Crystal-Wolf-Guardian: Definitely!
Rosebirdie: You almost made me cry. Thank you so much for saying that. I've really missed you guys as well.
Chapter 22: Annabelle
"I heard that you killed five students." Annabelle Deschamp's fingers toyed with the sheer ebony curtains draped around her bed. Annabelle had always enjoyed the more macabre side of witchcraft. In fact, she derived great delight from darkness - particularly the sort of darkness that allowed her own more blood gifts to come out. Divination, for all its whimsy, was a wretched, grisly art form that blossomed best in the space between madness and fortune. Clara wilted into a small velvet loveseat pushed against the wall across from her sister's bed, rubbing a hand over her tired eyes. "I would say bravo but I don't particularly think that you share my sense of humor."
"I don't," Clara stated blandly, leaning back into the stiff back of the seat. It always bewildered Clara how her sister kept everything so clean. Glass bottles filled with wax-sealed spells and work material like rabbit bones and pixie teeth lined the tall onyx, coffin-shaped bookcases that lined nearly every available wall. Placed at odd intervals were small alters, enchantments scribbled on their surface in between pools of dried wax. Busts of old gods sat precariously atop books and wall shelves. "Do you still pray to the old Gods?"
"No," her sister sighed, looking down at her nails. "I find that they make terrible conversation."
"Well, they mainly dabble with muggles now, you know."
Her sister's emerald eyes glittered a strikingly unnatural shade. "I thought they would see the benefits of aligning with someone with a bit more of an earthly pull. However, they didn't particularly agree with my ideas on incorporating modern technology into our interactions."
Clara raised a brow. "Like… muggle technology?"
"Like not having a million offering basins around my room," Annabelle sniffed, crossing her arms. "Or… I don't know. Transferring some of my coin over to Horus. Old man says he's the God of wealth but refuses to invest in cryptocurrency - can you imagine?"
Clara surely could not. In fact, she didn't know what her sister was ranting about at the moment. She had learned long ago that Annabelle's interests could fill an entire world and that many of those interests rested in areas that Clara knew very little about. She was too big for her own head - it spilled over into every corner of the room that she was. Books on every little thing - grimoires and scrolls that took up so much space that they had started to wander into stacks that filled the hallways just outside. Muggle books about the world outside of our borders and muggle books about worlds that can only be explained through written words. Books with only a few sentences on each page and books that were so big that they couldn't be held on shelves. Annabelle held a world inside of her frail body and sometimes she wondered if that was the reason that it was failing her. Maybe she just had too much inside - maybe the lack of room would someday grow to be too much and she would burst at the seams, coming untethered like so many books before her, her bindings snapping, her cover falling away.
"Archaic," her sister muttered, the words barely left her lips before a few of the stone busts shook ominous, sending a stack of papers to the floor in a flurry of discontent. She rolled her eyes, flicking a hand that send olives and a few other odds and ends flying into basins. The objects quickly caught fire, burning away in a purple flash of light. She slipped a look to her sister. "And emotional."
The silver-haired witch gave a soft laugh, her gaze drifting once more.
Clara's eyes moved to the stacks of candles, all in varying colors that took up an entire section of her beloved cabinets. "Do you still keep bees?"
A sharp click of frustration left Annabelle's lips at the mention, her expression growing haughty as she stalked over to the black and white pinstriped settee at the end of her bed. "Did you know that England's ecosystem only supports 270 species of bees?"
The white-haired girl's brows went up. "How…unfortunate?"
Annabelle shot her sister a scathing look. "France had over 874 active species of bees. It means that I can only domesticate a few to make the proper wax I need for my candles." She stared out the windows decorating one wall gravely. "Mainly honey bees."
"Oh, I do love honey," Clara bursts, immediately snapping her mouth shut as her sister glowered in her direction. "You can ferment it with flowers and make different flavors…" Her words slithered into silence as her sister's expression remained the same. "Or we could just throw the whole lot out. Get rid of it. I've always said honey is overrated. Too good on toast. Too good with peanut butter… Do you have any by chance..?"
"They're too sunny ," Annabelle huffed, seemingly finding great offense in the statement. "Always buzzing about. Do you know they're the only bee species that produces food eaten by man? How repulsively helpful."
Clara couldn't help the burst of laughter that overtook her. Merlin's beard, she had missed her sister so dreadfully. Looking at her, sitting there in a slim black dress, a forest green cardigan tucked around her, she could imagine just for a second that she had never left. That they were still in Beauxbaton. Clara's old friends would be coming by very soon and they would talk about trivial things like how to charm a whistle into a pocketwatch or how Mrs. Delare had surely used a nose reduction spell.
Annabelle would be sitting right there like she always had before and they wouldn't talk about the serious things like how scared Clara knew her sister was. Or how many more days until her next doctor's appointment or how much the last vision had affected her. Did she still get nightmares?
Laughter has a funny way of unlocking things inside of you. You think that you've cried all you can and then a moment like this can slip another wave of sadness from you like fingers gripping tighter to you, a hug turning into a clawing grasp for survival.
Clara's eyes were already raw from how much she had cried against her mother. She was glad when her sister didn't come to her, glad that she watched her for one troubled, silent moment before turning a smooth expression to the sunlight streaming through the windows. At the train station, Clara had felt like she was crying for all the things that she had lost, all the people who had slipped away from her. Now she felt like she was crying for all that hadn't changed - for the things that remained the same, whole and clean when she had returned feeling so broken and dirty. She felt the tell-tale stir of something dark and noxious in her very center.
She bit down on it, forcing herself to draw in one steady breath after another. She could control it. She had to control it.
"When they told me that you killed five students," Annabelle's voice was a slow, sure drawl, her eyes never leaving the open sky just past her window. "I told them that you didn't have it in you. Not even with wild magic coursing through you. You've always… been kind… too kind. Mom and dad force that patience down your throat-"
"I'm not kind," Clara hissed. The look of surprise that crossed Annabelle's face was too much for Clara to look at for too long. What Clara had done had been just as dark as what she had done all those years ago when she had cursed her sister. Wild magic wasn't something to allow out into the world. She had learned that lesson over and over again. Wild magic made wild choices. It corroded the very foundations of good magic, eating away and destroying the things around it. Clara stared hard at the wood floor beneath her boots, the hem of her robes dirty and wrinkled from trudging through the countryside. "I injured 12. One of the boys is still in the hospital. They said his arm is broken. The only reasons others aren't are because the nurse at Hogwarts is rather good with broken bones. The school has enough damage that they have to close down that wing for the rest of the semester."
And what about the rest? What about the invisible things that happened in people when something that dark is unleashed in front of them?
How would her friends ever be able to see her as more than the girl who had been sucked away by the darkness?
A black cat clock ticked away on the wall, it's tail swishing.
Out of a small hole in the wall a slim black cat stalked free, its eyes filled with disdain as it took in Clara's bowed head and its mistresses still, calm expression. To most, Annabelle might look entirely unaffected but Pendragon had known his lady for many months now and cats are many things but oblivious was not one of them. There was a tightness to her lips that made her seem…almost close to pain. Her fingers twitched slightly on the arm of her settee. Emotions like this were… well, they were frankly none of his business. He leaped onto her comforter, curling into a loose ball on her pillow.
"What now?" Annabelle's face had smoothed once more when Clara looked up and once again, she was thankful for her sister's lack of sympathy. Clara didn't need sympathy right now. She didn't deserve it. And although there might have been a bit of self-pity in that thought there was far more self-loathing. And self-loathing can be a horribly motivating beast when given to the right wielder.
Clara took a long breath, rubbing at her eyes once more before getting to her feet. "Now I go and look at my room. And I… move on."
Annabelle didn't get up as her sister drifted away, looking a bit smaller than she remembered her to be. When she heard the door close softly behind her she sighed, standing as well.
"Come, Pendragon. It seems we need to read a bit more on obscurials." Her eyes flicked scornfully to where the black cat was currently grooming himself. "And do please stop licking your balls on my pillow."
Clara found that her room, while large enough to more than accommodate her, was completely bare. Situated up a narrow staircase at the end of the hallway, the attic was more than likely the largest room in the house although there were no windows unless you counted the sprawling set that made up her ceiling. Currently, they were covered in dirt and dust and some of the roof's thatching that had come loose. She sighed thinking dejectedly about how much of a nuisance it would be to find a spell that would allow light to be blocked when she needed it to since the sun was currently turning her room into a sauna.
The sloped walls were painful white, the color made even starker by the sunlight filtering in. A simple twin bed with a brass frame sat against one wall, sheets that smelled of lavender and that were the color of ivory sitting neatly folded atop it. There was nothing else - nothing that had been brought from her previous home left behind. The Deschamps had sold it - furniture and all to afford the new expenses that would come from buying a larger house. They wanted a new life and that didn't include the memories that came with the old.
Her trunk lay in a patch of sunlight, the bold H of the Hogwarts insignia plain against the lavender dyed leather. She would have to ask herself later why she had agreed to let her mother get her those in that atrocious color. Maybe it had always been easier to just give in. Easier to let others make those decisions for her.
Who was Clara Deschamp really? Life had somehow tied her down with so many knots. She realized then, her body slumping onto her plain mattress that perhaps all of those years of tucking herself away had made her a little less… human. A little less magical. Her mother and sister - she knew who they were. She could tell who they were right away.
What was Clara's favorite color? Why hadn't she fought against the lack of a connection she had to her original wand? What did she want to do with her life? With her powers? She felt an uncomfortable tangle of pain slither up her nape at that thought. Magic - wouldn't it be easier to just get rid of the whole lot?
"CLARA!" Her mother's voice rang clear and strong through her door. She rubbed a hand over her eyes. "CLARA! SOMEONE'S HERE FOR YOU!"
Tawny eyes slid to the closed door, a bone-deep dread hollowing out her insides for a moment. Anyone who wanted to visit her now would only be here for one reason.
Thank you to anyone who reviewed. I know it's been a while so I wasn't expecting very many, if any. It really means a lot that people are still around and still enjoy this little world I've built though. I've gotten how much fun it is to creating all these place and how rich I find this world to be to create for.
If you can, I would really appreciate a review! It helps me kind of focus in on what's good or not good.