinkled sheets as if she'd been thrashing around all night.

That's when she realized she had been doing just that. The dream played out in her mind in pulsing flashes and the more she remembered, the more the agony of it came rushing back into her pulse causing her adrenaline to run wild.

Denoting a deep articulate sound from the back of her sore throat, she squeezed her eyes shut and lay in bed trying to regain her usual composure. This was not the time for a breakdown.

She thought of the piano. Her hands shuffling along the keys, each press of her fingers releasing a mellifluous melody into her ears.

Each note was like a tranquilizer dart, something muggles used to reduce irritability or agitation in animals by-way-of anesthetic drugs. They punctured into her eardrum, initially causing pain with their acuity, then transfiguring into waves of placidity and surges of dopamine.

It was her form of occlumency.

Once everything was tucked into the very back of her brain, she slowly reopened her eyes and came face-to-face with the least comforting pair in all of the wizarding world.

She made a deft motion with her nimble limbs. Before he could so much as blink she had reached into her night table's drawer, retrieved her dagger, and held it firmly to his trachea, ready at any second to slice his carotid artery in a swift slash.

"Why are you here Malfoy," she said in a voice that was slightly too calm for someone who was currently holding a deadly weapon to a wizard's throat.

He chuckled. Moving faster than she thought possible, Malfoy grabbed the hand threatening his pharynx and pinned it above her head against the bed's headboard, his toned body hovering over her with his knees pressed against either side of her thighs to hold her there indefinitely.

Lyra looked at him in shock, but shook it off quickly. "Explain yourself Malfoy or granted, you'll regret doing that."

"I doubt that, however, I am not in the mood to deal with your incessant nonsense so I'll let that slip this time," he said in a tone that seemed nearly genuine.

"Let that slip?" she all but scoffed, "You act as if what I do is something you permit, but let me tell you something, if you ever believe you can control me, then you are thoroughly mistaken. Now answer my question."

Still hovering over her body, his arms flexed on either side of her head and he leaned closer to her face. "I was in my dorm last night and discovered a hidden passageway that connected the Head Boy and Head Girl dorms. I was unaware of that at the time, so I ended up in your room and heard you screaming at the top of your lungs. You wouldn't shut it so I went to my room, retrieved some Sleeping Draught, and forced it down your throat. Happy?"

She was surprised by his immediate honesty but brushed it off as his hot breath ghosted across her forehead, even so, she didn't let it unsettle her. "No, not happy, because that still doesn't provide ample reasoning for you still being here," she replied with her eyebrows crunching in irritation.

He huffed. "After you finally stopped screaming, the passageway had closed and it would not reopen. I couldn't simply leave through your door because that would require your password which I do not have, so I slept here instead."

Her eyes widened at the overt admission. She had never known Malfoy to be this obnoxiously blunt. Why in the world was there a passageway between the Head's dorms in the first place?

"What?" she asked at once.

His features contorted into a wicked scowl. "I am sure you heard me, don't act like such a dimwit when you are truly nothing but the opposite. What could I do other than sleep here?"

Lyra scowled at his blatant words, not able to discern if the first part was his form of a compliment.

"Let me get this straight Malfoy, you, the same person who bullied me for years, called me a mudblood, and attempted numerous times to physically hurt me, are claiming to have given me Sleeping Draught and dozed off in the same room as me out of the kindness of your heart and inconvenience of a dysfunctional hidden passageway?"

"Yes," he responded without hesitation.

What in the world was happening to her? Was this some sort of twisted trick? If so, she would not have a scruple against returning the dagger to his throat and this time, actually finishing the job.

Nonetheless, she couldn't deny the fact that she dimly recalled someone pouring a liquid down her throat last night, and his story seemed to match the memory.

For minutes the two remained quiet, shooting daggers into each other's eyes, that is until they both realized the obscenity of their situation.

Lyra Wolf was in a scandalous pair of undergarments, pinned to her bed by Draco Malfoy, who was hovering over her half-naked body, a dagger not so far from his grasp, clearly having slept the night in her room.

Malfoy instantaneously rose from the somewhat compromising position and rushed towards the armchair near her small makeshift library wearing a disgusted look on his face.

Meanwhile, Lyra dragged her crinkled bed linen from the floor and wrapped it around her exposed torso wearing a similar expression of distaste.

"What is it with you Malfoy? Are you attempting to receive some sort of redemption where everyone forgives you and the world goes on with its merry ways with Draco Malfoy as its 'redeemed man of the century. 'Is that what you expect?" Her face was turning a deep fuchsia with her anger.

When he didn't respond immediately she continued, "What do you want? For everyone to deem you a vindicated man? Or are you really playing one of your sick mind games where you convince everyone you're good and trustworthy and then you turn your back on them with absolutely no hesitation or guilt."

Suddenly, a vivid evocation floated to the surface of her thoughts and it was like sinking her head into the contents of a pensieve in which her own memories swirled within.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon at her home back in London. The Battle of Hogwarts had occurred three weeks earlier, and she was in her stage of denial.

Draco Malfoy was staring straight at her through the pages of the Daily Prophet, announcing to the public his new initiative for Post-War Rehabilitation.

Rita Skeeter had dedicated the whole front page to "Draco Malfoy: The Hidden Hero Behind the Battle," in which she wrote exclusively about the Ex-Death Eater's "true" part in the War, portraying him as the most eligible wizarding bachelor, and a man who was covertly on the side of good.

Allegedly, though she had a hard time believing any of Rita's words, Draco Malfoy had been trained by the best in Voldemort's ranks, consequently making him the most effective weapon against his own side.

At the battle, unlike many of the Order members who refused to cast dark magic, Draco had killed 63 Death Eaters with a flick of his wand, 12 with his bare hands, and 6 using a quill, feather and all, after his wand had been snapped in half.

A bloody quill.

Some called him a monstrous machine. Others called him their savior. Either way, he had played a significant role in their victory whether she could admit it or not.

And then he went on to create an initiative for Godric's sake.

One that would work specifically towards rehabilitating magical families who were affected by the War, focusing primarily on future generations of wizarding folk learning about the history of the battle and second reappearance of Voldemort throughout their Hogwarts education.

All at the age of 18.

He and the Headmistress were collaborating on altering the wizarding perspective on Slytherins, once and for all diminishing the stigmatization that the Slytherin House currently possessed.

At the time, she scoffed at the prospect that Draco Malfoy of all people would be doing this, especially just three weeks post war. So she tore the prophet into shreds, and never thought of it again.

Until now.

Now everything made sense. Why Draco had not called her a mudblood on the Hogwarts Express. Why he and his mother were not currently in Azkaban. Why McGonagall was holding this stupid start-of-term dance as a way to join the houses in celebration.

Her mind was catapulted into the present at the profound hum of Draco's voice. "Wolf. Snap out of it and tell me the bloody password so I can leave this hell hole. And quit yammering about redemption, it's almost piteous."

Well, he surely wasn't making an effort to display the "gentleman aristocrat" façade he had been wearing all summer.

Honestly, it was quite the relief. She didn't think she could bear him pretending to be some new and improved version of himself, or whatever the pages of Witch Weekly described his persona as.

"No," she answered indignantly while trapezing her way towards the closet to change into something more suitable.

She grabbed the closest article of clothing she could and put it on quickly, stepping out of the closet to resume her argument with him.

"I will not stand and watch as you pretend to be some stupid 'savior,' or whatever the papers call you, just so that you can gain some sort of power and then stab everyone in the back!"

She had seen Malfoy lose his patience plenty of times before. He has most definitely been angry with her in the past, however nothing could compare to the way he was glaring at her now.

Draco's veins were pulsing in his tightly shut hands, the one on his forehead protruding rather threateningly. He wore a scowl that made her wish there was some sort of obstacle between them to prevent him from taking the few short strides required to strangle her, something that he seemed to actually be considering at the moment.

To her disappointment, he starts to slowly approach her. She takes a step back each time he takes one forward, eventually having her pressed up against the wall with his breath fanning across her face.

He towers over her, his head tilted downwards to look at the top of her head as she tries not to look up at his haunting features. A strand of his blonde hair falls out of place and brushes against her forehead as he inclines himself closer to her ear.

"Look at me Wolf," he whispers menaciously. Lyra takes a shaky breath and turns her head upwards, apparently not quick enough because Draco slithers his hand to her jaw and jerks it up for their eyes to meet.

"What I do is none of your business and you have no right to assume that everything I do is of malintent. If you so much as look at me accusingly again I will not hesitate to do something about it. Give me the damn password and I'll never so much as glance at you again. Do we have a deal?"

Lyra was fuming. Who is he to tell her what to do? She already told him that he could never control her, so it was truly pointless. On the other hand, she could not pass up on his offer for them to never interact again.

"Fortuna Major," she blurted before she could change her mind.

"What?"

"It's the password dumbarse. Get out before I kill you myself."

"If you insist on love" he draws with a smirk on his face.

The response stuns her. Lyra's eyes flutter shut, whether it be from agitation or something completely different, and she inhales deeply.

She senses him taking his hands away from the sides of her head, and heading for the door. Without a word, he's gone.

Lyra lets out the breath she'd been holding since having those words uttered in her ear as she was pressed against the wall. She was sure to have bruises from how hard she stumbled into it.

Bending down to pick up her dagger that had somehow fallen to the floor during their interaction, she notices that her journal was no longer where she had left it open last night.

A sense of dread sinks to the bottom of her stomach. She quickly straightens up, dagger in hand, and chances a glance at the page it was open to.

No.

Malfoy had of course, been reading her analysis on him. Great, now he probably thought she had some weird obsession with him.

She closes the journal, stuffing it into her satchel and running to the bathroom to quickly clean up her appearance to head down to the Great Hall for breakfast. This was going to be a long first day of classes.

"Gosh Lyra, everyone is staring at you," Hermione says as she rolls her eyes and pushes a strand of curly hair behind her ear.

"I know, I don't understand what the big deal is," Lyra answers as her anxiety starts to get the best of her.

She and Hermione were sitting at the Gryffindor table, laden with breakfast and parchment from the earlier arrival of mail.

That morning, after Lyra had regained her composure following the sordid encounter with Malfoy, she had made her way down to the Great Hall, only to be confronted by hundreds of stares from her fellow classmates.

"Don't be silly Lyra," Hermione stated fairly condescendingly. "I mean, have you not looked at yourself in the mirror lately?"

Lyra's head, which had been turned away from Hermione while surveying the room snapped back towards the girl who was giggling uncharacteristically. Hermione was not a giggler.

"Um, yea I have looked in the mirror lately and frankly, I was disappointed."

Hermione snorted, making a few heads turn her way, but she paid no attention to them and continued her equivocal conversation with Lyra.

"Oh come on Lyra, do tell me you have at least noticed that you've changed significantly since the war. Sure you look rather tired, and you have gotten a bit scrawny over the summer, but otherwise, you are quite the sight for sore eyes." Hermione's eyebrows wiggled teasingly as she said the last part.

"Are you alright Hermione? Are you feeling queasy or something because you are acting odd today?"

"No-"

Lyra interrupted with the realization, "Oh, I see, you're trying to hide whatever is causing everyone to stare from me. Is it really that bad? Either way I can take it, Hermione, go on."

Hermione was now staring at her, mouth agape, quivering at the edges as though it could turn up into a crooked grin at any second. "Wow, you really don't get it, do you?"

Yeah, something was definitively off about Hermione, she thought as she shot her a quizzical glance.

"Bugger off Hermione, usually the boys are the ones to act weird around me. Where are they anyways?"

Sighing in surrender, Hermione decided to move on from her initial topic and instead, answer Lyra's question. "Oh, Harry and Ron went off for auror training. They made an arrangement with the headmistress so that they could participate in their auror training while completing eighth year. I warned them that it would interfere with their studies, but of course, you know the boys, they..."

Lyra gave up on listening to Hermione drone on about the boy's whereabouts almost immediately, because honestly, she couldn't care less. Everyone seemed to be getting on with their lives as if Voldemort and his forces had not wiped out half of the student population a mere few months from now.

The dense atmosphere of despair was evident amongst both the students and the staff, but no one was falling dead from asphyxiation. No one but her.

Ginny soon joined the table to speak with Hermione, only ever casting a few worried glances at Lyra and a hastened "good morning."

Lyra moved her breakfast around on the plate with her fork, occasionally having it spill over onto the table but going otherwise untouched.

Once sufficient time had passed for it to be anything but abrupt, she gathered her things, waved to the girls, and dodged several questioning eyes on her way to the library.

Upon arrival, she smiled at the new librarian who was set to replace the late Madam Pince, and navigated to the very back to her favorite table, grabbing a thick book from the shelves on the way, where her musings could finally go unimpeded.

She inhaled the familiar scent of parchment and wood, content to be back at her safe haven, even releasing an audible sigh of satisfaction as she settled into the big comfy wingback chair.

Hours passed where her wish for being left uninterrupted was fulfilled, but, tranquility never lasts, she thought almost humorously at its irony. Someone was pulling out the wingback chair in front of her, not bothering to muffle the noise of the chair legs scraping across the floor.

She refused to give whoever it was the satisfaction of witnessing her vexation, so she ignored it and continued skimming the pages of Miranda Goshawk's Book of Spells.

Admittedly, it was a bit lazy of her to try to brew the potions in the back of the library, but since the book had the convenient ability to conjure utensils with which the reader can brew the various potions included, it would be a crime not to take advantage of it straight away.

She was about to add the last ingredient of boom berry juice to produce Wiggenweld Potion, something to hopefully counteract the flobberworm mucus in the unusually powerful Sleeping Draught Draco had given her (she was having some nasty side effects), when the stranger coughed loudly, making her pour in too much of the boom berry juice.

She grunted with frustration and looked up to face the soon to be dead person who had deliberately befouled her potion, "What is your problem dipstick?"

"Oh darling, I am just enjoying a bit of light reading. Don't mind me," the Slytherin from the train grinned devilishly.

"Excuse me, I don't even know who you are and yet you still manage to ruin my day."

"I'm Romeo Drimld Lovat, yes I know that my middle name is awful but you can blame my mother for that. And for ruining your day, was your day really so horrid that messing up your potion entirely derelict it?'

"Yes, and you just made the misery ten fold. You're a dirty sewage rat, you know that?"

"Oh, don't give me that muggle sewage rubbish, I may as well be the only good thing that occurred to you all day."

"How is that?"

"I already have a vile of Wiggenweld Potion right here," he says as he pulls out a miniscule glass vile, "All you have to do is ask for it nicely."

Lyra glanced between his challenging eyes before glancing at the vile he was holding out to her.

"There is no way I will ask for anything nicely, especially if you think I am dumb enough to take a potion from a stranger." Lyra grabs her absurdly poofy hair, a consequence from the precipitation the cauldron was emitting, and puts a quill through it to keep it up.

She turns indignantly away from Romeo and prepares to rebrew the potion with a quick vanishing spell.

"Is that right?" his deep voice interrupts after a while of silence. She turns back to him looking quite disgruntled that he chose to continue their conversation and states, "It is," with a slight tilt of her chin.

"Your loss Wolf," and he gets up and walks away, slipping the vile back into his robes pocket without so much as a glance in her direction.

Gosh, she thought, he truly was an odd person.

Classes went by slowly, the worst of them being potions, which was tremendously disappointing considering that it was usually her favorite class of all, however Draco Malfoy spent the entirety of the lesson glaring at her like some infected zombie.

It was most unsettling, that she could easily admit, but she couldn't deny that it had seriously creeped her out, a feeling she would rather keep a secret. If Malfoy found out that his attempts to perturb her were actually succeeding, she'd never hear the end of it.

The fact that he had not kept his promise to never so much look at her again angered her, but she knew he was doing it to get a rise out of her so she would not give him such satisfaction.

Since classes had ended a while ago, she carelessly jotted down a few of her observations on him in her journal, and then moved on to begin a page on the Romeo kid from the library. She sensed he was someone to keep an eye on but couldn't place just why.

Giving up quickly on actually evaluating the reason behind Romeo's behavior, Lyra marched towards the Headmistress' Office thinking it was about time to talk to Minerva.

As she mumbled the password to the Gargoyle guarding the entrance, watching as the spiral staircase formed from thin air, she couldn't help but feel the churning of her stomach.

Lyra climbed up the stairs and prepared to knock, but the door swung open to reveal Minerva McGonagall staring down from over her nose at Lyra's stunned expression.

"Good evening Lyra, I've been expecting you but you have arrived later than I anticipated, nevertheless, do come in."

"Um, yes headmistress," Lyra muttered as she rushed to take a seat in front of the Headmistress, who was already seated in the wingback chair behind the desk. Perched above her head was the portrait of Dumbledore, who was smiling wistfully at Lyra, stroking his beard.

A number of curious instruments, most definitely a few that she recognized from Dumbledore's time in the office, stood around the circular room making peculiar noises. The trinket she most recognized was a miniscule silver object that was releasing small puffs of vapor with each noise.

Saddened to see that Fawkes, Dumbledore's prized Phoenix was not sitting in the golden cage on the far side of the office, Lyra reverted her wandering gaze to Minerva.

"I apologize for not coming sooner-"

"No excuses Miss Wolf, now I have wanted to speak to you about our training lessons, and how I would like to continue them despite the end of the war. It is still of great importance to maintain your magical abilities, and I believe our lessons were assisting you significantly in reaching remarkable achievements."

"Oh," Lyra spoke, slightly taken aback by her bluntness, "That would be great but,"

"Then that is all Miss Wolf, please return to your dorm as it is near curfew already."

"O-Okay, thank you for your time Professor McGonagall." Lyra stood and made her way down the stone steps hurriedly, grasping her wand and heading for her dorm.

Lost in her introspection, she couldn't hear the footsteps following her down the corridor until the person was directly behind her.

She spun around, pointing the tip of her wand at the person's eye, shaking off the arm that had latched onto her robes, but surprised to see that another wand was pointed directly at her heart.

Fuck.