"All my life, my heart
has sought a thing I
cannot name."
Prologue
I was lost. Every moment of my life as far as I could remember I had felt lost. A perpetual emptiness sat somewhere deep within my soul, and I yearned achingly for the piece of me that was missing. I was a lonely little girl, lusting for something - anything - at all.
I grew up without my father, he had been incarcerated when I was a baby for committing unspeakable crimes in the name of The Dark Lord. Of course I had always suspected my mother was a Death Eater by association, one doesn't marry a heinous criminal by mistake, but she had never spoken anything of the sort aloud. We didn't speak of my father. In fact, we hardly spoke at all.
Perhaps it sounds melodramatic and even a little bit cliché for a teenage girl to say, but my mother didn't like me. I couldn't remember a moment of affection; not a hug, a kiss on the forehead, not even a single word of comfort when I had been scared or fallen ill. My mother was a narcissist with a terrible contempt for weakness and human emotion, which she would remind me with great hast whenever I dared to let my emotions surface in a moment of pain or fear. Growing up in such a household was enough to turn anyone into a pessimist, which was true for my sister, Brielle, who was absolutely awful most of the time. I didn't blame her, I had considered how much easier life could be if I could shed my skin and become somebody else. But unfortunately I was not a snake, despite being sorted into Slytherin on my first day at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and I couldn't shed my skin nor the layers of foolish optimism that shrouded me in a hopeless ideology that one day I was destined for something else.
My love for divination may have fuelled my affliction. Professor Trelawney had encouraged us to accept what fate had chosen for us, and made me believe each and every one of us had a destiny that was written into the bones of our very existence.
I was moronic to believe the notion of fate, because as I had learned, our future is subject to change based on our choices.
And despite the small child within me who lived in a sentimental whirlwind of catastrophic proportions, each poorly made decision had been that of my own.
Fate hadn't brought me here. There was no destiny, no predetermined timeline chosen for me by a higher power. I, and I alone, had brought me here. To a place of incessant darkness that had coiled around my soul and held onto it like a vice.
Demons were more than living beings now. They haunted the halls of the place I had once called home, lurking in each dark corner and crevice, waiting as they call for me. And like snakes, they shed, leaving pieces of themselves within me, my mind becoming host to the voices I can no longer hide from.
Sometimes I wish to escape the darkness, but that foolishly optimistic child is gone now, and I know there is no high power willing me toward something better.
My fate is dark, and it is a fate I have chosen all on my own.