Prologue
They called it destiny when I was a boy. The word effuses high romance. Adventure. A call to greatness. As a young boy, I saw my future self as the most powerful wizard in the world, capable of vanquishing great foes of both monsters and humankind. This visage is intoxicating. It was a standard in the back of my mind I could not shake, but in my mind, it was the ending sentence to every possible story about me that could be written. The entire scope of my sense of self-worth hung in the balance of this impending greatness, and all I needed to possess was a bit of patience to procure it.
Destiny instills a confidence in a person because it suggests that there is a rubric of one's life and that, at the very least, the ending will be a happy one. It suggests there will be no terminal illness or shortcomings; any difficultly can be quickly triumphed with a small amount of effort. One could also assume, I think, that destiny leads one to believe that happiness will be interwoven along this map of grandeur. Bad days blend into a mosaic of shadows, allowing the sharp pops of happiness to contrast brighter against the mundane backdrop of life.
As I grew older, they put this notion away, locking it in some deep recess of childhood lessons, abandoned at the first sign of adolescence. At the tender age of thirteen, I was no longer a hero of my own story, but an instrument which had to be properly fitted and molded into something better than nature designed. I was not Lucius Malfoy, but the son of Abraxas Malfoy. This is a title I understand now to be far more valuable to society than my identity. Nothing thwarts lineage, not in this world or the next, I am convinced.
My early existence was a falsehood which I clung to for many years before I realized that destiny is a euphemism for obedience. And the shedding of childhood and all it encompasses is compliance.
If I had known that, my story would have been different.