Before (before the rain hides itself from them, before the sun shines down upon them, burning their shoulders and faces and legs, before the ground beneath their feet is deprived of moisture, of food, of life, before the water all around them retreats into itself, leaving pillars of salt behind like a barrier, like a shield), he is born underneath the shade of a giant bearded fig tree, is born to rough hands and strong arms and bright smiles, is born into warmth and life and love.

He is told that on the day of his birth, there was an areyto held. His Arocoel tells him, when he is older, that his father being cacique of the village allows for certain perks. Aracoel interrupts to disabuse him of this notion. "Just because Caonabo is your father as well as cacique does not mean we did anything other than pray to Yocahu to give thanks for your birth," she tells him, "and present you with the jewelry your Bibi created. Do not let Arocoel fill your head with lies, Sal." At this, his grandmother lifts the jade and gold necklace from where it rests on his chest, so that he can admire the way the polished stone and metal looks against her calloused, wrinkled fingers.

"Thank you, Bibi," he tells his mother that night, resting his head against the soft cotton of her apron-covered chest. She smiles down at him, smoothing his black curls against his sun-bronzed face.

"For what, my love?" she asks him, her dark eyes glinting in the firelight that is kept safely away from the walls of the tree housing their family.

He yawns hugely as she kisses his forehead, the skin of her mouth smooth, her cheeks round in the flickering light, her arms steady around him. "The necklace," he mumbles, and she brushes strong fingers against the smooth stones and sanded metal that comprise it.

Only a few short years later, Arocoel and Aracoel stand beside him and his Baba and the remaining wives as they set fire to Bibi's emaciated corpse. He cannot look away as the skin of her hollowed cheeks and bony, brittle fingers and parched lips melts and curls beneath the touch of the flames.

He can smell the scent of it permeating through the yucayeque days later, as more of their dead join his Bibi. He thinks that the lack of water to wash away the smell of burning bodies makes it worse; he imagines that he can smell scorched skin coming from the cracks in the ground, and the odor is worse than that of infected, cracked and bleeding hands the villagers use to harvest what little food has managed to grow despite the drought. Soon enough, though, they cannot even grow potatoes with the lack of water.

Sal watches from behind the aerial roots of an increasingly dead bearded fig tree as his people suffer from dehydration. Those who manage to survive the lack of water are few, and many of them starve. Somehow, through it all, no matter how little food he ingests, no matter how rarely water touches his lips, he survives. He outlives his Baba and all his Liani and the siblings they have given him. He survives the deaths of his grandparents, and somehow it is this - losing Arocoel and Aracoel, losing his last connection to Bibi - that hurts the most.

He joins the people he has grown up with as they pray to Jurakán for hurricanes, as they plead to Maboya for forgiveness, as they offer up sacrifices and struggle their way through ceremonial dances and ballgames, hoping to be blessed with rain, with a good harvest, with relief from dying. They present to their gods the last of their crops and a portion of their rationed water, they proffer the bodies of the dead, of the living, of animals and people alike, and still it does not rain.

One day, the sky clouds over, and thunder rumbles, and the people who still have enough strength in their limbs to stand stand together, thinking - hoping beyond hope, praying beyond belief - that this storm will be their salvation. They lift their voices to thank Jurakán for his intervention, to thank Maboya for his absolution; only, the thunder rolls louder and louder, and lightning flashes through the sky, and the heavy, gray rain clouds hover mockingly above them, and it still does not rain.

They watch, hope abandoning them, as lightning strikes the dry, cracked ground, and the dead, dangling roots of a wild banyantree. They burst into flame, the tongues of fire licking from the bulk of one tree to another, surrounding the village with a ring of fire. It creeps forward, slow at first and then steadily quicker as the flames leap higher and higher.

Sal can only watch as the fire surrounding him and his people swallows the land around them hungrily. He can hear the screams that rise up from the inferno slithering forward to consume him. The conflagration reaches for him, extending close enough that he can feel the heat of it flickering at him. Bright sparks lunge for his exposed skin, and a fiery pain burns through him, coursing through his body. His heart-beat grows loud in his ears, so that it is the only thing he can hear. It thunders on top of itself, an ectype, an echo of the same decibel ringing through his ears, vibrating through his bones.

The agony fades, and with it the intense beating of his heart, and Sal looks around himself. The world is fuzzy, though not lacking in vibrant colors. He can see the white-tipped flames surrounding him, taller than before, is cognizant of the scorching fingers reaching for him. He is able to hear the screams of his people and feel the trembling fear of them through the dead earth. The warmth of the flames seeps through his skin to set his blood to boil, and his instincts take over. He snakes his way toward the flames, moving as fast as he can. He passes through the igneous wall that traps him - them - and slithers forward on his belly, leaving his burning village behind.

It is as he nears the edge of the island he has grown up on - as he reaches the receding, salt-lined water-line - that a rumble from high above him shakes the ground he is pressed against. The sky opens up and the resulting cloudburst is accompanied by a deluge of water falling from the dark clouds blotting out the sun, and torrential winds that howl in response to the fulminating thunderclap. Beneath even that, he can hear the hissing of the fire being drowned, of the water touching the parched, burning earth around him.

It is too little too late; he can see the charred husk of his village and its inhabitants when he turns around, hoping to find signs of life rather than the corpse that greets him. A devastated hiss slips out of him at the sight: coal-black huts, smoking underneath the falling water; dark ashes floating down gracefully alongside the downpour; skeletal remains contorted in pained positions and strewn across the ground, the bones of them more black and gray than white.

He turns away from the nightmarish sight, staggers past the salt barrier to the rising water-levels of the ocean. He falls to his hands and knees, scoops leaking handfuls of the salty water up and raises cool, sweet water to his lips. He drinks his fill, drinks until he is unable to force his exhausted arms up the distance to his mouth, until his shaking legs are no longer strong enough to hold him up. He falls back into the lapping waves and stares up at clouds the color of death.

He closes his eyes and lets the crashing, turbulent waves wash over his body, lets them toss him around, lets them wash away the aches and pains that have settled into his bones, his muscles, his skin. He lets the waves wash him away, lets them carry him where they please.

The one thing they do not wash away is the pain of his loss.

He is shaken awake by gentle hands and muttered words. He opens his eyes to see a boy only a little older than him - a boy with golden hair and golden skin and blue eyes, a boy speaking words he does not recognize, is unable to understand - leaning over him. The golden boy babbles incomprehensibly at him, and Sal can only frown in confusion. The boy rushes off, leaving him to stare around himself: in front of him, there are blue waves lapping at hot white sand. Behind him are craggy mountain-ranges painted in a deep shade of navy against the pale sky. Between him and them are intricate stone buildings and thick-trunked trees capped with bushy foliage and dark fruits weighing down their branches. He squints against the bright sun, raises his hand to shade his eyes from the glare it leaves as it reflects off of the calm ripples of warm water.

The golden boy comes back, this time with a man and a woman trailing indulgently behind him. They both have the same golden hair and honey-like skin as the boy; the man has matching blue eyes, though, while the woman's are nearly the same color as her hair. They catch sight of Sal lying sprawled across the beach, wrapped in soggy seaweed, and their faces take on a worried cast. The woman kneels by his side, jabbering at him in the same indiscernible syllables as the boy, and he can only tilt his head curiously at her. She purses her lips, does something with her hand, and when she speaks again it is in words he can understand.

"Do you know where you are?" she asks him, and now that he can understand what she is saying, he can appreciate the soothing, almost raspy quality of her low voice.

"No," he replies, looking around himself at the beautiful landscape once more.

"This is Athens," she tells him, before asking another question. "Do you know where your family is?"

Sal looks down at his hands, mumbling his reply.

The woman crouches down on the ground so that she is eye-level with him. She reaches out and takes one of his hands in her own, and he notices at once that the skin of her fingers is smooth, unlike the hands of anyone he's ever met. She looks him in the eye as her thumb runs in a line back and forth over his knuckles. "I'm sorry, darling," she says, "I didn't quite catch that."

"They're burnt," he says louder, and her eyes tighten. She rises to her feet, dragging him with her, and says something to the man and boy she'd arrived with in the rolling sounds he cannot put a meaning to.

"Come with us," she tells him, and he follows dutifully, admiring the bronze of his skin against the gold of hers. She brings him to a house made of smooth white stone, and it is cooler than the sun-soaked air near the waves. He stops squinting once they are inside, thankful for the shadows it provides. She withdraws a sleek stick once they are inside, and a quick flick later, he is able to understand the words passing between the man and the boy.

"... don't know," the boy is saying. "I was just walking along the beach when the tide dragged him in. I wasn't even sure if he was still alive, but I thought it couldn't hurt to check."

The man casts a brief glance at him. "Well he's certainly not from Greece," he says. "You don't see eyes that color with skin that dark very often here, and whatever language he speaks isn't native to the country. You saw your mother cast the Translation Charm."

The boy nods, staring unabashedly at Sal. "I'm Radomir Slytherin," he says, pride lining the words, like his name means something. "These are my mother and father," he points to the golden people behind him.

"Sal," Sal returns.

They name him Salazar Slytherin months later, when he has gotten to know Anana and Nathair and Radomir, and they have taken him into their family and called him their own. The blood ritual Nathair - Father - learns to perform only makes it official.

He is ten the first time Radomir raises the dead.

His brother closes his eyes, lines of concentration etching themselves into the skin of his forehead, and Salazar watches as bones crop up from the ground. There is no splitting of the earth, as he has convinced himself there might be. Instead, bones crawl out of the ground, skittering towards each other and collapsing in a pile. The furrow between Radomir's eyebrows deepens, and the pile of bones clatters ominously before it shifts, bones creeping over each other to assemble themselves back into the form they had once taken.

A winged horse stands before them, the hollows of its eyes menacing as it flaps its skeletal wings through the air and rears back silently on its hind legs.

Radomir opens his eyes and looks disappointed. "Nothing happened," he says, staring directly at the space occupied by the undead horse. Sal throws him a disbelieving glance as the horse makes its way soundlessly over a rocky mound. He follows it, Radomir close behind and throwing him curious glances. Sal stops several feet away from the horse, which noses at the shed skin of a snake. Radomir startles at the movement, and stares in shock when the undead horse kneels, shifting and rolling over the shed skin, nudging it into place, and when it stands again, the skin is settled between the bones, covering more than it should have, and Sal wonders if the animal had thought itself naked.

"Where did the snake skin go?" Radomir asks.

"You really can't see the horse?" Sal returns.

"What horse?" Radomir wonders suspiciously.

"You created a winged horse out of bones!" Salazar tells him. "You cannot seriously tell me that you don't see it. I swear to the gods that it just put on that snake skin. It's a strange look, all skin and bones."

Radomir looks at him. "Sal," he says seriously, "I'm telling you, there's nothing there." He falters when the horse's bony nose nuzzles the back of his hand. "Is there?" he tacks on nervously.

Instead of answering, Sal takes hold of his brother's hand and guides it over the bones and skin of the creature. Radomir's eyes widen in awe. "I did this?" he asks, as though he can't quite believe it.

Sal offers him a smile, and Radomir glows. "I'm going to show Mum and Father," he says, running back the way they came. The horse focuses its empty eyes on Radomir's retreating form, and flies after him.

Sal follows his brother and his creation at a more sedate pace, picking his way over the jagged rocks and marshlands of the fen.

They discover that their father can see the creature, while their mother cannot, and it is this that makes them realize that death is the key, for that is the only thing Sal and his father have in common, is the one thing they could talk about but don't.

The horse follows Radomir around faithfully, lingering in his shadow and nuzzling him lovingly despite his inability to see it. Radomir, upon hearing Sal's description of the animal, names it Thester. Sal can only roll his eyes at his brother's eccentricities.

The day Radomir looks at Thester and really sees her - sees the dark bone and reptilian skin and shadowy wings of her - is the day she stops following him around, stops nuzzling him, because… well. He shouldn't have wanted to see her. The look on his face that day is that of someone who has seen death, is that of someone who has lost a loved one. Radomir sees death - sees Thester - and she abandons him.

Sal can't help but think that his brother deserves it.

Even years after the fact - after he has washed up on a shore an ocean away, after he has gained a new family to replace the one he lost - Salazar still dreams of burning villages and terrified screams. Even in his dreams - memories - he can smell the dry wood, and the rot, and the dead air that suffocated him. He can still smell the burnt flesh.

The brother given him by the mother and father who found him asks him time and time again what he is afraid of, laughing every time at the response. "Fire," Salazar replies the first time. "Burning," he says later. "Death," is his response years later, and Radomir laughs at and mocks and sneers at his answer. Finally, the last time Radomir dares to ask, Salazar replies with, "I am afraid of losing my loved ones." That time, his adopted brother's laugh is stilted - forced - and Salazar can't help but wonder if Radomir thinks he does not belong in that category.

"You know that I love you, right?" he asks one day, and Radomir hesitates long enough to confirm that he does not.

"I don't need to be loved by someone of lesser blood," Radomir says instead, and Salazar ignores the barb; it has been something of a sore point in his family that neither of his parents had magic, and while he knows that his new parents love him, Salazar is also very aware that they wish he had magical ancestry.

"In my village," he tells them the first year he is with them, "there is no magic like there is here. We use plants to heal, and we pray to our gods, but they do not answer, and so it refuses to rain."

"Here," his new father tells him of Philippi, "when we lift our pleas to our gods, they answer us. Zeus sends us rain, Athena gives us wisdom, Hermes protects us while we travel."

"Zeus is the best of the gods," Radomir tells him. "He's the king, and he rules the skies. Imagine being able to fly on the winds!"

"I'd rather keep my feet on the ground," Salazar replies, remembering how the sky had burned and drowned what remained of his village after denying it the water it so desperately needed. Even the notion of leaving the permanence of the earth behind for a sky that neither cares for his well being nor has the ability to support his weight is vaguely disturbing.

"Do you remember," he asks his brother years later, "when you said Zeus was the best of the gods?"

"Of course," Radomir says, grateful for the change of topic after Salazar's newest answer to the question of fear.

"I think that Hades is the best. He is of the earth, and he's king of the dead. He doesn't have to lose his loved ones because when they die they always join him in his domain."

Radomir looks away from him uncomfortably. "Salazar," he says, his gentle tone far different than the one from a few moments before, "I know you fear losing your loved ones, but sometimes it's best to let people go. Zeus is stronger than Hades will ever be because when Zeus loses someone, he mourns them and he moves on. Hades never forgets, and he is always mourning; that is not strength. That is weakness."

Sal looks away from his brother because he is wrong. There is nothing weak about mourning for the dead, about grief and pain and loss; there is nothing weak about remembering.

He wakes once again with the feeling of embers pressing into his skin, with the scent of burning flesh and death curling into his nose, with the screams of his village in his ears, and flickering flames imprinted on the backs of his eyelids. His mouth is dry, and his voice cracks around the scream of terror that presses out from behind his teeth.

"It just goes to show," Radomir tells him once he has finished speaking about his nightmare, "that Muggles are inferior to Wixen. If your village had been a magical one, none of them would have died because they could have made it rain."

Sal looks at where his parents are lounging, and notices that they do not look at all disapproving of his brother's words. He frowns. "Am I not magic?" He looks around again, sees the confusion that crosses their faces at his query. "Even with my magic," he clarifies, "I was not able to make it rain. I drank no more water and ate no more food than the rest of my people, and though I wished desperately for the heavens to open up and mourn for those of us who still lived, it still refused to rain until they were all dead. My magic saved me, but only at the penultimate moment, and then it did not save all the others.

"My village having magic would not have saved them because it barely saved me. You cannot sit there and tell me that my people were inferior to me when I was the one who survived while they hungered and thirsted and burned to death and did so without complaint or fear. Even as they died, they protected the young. They burned trying to keep the flames from reaching me. That is not inferiority or weakness. That is strength, even without magic."

Radomir looks away from him, refusing to meet his eyes. Their parents smooth their faces into expressionless masks and say nothing. Sal looks down at the cup of clear water he holds in his hands. The liquid trembles, and he quickly sets it aside. "Sorry," he blurts out, flicking his eyes across the room, over the high ceilings painted with the stories of the gods.

"Salazar," his mother says, her voice soft and aching, and he flinches away from it, from her, from this family that loves him but hates his past, who loves him but hates his blood, who loves him but…

Because there is always a but, isn't there?

"Sal." she says again, her voice quieter than before, soft and smooth and lilting over the syllable of his name, and she wraps her arms around him gently, brushes smooth fingers against his cheek, his chin, his hair, and it's wrong. It is wrong; this is not Bibi holding him. These are not her strong arms or her calloused fingers offering comfort. He struggles out of her hold, and she looks hurt.

He hadn't meant to hurt her.

"Sorry," he says again, and the truth in it cracks the word in two, shatters it against the marble floor to reveal his heart, burned but healing, broken but stitched back together, scarred but…

Because there's always a but.

He turns away from his mother and father, turns his back on his brother, and runs until he is stumbling through the waves that washed him away.

He looks up at the cloudless sky, looks up at the heavenly bodies that freckle across it, and wonders why the floodgates hadn't opened up sooner. The stars stare down at him, unblinking and heartless and cold, and they do not reply.

The day he is bitten - the day that he spreads himself out on a sun-warm rock and lets the heat of the day warm his silver scales and the scent of the Philippi fen glide across his tongue and into his mouth - is a beautiful one, the sky a deep, cloudless blue, the daylight shining bright and dappling the rocks around him with its light, the susurration of the breeze through the grass and cinquefoil disguising the sound of the snake sliding through the vibrant green of the sedge-covered peat.

He is caught unawares, is half asleep from the lazy heat of the air and the rocks, the white noise of the swaying grass rendering him oblivious to the serpent's approach.

Even after the fact - after, when he has time to think on it, to analyse the events of the day, to wonder why how why - Sal cannot decide if he shifted into the other snake's path, or if it simply attacked him unprovoked. Either way, the resulting bite is painful enough to force him back into his human form, and the venom from it floods through his system, fast and unerring in its journey to his heart.

The pain of it is like fire running through his veins, setting his blood alight, is like burning from the inside out while the fire creeps into his heart and lungs and pumps through every nerve in his body as the flames in his lungs drown him and choke him and tear agonised screams from his charred husk of a throat and pull burning, stinging tears from his eyes, and he chokes on those, too, gags on them, and he can't breathe, is choking on nothing, is dying...

And he doesn't want to die, not yet, not when he's finally coming into himself, not when he's finally secure in his place in the world - in his place in his family. He's not ready to die because he's got new people to love, new people to love him, and they're alive and well and not ashes and death and sorrow and suffering - there's not enough water, not enough food - dancing on the wind.

There is… something… soft and cool against his scorched skin… a silky voice… an angrily hissed "Leave!"… a brush of skin and bone… a whispered word… a wash of calm that pours over him, a fleeting moment of relief amid the burning, sundering pain.

There is a lighting strike, and it hits again and again. It bends his spine and makes him writhe against the… against it. It lights up behind his closed eyes, bright and hot and white, and it runs through his body-muscles-veins-nerves even faster than the venom that strangles him.

He gasps. His eyes open to the worried face of his mother, flashing light crackling around her and into him, making everything inside of him spark.

The feeling dogs his footsteps for days after; he constantly twitches against the lightning strikes that rush through him, but he can't bring himself to care, much. He is alive, and that's what matters.

If it is years before he shifts from human to snake, before he stops flinching away from the sight of smooth scales, or flashes in the sedge, or the sound of hissing or slithering, well. Snakes are just one more thing to be wary of.

Years later, a serpent - huge and bright green and familiar - lunges for him, and Sal jumps back, throws his arms up, and shouts "No!" with something like terror lacing through the word. The snake - bigger than he is and angry and poised to kill - stops.

It stops, still ready to strike, even as Sal backs away slowly, whispering desperately to it as though it can understand him. "Wait, wait, please wait, please, please, please."

He thanks Hades when it does, thanks every deity he can think of when it lets him retreat. He nearly jumps out of his skeleton when the snake cocks its head curiously at him and says, in a raspy, hissing voice that sends shivers down his spine, "I am waiting."

They arrive in Giza just as the sun is setting, and the red glow of it sets the pyramids - with their jagged, craggy sides and sharp angles and flat tops - ablaze. Even in their ruinous state, they are masterpieces - marvels; he can see it in their sheer size, in their deliberate placement, in the way the shift of the raggedness to smoother sides part way up is a poor man's mockery of the capstone that was once able to pierce the sky, in the enormity of the granite and limestone stepping up and up and up , like a staircase into the heavens.

"You were right," Sal tells his father, unable to prise his eyes away from the vision in front of him. "They are incomparable. Nothing in Greece could hope to rival them."

"This is only how they appear to the Muggles, Salazar," his father tells him, and Sal can hear the smile in his voice. "This is barely even a shadow of what they are really like."

If that is true, Sal cannot even imagine what the pyramids look like in all their glory. He follows his family down to the city, wondering all the while how it is possible for the structures to be a penumbra of themselves when they are still so beautiful.

"The Muggles stripped the pyramids of their glory when they built Cairo," his father says as they pass through the gleaming city; Sal's eyes trace the shape of the Mosque that stands proudly amongst the edifices of al-Qāhiratu. "It is only magic that has kept the true glory of them hidden away, and it is thanks to magic that they have maintained their true form even under the assault of the non-magicals."

"Surely they didn't understand what it was they were destroying," Sal says placatingly, more than familiar with the bitter tone that has crept into his father's words. Even before Sal became part of the Slytherin family, his father had been eager to assign blame for all of the horrors in the world to Muggles; years later, Sal's presence amongst them - as one of their own - has not brought about a changed perspective. Sal wonders if Nathair even realises that he assigns the same hatred to them that he claims they bestow upon Wixen.

"You do not understand now," his father tells him disparagingly, "but when you see the difference with your own eyes, you will be unable to claim that that is the case. There is no plausible way they didn't understand what they were doing when they had the pyramids glittering before their eyes."

Sal purses his lips and does not reply. There is no convincing his father that he is wrong, ever - even if he is. His words that are tempered by inexperience certainly will not persuade him, especially with the lack of conviction that he knows will be behind them. He cannot defend a people when he has not seen the truth of what they have done.

Silence lingers uncomfortably between Sal and his father that night. Neither Radomir nor his mother make any effort to dispel the tension, and he knows that it is because they - even without seeing whatever destruction has been wrought - agree with his father. He wonders how he has ended up with a family that disagrees so thoroughly with his views on Muggles, wonders why it is this point of contention that has the capability to tear them apart when nothing else does.

"You may explore the city tomorrow," his mother tells them. "We plan to visit the Sphinx tomorrow evening, so you will have the entire day to familiarize yourselves with our surroundings."

"Remember," Nathair adds, not looking Sal in the eye as he delivers his warning, "that this city is not welcoming towards those with magic. Their holy book forbids its practice, and one of my good friends told me that there was a girl who got caught practicing magic recently; her father sentenced her to death, and was apparently the one to kill her."

Sal looks up from his food to find his father staring directly at him. Do you see? the look in his eyes says. This is what the Muggles are capable of. Sal holds his father's gaze. One repulsive man does not make all the rest horrible as well. A muscle in his father's jaw twitches, but Sal refuses to glance away before Nathair does.

His father flicks his eyes away, muttering "Be careful." A frown pulls at Sal's lips, and the roar of victory that warms his chest whenever he beats his father out fails to come. His father does not usually give in without a fight.

He sleeps uneasily, startling awake several times, images of sharp knives and golden hair and flames threading themselves into his dreams and fading in the morning light. When he wakes, it is with a dry mouth and the disconcerting feeling of fire branding itself into his skin.

He slips out of the house before either Radomir or his parents have awakened. He is not in the mood for tense silences and unchanging differences, and so he avoids the discomfort that he knows awaits him, leaving a note on a piece of parchment behind. He may not agree with his family, but he does not wish for them to worry about his safety.

Cairo in the daylight is beautiful, all wide streets, with the equally wide canals glittering in the sun. All around him, there are houses and shops and bathhouses, and people wandering the streets, speaking in low tones that he can only understand because of the Translation Charm. Sal picks his way through the city, stopping to admire al-Azhar and the brilliant white domes and towering minarets that sprawl across the land to compose the Mosque. He wanders aimlessly, not stopping in any of the businesses that line the streets. Not too far from al-Azhar is Bayn al-Qasrayn , and Sal can only stop and stare at the palaces on either side of the square that seem to shine brilliant gold in the light of day.

The architecture of the city is stunning, and it arrests his attention so thoroughly that he almost misses the three men passing through the Golden Gate and into a courtyard just beyond it. One man, Sal notices, has red hair, and is taller than the other two, who have blond and dark hair.

The blond man is angry, this much Sal is able to see even without hearing what the three of them are saying. The redhead says something to the blond that has him storming back through Bab al-Dhahab, turning at the last possible moment to sketch a perfunctory bow back in the direction he came. He brushes past Sal, snarling at him as he does so, and walks quickly down the street. Sal watches him leave, and turns back to the courtyard, wondering what was said.

Calmer now, the red haired man says something to his companion, who nods and offers a bow of his own before departing. The man still in the courtyard, then, must be the Caliph, Sal decides.

"You, boy," says the man with dark hair, and Sal looks up in startlement; he had not heard the man approach. "Do you know which way Jawhar made off to?"

"The blond man, sir? I think he went that way," Sal says, pointing.

"Thank you," the man says, before walking off after the blond man - Jawhar. Sal watches him leave, wondering what had made Jawhar leave so abruptly in the first place, and why the other man had followed.

"You will have to forgive Ya'qub his abruptness," another voice says, and Sal jumps. It is the red haired man - the Caliph - standing next to him with an amused expression on his face. "Jawhar has been… volatile these past few months, ever since Helga…" he breaks off, his expression shuttering, and shakes his head. "No matter. Thank you for your assistance."

Sal barely manages a nod in his bewilderment. The Caliph, satisfied, reenters the courtyard through the gate and retreats into the magnificent palace.

He makes his way toward the opposite end of the city, brushing brief glances over the stalls that line the street. None of the wares being sold are of any interest to him, and so Sal presses a few gold dinar into the hands of children who scurry past him and walks on.

It is nearing sunset when Sal finds his family waiting for him outside the city walls. He joins them, and they walk in silence toward the pyramids and the Sphinx that guards them.

"What do you know of Sphinxes?" his father asks as they draw close enough to see the silhouettes of the monuments erected against the sky.

"According to our myths," Radomir says, "the Sphinx is a woman with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. Some stories claim Sphinxes have the tail of a serpent, as well. They are apparently quite fond of riddles, tool."

"That is mostly correct," his father says, and ignores Radomir and Sal's curious expressions. "Some Sphinxes have more animalistic characteristics than others. The one we will meet is one of them. She is quite fond of riddles, as all Sphinxes are, and she will choose one of us to answer the question that she poses. If the question is answered incorrectly, she will not let us in, and there is a risk that she will eat us, so don't answer incorrectly."

"The Sphinx is made out of stone," Sal observes when they are finally close enough for him to notice such things. "How will we wake her?"

"There is magic in names, Sal, as you know. We must speak her name, and then she will awaken," Nathair tells him, quickly casting a spell to keep Muggles away. "Quiet now, while I wake her. Pakhet!" he calls, "we request entry into the pyramids."

Before his eyes, the Sphinx shakes her massive head like a wet dog, and the stone of her rumbles in protest at the movement. Pakhet ripples, and laying in place of the crumbling limestone monument is a creature made of flesh and blood. She is barely smaller than her stone cast, but instead of rough-hewn rock, she is made of silky golden fur and feathered wings. A serpent's tail swishes in the sand around her, tracing arcs into it. She has an attractive face, with almond-shaped eyes that glitter in the setting sun; her lips pull back in something resembling a smile, revealing sharp rows of little teeth. The patchwork effect of so many creatures thrown together is somewhat disquieting, and Sal shivers.

"You may move forward only if you can solve my riddle," the Sphinx tells them in a low, raspy voice. "And it is to be answered by the dark haired boy."

"And what is the riddle, great Pakhet?" his father asks in a remarkably steady voice.

"I am home to eyes and ears and mouths that are not my own.

The tomes that lie inside me are always out for loan.

Those under my employ entwine the past and present.

I offer refuge to rich kings and the poorest peasants.

I am known by many names, though I answer to none.

I am that in which leisure is served, and I don't believe in fun.

In me you will find shared and opposing opinions.

I promise you, though, that following does not make you a minion.

Join me and you will find that there is always more to learn.

For sharing knowledge does not allow you to speak out of turn.

What am I?"

Sal raises his eyes to the emblazonry of the shafts of light seeping into the sky, and tries to think. The expectant gazes of his family are heavy on his back, and he makes the mistake of allowing his eyes to skim across Pakhet's vicious, ravenous face. He swallows, and she leans down far enough that her eyes are level with his. "History, learning," he mutters under his breath, "books… library."

"Is that your final answer?" the Sphinx asks, and he can see the terrible, hedonistic glee that ignites within her dark eyes.

"No!" he yelps. "Just… just thinking out loud… um…" Knowledge and learning. Where does one go to gain knowledge? Sal wracks his brain for the answer, and remembers - in a flash of brilliance - the Mosque he had passed earlier that day, remembers its domed roofs and cupolas and multitudinous minarets perched upon and surrounding it as far as the eye could see. "A school!" he says, certain that he's got it.

A smile stretches Pakhet's lips. "Is that your final answer?" she asks again, and his stomach plummets.

"Um… yes," he replies, sounding more confident than he feels.

"Well done," she says, and ignores his breath of relief. She lifts a massive paw into the air, extends equally massive claws, and swipes almost violently at the air between her and Sal and his family, tearing through the magic separating the magical community from the rest of the world. "Good luck," she says, loud and clear in his mind, "in your future endeavors, Salazar Slytherin." And then she is gone, and the crumbling pyramids go with her, leaving in their place something completely different.

Sal looks in awe across the miles of sand stretching before him, looks at the flat plains rolling into ridged hills, and the tiny, glittering granules tumbling down the slopes in sprays, aided by the zephyr that fails to soak the heat from the sultry air. The sky is saturated with pale reds and purples, the cerulean of it swallowed by the bleeding colours. The desert takes on a warm cast as the last vestiges of the daylight sink behind it, staining the yellow dunes. The pyramids - glowing white stars come to earth - gleam brightly in the fading light, the pyramidia crowning them with blushing, burnished gold. Sal thinks they are the most beautiful things he has ever seen; the sharp lines of them cutting through the air, standing bold and proud against the painted welkin, the zenith bright and unashamed as it eclipses the brilliance of the galaxies threading their way into the ether.

The sight of it steals his breath away.

"You see what they have done?" his father asks upon seeing Sal's obmutescent face.

Sal abruptly regains the power of speech. "It is better to take materials from a seemingly lifeless place than from the earth if one is building a city."

"But this place is not lifeless." Nathair gestures emphatically at the hustle and bustle of Wixen milling about the marketplaces and disappearing into the pyramids. "Are you blind, Salazar? Can you not see the people here? Can you not see the life that overflows from this community?"

" I can," Sal tells him. "But they - the Muggles - cannot. We have hidden ourselves from them so completely that it is as though we do not and have never existed. You cannot blame them for tearing down a city they cannot see. You cannot begrudge them for making better use of a tomb. "

"Just because you do not does not mean that I cannot, " Nathair replies disdainfully.

Sal wants - more than anything - to scream at his father's belligerence. He doesn't think he has ever met someone as stubborn as the man who adopted him. He does not scream, expunging only an exasperated sigh from his lungs before he turns away from the family he has never quite fit into - for they are Greek where he is Carib, and gold where he is bronze, and day where he is night, and fierce where he is fearful, and vindictive where he is forgiving - to face the world that is ferociously guarded, and seen by only a fraction of those who look upon it.

The entire walk to the glowing pyramids is a series of starts and stops; Anana exchanges several galleons for a book about Elemental magic, and she flips through the delicate, colorful pages reverently, tracing her fingers over a peculiar script that Sal cannot quite make out when he looks at it from the corner of his eye.

Nathair purchases a dark brown bar of… something that the vendor assures him is "Authentic and specially imported; the best thing the western world has to offer, as uncivilized as it is." Nathair breaks off a piece of the bar, and closes his eyes in pleasure as it touches his tongue.

"Cacao," Father tells Sal and Radomir, offering them a small sliver. Sal tries it, and is unimpressed by his father's taste. The bitter taste of it does not evoke a sense of elation within him, though he admits that the rich undertones of it are interesting, or would be, if the cacao were sweeter.

Radomir buys nothing, instead trailing the very tips of his fingers over expensive fabrics, or highly polished wood, or glittering divining orbs lined up in rows. The vendor at that particular stall scowls at Radomir, chasing him off when he presses his fingerprints into the glass, and the magic in them sends them dark and cloudy and formless - a sign of an uncertain future.

Sal does not intend to buy anything, even with a pouch full of galleons, but they pass a table upon which gems and jewelry are piled carelessly into a mound, scintillating in the dull glow of twilight. It catches his attention, though he is typically not one for jewels or precious metals. Sal moves closer to the table, entranced by the bright colors. The necklaces and rings are exquisite - all delicate metal-work and bewitchingly faceted stones - as are the loose bijoux, but none of them quite catch his attention the way the ovular, nail-sized cabochon does. It is an oddly serpentine vortex of black flecked through with green and blue and gold, glittering as though the sun has not yet sunken beyond the horizon. He is mesmerized by it.

"Are you sure you want that one?" the peddler asks him hesitantly as he hands over the single galleon required. "It's not even an enchanted stone. As far as my associates and I can tell, it's just a pretty stone."

"Yeah." Sal tells him quietly, scooping the stone up with a kind of deliberation he can't explain. "I'm sure." He tucks the jewel into his pouch and slides it into one of the folds of his robe, near his heart, and moves on. His family casts curious glances in his direction as they approach the pyramids, but Sal feigns obliviousness; he doesn't know why the stone caught his attention so completely, and even the idea of trying to come up with an acceptable explanation is exhausting.

They make it into one of the pyramids with minimal distractions after that, and Sal is forced to revise his earlier opinion. The inside of Hetepheres' pyramid is breathtaking; it is all high ceilings and criss-crossing passage-ways, gold filigree glittering on the angled walls, shot and bled through with vivid reds and blues and greens painting stories on the walls in the same way that the ceilings in their summer home in Athens are. Sal can barely breathe against the curve of his neck as he cranes his head back to look through the floors and floors of clear, glittering glass, supported by curling metal frames that look far too delicate to hold their own weight, let alone that of hundreds of people. But that, Sal supposes, is what magic is for.

Father and Mother tug him and Radomir along behind them until they reach a woman standing beside a pile of ornate carpets. She smiles at them and gestures to the stack; the topmost carpet, a deep blue thing embroidered with subtle gold designs and matching tassels, floats gracefully into the air and slides over to them, sinking down to a level that allows them to climb onto it. Once the four of them are seated, the carpet lifts back into the air and takes off, not seeming to notice the added weight as it flies up and swerves around the air traffic darting back and forth around them.

"Do you remember," Sal asks Radomir, and his brother lights up, having learned long ago that whenever Sal begins a sentence this way he is conceding to something Radomir had argued with him about, "when you told me to imagine being able to fly on the winds and I told you I'd keep my feet safely on the ground?"

"I do," Radomir says, the boyish grin that shows his teeth and presses into his cheeks and crinkles his eyes, making him seem sixteen instead of twenty-one, making him seem like he's never seen death, like he's never seen the horrors of the world and let them twist him around.

"I'm imagining it," Sal tells him, and listens to the wind that pushes past them and steals the sound of his voice.

Radomir's smile slips from his face, but it lingers in his eyes, which glitter joyfully in the candle-lit darkness, the flames and their halos reflected in pools of black and blue. He shifts closer to Sal, wraps his arm around his shoulders, hugging him for the first time in years. "Isn't it amazing?" he whispers into Sal's ear, and even the wind cannot purloin the awe from his remark.

"Yeah," Sal whispers, letting himself sink into his brother's embrace, letting himself wrap an arm around Radomir in return and squeeze, letting himself think that maybe… maybe everything will be okay. "It is."

The carpet takes them floor to floor, pyramid to pyramid - each bigger and more impressive than the last, or that is the impression burned into Sal's mind. It waits dutifully for them as they disembark and explore various shops and stalls, taking off eagerly once they rejoin it with lighter pockets and hands full of obscure books and fascinating objects.

As stunning as the Egyptian magical community is, Sal finds the details of the place slipping his mind, being filed as unimportant. It is not the images - is not the myriad of vendors and peddlers, nor the splashes of bright color, and neither is it the smells of the spices and Potions ingredients being sold, or the texture of the intricately made wands on display - that stay with him. It is instead Radomir's rare smile and warm, strong arms around him, and his mother's bright, pealing laughter tintinnabulating through the air, threading itself into the music that plays, as she grasps his hands in her own and dances with him, and his father's gruff, proud words, and the sweet warmth that settles in his chest (this is family: these happy memories, this love that refuses to hide itself away in the darkness, these people who look at him and see his differences and hold him close) that linger in his mind.

He is lucky, though this is not something he acknowledges until later, for his final memories of them to be supersaturated with love and warmth.

He doesn't really know how it happens. They make their way back to Cairo, the light breeze strong enough to cover up the footprints that follow them, the stars bright enough to guide them, the sky dark enough to cloak them from sight. Maybe Mother's gay laughter as she dances across the wind, holding onto Father's fingertips, is what draws them. Maybe it is Father drawing the water from the air and shaping it for her to jump through, or using it to caress her cheek and tangle through her flowing hair. Maybe it is Radomir raising the skeleton of a winged stallion from the desert and riding it to the moon. Maybe it is Sal, kneeling, pressing his fingers into the sand that glitters in the moonlight and turning the granules to tiny little diamonds. Maybe it is none of these; maybe it is just the four of them walking side by side, Father's arm around Mother's waist, Sal and Radomir flanking them. Maybe it is a bitter man looking upon the affection that lingers in their every movement, following them with all the skill that named him general dogging their footsteps.

He doesn't really know how it happens. He goes straight to bed and lets the darkness swallow him whole. Maybe the man sneaks up on them as they dance together in the light of the blazing fire, maybe he sneaks into their room and pins them to the bed with a sharp blade. Maybe he bursts in, unconscious of the destruction he wreaks, and drags her out of the house by her hair. Maybe they are followed, and quicksilver cuts through gold once, twice.

He wakes to Radomir's hand over his mouth, the other shaking his shoulder. His brother shoves several bags at him, gestures for Sal to follow him. He does, his feet silent against the ground as they pass the felled door. Sal can see fire on the street, and a smell that only haunts his nightmares reaches his nose. His brother tugs him along, past the door and into the parlor. Sal watches as Radomir slashes a hand through the stone fireplace in front of him. It flickers, and Radomir turns to him. The hug Sal receives is uncomfortably tight and desperate in its brevity. Before he knows quite what's happening, Radomir shoves him through the wall. Green fire flares up around him, and Sal flinches away from it, expecting it to burn. Instead, his face scrapes against stone, and the space around him constricts almost painfully before spitting him out in their home in Philippi.

He waits for two weeks before he accepts that Radomir is not coming for him. He sits on a rock outside of their house, stares up at the bright blue sky, and wonders why it does not grieve.

Sometimes, Sal makes the mistake of listening too closely to the stories that are told in the taverns. Even though it has been close to a year since his unexpected trip from Cairo to Philippi, he keeps an ear out for any rumors that might flood him with the relief that finally knowing for certain that Radomir is still alive will bring. Sal smiles mockingly into his cup of cheap wine; it seems that even losing his second family is not enough to extinguish his eternal optimism.

"... say he rides a reptilian, winged horse," a man nearby says in hushed tones to his companions, and Sal turns slightly in his chair, intent upon the conversation.

"I ain't heard nothin' about a horse," another man drawls, his words slurring into each other, before he takes a messy gulp from his cup that leaves wine trickling from the corners of his mouth and into his mangy beard. "Why, my brother tol' me tha' Slyth'rin jus'... y'know… rides the air."

"An' how often is your brother right about anything?" the first man spits. "He had you thinkin' that Slytherin was a gods damned Floral Magician when everyone knows that the Reaper Guild don't accept anythin' they consider to be weak within their ranks. And Slytherin's their leader. C'mon man, don't be daft."

"Well no one else knew wha' he was, neither. You know 's'well's I do tha' he let his Reapers do all 'is dirty work when they first star'ed."

"Bu' a Floral Magician. Augustus, yer brother couldn't'a been more wrong if he'd tried. I'll be th' firs' ta admit that it was a nasty shock when Slytherin firs' raised the dead, tho'i' makes sense, if ye think about it: the man's a Necromancer. I dunno if ya c'n get more obvious than a name like the Reaper Guild."

"Too true," Augustus says, a great yawn overtaking his pudgy features and scraggly beard. "Might's well go 'round sayin' 'Ello, I'm a Necromancer, and I'm here for yer souls.' Wha' is th' worl' comin' ta?" he wonders lazily, scratching his portly stomach absentmindedly. "We don't e'en got creative names anymore." He sighs forlornly into his drink, the sound almost a snore, and Sal takes the opening.

"I couldn't help overhearing," he begins, his words markedly clearer than his new conversation partners'.

"I'll jus' bet you couldn't," the first man grumbles irritably.

"You said the leader of the Reaper Guild is named Slytherin?" Sal asks, undeterred by his lukewarm welcome, "And that he's a Necromancer? Is that right?"

"'S'right. You jus' gonna repeat back wha' we've alrea'y said?"

"No, no," Sal reassures him. "Just clarifying some details. You said you'd heard that he was riding a winged horse, and Augustus here mentioned that he'd heard that Slytherin was just riding the air. Have you heard any other accounts that match Augustus'?"

"S'pose so. Don't really know wha' tha's gotta do with anythin'."

"Oh it's not really important," Sal lies, thinking of Thester. "D'you happen to know where Slytherin is, or where he's heading?"

"Not a clue," not-Augustus says. "Betcha c'n jus' follow th' trail 'o death he leaves behind, though." He shakes his head and blinks blearily up at Sal. "Why? Nice guy like you gonna join 'im?"

"Stop him, more like," Sal mutters. "Maybe ask him what he's been doing for the past year, since he's apparently alive. Why didn't he come home?"

"Wha's tha'?" not-Augustus squints at him.

"Nothing," Sal says. "Just talking to myself."

"Should prolly get tha' checked out,"

"You should probably be done imbibing for the night," Sal counters.

Not-Augustus scowls. "Don' tell me whot ta do, ya ain't ma mum."

"That's what I thought," Sal says before turning on his heel and walking out of the pub.

Once he's home, Sal roots through the old maps his father kept pinned onto the walls of his study. "If I were Radomir," he wonders aloud, tracing his finger across trade routes and the names of various cities; his father's spidery handwriting denotes some places as all-Muggle, and others as having magical communities, "what would my goal be, and where would I go to accomplish it?"

He starts asking questions about the Reaper Guild; he knows nothing about them, apart from the fact that Radomir is their leader. Now that he is really paying attention - now that he knows what to listen for - Sal is able to gather a great deal of information, though how much if it is true is unknown.

Sal learns that the modus operandi of the Reapers is to attack and decimate various Muggle cities. So far, eleven cities have been subjected to a terrible fate, and the only reason he's heard anything about it is because the last city was in Karpathos, and therefore uncomfortably close to home. Each city he hears about is marked in red on one of his father's yellowing, curling-cornered maps.

Beyond a distinct avoidance of Cairo, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the locations Radomir chose. Further probing fails to reveal any antagonization on the part of the Muggles, and Sal is forced back to the map room to re-evaluate.

He tries to think about what he knows regarding his brother. He is twenty-two now, and a Necromancer, same as always, same as the day he was born. He has hated Muggles for longer than Sal has known him, just as their parents did. It is very likely that Radomir - unlike Sal - knows the truth behind their parents' deaths, for it had been his hand blocking any screams from escaping Sal's lips, and not the other way around.

He wonders if - but no. Radomir would never be so foolish as to try such a thing. And besides, hadn't Radomir been the one, all those years ago, who had made mockery of the desire to never let the dead leave? And yet, even with this in mind, Sal finds himself back in his father's study, staring at the map on the wall.

If he is correct in his suspicions, then Cairo - the place their parents died - is Radomir's focus. Sal starts connecting the dots the attacks have plotted to form the shape he suspects Radomir is making. It is a bit off, missing four spots as it is, but the overall shape is the beginnings of what he'd expected. Radomir is desecrating cities, is massacring their people, and it is with the intention of forming a pentagram around Cairo.

And, Sal realises with a sense of dawning horror, Samhain is fast approaching. If Radomir truly plans to summon their parents back from the dead - if he means to resurrect them - that will be the best time to do so. Even Sal knows how thin the veil between life and death can get, and he is not a Necromancer; there is no doubt in his mind that Radomir knows exactly how to manipulate both the pentagram and the veil.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen, Sal thinks sardonically. It seems as though his brother has changed his mind after all, and has thrown his lot in with Hades. They are all switching sides, then; Radomir has given his allegiance to the god of corpses, and Sal has fallen in love with the sky despite its indifference. Their parents, too, have traded sides, abandoning the living for the unemotional dead.

Over the next few weeks, Sal tries to predict where Radomir will strike next. He has it narrowed down to four places; these are the cities that will help complete the pentagram. In some ways, his brother is predictable: some months, he attacks on the seventh day. Alternating months are on the thirteenth. This is the pattern he has struck: seven, thirteen, seven, thirteen. For each of the eleven cities, he has not deviated. And then there is the way he circles around Cairo as he moves from from target to target. And yet, even with his patterns and predictability, Radomir manages to outsmart Sal - he manages to surprise the brother he doesn't even realize is looking.

Instead of attacking Amol as Sal expects, Radomir burns Yozgat to the ground, and Sal does not find out - does not feel the flood of shame that rushes through him for failing (for not knowing his own brother ) - until he has spent an entire day in Amol wondering if Radomir has finally broken pattern. He returns to Greece, and instead of silence, he is met with horrible stories depicting the burned corpses of a city and humans alike.

He guesses wrong, and it costs people who aren't him something.

Second time is never the charm, and yet... this time, unexpectedly, it is. Sal returns to Amol on a whim, returns because he was wrong the first time and can't stand to be wrong again, returns because his stomach roils uncomfortably at the thought of not going back. So he goes back, with no real reason for it, and he arrives to absolute chaos.

There, surrounding the city as clear as anything, are shimmering Wards rising up from the ground, trapping the citizens inside them, and doing nothing to keep out the dead bodies that have clawed their way out of the crack in the ground. Sal tries to remember if any of the stories about the Guild had included the earth splitting open to release the soil-chained, god-spurned deceased. Perhaps no one had found those details to be remarkable; after all, they do not - cannot, really, with how his brother holds himself tight to his own chest - know Radomir as Sal does. Most likely, they are unaware that it is his brother's all-encompassing rage that cleaves the world, and not his death-touched simulacrums.

As Sal draws closer, he can see the dark robed Wixen following in the footsteps of the Necromantic army. Their spell-fire flashes in bold streaks against the darkening sky. Buildings are set alight, and he takes an aborted step backwards, before remembering: this is what he is here to stop. He is not here to stand by and watch as his brother (and that is why he's here, isn't it? Would he have bothered to do anything if Radomir had not been his ?) razes yet another city to the ground and salts the earth with the ashes of its dead.

The city is on fire, and Sal - pushes down the fear and traps his terror behind his teeth - walks toward it. Before he has even reached the outskirts, it is more than just the houses and shops and mosques burning. The cadavers courtesy of his brother have become a part of another blazing inferno, this one white-hot, and the color of the stars. Even as the corpses turn into cinders, though, more scrabble their way out into the open, and head straight for the city.

"Radomir! " Sal calls, having finally caught sight of his estranged brother. Directly in front of him, a girl - and how had he not seen her before? - flinches. The star-bright fire stutters at the same time, allowing Radomir to renew his efforts. The fire the girl creates flares back up at once, more aggressive than it was only a moment before. "Radomir!" Sal repeats, stepping closer, his voice loud enough that his brother can - and does, as proven by the way he jerks, allowing the girl to gain the upper hand - hear him. "Don't do this," Sal says, the words not quite a plea, and Radomir... doesn't listen.

"Brother," he tries, and it comes out softer than he intends. Somehow, it is this (a soft, heart-felt, memory-charged word that claims - that binds him to some… one) that reaches Radomir and melts his bitter heart enough that he listens. "Do not make me fight you," comes out equally soft, but the phrase is threaded through with steel.

Radomir turns to face him, and his fabricated army crumbles. "You could never fight me, Sal," he says, his voice overflowing with uncertainty. And how terrible, Sal thinks, that you can grow up with someone, and love them, and know nothing about them. "You're too afraid of losing the people you love."

"I am," he agrees, because it is the truth, and he should have realized that Radomir (the golden boy who saved him, who took the time to learn his fears, who flew alongside him and taught him to love the sky) has always meant to use his nightmares against him. "Or I was," he says thoughtfully, because he has already lost his loved ones twice, and even he - with his hopeless optimism - can tell that he has lost Radomir; this man - his brother, his family - is never coming home. "Now I am more afraid of you than I am of losing you, brother."

It is the wrong thing to say. Radomir recoils as though Sal has physically struck him, instead of answering the question that his brother has asked him many times before (what are you afraid of?) (you).

Radomir's next words are snarls, are the torn visage of his heart as he spits them at Sal like weapons. "I am not your brother, Salazar. You are born of mud. You are weak, and unable to let go of the past. I cannot claim one so stuck on permanence as a brother."

Sal straightens, refusing to let Radomir's words hurt. He steps forward, past the dark haired girl. "The past has made me who I am, Radomir," he says, stopping in front of her and blocking her from Radomir's sight. "I cannot help that it has made me wary of death." He pauses briefly to look at his brother, and takes in the tense lines of his shoulders, and his unusually stooped posture, and he sees the grief and rage his body is playing host to.

(He knows those feelings, has felt their insistent burn lingering years after drowning them in salty waves.)

"Do you remember," he asks, and somehow Radomir knows that this is not the beginning of a concession as it normally is, for he doesn't light up. "When I told you that Hades was stronger than Zeus because he never lost anyone when they died?"

(Do you remember when you told me to imagine being able to fly on the winds? Do you remember when you said Zeus was the best of the gods? Do you remember when you...)

"I do," Radomir rejoins, his body growing tenser, and a shadow crossing his face.

"You told me that Hades' inability to let people go when they died was a weakness. You were right. But brother, it is not I who lives amongst the dead and keeps their counsel. It is not I who seeks revenge for the deaths of our parents."

"That does not mean you will fight me because I am, though," Radomir says, his words full of false confidence. "Your refusal to seek revenge does not mean you do not agree with what I am doing. I know you, Sal. I know that you would do anything to keep your loved ones alive."

"I would," Sal disagrees and agrees all at once, because he cannot support his brother's methods, but if he could just keep anything bad from happening... "But our mother and father are dead, and it is pointless to avenge their deaths by attacking all non-magicals when only one is responsible for their demise. You are wrong, though," (about a great many things, first and foremost being that he somehow believes that resurrecting their parents is a good idea). "I will fight you, if need be, because I have learned that living in the past does not create permanence. If I fight you," he prays that it will not come to that, "it will be to save you from yourself."

Radomir bares his teeth in a vicious grimace, but the remainders of his undead army shift from bone and sinew to ash, and he disappears with a loud, startling pop. Sal wonders if he'll ever see his brother again, but the continuing chaos within the city draws his attention away from the unclear future, and he follows the girl who burned his brother's armies down.

He turns one of the Reapers into a pillar of salt, vaguely remembering a story his mother had told him when they first took him in. Sodom and Gomorrah seems like a fitting inspiration, though it is perhaps wrong of him to punish the Reapers for Radomir's faults (do not look back, terrible things happen to those who look back, and Orpheus proves this just as well as Lot's wife, his mother had told him and not his brother. Sal wonders if it would have made any difference).

The girl - showing unnatural versatility, and it is this more than her fireshow that clues him into what her specialization is - de-ages another Reaper, so that the witch before them is the size and shape and - he hopes - has the mental acuity of an infant.

Sal looks at her, eyes narrowed in consideration. "You are a Cosmic practitioner?" he asks, his tone pushier than he'd intended.

"I am," she replies, her confusion - writ large - playing across her face. "Why?"

"You can channel the stars through me," he tells her, hoping that he's right, and his desperation bleeds into his voice, "as an Alchemist, I can turn them all to salt if I have enough power." That much is true, if it works as he hopes. It might not work at all, though, if she just stands there looking dumbfounded. "Well?" he snaps at her. "Will you do it?" She looks unconvinced, and so he blurts out the only thing he thinks will convince her. "People are going to die if we don't end this quickly."

She gives no verbal reply, but he sees the moment she starts overflowing with the power of the stars. "Ready?" she finally asks, and light pours out of every visible opening in her body.

"Yes," he replies, and she begins pouring the overwhelming flow into him, and he burns . (Tongues of flame reach for him, and he reacts on instinct and slides through them. His village is a burned husk, a shadow of itself and the life it once played host to. Venom burns through his blood, and electricity arcs through his veins. He sees flames through a beat-down door. Don't look back, his mother tells him.) The Reapers turn to salt.

He gasps, leans heavily on the girl, and they sink to the ground together, exhausted.

"That," he pants, "was a lot. Wasn't expecting quite that much magic at my disposal."

She smiles at him. "I didn't know I could draw that much at once. I have used the stars to do incredible things before, but nothing quite like that."

He stands, holding his hand out for her, and wondering what other things she has done. "Salazar Slytherin," he says instead of asking. "An Alchemist who is learning that it is better to love and lose than for the memories of the past to be permanent."

(It is not that Orpheus looks back that loses him his wife. It is that she is already dead; she is in the past, and he still has a future. It takes Sal years to understand this.)

"Rowena Ravenclaw," she smiles. "A Cosmic practitioner who wants to build a magic school someday."

"Can I help?" he asks, and her agreement meets his ears in a flurry of bronze wings, and amber eyes, and a sharp beak. "An eagle. How fitting." Somehow he knows that there is no other animal in the world that would fit her as well as an eagle does.

It is funny how sometimes the things that a person fears the most are what pull them from the depths. Rowena is fire - is lightning and thunder and heartless constellations - is everything that Sal has grown up running away from - hiding from - and yet he follows her home.

Rowena finds him wandering the ringfort, his fingertips learning the rough bumps and divots of the stone walls, once well-maintained, but now crawling with ivy and moss, his eyes tracing shapes into the clouds overhead.

"Why do you walk around and around this place like you are lost?" she asks him, threading her arm through his. "We came to Éirinn to see new things, and yet you return here each day, and you walk the same path as the day before, and you drag your hand behind you."

Sal switches sides, setting his fingertips against the outside of the next ring. "I am not lost."

"I know that, but I wonder sometimes if you do," she tells him, looking into his eyes. He glances away, focusing again on stone walls and his calculated footsteps.

"I am not lost. I know who and where I am. But I have lost - people, things. I am only trying to find where and what and when."

Rowena leans her head against his shoulder and sighs. "You should not spend so much time thinking on the horrors of your past. You punish yourself like this."

"What am I supposed to do? My past has made me who I am. You cannot truly expect that I do not think upon it now and then."

"You wallow in your past. You relive your mistakes and your nightmares and your failures. You torture yourself with your past, and you let it tear you down instead of build you up. you're killing yourself, Sal, you're drowning yourself in your misery."

"I can't just get rid of all my bad memories! I'd become a veritable shadow of myself. And besides, it's never been done before; how do you even know if it'll work?"

Rowena's eyes glint. "We won't be getting rid of your memories, Sal, only the excess emotion behind them. You'll still be you, just without all the extra guilt and fear and sorrow that leeches away at you all the time. Come on, it'll make you feel better."

"You are certain?"

"I am. I have done something similar; not for the same reasons, of course, but similar all the same."

"What do I do?" he asks her, because she has offered him a solution, and he is so very tired of the soul-sucking misery that fills him and tries to eat away at him.

Rowena guides him through the process, and Sal watches the wispy silver ball before them grow larger and darker and more solid as he adds his nightmares and fears and regrets to it. When he is done, his memories have taken on the visage of a rotting, tatter-robed skeleton, from which a cold feeling emanates. It is death given life, fear given form, misery given an outlet so that it may steal joy.

"This was not meant to happen," Rowena whispers with dread, and Sal looks at her face to see that she is as afraid as he is.

She tries to set the creature alight because it looks like it should burn. It does not (and of course it doesn't, when it has been made of Sal's fears, when fire has been poured into it to create it. You cannot fight fire with fire). The chilly feeling only grows.

The creature floats closer, breathes in a rattling, raspy breath. Bone-deep cold shivers its way up Sal's spine, and he takes a step backwards. The nightmarish creature seems to suck all the joy out of the atmosphere surrounding them, seems to suck all the joy out of them.

Sal remembers...

("Salazar Slytherin!" Rowena shrieks, and he looks at her guiltily. Enoch throws him a look filled with pity, like Sal's a stray dog who's been malnourished and abused. To be fair, part of that assumption is true, even though it has been months since he followed Rowena home. "I can't believe you grounded me!"

Sal, in a shocking display of self-preservation, backs away slowly. Rowena, undeterred, stalks toward him, and he suddenly understands why snakes and eagles are not often associated with easy camaraderie - at least, not between each other.

He seems to have a knack for falling in with dangerous people, and the why of it never fails to escape him.

"I... thought it would be funny?" Sal asks. It had been amusing, watching the Ward he and Enoch had developed and tested together come to life as it crept up between the rings of the Grianán, watching Rowena try and fail to shift into her eagle form, each time leaping into the air, each time falling back to the ground. It had been funny until Sal, laughing too hard to concentrate on such trivial things as keeping the Ward up and not divulging who was responsible for said Ward, had let the thing slip.

Rowena, upon realizing what was happening, had not been best pleased, and Sal regrets his moment of frivolity more and more, the closer she gets. "You thought it would be funny," she repeats, her tone flat, her posture regal, and her face unreadable. "Did it live up to your expectations?"

It had surpassed them, but Sal cannot possibly tell her that. "Um,"he says instead, looking to Rowena's husband for assistance. Proving that he really does deserve Rowena, Enoch raises a heartless eyebrow at him. Sal scowls darkly, but he only smiles back angelically.

"Whatever," Rowena snaps. "I'll get you back for this, Sal." Her threat concerns him less than it would have, now that she has reverted away from the use of his full name, but he has known her long enough now to know that whatever she ends up doing will be appropriately horrible.

Rowena storms off not long after, and Enoch follows after her in a display of how seriously he takes his husbandly duties. Sal stays behind, sits down, leaning back against cool stone walls, and staring up at the bright, cloudless sky.)

The creature's rattling breaths make it seem as desperate for happiness as Sal is, and he can feel it stealing the feelings from his memories away.

("Enoch and I are having a baby," Rowena tells him, her face fairly glowing, and Sal can only smile helplessly at her.

"Congratulations," he offers, though he wants to say so much more, like - you will be a good mother, any child would be lucky to be loved by you. Any one would be lucky to be loved by you.

Somehow, she sees the words in his face without his having to say them. "You'll be godfather, of course," she says, and it is not a question.

"Of course," he says anyway, he says like there was ever an option, he says like he would ever have considered saying differently.)

Something inside Sal feels desperate and mean, feels like refusal, like denial. He holds on tight, lets the happiness overflow within him and pour out of him, pour out at the creature who wants but can't have, who needs but has been too forward in its taking, who hasn't learned yet that the best way to steal something is to do it under the cover of darkness.

("Isn't it amazing?" Radomir asks him, an arm around him, a flying carpet beneath them, their parents beside them, the wind flying past them, and they fly and fall with it, safe and as loved by the sky as it can bring itself to… love them. There are warm smiles and bright laughter and pride flooding them, and there is a woman dancing in the air, and water twisting itself around, and a jewel more precious than diamonds because it is love that lives in this moment that is untouched by...)

"You can't have that one," Sal whispers to this creature of his own making, even as he lets the warmth and love of it burst out of him like a coiling snake and attack, all vicious fangs and a constricting body, its words a venom that poisons no one and everyone.

It backs away, backs away from Sal, from Rowena, retreats into the dark mist of its cloak and disappears, and Sal can breathe again, now that the oppressive cold and seeking despair is gone.

"How did you do that?" Rowena asks him, something like awe colouring her voice.

"I used what it wanted - happiness - as a weapon," he tells her, and it is a sign of how well they have come to know each other that she does not push for more detail.

If he could scream in his serpent form, he would. He settles for hissing in vehement protest when Rowena swoops down from above and scoops him up in her talons before shooting back into the sky where she had been flying ahead and circling back.

The thin air is cool against his scales, but he doesn't have time to focus on that; his attention is held instead by the scene below them, and Sal realizes why Rowena had come down for him.

Popping into existence below them, just outside the city, and joining an already present group, are several dark-robed Wixen. They stand in front of a man, though Sal is unable to make out many details from so far away.

Rowena flies them closer to the people below. None of them pay them any mind, for it is not unusual to see an eagle carrying a snake in its talons. This is an unexpected boon; the inattention of the witches and wizards allows Sal and Rowena to draw nearer, and listen in on the meeting being held.

"Reapers!" the man they stand before calls. The Reaper Guild stands at attention, and Sal wonders when and how they managed to draw so many to their cause, wonders why Radomir is unable to admit defeat. For this man - with his shining blond hair and gold skin - is unmistakably his brother. "Reapers!" Radomir calls again. "Today is the day we will march on the accursed armies of King Æthelred as they defend against the Danes, and show them who exactly is the superior force in this world. For too long, the Muggles have forced our kind into the shadows and burned us alive. They have convinced themselves that we are less , that they - with their Christian God, with their King of the Jews, with their lack of magic - are better than us. Today is the day we prove them wrong. Unlike them, we are united. We do not concern ourselves with gender, or the color of our skin. We only concern ourselves with magic - with the purity of our blood. Join me, fellow men and women, wizards and witches, so that we may prove that it is magic that makes us superior!"

Radomir's army lets out an enthusiastic cry, and they begin to charge toward the city. Sal and Rowena share a glance, and even as animals the intent is clear: we cannot allow them to attack.

It is with this in mind that Rowena flies high and opens her claws; Sal falls through the air above his brother's army, and shifts into his human form just before he touches the ground. He appears out of nowhere, landing in a crouch, and he immediately begins firing spells at the Reapers. An Exploding Charm takes out several of them, and another is taken care of when he Transfigures her hair into a tree whose roots reach desperately for the ground and plant themselves in it. The tree's features quickly overtake the woman's turning her skin to bark, and trapping her scream in a contorted knot on its trunk. Sal is busy turning another wizard into gold, the glittering metal spreading to his companions and petrifying them, when Rowena finally falls from the sky in a chariot of heavenly fire that burns brighter than the sun.

Fire burns around her, reaches for the Reapers and snaps them up like kindling, fast and deadly and painless, for there are no screams from those burning. The Reapers stop running, stop fighting; they crack their bodies away into oblivion, leaving at most a finger behind, until all that is left of them is a new old tree, and Radomir standing in fields of gold that only melt beneath Rowena's fury.

"We must stop meeting like this," Radomir drawls, and Sal snorts.

"That can be arranged, if only you can be convinced to stop attacking Muggles," Sal returns, the words biting and disappointed because he already knows how this will go.

"Do not bother holding your breath, brother. And do not waste it, either. You know where I stand on this matter. You know better than anyone that I will not stop."

"What I do not understand is why. "

"You did not see it, Salazar. You did not see the man with hair like mine, and mother's, and father's - you did not see him break down the door and kill them and burn them. I did. The Muggles are scum. They see what we can do, or they hear of it, and they fear us and hate us in equal measure. You have heard of the burnings. You know what they do to our kind. They will never accept us. It took one of theirs killing Mother and Father for me to understand that. What will it take for you to see the same?"

"That is one man. They are not all like that."

"They are all like that. They are all like him. "

"My parents were not like that. You may have seen the sins of one, but he does not represent them all!"

"Of course you would say that. You are born of scum. You are born from the mud of the earth. You would defend them to your last breath because you are just like them! "

Sal looks away from his brother. "It is you and not I who is like them. You say that they kill us for our magic, but you kill them for their lack of it. How are you any better than they are?"

"I am better because I have magic. Listen, Sal. They look like us, and they talk like us; they build cities like we do, and they have the same appreciation for fine things as us. But they are not us, and it is because we have magic, and they do not. Magic runs through our veins - yours and mine and hers alike. It is only blood that runs through theirs."

"And yet every single one of us bleeds the same."

"Colour means nothing. The fact remains that we can do things they cannot. This is the way of the world, as it has been, as it will remain."

"Colour means everything!" Sal shouts, finding that he is done with this conversation, as well as his brother's obstinance and unchanging opinions. "It proves that we are all the same."

"You are an idealist, Sal. You want the colour of our blood and the fact that it matches theirs to mean something. But they also believe that colour has meaning - they believe that it means that some of them are worth less than others. And here is the thing: none of them care that they are bleeding red the same as the rest. They know the same thing that I know, and it is what you cannot accept. The colour we bleed is the least important thing about us; it is everything else that matters."

"You cannot be serious."

"Perhaps if you actually took the time to get to know the people you are defending you would not be so desperate to save them. They certainly would not want someone like you defending them," Radomir says, gesturing at Sal, before disappearing after his followers.

Sal wonders how it is that he and Radomir manage to communicate so ineffectively; they can while the time away speaking about Muggles and Wixen while a battle rages on around them, and yet they are unable to just stop and listen to what they need to hear. He barely knows his own brother anymore, and he has done nothing but argue about a people he knows nothing about.

("Do you miss me? I miss you," he wants to tell his brother. These are not the words that come out of his mouth.

"You know I love you, right?" he wants to ask Radomir, because the first time he had asked, the answer had been uncertain silence.

"Come with me. Don't leave me again," he wants to say, and he wants Radomir to stay.)

"Come home, Sal," Rowena tells him, her voice as soft as the cloak she holds out to him. He reaches for it, reaches for her, and tries to convince himself that Rowena is just as good as a brother. It almost works.

They walk along in silence, until Rowena - famously uncomfortable with quiet - breaks it. "I can't wait until Helena is old enough to appreciate the story of the time Uncle Sal went into battle naked."

The laugh that pushes out of him is startling. "She will never be old enough for that."

"You mean you will never be old enough. Did you not realise that you had no clothing the entire time we battled your brother's forces?"

"It was hardly my main concern," Sal mutters. "I was preoccupied with his Reapers."

"In any case," Rowena says, and he can tell that it will be a long time before she drops this particular subject, "we now know that fighting our enemies in the nude is a very effective technique. They didn't stay for very long after you arrived."

"Aren't you supposed to be wise?" he asks her, and she eyes him. "I suggest you drop this, and stop insinuating that I scared them away, or I might have to test it out on you and Enoch when the two of you begin to irritate me. Just to make sure it works."

Rowena huffs, muttering something about him stifling all her fun, but she doesn't mention it again until they've arrived home, and Sal cannot help but count it as a win.

"What is that?" Héctor asks, and Sal looks up from where he's been flipping the stone from Cairo between his fingers.

"Just a pretty rock, according to the man I bought it from," Sal replies, failing to mention how the thing had utterly captivated him the first time he'd seen it. Even with a few years to look back on the moment, Sal can concoct no reasonable or realistic explanation as to why.

"You do not sound sure that you believe that," Héctor says probingly, and Sal shifts his gaze from the swirling colors resting in his palm to Rowena's père.

"You do not need to tell me if you do not wish to, but sometimes talking things through allows you to see things you could not, at first."

Sal twists his mouth. Both of Rowena's fathers seem kind and understanding, but he has not gotten a chance - or perhaps he has just not made the time - to get to know them. He doesn't know how to talk to them, because half of the time he doesn't know what he wants to say, or how he wants to say it.

That is the nice thing about being friends with Rowena. She always has something to say, and she rarely expects two-sided, or even reciprocated, conversation from him.

Héctor correctly interprets his silence as reluctance, and smiles. "As I said, you do not need to talk about it, but I am willing to listen if you decide otherwise." And with that, he sits down against the tree neighboring Sal's and gazes out at the grassy plain and the steep drop into the sea, leaving Sal to return to his fidgeting.

They allow the silence to linger for a while, and Héctor's presence is such that Sal does not feel pressured to talk. Perhaps it is this quality that is what makes him do so. "Have you ever looked at something and just been… completely entranced by it?" he frowns and shakes his head, because he remembers…

He remembers his parents - Baba and Bibi and the other Liani, as well as Mother and Father - looking at each other, and seeing only each other: no distractions or interferences. He has seen Hector and Christopher look at each other in the same way, as though they are completely spellbound by each other. Even Rowena and Enoch look that way, sometimes, and while Sal would call the look captivation, he knows the feeling is probably more accurately referred to as love.

"Not as though you're - you know - in love with it. Just... spellbound? Like, you see it, and it captures your attention, and you can't look away until you've done what it wants?" It comes out like a question, like he's not sure that that's exactly what it feels - felt - like, like Héctor's the one who experienced this moment and Sal's life, and not Sal, and that's why he's asking for confirmation.

Héctor eyes him. "I assume you are referring to that rock you're holding? I have never heard of such a thing happening, but then I am not as well read as Topher. If you do not object, I can ask him. There are some things one cannot know when they have not grown up immersed in magic, yes?"

"If you don't mind, I'd prefer it if you didn't mention it," Sal says, not entirely sure why these words are coming out of his mouth. "And yes," he adds, once he's finally regained control of his words,"that's what happened when I first saw it. It was like it wanted me to buy it. And I did."

Héctor huffs out a sigh. "Fascinating. Why have you kept it?"

"I bought it the night my parents died. It serves as a reminder of our happier moments. And I suppose it never occurred to me to get rid of it," Sal tells him.

Somehow, the brilliant vortex rippling within smooth, glossy black brings him back to the deep blue of a flying carpet, and the wind sluicing around them, and warm arms, and bright smiles, and laughter not being the only thing tangling its way across the air currents.

Héctor smiles, a quick, flighty thing that Sal barely catches out of the corner of his eye. " I would bet that your second reason has quite a lot to do with the first. Family - family is everything, especially for people like us."

"People like us?"

A vaguely sorrowful expression takes over his face. "Rowena talks a great deal about you. And my speciality is Telepathy. Your mind can be quite loud, sometimes, when you think in words. It filled in the blanks she could not. I apologize for the invasion of your privacy."

"It's fine," Sal tells him, though it's not, quite, not really.

"I appreciate you saying that, even if you don't mean it," Héctor tells him. "And I meant that we are part of the unlucky number who lose our families and can do nothing but cling to what remains."

Sal looks at him curiously, and Héctor sighs, but he does not deny him the information.

"My parents were both Muggle-born," Héctor begins, "and so when I was born with magic as well, they were quite were less pleased when I married Topher - I suppose not all prejudices can be erased with the introduction of magic. We cut ties, and I have not seen or heard from them since. Those first few years, I latched onto Topher. I - I needed him in order to be happy, and it almost destroyed us. Eventually, though, I was able to be happy on my own, and that was when we introduced Rowena into our family.

"You and I? We need other people, we need family, and the more they pull away, the more we cling - to them, to our memories of them, to our expectations of them, to things that represent them," he nods at the uncut gem in Sal's hand. "And that is at least part of the reason you have kept that 'pretty rock' when it is - by all accounts - nothing special."

Sal looks away from Héctor, hating how easily Rowena's père can read him. "I don't need people," he lies, and it's a pitiful enough one that he can't even convince himself.

"No?" Héctor asks. "Then throw away that rock. Don't talk to your brother the next time you see him; fight him instead, until you come out on top. Leave here - Rowena and Enoch and Helena, all of us - without saying goodbye." He stands, looking down at Sal as he does so. "You can't even imagine it, can you?"

"No," Sal says, because there is nothing else to say.

"We need people, Sal. We need family, and things, because you and I? We've lost enough that we're always wondering if we're loved. That's why you followed Rowena home. That's why we are having this conversation. We forget that bad things happen, and that does not mean we are not loved, just unlucky in life."

With that, Héctor walks away, leaving Sal to his tumultuous thoughts.

Sal finds himself flipping the stone through his fingers and cradling it more often in the days after his conversation with Héctor. It is perhaps warmer than it has been in the past, almost like the heat from his hands has soaked in and lingered.

Come to think of it, it almost seems like the stone has grown larger, the brilliant flecks of color stretching longer across the increasing girth. But the growth is so incremental that it is almost unnoticeable. Indeed, it is not until he looks at it one day and thinks that it used to be the size of his littlest nail and not almost perfectly fitting into his palm that he realizes.

Even that, though, occurs days before the gem starts getting away from him. It's little things at first: some days he finds it in his robes when he's sure he never put it there. Other days, he doesn't realize it's been missing until he sees it glittering in the curls of Helena or Rowena's hair. On one particularly memorable day, Sal sees the thing resting underneath a toad that hops away under his bewildered attention.

"You are certain you do not wish for me to mention this to Topher?" Héctor asks when Sal brings it up. "It seems to me that this is not just a pretty rock after all."

Sal thinks about it, and this time his mind and words are in agreement. "If he knows anything, let me know."

"When I was younger," Christopher tells him a few days later, "my father took my sister and I for a walk in the woods. We came across a pack of wolves, and there was one wolf - a beautiful silvery beast - that took one look at Athena and followed her home. She was equally entranced by it, and described the bond they had in words very similar to your own. Now, you said it's been getting bigger and moving around?"

"Yes," Sal says, wanting to ask how similar this situation can possibly be to Christopher's sister's, when she had a wolf and he's got a peculiar rock.

Héctor snorts at the stray thought, before hastily schooling his features at his husband's curious glance.

"I think it's likely something similar to my sister's situation. Do you mind if I take a look at it?" Christopher asks him, letting Héctor's amusement slide for the time being.

Sal holds the stone out, and Christopher scoops it up, examining it carefully from every angle.

"I think it's an egg. I can feel something alive in there, but it's almost like it's sleeping. Not exactly, but close."

"I can't hear anything," Héctor says thoughtfully.

"But do you normally hear anything besides human thoughts?" Christopher asks curiously.

"Sometimes," Héctor whispers, "if they are desperate enough."

An amorphous expression settles on Rowena's father's face before it is smoothed away with a tight smile.

"Thanks," Sal says quickly, because this moment - fraught with something he cannot define - is not meant for his (eyes, ears, memories) thoughts.

Neither Héctor nor Christopher replay, and Sal makes a swift getaway. He knows when his presence becomes an intrusion, and how to disappear when it does.

"You were right," he tells Christopher a few days later, holding a tiny snake in his hands. Its scales are the same swirling mass of color set in the same glossy black as the shell it crawled out of.

"What will you name her?" Christopher asks, watching as the snake slithers up Sal's arm to settle itself around his neck in a cool curve.

"Analisa," Sal replies, smoothing a finger over her scales. The name is a tribute to his second mother, who walked the winds and earth and seas alike, who was beautiful and strong with it, who taught him that fire does not always have to burn.

Anana and Analisa teach him the same lesson years apart from each other. "Sometimes the beautiful things in life are the most deadly," Analisa tells him after the weight of her stare has killed a man. His mother's voice echoes over top, the words spoken in the same his, directed at Radomir and Sal, and the snake in their hands.

(Mother says it to them both, but it is only Radomir who understands it until the day Sal is bitten and dying and shocked back to life. Sal can only understand her in his memories of her, and isn't that always the way of things?)

There is beauty in death, Sal thinks, remembering Thester. Perhaps that is why Hades took Persephone as his wife. Perhaps that is why she stayed.

"There is beauty in death," Sal tells Analisa, smoothing his hand over her glittering scales. Her tongue hisses out between her venom-soaked fangs as her massive body curls around him.

"But there is beauty in life, as well," she replies, "for it has given us each other."

Sal looks around himself - at Rowena and Enoch following Helena as she toddles along the sharp line of the earth where it breaches the sky and the see, at Héctor lying with his head in Christopher's lap and Christopher's fingers wound through his dark hair, at Analisa's scales, which glitter in the sunlight even brighter than the diamond-tipped waves below them - and cannot help but agree.

Afterwards, Sal likes to place the blame for it solidly on Enoch's shoulders. After all, it is Enoch who suggests that they visit the island where he was born. It does not occur to Sal to ask Enoch why he and his parents had left Dyrøy in the first place, or why the population of the island numbers fewer than two-hundred inhabitants.

The island is pretty enough, though it is certainly not anywhere near the same level as many of the other places he has seen. Athens, for one, is far more… more than Dyrøy, and Sal is certain that nothing - especially this half-green island - will ever be able to beat out the utter majesty of the pyramids.

The first few days they are there, they see no one, and so they spend their time swimming in the ocean and climbing to the tops of the few mountains the island boasts. The views from the summits are spectacular, and so Sal finds himself trekking back up to the top, with Analisa at his side, just to sit and stare in awe at the grandeur of the world beneath him.

Some days, Héctor joins him at the apogee, and they sit in silence, watching the sun pull itself higher into the sky, drawing its pigment-stained cloak tighter around itself until it disappears, leaving behind only the warm fire of it to soak into cloudless, crystalline blue, and the fading light of the moon and stars.

By the seventh day, Sal has decided that Dyrøy has earned its name. The number of deer - fawns and does and bucks alike, including the huge-antlered stag he has seen sunning itself by the shoreline with the rest of its herd - far outranks the number of people he has seen, twenty to one, and maybe even more.

All in all, it's a peaceful place, its rather bland and unspectacular scenery more than made up for by the way time seems to slow down and grind to a halt, by the way the sun completes its peregrination lingeringly, settling on its flaming throne high above the earth and casting its warm gaze upon them, before creeping down reluctantly, ceding its light-drenched crown to the queen of the night and her glorious subjects.

It makes Sal wonder if the sun, able to see every inch of the sky, able to gaze down upon the smooth plains and dipping valleys and protruding mountain ranges of the world, is ever lonely. Perhaps that is why, some days, the sun pulls blankets of clouds around itself and sobs its light out where no one and nothing can see it. He wonders if that means that when the moon pours out her sadness to the earth she is mourning the loss of one of her subjects.

It is only when Héctor looks at him oddly one day that Sal even realizes what he has been contemplating. With a vague sense of embarrassment flooding him, Sal scowls at Héctor, though it is a weak thing that he knows Héctor knows he doesn't mean, and pretends that his mind is the sun, and pulls dark thunder-clouds around it.

Héctor startles. "How did you do that?" he asks sharply. "You..." he gestures inarticulately, like if he threads his fingers through the air enough, he'll be able to pluck out the right words. "I could hear your thoughts," he tries and, those words fitting, pushes on, "and then all of a sudden I couldn't. I could - can - only see storm clouds and hear thunder. And," he adds, motioning expansively at the sky above them, "it's not from here. It's coming from you. So how did you do it?"

Sal shrugs. "I just... imagined I was like the sun, like I was thinking about, and then I pulled clouds around myself. Can you not... see... through them?"

Héctor hums. "I don't know if I can if I put effort in, but just like this, when I am not really using my Telepathy beyond general brushes of my awareness? Like this, I cannot hear your thoughts."

"And if you are trying?" Sal prompts.

Héctor's face takes on a worried cast. "There is a reason people fear Telepaths, Salazar. If we push too hard - if I push too hard - there is the very real risk that your mind will shatter. I do not wish to risk that, especially because we don't know how much mental force your clouds can withstand."

"I am not asking you to be destructive in your intensity, only persistent, only insistent and deliberate," Sal replies. He is, after all, rather fond of keeping his mind intact.

Héctor still looks uncertain. "This requires at least a modicum of trust, Sal. It took years before I could enter Topher's mind with intent without hurting him, and - "

"I trust you." Sal interrupts. "Trust has never been my problem," he adds ruefully. "But you should know that I do. I trust you not to hurt me."

Héctor forces a smile onto his face and clears his throat. "Okay. Let's try this out."

(He loses himself in the clouds around Sal's mind, wanders in circles trying to find his way in. He makes it eventually, and Sal laughs at the triumphant grin that creeps across Rowena's père's face after he finally succeeds.)

When they recount the morning's activities to Rowena and Enoch and Christopher, Rowena's eyes take on a dangerous gleam that prompts Sal to shift nervously where he sits against a tree, licking grease from his fingers. "You'll be showing me how to do that tonight, won't you?" she demands in a sickly sweet tone, and he shudders at the sound of it.

"Of course," Sal demures, and he tries to ignore the gleeful, demonic smile that settles comfortably on Rowena's pretty face.

Enoch shoots him a sympathetic glance before he stands, swinging Helena onto his shoulders. She grabs his sandy hair in a chubby hand and shrieks happily as he runs to and fro across the greenery, flowers sprouting up behind him and twining themselves together Helena's dark hair as they pass by.

After a while, he slows, swinging Helena back down to the ground. She wanders along the shoreline, and Sal rises to join the others as they follow behind her at a more sedate pace, Rowena catching up with Enoch to thread their fingers together, and Christopher throwing an arm across Héctor's broad shoulders. Sal walks alone and tells himself he doesn't mind.

As they wander, Sal watches fondly as his goddaughter runs into the lapping waves, kicking at them so that the ocean spray leaps up to glitter in the sunlight. Helena shrieks as the cool water spatters back down onto her, though this does not deter her from running back in and splashing around again. At some point, a young boy - if Sal had to guess, the child is only a year or so older than Helena - with glittering gold curls and equally gold skin rushes down to join in the fun.

Just as Rowena has begun to show signs of impatience, Helena and the boy approach of their own accord. "This is my friend 'olden," she says happily, and Sal's heart melts when the little boy smiles shyly and offers them a wave that seems to distort the air around him before running back to the water. "'e's very shy, Mummy," Helena says confidingly. "'e doesn't talk at all. I even 'ad ta guess 'is name! 'e's very silly, but I like 'im. C'n we keep 'im?"

Rowena laughs. "We don't keep people, darling." She bends down to poke her daughter's stomach and plants a kiss to her cheek. "But go play some more, okay? We'll be heading back to the cottage soon."

Helena giggles and runs off again.

The spouses are murmuring quietly amongst themselves when it happens. One moment Helena and Holden are chasing each other around, playing a game of Touch and Go - and Helena seems to be It. For the most part, Holden is quite good at staying just out of range, but Helena manages to surprise him; she grabs for his shoulder, and her hand phases through him, and Sal realizes several things in quick succession.

First, though Holden had been in the water, he was perfectly dry. Sal never heard a sound any kind - be it laughter or words or even a grunt - come from the child. Additionally, when Holden had moved, there was always a faint rippling of the air around him. There is a sudden, swooping feeling in stomach as he realizes all this, as he realizes that Holden is not - was never - real , as he watches the unreal, untouchable golden boy (so like Radomir, something inside him points out achingly) fade away into nothing in a burst of light. The look on Helena's face - miserable shock and surprise - punches him in the gut before she too is gone in an implosive flash of bright light.

In front of him, Rowena stands ram-rod straight, and he knows that she has noticed Helena's disappearance. At the same time, a massive creature - black and covered in delicate scales that seem to suck the light away from the world, with vivid purple eyes, which are luminescent against the black, reptilian pupils, and thin tendrils of smoke curling from its nostrils and gaping, fanged mouth - that he recognizes as a Dragon only from the myths Mother had told him and Radomir when they were younger fades into view.

Sal swallows. Analisa slithers up his body and coils herself around his shoulders, the shifting plates of her coruscating scales - impenetrable as they are - acting as a shield against the world that means to break him. He is thankful for it a moment later, for the Dragon releases a long, gusty exhale that is accompanied by curling flames that grasp for him. Rowena is able to throw up a shield in front of her family, but it does not reach far enough to encompass Sal. It is Analisa's body that protects him, the glossy crust of her killing the burning heat and licking tongues on contact.

The fire freezes him in place for a moment, trapping him in memories that aim to char his skin. (There is a burning village, a burning body, a fire framed by a fallen door. Fire reaches down from the heavens, intent on punishing an entire group of people. He lunges forward, refusing to be trapped by the embrace of the firestorm.)

Rowena glows bright white, the power of earth's star filling her and leaping towards the beast in a tidal wave that Sal turns into knife-edged ice shards that shatter into a dazzling rainbow against its hide, failing to pierce the spaces between the scales. With that method a failure, Sal turns his attention towards Transfiguring blades of grass into vicious swords that he flings at the Dragon in a volley. These, too, shatter against the light-consuming scales of the Dragon.

The Dragon, having graduated from breathing fire at them, lunges into the air, beating its great wings to carry itself closer to where they stand. Unexpectedly, the speed at which it approaches decreases dramatically as a mass of green and purple creeps over it, the plant taking root and growing around the Dragon's body. Sal finds himself looking to Enoch for an explanation.

"Creeping Thyme," his friend explains, his voice tight as he forces the plant to come to life in spite of the lack of dirt it grows in. A moment later, his efforts are rendered useless; the air around the Dragon becomes a dark void, and at the same moment, Helena reappears in almost exactly the same place she had disappeared. The darkness dissolves a moment later, and when the Dragon comes back into view, it is furious, its wings carrying it at a normal speed, and the Creeping Thyme lies in wilted curtains around it.

In a desperate attempt, Rowena sets the dead plants alight. They burn quickly, and the resulting freedom helps the Dragon far more than hindering it.

"Enoch!" Christopher calls from where he stands in front of Helena. "Use Leopard Plant."

Enoch kneels behind a wall of water that Sal creates, pressing his hand to the ground. Little golden flowers sprout up from the ground in corymbs, the bright color punctuated by vivid red stems and large green leaves. Enoch looks to Rowena, who channels her magic through him as she had done to Sal the first time they met. The flowers shift and change, taking on the form of several large cats, their fur a muted version of the flowers and marked with black spots. Sal notices Christopher focusing all the weight of his considerable attention on the leopards in his periphery as he uses his magic to break tree limbs away from their trunks and hurtle them towards the Dragon, the wood taking on a silvery hue and wrapping itself around the creature in heavy metal chains that force it down to the ground.

As one, the leopards spring for the downed Dragon, their needle-like teeth and formidable claws intimidating but not harming the creature. It roars in protest, flame spurting from its mouth and engulfing the flower-born cats, the heat of it melting the chains that hold it down into shining pools of sludge.

Between one breath and the next, the sunlit world around them shifts, a black space opening up in the sky and sucking the sun into it, swallowing all the light in the world and leaving them in blackness. Sal hears Rowena cry out from far away, the sound one of pain, and he isn't certain if it is because the source of her power has been consumed, or if she has truly been injured.

Without the sun, Sal cannot see, and so he stumbles around blindly, trying to find his family. It is only when he brushes against a scaly body that he realises his error. It is only Analisa, who had at some point in the chaos disappeared from her perch on his shoulders, but it could have been the Dragon. His blind, unthinking stumbling could have been the death of him, and with this in mind, Sal stands still and breaths in deep.

He does not need to see to fight; plenty of people go through life blind and make it out alive. Sal shifts into his snake form, scenting the air. He is not so impaired like this; vision as a snake is not as good as it is when he is human anyways, and so instead of panicking about what he lacks, Sal takes note of the vibrations that travel through the ground and air, and he makes his way carefully towards the one scent he does not recognize.

:Wait,: a voice in his mind that is not his own commands. :Just because we cannot see the sun does not mean it is gone. You can still feel its warmth, can you not?: Sal pauses, and realises that he can. :The Dragon can still see us, even though we cannot see it.: It is Héctor's voice that grows clearer in his mind. :It can see you approaching, Sal.:

:How can you tell I'm approaching it?: Sal wonders, not really expecting an answer.

:I can feel your mind, and I can feel Topher's, as well, and he can feel the Dragon.:

:So what should I do?: Sal asks.

:Hide yourselves,: is the reply, and then Sal's mind is his own again, as silent as it always is.

Sal has only managed to cast magic as a snake once, and the result had not been what he intended at the time. Still, it cannot hurt to try again, especially when his past has shown him that he performs better under pressure. He concentrates, and something cool washes over him. Beside him, Analisa hisses in protest. "What did you do?" she demands.

"I have hidden us from the Dragon," Sal replies, and together they lunge forward, blindly following the scent of the beast.

It is over quickly after that; the Dragon, for all its ability to deceive them, does not see Sal and Analisa approach, and it is only its furious huffing that tells Sal that it knows they are there at all. Analisa's fangs are far sharper than the claws and teeth of the leopards, or the grass-blade swords that Sal had attacked with earlier, and the Dragon's underbelly is far softer than the rest of its hide. Her tusks slide in easily, and the deadly venom that coats their surface enters the Dragon's blood with deadly intent.

The sun and the sky and the world around them fade back into view at the Dragon's pained roar, and Sal, freshly human again, squints against the pervasive brightness that was there and not-there all along.

"So that was why you and your parents left Dyrøy," Sal accuses Enoch the next day, once they have all recovered from the fight with the Dragon. Rowena's injury is nearly healed, the Dragon's teeth having miraculously missed everything important when it bit her abdomen after swallowing the sun, and no one else had suffered anything worse than a broken limb.

"I honestly forgot about the Hebridean Blacks," Enoch says defensively. "We left when I was young, and they rarely came near humans. But yes, they are why we left, and they are the reason barely anyone lives here."

"Are they native anywhere else?" Sal asks suspiciously.

"No, thank the gods. I don't know if anywhere else has as many deer in such a small radius, and since deer are their main source of food…" he trails off. "It makes you wonder, though, if they do, and we just miss them because they want us to. I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to hide with the ability to manipulate light to such a degree. I had no idea they could just… make it disappear like that."

"It's certainly an impressive ability," Sal concedes.

Enoch sighs. "Yes. An impressive ability that is going to wake me up at night." He hunches into himself, his shoulders curving forward. "Rowena's going to be terrified of the dark after seeing it swallow the sun like that."

(He is right; it takes months for Rowena to move freely beneath a starless sky again, and when she finally does, it is with Enoch on her right, Sal on her left, Analisa around their shoulders, and tears slipping down to dry in tracks on her cheeks.)

"And what about you?" Sal asks, his voice soft, shifting his body so that his back rests against Enoch's.

"Me too," Enoch whispers, slouching down, his head tilting back to rest between Sal's scapulae. And isn't it just terribly ironic that the thing that catapults Sal's heart into his throat has always been fire (light) when so many of the people he loves fear the dark?

The gloaming - marked by dull pinks and purples against the steadily darkening sky and imperious nebulae and lengthening shadows - is the only thing that signifies the passage of time as Sal wanders through the country-side. Rowena is with him, her arm wound through his and her head on his shoulder as they make their way slowly around the bank of Loch Rannoch, having made their way from Ceann Loch Raineach, where they had arrived the day before with the rest of their family via the River Tummel. Analisa slithers along before them, and the swirling galaxies that reside within her lustrous scales greatly resemble the stars that have begun to embed themselves in the smooth reflection of the inky surface of the lake.

"Enoch and I have been trying for another child," Rowena says abruptly, shattering the peaceful silence and knotting Sal's stomach with her words. Her voice is tinged with an emotion Sal can't quite make out, and so he looks down at her glossy head.

"Are you pregnant again?" he ventures.

"It was so easy last time," Rowena says instead of answering his question. "We weren't even trying for Helena. But we've been trying for months - before and since our vacation in Dyrøy - and nothing has happened. I thought that perhaps I was pregnant while we were there, because my bleeding had stopped. But as I said, it has been months, and I have neither given birth nor begun bleeding again." Her voice is tight, and she pauses. Sal waits patiently for her to continue.

"I think," Rowena whispers, and now there are tears dripping into her words, "that maybe I was pregnant in Dyrøy, and that when… when the Dragon bit me. I think that maybe it. Killed the baby, because. Um. I've heard that when a woman takes damage. Like I did, you know? Well, I've heard that. That sometimes they - they can't get pregnant anymore. And I think that that's what happened to me." Her shoulders shake, and her hand curls around his arm with bruising force. Sal stops walking, pulling her to a halt, and he pulls her into him, wraps his arms around her, and says nothing as she sobs into his chest, the warm salt of her tears soaking his tunic.

"I feel broken," Rowena says a while later, once her tears have dried and her voice has smoothed out and she is able to stand straight on her own.

"Not being able to get pregnant doesn't mean you are broken. Your ability to bear children does not determine your worth," Sal says fiercely.

Rowena laughs, and it's a heartbroken thing that comes out sharp and bitter, and it shatters against nothing. "That's what Enoch told me. But you don't get it, and neither does he. I know that I'm not worthless. I know that I'm not broken. But knowing that doesn't change how I feel, and I feel broken. That's not something you can get rid of with comforting words and vehement reassurances because feelings aren't logical, and they can't be explained or convinced away." She breaks off, and looks at him. "You know that better than Enoch does."

Sal feels his lips tighten, and he smooths his face into something expressionless and cold and diamond-hard. "This isn't about me," he says, and it feels a little bit like a lie.

Rowena sighs. "I don't know if this feeling will ever go away," she says, like she's accepting his denial. He wonders why it's so difficult to tell who her words apply to when they're phrased like they're a concession.

"One day, you will finally see yourself as everyone else does," Sal tells her, (and he feels like he's standing on the edge of a cliff, barely keeping his balance, and all it'll take to send him over is -) leaning down to brush his lips across her cheek, the movement softer than the words he whispers. "Strong and brilliant and unbreakable." (- one single touch.)

(He falls, and he catches him self, his fingers digging into the ground that once supported his feet. He pulls himself up, away from the void, and drags himself back onto the cliff, his arms straining desperately. He refuses to risk breaking something, and so he sits on the edge of the cliff again, no longer in danger of falling, and he stares down into the unknown, wondering if there would have been anyone to catch him if he had just let himself fall. It is not just his shoulders that ache, but he pretends not to notice.)

Rowena pulls away to resume her original position at his side, and they walk on in silence. "I'm sorry, by the way," Sal tells her softly. "I know you wanted more children."

"And Helena wanted siblings," she adds.

"Then it's a good thing that your ambition is to build a school, isn't it?"

She looks at him thoughtfully. "I hadn't thought of it like that. But I suppose it will not be unlike raising children." She trails off when she sees Analisa emerge from the shadows, intent on Sal. "Thank you."

Their school is less a desire, now, and more something that Rowena needs to come to fruition. She needs it, and Sal wonders if she even knows how much. He wonders if her dream coming to life will be enough to convince her that she is not broken, wonders if she'll look back one day and tell everyone who'll listen: look what I've done. Look how the world tried to break me. Look how I didn't let it.

"Salazar," Analisa hisses, her voice tearing him from his thoughts.

"Yes, lovely?"

"I found a Dragon a ways away. It's not very happy."

"Where is it?" Sal asks, panic crawling into his chest and settling there.

"Follow me," Analisa tells him, and he does, dragging Rowena behind him.

"What's going on?" she demands.

"Analisa antagonised a Dragon. I'm going to make sure no one's going to get hurt, and you're clinging to my arm." Sal tells her. Rowena lets go of his arm, shifting into her Eagle form. Sal does the same, crawling forward in Analisa's wake before Rowena scoops him up in her talons and flies after the basilisk. Sal prays to all the gods he knows of that the Dragon is not a displaced Hebridean Black.

When they arrive, the Dragon - a Welsh Green, he notices with relief - is roaring angrily, and it is enough to make Sal wonder how the sound of it hadn't carried to where he and Rowena were wandering the banks of the loch. As he watches, a massive rock flies towards the beast's vivid green hide, the force of the blow downing it. Sal squirms in Rowena's hold until she allows him to drop to the ground, and he shifts back into his natural form as tendrils of dirt creep into the creature's orifices. Sal concentrates, and turns the earth into water, directing the flow into the Dragon and drowning its fire. The vibrant hue of the Dragon's scales fades to a greenish gray, and it is only then that Sal stops channeling water into it.

Out of the corner of his eye, Sal sees a pretty blonde girl run across the green towards a man laying on the ground. He approaches, noticing that the girl is not as young as he had first thought, likely only a few years his junior. She is dwarfed by the man beside her, who wears a cloak that covers very little, especially when he sits up at the praise Sal offers them.

He is a bit surprised to learn that this was their first Dragon, but he supposes that he had not seen the entire fight. He rambles about Welsh Greens and their affinity for Earth magic, as well as ley line locations, before he mentions Rowena, who lands and shifts like he's her personal herald.

The four of them exchange names, though it is Rowena and Helga who do all the talking. The man - Godric - is back to laying on his back, and it is only Rowena's mention of the first time he had shifted in battle that keeps him from staring. Sal scowls at her. "We've just met them, you don't need to go around sharing all our embarrassing stories just yet."

"I think we'll be seeing a great deal of Helga and Godric in the future, Sal. They'll make great additions to the school, don't you think?" Rowena says cheerfully.

Sal remembers the story Rowena had told him when they'd first discussed the school in detail. Morgana's prophecy - if that's what it was - seems rather obvious now; Rowena is obviously the stars that are referenced, and Sal as an Alchemist could be meant to represent permanence. One of their new acquaintances is obviously able to use Earth magic, as proved by the battle with the Dragon, and Sal is willing to bet that the other is a Healer. He supposes they would make a good addition to the school.

"So you're the ones we've been hearing about?" Godric asks in a deep voice. "The ones wanting to standardize a magical education for all Wixen?"

Rowena looks pleased, and Sal supposes she would be. Everything is finally coming together. "Yes," she confirms. "I take it you've heard of us?"

"Of course. We've been travelling together for several years, making our way toward Alba because we heard rumors of you and what you wanted to do."

"How lovely," she replies, and Sal tunes out her next words until he hears his name. "Speaking of which, Salazar," she says, and he knows that she knows he wasn't paying attention, "I think this spot right here will be a perfect place for our school."

Sal looks at her like she's crazy, an eyebrow raised. "Right here? Where there's a Dragon," he says, willing her to understand how ludicrous her words seem.

"Precisely," Rowena says coolly. "You're the Alchemist here; use that permanent Transfiguration you've got a knack for to turn this magic-filled Dragon's body into a school for our future students."

Sal rolls his eyes. Of course Rowena made the connection before he did; she was the one who grew up believing that Dragons were the source of all magic, and now Sal's gone and drowned one. Clearly Rowena only buys into prophecies if and when they suit her, and now that she's gone and bought into this one, Sal has no choice but to do as she desires.

("Why did you do it, then?" she asks him later, and Sal looks at a sky that is swirling with shimmering lights, and he sees a world where the constellations above him are not the only things that glitter like gold.

"It was your dream," he replies. "It's always been your dream. You can't pretend otherwise when I already know the truth."

"Exactly," she says, jabbing a finger at him. "It was my dream, not yours. But you jumped in head-first, no questions asked, and you made it happen. Why?"

"The first time we met, you gave me something. Call it whatever you want: power, family, another chance, a secret. It doesn't matter what you gave me, only that you gave me something and it meant something. You gave me this thing, and how could I not give you something in return?"

"Sal," she sighs, "it was a gift. I didn't expect anything in return."

"And maybe that lack of expectation is why I brought your dream to life. You gave me mine. All I did was repay the favour."

"You didn't have to," she tells him, her voice a soft, fluttering thing, the emotion colouring it as fleeting and fragile as a hummingbird's wings.

"I wanted to," he replies, his words not nearly as delicate as hers, threaded with a promise that he cannot name, reinforced with impenetrable, unbreakable stone, thick castle walls built around and protecting them - protecting her. Don't you know that I'd make all of your dreams a reality if I could? is what he refuses to voice, because there is a line there, where her dreams and his dreams meet and overlap as waves on a beach do, and if he crosses it - well. He has already caught himself once, and with her comes him, and he doesn't know that he has the strength to stop his fall again.)

Sal breathes in deep, and sighs out pure magic. It pours from the ley lines into and out of him, his body becoming a conduit that conducts something stronger than mere fire or lightning. With every inhale, raw magic floods him; with every exhale, he breathes into the body of the Dragon a command that it has no choice but to obey.

It grows and changes, grows and grows and grows, until it is not a Dragon that pieces of wood and stone fly towards and affix themselves to and stack themselves together to create. Out of claws and fangs and fire, out of scales and magic and impenetrable hide, a castle takes form; turrets and towers and minarets creep up to pierce the night sky and bastions fuse themselves to the center of the outside walls, magnificent bridges and twisting hallways and winding staircases link themselves together from the inside out, curtain walls gain height and curve together to leave entrances to the courtyards, battlements and parapets push themselves up from nothing to line the wall walks and dungeons bury themselves deep in the earth, the generous curve of a barbican spreads itself in front of the front gates, leaving the back of the castle to face the lake and the leftmost enceinte overlooking the mountains, so that only the right side is left vulnerable and exposed to the rolling plains that reach as far as Sal can see.

He looks up at this castle that he has made, looks at the clean stone lines and cutouts of it, feels the life in every wall and corner of its unfinished skeleton, and thinks that this - this place that he has created to house his family and strangers, this place that is meant to be a safe haven for children of magic, this place that Rowena has dreamed of, this place that was prophesied, this place that he has created, that he has poured himself into - is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, and it is not that it is more impressive than the pyramids, though it is, in a way. It is that he - Sal, Salazar Slytherin, the boy who lost everything, and lost it again, and found it - has created something strong and fierce and lasting. He has given the world a permanent version of himself that will stand for centuries, a version that will grow stronger and more beautiful with age.

When he has finally done all that he is able to do - when he has pushed himself to his limits and found that turning a Dragon into a castle is within the realm of possibility - he turns to the others, appreciating the awed looks they cast at him and his creation. "We'll have to finish building it with actual stones, but this will be our school, a place where Wixen may come to learn magic in safety."

Godric joins him in staring, while the girls speak in muffled whispers to each other. The sun rises as it is wont to do, and Helga and Godric depart and return with children dogging their footsteps. Enoch and Rowena's fathers join them, and with Helena and Helga's boys left in Bremya's reportedly capable hands, the seven of them continue building. When the castle - unfurnished and uninhabited - is finally finished, days later, Sal stands back and admires its imposing silhouette, and wonders if the pride coiling in his chest is anything like what Prometheus felt as he watched his clay creations stumbling about when he first created humans.

( Just as Muggles are not equal to us, you are not equal to a Titan, a voice like Radomir's whispers within his mind..

"And I cannot afford such arrogance," Sal whispers back to a voice he isn't completely sure is there.

Arrogance begets irreparable mistakes, his maybe-brother's voice agrees cuttingly, and we both know that you cannot afford to make any more of those. )

Sal grits his teeth against the jab and shakes off the thought; it is dangerous to go around comparing oneself to a being of the same race that had birthed the gods.

"But it is not unreasonable to be proud of an accomplishment such as this," Héctor says, his eyes piercing as he looks hard at Sal.

Sal looks at Rowena's dream, at his creation, at their hard work, and he smiles. "No," he agrees, "it's not." The prides coils snakelike in his chest, no longer as burningly urgent as before. This feeling - it is okay to feel this way, he thinks, and for the first time in years the ground is solid beneath his feet.

They take turns leaving; Helga is the first to depart and return, the hand of a small boy held carefully within her own, the contrast of their skin like the squares and players on a chessboard, ebony and ivory placed side by side, staring at each other across a battlefield unlike any other. She calls the boy Adaire when she introduces him, and she speaks to him with soft, pretty words, and offers touch to him with gentle hands. She tells him that others will join them soon enough, and then she turns her attention back to the boy who stands silently in the shadowed corners of the castle, who stares around at them with wide, distrustful eyes, who flinches away from sudden movements and loud noises and bright lights, who does not smile at or play with the other children, who approaches no one but Helga, and who refuses to make eye contact with anyone - including the woman who found him - as though he's afraid he's not supposed to.

Sal finds him sitting in the entrance of one of the courtyards one day, sitting there like he wants to be out in the sun, surrounded by the trees that grow wild and free within, with grass beneath his feet, sitting there like he's trapped, halfway between shadowed, stone halls and sunlight and growth and freedom. Sal crouches down, kneels down before the boy like a faithful subject before his king, holds out his hand, palm up, the empty space of it waiting to be filled by the tentative fingers of a lost child.

Adaire places his small hand within Sal's own, rests it there in the same space where his body is curled against a stone wall. He stares down at their hands, ebon fingers wrapped in bronze, and they stay there, a man kneeling before a child in the entrance of the ward, hands clasped together.

Sal returns the next day to find Adaire with his back against the same wall. He kneels again, extends his hand in supplication, and applies gentle pressure to the fingers that wrap around his. Adaire stands beside him, his chin almost near enough to Sal's arm to brush against the crook of it, and they look out on the sun-soaked grass and the glittering leaves of the trees, the edges of them gilt with the same gold that is threaded through the rough bark of the sturdy trunks.

Adaire releases Sal's hand days later, forging a path into the courtyard, weaving his way between the saplings. Sal watches the way flowers spring up beneath the boy's bare feet, the way the grass grows to follow each step he takes, the way the trees he touches grow taller, buds decorating the branches and coming to full bloom, fruit growing and ripening and pulling the branches towards the ground, the colors of them like jewels peeking out from between green and silver and gold. Adaire returns to his side, and Sal slips an arm around slender shoulders, a proud smile playing across his lips, and Adaire looks up, looks up at him with dark, liquid eyes that remind Sal of the cacao his father had purchased in Egypt so many years ago, and he smiles back. "Beautiful," Sal whispers with reverence, not entirely sure if he's talking about the magic or the smile, entirely certain that he means Adaire, and his next movement is slow and deliberate and unmistakable; he kneels as he had that first day and all the days following, and he slides strong arms around a fragile body, and he squeezes the boy tight to his chest, pretending that he cannot hear or feel the shaking shoulders and gasping sobs and hot tears held in his embrace.

"How did you do it?" Helga asks him at dinner as they watch Adaire smile and laugh with the other children.

"I did nothing," Sal replies, "except return. Everything else was all him." He finishes his stew in silence, leaving Helga to parse his words.

"He is a remarkable child," she says quietly, and Sal dips his chin in agreement, a smile playing across his lips when he notices Adaire looking up at him

Godric leaves and returns. Unlike Helga, he does not walk back through the fortified gates accompanied by a miniature shadow.

Rowena is the next to go off in search of students, and Enoch goes with her. They return several weeks later, a girl only a few years younger than Bremya trailing behind them, a brilliant smile on her face and flames flickering through her hair, and a small boy with sandy curls and dimpled cheeks clasped against Enoch's hip.

"Their mother was very ill when we arrived," Rowena tells him in hushed tones from where she and Enoch sit tangled together on the opposite end of the settee that furnishes their makeshift common room. "Delphine was trying to take care of her as well as Mykol, and she was doing an admirable job of it, but all parties were relieved when Enoch and I mentioned the school. Delphine took hardly any convincing at all, and her mother begged us to take Mykol as well."

"Is she still alive?" Sal asks.

Rowena and Enoch exchange a glance. It is Enoch who answers. "It's unlikely. We were thinking that we could raise Delphine and Mykol. We can use the potion Topher and Héctor used when they took Rowena in."

Sal tilts his head thoughtfully. "You know that I will support you if this is what the children want."

Rowena smiles softly and leans forward to place a hand on his shoulder. "We know. We just wanted to run it past you. And… we thought you might be interested in doing the same for Adaire."

Sal's lips tighten, and he finds that he feels rather off-balance in the wake of the sudden rush of defensiveness that cascades in. "Thank you for thinking of me," he says stiffly, and Rowena draws her hand back slowly, confusion settling between her brows. He ignores her unspoken query, instead standing and making his way out of the room.

Rowena's injured confusion and Enoch's furious bewilderment follow him through the halls of the castle, and even time spent in the courtyard with Adaire is not enough to shield him from it. And so Sal walks out the front gates without warning, and wanders the country in search of prospective students.

He returns nearly nine weeks later having found a dark haired boy named Gabriel Cnotta in Lindurm, Merlin Emrys - barely eleven, with auburn hair and too-blue eyes and freckles - in Strathclyde, and a boy of about fifteen with dark hair and eyes known only as Sebatan, whom he had met in Thessalonica. He returns eight weeks and some days later to disappointed expressions from Godric and Helga, unrestrained fury from Enoch and Rowena, betrayed silence from Adaire, and something not nearly as kind as pity from Héctor.

It is days before any of them offer more than meaningless pleasantries to him, and still longer before Adaire offers him anything at all besides accusatory glances and words directed towards everyone but Sal, like he thinks Sal will be overcome with jealousy and apologise. (He is, and he does not.)

Héctor finds him one evening to offer sage advice that Sal cannot appreciate. "None of them understand why you left so abruptly." He offers Sal a knowing look. "They cannot know how you feel if you refuse to talk about it, and so all they know is that you left without warning or explanation. You hurt them, and you have given them no explanation for it. If you would just talk to them…" He trails off, seeing that Sal is not listening, and walks away, leaving Sal to his thoughts.

"For all her wisdom," Christopher tells him one night, having stumbled across Sal's hiding spot at the top of the tallest tower, where the view afforded him is extensive in every direction: valleys tripping over themselves beyond the outer wall one way, the glittering lake a dark mirror stretched in the opposite direction, sharp peaks delving into the sky on the left, and grassy plains reaching out to meet the dark-edged horizon to the right, "Rowena cannot always understand what is right in front of her, and Enoch is hardly better. Neither of them mean to hurt you," he says, turning to face Sal, his amber eyes - so like Rowena's - glittering even in the dim light of the night, "just as you do not intend to hurt them. But your secrets and your walls make it so that all you do is hurt each other when you barricade yourself inside. You cannot rightly punish them if they do not know their grievances, Sal, and if you cannot tell them how it is that they hurt you then you must simply grin and bear it when they fail to tread gently."

Sal sighs, gripping the rough-hewn stone tightly, leaning forward to admire the world below, where warm lights flicker behind the windows that look into the castle walls.

Day breaks, and Sal - tired of cold fury and hurt looks and deserved silence - makes his rounds to the inhabitants of the school.

"I should not have left without a word," he tells Rowena and Enoch. "I apologize for my selfishness."

"It was unfair of me to leave the way I did," he proffers to Godric and Helga, the words a plea for absolution. "Never again will I steal away as a thief in the night, carrying away all knowledge of my whereabouts."

"I am sorry I did not bring you with me," he tells a petulant Adaire. "It was wrong of me to abandon you."

By the time the new students have begun arriving, he has been forgiven by and is back on speaking terms with the others, who have gotten their revenge quite soundly by securing the right to name the school. Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is the appellative they choose, and he knows that this - calling his magnolious creation something so abhorrent - is their way of punishing him.

The first two students arrive together on the first day of the last week of August. They are siblings, and the molten silver eyes are inlaid in their fine-boned, aristocratic faces are fringed with lashes as dark as the hair that crests their heads. They introduced themselves - Lyra and Turais Blæc - in a manner befitting their station as nobles, the cultured tones of their voices punctuated by a curtsy or a bow.

Somehow, with this impression that they have constructed and presented, Sal is unsurprised to learn that both their parents come from magical families, and is even less surprised when they mention that they have had tutors for their magic.

The twins are fairly pleasant, though they can be cold and rather aloof. They are also uptight in a way that Sal cannot deal with for extended periods of time, so he is pleased when Godric collects them each day and takes them to play with the other children. He hopes that Godric's boisterous personality and the carefree whimsy of the youngsters will rub off on the Blæc siblings.

Following the arrival of Lyra and Turais by only a few hours are two children who greet Helga enthusiastically. They enter the gates hand-in-hand, the girl - dark hair and eyes bordering on purple - looking around the grounds with awe before seeking out the woman who had invited them. "Thank you for asking Corvan's parents if I could stay with them before arriving," she tells Helga gratefully.

"Absolutely," Helga replies, holding her arms out to the girl. "How was the trip for you, Corvan?" she asks the young boy, ruffling his brown hair fondly.

"Good," he says, smiling so that the red mark on his face ripples like spilled wine. "Mum and Father came with us up to the gates."

Helga smiles brilliantly. "Corvan Estranger and Rue Magister," she says, introducing them all.

After the first four students' arrival, the others begin walking through the front gates in quick succession.

Godric greets a blond boy who is as excitable as he is, and introduces him as Solomon. He takes a shine to Bremya, and follows her persistently around the castle and grounds.

Merlin trips through the gates only moments after Ianthe, and their hair, red as it is, - hers more orange, and his soaked through with soft hints of brown - clashes horribly. Ianthe manages to dance out of the way, and when Merlin approaches her later, failing to quail beneath Rowena's gaze, she accepts his heart-felt apology with grace.

Magnus Liefgut and Tatum Wesele arrive the same afternoon as Sebatan. He arrives first, his dark hair and eyes epitomizing him as a thundercloud, and Magnus' cheerful lunacy and Tatum's devious smile are a startling contrast against Sebatan's emotionless face and walled off eyes.

Last to join their motley crew is Gabriel, who has all the proper bearing of the twins, and perhaps double the mischief of Tatum, who takes one look at him and sidles up to whisper in his ear. The smiles that creep across their faces are identical, and Sal regrets that the two of them ever met.

Roughly half of their students have had magical training at some point in time, and Sal's stomach plummets when he learns that - in addition to the Blæc twins, Magnus and Corvan - both Tatum and Gabriel are part of this group.

He dreads whatever it is they are plotting together.

Before meeting Godric, it was always Sal who managed to get them into situations . Sal supposes he should not be surprised; after all, this is the man he first met while fighting a Dragon, and it had not been Sal running amok with nothing to cover him then . Even so, Godric's impulsivity is at times astounding. One of the half-dozen children with magical experience (he is certain it was either Tatum or Gabriel - or the both of them - though he cannot prove it) poses a challenge for their future Professors, demanding that the four of them prove themselves worthy of teaching magic. Godric takes the challenge seriously, and agrees for all of them.

The startled "Wait, really?" that echoes against the stone walls of the Great Hall makes Sal groan, because of course the challenge wasn't real, but now Godric's gone and agreed to it, and so they have no choice but to follow through.

Oblivious to the chaos he has brought upon them, Godric grins, and a faint rumbling sings through the ground beneath them. "Of course," he booms, and the deep, rumbling timbre of his voice thrums through the walls, the sound and feel of it electrifying as it vibrates deep within Sal's bones. "Anything for our children," he adds, his voice softer, the stop-and-watch-me-move-the-world quality smoothing out of it and becoming something kinder.

Sal sees the children sit up straighter at Godric's words, like they're proud to have been claimed as family by this man who helped create a school, and who is still willing to prove himself to them. Their spines are straight and their shoulders set with pride and the knowledge that their opinions mean something to someone.

Oh, Sal thinks. It is not impulsivity, then. Or at least not completely, because it is spontaneity with a goal, recklessness with intent, courage with heart, and Godric - unlike Sal - is willing to pour himself out, is willing to chain himself to rocks with all his flaws and mistakes laid bare to the curious eyes and cruel talons and cutting words of the vultures who wait, wrapped in human skin, to pick him apart.

Oh, Sal thinks, and looks around himself. The children - eighteen, including Mykol - all sit in alert curiosity. Héctor and Christopher - at the opposite end of the table - look amused. Helga has a calculating expression written in the curves and angles of her face. Rowena is thoughtful, Godric determined, and Enoch watches Sal with a challenge sparking like wildfire behind his eyes, like he knows that Sal - with hesitance and uncertainty weighing his shoulders down like the burdensome mass of the sky - will be the one to make or break this.

"Go on, then," Sal hears himself say. "You can be the first to do something appropriately impressive, Godric." A sly smile settles on his lips at Godric's expression, which shifts from triumphant to worried in half the time it takes to blink.

Clearly, Godric had not expected such easy agreement from Sal; it is evident in the tight smile that curves his lips and crinkles the corners of his eyes as he says "Spectacular displays of magic are best appreciated with full stomachs," that he had expected more time to decide upon a course of action. The students make no protest at Godric's obvious deflection, and Sal wonders if they simply have no reason for such cynicism, or if they just trust Godric and the rest of them to keep their word.

He does not know which option he hopes for. Does he pray for the preservation of innocence, or for the beginnings of the foundations of trust?

No matter the reason, the lack of surprise in their eyes when Godric stands and leads them all outside after dinner is gratifying. It is a powerful feeling that accompanies the knowledge that their students have complete faith in them.

Godric stands with his back to them, facing the sun as it slowly creeps below the flat plains that roll away from them. With mountains behind them, the loch beside them, and a defensive wall opposite it, this is the side of the castle with the most lacklustre view.

And yet with Godric before them, bathed in shadow save for the red edges of his hair and beard, which tumble down his back and chest in glowing streaks of fire, the picture he makes is rather stunning. And when he kneels down, well. The fading sun still sets his hair alight, still outlines his form so that the line of his shoulders as they cut through the air - black edged in steel - are almost intimidating when he plants his hands into the earth.

Sal swallows, and the ground grumbles, and before his eyes, a forest pushes its way out of the ground, growing so tall and thick and deep that it is impossible to see any light through the imposing trees, and even the last vestiges of the falling sun cannot pierce through the foliage to ignite Godric's form.

Sal's lips part in an awed inhalation of breath, and he can taste the forest - dirt and wood and pine and moss - on his tongue, can feel the green scent of it - overturned earth, grass after a thunderstorm, the faintest undertones of rot - curl into his nose, the smell and flavor of Godric's creation so thick that he can see the forest in his mind's eye: in the day, the sun glitters across the impenetrable dome of the leaves that form a shield between the earth and sky so that they shine like buffed jewels - emerald cresting bronze wood, rustling in the midsummer breeze; rubies and topaz and tourmaline raining down to mark the arrival of autumn; diamonds coruscating along the stark lines of the branches, sharp and biting and cold, in the dead of winter; emeralds again, or maybe peridots, punctuated with clusters of garnets and citrines and sapphires, and the occasional amethyst or pearl, glimmering sparsely against unpolished wood that japs at the color-leeched hue of the sky like it owes it something, like it owes it life, now that it is spring.

The awed murmurs that flutter through the air around him are a relief; he is not the only one so utterly entranced by what Godric has done that intelligible words are lost to him.

Godric rises to his feet. The height of him and the breadth of his shoulders are majestic as he walks towards them; he is a living, breathing shadow against a backsplash of other living, breathing shadows, which are rooted to the ground as the moon rises slowly to throw their textured surfaces into sharp relief, so that the trees resemble an army of giants who face the darkness with the intent to protect them all.

Rowena is the next to display her skill. They are settled in the Great Hall, chattering quietly amongst themselves as they break their fast. Only she is silent as she stares thoughtfully across the hall, her gaze on the walls of windows that look out upon the lake. She purses her lips.

When their plates have been Banished in the direction of the kitchen, Rowena stands, her eyes sharp and clear, her gleaming brown curls spilling down her back to settle against the deep blue of her robes. Everyone turns to look at her.

She says nothing about what she plans to do, and so they are all left to watch in curiosity as she closes her eyes, a faint smile playing across her lips, and lifts her palms to the ceiling.

The rough gray stone above their heads morphs and changes, turning a pale blue shade with wispy white clouds moving slowly across it. It is a beautiful piece of spellwork, but Sal cannot help thinking that Rowena could have chosen something far more impressive with which to show off, because - well - is that not the point?

So the ceiling mimics the state of the sky, but it is nowhere near as impressive as Godric's forest, no matter how pretty it is. Sal operates under this opinion for several days, and cannot quite wrap his head around any reason for Rowena to be walking around as smugly as she is. Even Enoch, when Sal throws him a questioning glance, can only shrug helplessly in reply.

The day they finally learn the reason for Rowena's peculiar behavior is a beautiful one. It is the last day of August, and they have plans to begin classes the following day. With this in mind, the children all insist upon spending the remaining hours outside before their lessons begin, They head out after breakfast, and Sal is not the only one who is delighted by the way the sun rays heat the air to a balmy temperature, and how they refract off of the surface of the lake, so that it looks like the black of the water is studded through with flecks of gold. There is not a cloud in the sky, which is a shade of blue that is nearly on par with Godric's eyes, and so Sal shifts into his snake form and curls up next to Analisa on a rock set on the edge of the lake, letting the sun shine down onto his silver scales.

The children all rush around the grounds, and Sal - in his sun-warmed stupor - finds himself appreciating the sprawling grass lawns that surround Hogwarts, and are in turn protected by the natural and magic-made walls of the area. He is pleased to see that their students - in spite of their differing upbringings - all get along fairly well; they switch smoothly from game to game, including even the youngsters in their play.

After a while, the children break into groups; some of the older boys find a small rock to throw around amongst themselves, while the girls fiddle with each other's hair. The younglings chase each other around, and every now and then they venture tentatively into the shallows of the loch.

A little ways away, Helga sits beneath a tree. She is watching the children carefully, though she is discreet enough that they do not notice. A glowing badger stands by her side like a sentinel, its eyes glittering with happiness, and its sharp teeth bared in something resembling a smile - as close as an animal can get to one, anyway. He takes a second glance at the creature; there is something familiar about it. And then… he remembers those teeth, remembers the uncomfortable feeling that had crawled up his spine at seeing them set in a human's face. Even seeing them as they should be does not make those teeth less disconcerting than when they line a Sphinx's smile. Sal shudders at the memory.

The badger fades away into wisps of silver when Delphine and Bremya approach Helga, the words that leave their mouths enough to convince her to join them in their hair-weaving session.

Godric takes no prompting at all to join the boys, though they move on from playing catch to shedding their tunics for swimming lessons not long after. Perhaps they had simply desired supervision for the weaker swimmers of the lot.

The sight of Rowena and Enoch sitting with their heads bowed together ignites his curiosity enough that pulling his gaze away from Godric's (shoulders and arms, which taper down to a slim waist, all of which have water streaming down in shining lines) Godric-ness is less difficult than it should be. They are too far away for him to hear, and so Sal settles for staring in such a way that they cannot tell.

One of the girls suggests that they eat outside for lunch, and so they head into the castle to procure the food. They stop in the Great Hall, and it is then that they realise Rowena's prowess.

Between the time it takes for them to head inside to collect whatever foodstuffs they need, and the moment they set foot in the Great Hall, it begins to rain. Only, there are still no clouds in the sky, according to the ceiling; the sun shines just as brightly as before, but now it glances off the droplets of water, turning them golden.

Perhaps the most spectacular thing, though, is that the sunshower is actually present within the hall. Rowena has made the ceiling mimic the sky so completely that even the precipitation occurring is present within the castle walls. He would almost think that she had simply removed the ceiling if it were not for the fact that there are several storeys above the Great Hall, each with their own complex labyrinth of secret passageways and halls and winding staircases, making such a thing impossible.

The only thing more impressive than the presence of the rain is the fact that Rowena's spell ensures that the weather halts halfway down, so that they have both the experience of the rain and the safety of the walls and plafond encapsulating them.

In truth, the shimmering blades of grass outside are the only things that lend credence to the fact that the liquid sunshine did not only occur indoors, and it is this - juxtaposed with the dry stone floor of the Great Hall - that makes Rowena's spellwork seem truly amazing.

They are back inside for dinner, and it seems that mealtimes have become a common theme for spectacular occurrences, for Helga brandishes a handful of green and purple echinacea stalks in her left hand, and then - throwing them up into the air - duplicates them and weaves them together, holding them steady above everyone's heads. Even after she releases the spell, the stalks linger in midair.

Helga summons to her side the glowing badger from that afternoon, and they watch in silence as the beast swims through the airspace, brushing against each of Helga's creations. Glowing hairs slide from the badger's body and wrap around the stems like snakes. Or, Sal thinks, looking again and revising his previous thought, resembling Asclepius' rod. Once the last snake has slithered its way around, the stems - like candles in sconces - ignite, like a bunch of oil lamps being snuffed out all at once, if extinguishing something meant the same as lighting it.

Helga smiles with a satisfaction that Sal can feel as the candles she created flare up. There is one for each of them, an ever-burning rod with a silver snake wound around it, and the flames - part of Helga's badger, which has dissipated once again - feel like hope and safety. (They feel like healing, too, but they do not realise this until later, when Helga deigns to reveal the healing properties of the plant she had used, after they notice that none of them have gotten even minorly ill since taking refuge behind Hogwarts' walls.)

Sal finds himself pacing the halls restlessly that night. The other three have already proven themselves to the children, and yet he still has come up with nothing that might impress them. He feels as though he is expected to have performed already, or at least to play his hand before classes begin, and he almost wants to tell the students that he has no hand to play, that he built the castle, and is that not good enough?

So he wanders the halls, and even if he does not yet know all the twists and turns of the school by heart, he knows it well enough for his feet to keep him wandering in circles while he thinks.

He cannot think of what to do. Godric has gone and created an entire forest, and Rowena has Enchanted the ceiling of the Great Hall, and Helga has instilled in the school what she insists is a perpetual source of hope and healing - introduced into the world by way of light, and powered by and for each student.

"As long as the students have faith in the safety that Hogwarts offers," she had told them, after putting the children to bed, and before heading there herself, "those candles will burn, and our school will be a place of hope. And," she adds through the still-open doorway, "there will always be a candle for each person present, no matter how large or small that number becomes."

A breath of quiet laughter draws his attention away from his fruitless wandering. In his musings, he has ended up on one of the upper floors, in a heavily windowed part of the castle. The moon and stars here are especially bright, and Sal is unsurprised to find Rowena and Enoch standing before an open casement, bathed in silver light. It makes the two of them look angelic and untouchable; his arm is wrapped loosely about her waist, and her head is on his shoulder. They are woven tightly together, like two trees that have grown up leaning upon each other, and the effort required to separate them would be worthless, because they are sturdy things, and will therefore return to their leaning the moment the pressure is removed.

He does not make a sound, but they notice his presence all the same, and turn towards him. "Sal," Enoch greets him, his voice the kind of quiet that is typically reserved for late-night conversations one might hold, the hushed tone a necessity when one does not wish to wake the other people in the house. "Join us." He makes a sweeping gesture towards the window, and Sal approaches, lifting himself up to perch on the stone ledge and adjusting himself so that his back is supported by the base of the arch.

"Look," Rowena says, equally softly, leaning forward to point out the window. The sky is as clear as it has been all day, though it is now a velvety black rather than the warm blue of the day. Like any other cloudless night, stars are scattered in thick, congealed masses across the heavens, and they are as beautiful as they always are. What really catches his attention are the flickering green lights, tipped with red, which dance across the horizon. "Enoch says they're called Mirrie Dancers."

"They're beautiful," he replies in a whisper, his voice lowered to match theirs, though he knows that no one can hear them. He tells himself he's not quite sure if he's just talking about the lights, but something in his tone must give him away, or maybe it is the way he is looking at the two of them as he says the words, like his attention is not completely captured by the Mirrie Dancers after all.

Whatever it is, it results in Rowena leaning forward again, pushing up this time, and brushing her lips softly against his. She sinks back down, pressing herself against his side, her body a soft line of heat against him. Sal swallows and closes his eyes; this will make everything so much more difficult than it needs to be.

Another set of lips settle against his, soft and certain. They press tenderly once, and again, and they linger the third time, parting slightly and nudging Sal's lips open in turn, slotting them together comfortably. A broad hand rises to settle on the back of his neck, the heat of it as much a brand as Rowena's form against him. Sal inhales sharply, and there is a brief warm slide against his bottom lip, and then a gentle almost-pinch. Soft kisses are trailed up his neck and along his jaw. Sal's eyes slide open just a bit as the pressure of Enoch's lips against his intensifies, and he pushes into it, desperate and ravenous. There is the slick slide of tongues against each other, just briefly, and something hot and inexorable begins to build in Sal's stomach.

Blunt teeth graze his ear, and long hair that isn't his tickles his neck, and Sal pulls away. "Stop," he says, his voice deep with something he refuses to name. Enoch and Rowena step back, exchanging a glance. "There is no space within you for me," he tells them, the memory of Rowena's body pressed along his side already cooling, and the tingling of his lips where Enoch had kissed him and he had kissed back fades with it.

Rowena's eyes glitter in the starlight, and the angles of Enoch's face are painted in heavy chiaroscuro, but neither of them say anything to stop him as he slides from the ledge and backs away.

Sal pushes down the hurt that wells up; this is one mistake for which all of three of them are to blame. This is as much his decision as it is theirs. He turns away from them and resumes his wandering.

He finds himself in the Great Hall, looking up at the stars in the sky that he has already seen once tonight. These ones do not seem quite so bright, and Sal wonders if the addition of the floating candles has muted their luminosity.

At night, when the hall is awash in darkness, and the sounds of voices no longer clatter along the walls, the Great Hall feels desolate and terribly lonely. Sal feels the same way, and is it a tragedy to compare oneself to an uninhabited room, or simply a fact of his life?

The horrible quiet of the Great Hall is, at least, temporary. Sal cannot sleep, and he cannot fill the silence in his mind and the hole he has torn in his heart, and so he settles for filling the hall with something other than emptiness.

He works his magic beneath the light of hope, and he steps back to admire his handiwork when it is finally done. There are four images which line the walls. They are motionless, and the full faces of their subjects are never shown, but there is this: first in line is the silhouette of a man kneeling on the ground, the beginnings of a forest stretched out before him. He is lined in silver, the tone of it oddly warm, and his hair and beard ripple like flames. Beneath the image are curling words that read the heart of the forest.

Next is the image of a bronze-feathered eagle, wings splayed wide and glossy in the sunlight. Her eyes glitter, the dark pupils encased in amber resin. Her talons are extended, reaching for something. Below it are sweeping letters that title it the queen of the skies.

The third image is of a girl, her head tossed back so that her face is not visible, and her golden tresses cascade down her back and out of sight. A glowing badger, pearlescent in color, leaps from her chest, its eyes lifelike, and its eyeteeth dangerously sharp. The elegant script beneath it says sweet as honey, sharp as ice.

The final image is different from the others. It is almost abstract in nature, the forms human in the way of shadows. The edges are foggy and blurred, and the clearest thing about it is the eyes: sapphire in red, azure in gold, amber in chestnut, emerald in coal. In the pupils are the reflected forms of animals. There is a roaring lion on its hind legs, a badger with its teeth bared and poised to strike, a majestic eagle beating its wings, and a coiled snake with its head reared back. The words below this painting read only the founding four, a title that seems almost too simple for the subject matter.

Sal makes his way down to the dungeons, where it is cooler at night. He lets the cold lull him to sleep, and the paintings he created to adorn the walls of the Great Hall swim through his dreams that night.

At breakfast in the morning, he is the subject of curious glances. He knows that they know the paintings are his, but he likes that no one can prove it. He likes being able to hide in plain sight, likes hiding his accomplishments and still receiving the credit for them.

"Forget about it," Sal tells Rowena and Enoch when they approach him right before his first class is due to begin.

Rowena complies almost too easily, offering him a melancholy smile, and walking out of the room.

Enoch is not so easily convinced. Something dark glitters in his eyes, and he stalks towards Sal, backing him against the wall. He leans forward so that their lips are nearly touching, close enough that Sal can feel his hot breath whenever he exhales.

"You want us to forget about it?" Enoch asks, pressing closer, trapping Sal between stone and his body. His mouth brushes lightly against Sal's as he speaks. "You want us to forget how you look at us? You want us to forget how you feel about us?" He moves impossibly closer, so that he is hot and hard against Sal everywhere they are fused together. His lips move aggressively against Sal's, and Sal can taste the anger on his tongue, can feel it in the flexing muscles in the hand that moves up to circle his throat, just like he can taste and feel the hunger.

He moves his hands to Enoch's shoulders and shoves him back. "Yes," he says, and his voice is mercifully steady as the word comes out. Enoch rakes a hand through his sandy hair and stares hard at Sal.

"Fine," he says, his voice frigid. Then he turns on his heel and walks out, his robes billowing dramatically behind him, and Sal pretends that he is not still affected when the students begin filing into the room several moments later.

He clears his throat. "Welcome to your first Transfiguration class," he begins quietly, and the children all sit up straight to listen as he begins his lecture, demonstrating Transfiguration and its reverse, showing them Conjuration and Banishment, and then inviting them to try it out themselves. He walks around the classroom, offering advice to the students who require it, and deliberately avoiding the wall Enoch had him pressed up against moments ago.

At the end of the hour, he releases them to Helga's tender mercies for Healing, and sinks into a chair, trying to mentally prepare himself for lunch, where he will see Rowena and Enoch, and for his Potions class after that.

He casts his eyes up to the ceiling and prays to the gods for patience.

The summer before the second year begins, Sal sits down with the others, who have by now settled in comfortably with teaching their classes. Together, they devise a rudimentary plan for the education of their students. The first two years will be spent teaching the children Traditional magic; the third year will offer other, more select, courses, for which they will need to find qualified instructors. By the sixth year, the students will be ready for lessons in their specialization, which will again require more qualified teachers.

The second year brings to Hogwarts dozens more students, many of whom have not been personally recruited by any of them. The Great Hall grows noisier at mealtimes, and the increasing number of floating candles becomes evident at dinner each night. Hogwarts' expansion is, for the most part, a good thing. Students with common interests fall in with each other, forming solid friendships.

There is unfortunately an increasing number of students who disapprove of anyone of non-magical birth, but they are for the most part raised well enough to keep their opinions to themselves.

Some time during their third year, the both of them having presented as Tricksters, Tatum and Gabriel finally make good on the plan they had developed the first year they met. It happens overnight, as many things do within Hogwarts' walls. One day, everything is the same as it has been since the castle became a castle, and the next, the staircases are moving unexpectedly, sometimes helping students arrive to their classes faster, and sometimes helping them lose themselves altogether. It is an impressive piece of magic that both Tatum and Gabriel accredit to their teachers when they finally assume responsibility for their actions.

During the fourth year, Analisa grows too large to make use of the hallways, and so Sal carves out a cavern for her below the dungeons, leaving her access to the forest, which has become home to Unicorns and Centaurs, as well as other less desirable inhabitants, whose presence makes the forest dangerous enough that they are forced to ban entry without supervision.

Not long after Analisa's new home is built, they hear news of a town being set up not far from Hogwarts. When they go down to investigate, they find a girl not much older than Helga directing the building process.

"Lavinia?" Helga asks, and the girl turns to face them.

"Helga!" she replies, a smile crossing her face. "And Godric," she adds, her tone flatter than the one she used to greet Helga. "How have you been?"

"We've been well," Helga tells her. "We met Rowena and Salazar not long after you left, and we've been teaching at the school we founded since then. What have you been up to?"

"Good for you! I haven't heard much about Hogwarts," she says, and the lie is obvious in her voice. "And I haven't done very much since I left your company," she adds with false modesty. "I was in Britannia for a few years, and I helped set up a magical community there. I've used some of my Illusions to hide it from the eyes of the Muggles, and it's been thriving. Some Wixen have opened up shops there; the first was a wand shop. There are also some places for them to live. It's called Diagon Alley. I don't know if you've heard of it out here in the Highlands."

"I don't think we have," Godric tells her coolly, and Sal looks at him. She is not the most pleasant person in the world, he can grant that much, but as far as he can tell, there is no reason for such obvious dislike on Godric's part. There is clearly a story there that Helga and Godric have not seen fit to share for one reason or another. "Perhaps your Illusions work on Wixen as well as Muggles," he adds bitingly. Sal is not so stupid that he cannot read between the lines Godric has drawn in bold ink for all to see.

Lavinia laughs, a fake, brittle thing that grates along Sal's spine uncomfortably. "I would never," she tells Godric condescendingly. "I've changed. That's why I'm here. I've come to build a magical-only village. Just think, during the summers, your students can stay here, rather than returning home. And they can visit during the school-year as well, if they need a break from their undoubtedly rigorous education."

"Yes," Rowena tells her. The dislike in her voice is faint, but it is still clear to anyone who knows her. "You can even add taverns, so that there is alcohol and entertainment readily available to any who wish it."

Lavinia smiles. "I already have plans for a pub sketched out. We'll call it the Hog's Head, so that there's some association with the school."

"You might as well just call the town Hogsmeade," Sal tells her, his voice falsely cheerful. "It can be the place where the overworked school-children come when they feel the need to imbibe."

"Brilliant!" Lavinia exclaims, bustling off to redirect a pair of wizards who are transporting a pile of wood to - apparently - the wrong location. "No, no!" they hear her tell them. "That goes over there, not right here. Can't anyone follow simple instructions? Welcome to Hogsmeade," she calls back over her shoulder, the farewell clearly meant for them.

Sal sneers at her retreating back in disgust. "Let's go," he tells the others, and they walk back to the castle together.

Helga sighs in disappointment. "I wish I could say she's not always like that," she says, and ignores Godric's disagreeing grunt, "but it wouldn't be true. She's been flighty and self-absorbed since the day we met, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. She means well," she adds, and scowls when Godric snorts. "But she's abrasive about it."

"I don't particularly care how well she means," Rowena says. "I just hope we've seen the back of her. I don't know how much more of her I can stand." Sal bumps his shoulder against hers in solidarity, and she offers him a brief smile.

This works far better for them than anything else would have. She and Enoch are as close as ever, and Sal's friendship with the two of them has not suffered at all. They graciously ignore his glances, and he buries his memories, and he can hardly tell the difference between before and after when he doesn't think long on it.

"To be fair," Sal says begrudgingly, "it's not a bad idea she's got, and she as good as offered the village for the use of our students during summers. For those of them in dangerous homes, this could be a blessing disguised by… her. We would be fools not to take her up on her offer."

"That is true enough," Rowena sighs, leaning her head on his shoulder. "I thought I was supposed to be the wise one, Sal. When did you take my place?"

Sal laughs. "I could never. I have only borrowed your intellect to see the picture clearly. Now, Godric, my friend, tell me what it is about her that has you so on edge."

The story that follows, told alternately by Godric and Helga, is appropriately horrible. A muted sense of rage coils in the pit of his stomach at their words, and by the end of it, Sal decides that Lavinia deserves Godric's hostility. She may not be entirely to blame, but she is in part, and Sal has seen the wreckage of Bremya's face, has seen Silas and Symeon share their eyes with one another, and he rather thinks that Lavinia deserves to be the recipient of quite a bit more hatred than she is. After all, anyone who dares bring children into a conflict, in a bargain for their own safety, deserves anything and everything terrible that the world can throw at them.

"How is it that you are not still angry at her?" Sal asks Helga at dinner that evening. "Godric is still furious about what happened in Chernobyl, but you greeted her as you would anyone else."

Helga sighs, looking across the Great Hall at their children. There are dozens of them now. Mykol - at six - is their youngest, and nearly the age Adaire was when Helga brought him home. "Godric and I had different experiences with Lavinia. Where she helped ensnare him, she helped me rescue him."

"But is she not the reason for Symeon's blindness and Bremya's scarring?"

"I'll grant you that," Helga allows. "She thought that sacrificing our children to the Hunters would save her from their wrath, and her selfishness resulted in what you see today."

She looks directly at him, her expression fierce. "I hate that she did not have it in her to sacrifice herself for us. In some ways, I despise the fact that she was willing to send innocent children to suffer in order to save herself. But I also understand doing anything to keep yourself alive - I have done it myself, though not to such an extent.

"This is the difference between Godric and I: when he or someone he loves is wronged, he will fight back tirelessly. That is why he left his home. That is why he never left me behind, even when I did nothing but hinder him. Godric's capacity for love is perhaps his greatest strength. But it is also his greatest weakness, because it ties into his inability to forgive.

"And this is the difference between us. When I am wronged, I forgive too easily. That is why I stayed in Cairo for as long as I did after my father tried to kill me. I could not bear the thought of leaving; I grew up desperate for love, and so I stayed until I was forced to leave.

"I am not as good as Godric at loving fully and effortlessly. But where I cannot love, he can, and where he cannot forgive, I can."

She turns back to look at their students, and Sal does the same. He finds Bremy and Symeon laughing happily, other children surrounding them. A war-torn face and destroyed eyes have not broken these children.

"Ultimately, though," Helga says, startling him, "I was not the wronged party. They were, and they chose to forgive her years ago. It is not my place to hold a grudge. Godric may feel towards her as he sees fit, because Bremya and Symeon are not the only ones who her actions hurt. She wronged him, too, and he has not forgotten that."

"And it is possible that he never will," Sal says, understanding. Godric may love with his whole heart, but he would sooner tear someone apart than forgive them. It is no wonder, then, that - where Helga is a badger, and Rowena an eagle, and Sal a snake - he is a lion.

"Now you understand him," Helga says, smiling sadly. "I wasn't sure if you ever would."

Sal looks away from her gaze. "Some days," he confides, "I am not sure if I even understand myself ."

Helga lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, and he looks up into her glossy eyes. "I think you understand more than you give yourself credit for."

And perhaps she is right; perhaps the feelings that he buries away are ones of understanding. Perhaps the dread that settles in his stomach at night is a sort of cognizance; perhaps he makes the choices he does because he understands the situation intuitively, even if - for the most part - his particular brand of awareness has nothing at all to do with logic.

"It hurts," he tells her, not quite sure what he means; is it the understanding that hurts, or the choices he makes in light of it?

"I know," she replies. "And it is not the kind of pain that I can Heal."

She leaves him to his thoughts as the Great Hall slowly clears out. Sal remains seated, staring up at Helga's candles, staring up through the spaces between them where the night sky peeks through, staring up at the untouchable stars, and he wonders if they hurt, too.

The doors swing open and close again with a click, and Godric's shadowy form approaches. He sits down beside Sal, allowing the silence to linger.

"How do you do it?" Sal asks.

"Do what?" Godric replies questioningly, his voice a low rumble that Sal can feel vibrating in the air around them.

"How do you just give your heart away to everyone? How do you survive that, knowing that everyone with a piece can crush it?"

"Helga has been talking to you," Godric says knowingly. He shifts in his seat, throwing his legs over the arm and his arm over the back, so that he faces Sal. "No doubt she said something about our differences, about my inability to forgive, and her struggle to love."

Sal tilts his chin in a nod that cannot be seen in the candle-lit darkness. "Yes."

"She and I have had this conversation many times before. In some ways, you and Helga are very alike. You offer your love sparingly, to those who have earned it, because you have both been hurt before. For you, forgiveness is easy, because it does not require love. She is the same way. You do not offer your love so freely as I do, and so it doesn't hurt to offer your forgiveness; if you do not love the person you are forgiving, it does not cost you anything, and it is in part because you do not expect anything from them.

"The way I love seems reckless to you because I love the whole world, and I do so without any hesitation. I am not afraid of loving because it is a way of life for me. I am afraid of forgiving because for me there is love behind it; there are expectations, and they have been shattered. It takes a certain kind of bravery to forgive people, and I envy you for it.

"I hold no love for Lavinia, but I have basic expectations of everyone in the world, and she destroyed them. I have a view of the world that is perhaps overly optimistic, and she damaged it. She is not the only one, and I have not forgiven the others, either. I have found that while I am brave enough to offer love to the world, I am not brave enough to forgive its sins. It is hard to forgive those who ruin the things you love."

"It is harder to forgive the people you love," Sal says.

"It is," Godric agrees. "And you and Helga are both better at it than I am. She has forgiven her father. You have forgiven your brother time and time again. I value the bravery that I see within you, for it allows you to forgive, and I value the bravery that I see within myself, for it allows me to love."

"And the risk of your heart being razed?"

"Is a risk I am willing to take. I know what people see when they look at me, Sal. They see a giant of a man who blazes like fire. They see a wizard who wields a sword, and a man who can use Battle magic, and they think that the only thing there is to me is brash, thoughtless bravery. Sometimes, I wonder if the reason that that is all they see is because that is all I am. And then I remember that I have the ability to love, and furthermore the choice to do so, and I remember that I am brave, but that that is not all there is to me."

"Better brave than a coward, better love than hate. Behold the life in this man's tower, where the world's blindness sees its fate," Sal says. "It is not on you to prove to the world that there is more to you than they wish to see, Godric. You cannot make a visionless man choose to see what is in front of him any more than you can force a caitiff to hold a sword, not even when they are willfully blind and willingly afraid."

"You have finally seen me as I am," Godric rejoins.

"I finally wanted to see you."

"And what have you seen?"

"I see a giant of a man with the heart of a forest, and the capacity for enough love to burn it," Sal says, remembering the painting he had created years ago, of Godric - cast in shadows - kneeling before a forest he brought to life, named the heart of the forest.

The conversation lapses into silence. He and Godric sit side by side in a comfortable silence that Sal had once believed the other man to be incapable of, and he wonders how many others he has failed to see.

Godric nudges him with the toe of his boot. "Good night, Sal," he offers, standing. He makes his way to the doors of the hall.

"Why did you come back here tonight?" Sal asks, stopping Godric in his tracks.

He turns, and the candle-light gives his face a ghoulish cast. "I was looking for you." And then he is gone.

Sal has heard of no attacks upon Muggle villages by Radomir or his Reapers for years, and so he makes the mistake of assuming that his brother - now thirty-five, and therefore older and wiser than he was at twenty-two - has finally given up the grudge he holds against Muggles and their magical children.

He does not find out how wrong he is until it is far too late.

Radomir has not ceased his attacks in the years past. Instead, he has shifted his target. No one can possibly miss large-scale attacks on cities, and - in comparison - no one notices when a few children here and there end up dead. Or, perhaps it is simply that no one cares when those children end up dead because strange things have been happening around them.

When they finally connect the dots and come to the realization that Radomir is wiping out the Muggle-born population, Sal wonders aloud how his brother is finding the Muggle-born children.

"He must have an Angelic sorcerer within his guild," Rowena says with no small degree of certainty.

"That seems a bit ironic, don't you think?" Godric mutters under his breath. "Someone who can commune with the angels who is under the employ of a man who wreaks death and hatred upon the world."

"Even angels can fall, Godric," Helga reminds him.

"Angelic sorcerers," Rowena continues, ignoring their commentary, "have the ability to see auras. Père's mother was an Angelic sorceress, and he saw what she saw, once. Apparently, Muggles have different auras from Wixen, while Muggle-borns and Half-bloods and Pure-bloods also have different auras from each other. I would be willing to bet my diadem that that's how they're finding the children, though."

"It's a good thing - with our Muggle-born population - that Hogwarts is Warded then, isn't it," Godric says. "And that it's a veritable maze, complete with hidden rooms and secret passages and traps."

"You say that like you don't appreciate the complexity," Sal returns. "We know you like the set-up; you regale us with the tales of your adventures within these walls every day at dinner. Why, just yesterday you were praising the intricacies of the stonework, saying that you'd discovered a new and fantastical room hidden in the spaces between the stones."

Godric scowls at him. "I will stab you dead with my sword, Sal," he threatens, gesturing to the silver blade and ruby-studded hilt at his side. It, like Rowena's diadem and Helga's chalice and Sal's necklace, is crafted from Goblin-metal, and has intriguing powers.

They discovered the ability of the sword the day that Gabriel finally managed to beat Godric in combat. Gabriel's blade had sent Godric's flying across the clearing, edge over hilt in a deadly flash of quicksilver that cleaved the air. When Godric had gone to retrieve it, the sword had already returned to its place in his scabbard.

So the Goblins had gifted them the sword, Rowena's diadem, which allows the wearer to absorb information within books or objects with just a touch, Helga's cup, which turns its contents into a potion for healing, and Sal's locket, which protects the wearer from any force - physical or magical - while still allowing its owner to attack their adversaries, and all without any discernible reason, despite the fact that Goblins do not give gifts without any expectations of reciprocity.

"You love me too much to kill me," Sal says with amusement.

"So I'll stab you non-fatally," Godric reasons. "Just somewhere that hurts enough to shut you up for a few minutes."

Sal eyes him disbelievingly. "Radomir won't come here anyways," he suggests, deciding to ignore Godric's insanity. "He prefers to fight fights he knows he will win; anyone who knows anything about Hogwarts knows that it would take someone monumentally stupid to attack the castle. It is the next best thing to a fortress. And he will gain nothing beyond the mockery of his peers if he does attack the school. It is a foolish endeavor to lay siege to a place that is so easily defended, and Radomir is smart enough to realise that."

"That is true enough," Rowena agrees. "Even so, we must remain vigilant. We cannot afford to risk the safety of our students in our certainty that your brother will not act irrationally. If any of us hear anything about Radomir, we must all be made aware of it. It will not do to be caught off guard when there are more lives than our own at stake."

They hear nothing regarding Radomir for more than a fortnight. It is Godric's students who hear something, and Godric who mentions it to the rest of them.

"Turais and Lyra have recently heard from their father," he tells them one night after their students have gone to their dormitories. "He mentioned that the Reaper Guild has been attacking Wixen communities in recent days, and that his victims are Muggle-borns more often than not. Apparently, he has been moving around the continent, slowly making his way in our direction. One of the most recent attacks was in Diagon Alley. Their father is concerned for the safety of the twins. He has asked about them coming home."

Rowena sighs. "Hogwarts is likely the safest place in the world for them right now, but if the Blæcs want their children home, we have no right to deny them."

"They are more than old enough to make their own choices!" Godric argues. "They are both older than I was when I left my home. Their father should not be able to force them away from us."

"Have you asked Lyra and Turais what they wish to do?" Helga asks him gently, placing her hand on his shoulder to keep him from rising from his chair.

"I didn't have to. They told me themselves that they wanted to stay and finish their education. Turais has even been hinting that he would like to teach here in a year or two."

Sal leans forwards, his elbows propped on his knees and his chin resting on his fist. "If they are adults, can their father force them to return home?"

"I am not entirely certain. I know that some families have Ancestral magic that gives the patriarch the power to command the rest of the family," Godric says. "I suppose I could ask them."

"You should," Rowena commands. "And if it turns out that their father cannot force them home, I - for one - would be delighted to have Turais help us teach the students. He could help relieve your burden, Sal; if you had him start teaching Potions with you, he would be able to take over the class in no time."

"I would hope so," Sal says musingly. "He is a Potioneer, after all. And, if he stayed, he could help protect the school when Radomir inevitably comes knocking."

"I thought you said that your brother would never attack the school," Helga frowns. "Have you heard something?"

"I have not," Sal tells her. "You know I would never keep such an important detail from you. But think: we are not the only magical community around here."

"Hogsmeade," she whispers with dread.

Rowena and Godric both sit up straight, their faces hardening. "The town is nowhere near as well protected as Hogwarts is," Godric says. "As far as I know, the only Wards that Lavinia thought to include were Muggle-repelling ones. 'Muggles are our biggest problem,'" he says in a disconcertingly high-pitched voice that seems to be his half-hearted attempt at mimicking the woman. "'Why should we put up any Wards that might inhibit and violate the comfort of our own kind?' Well," he says, switching back to his normal register, "it might be because our own kind can be absolute bastards just as well as the Muggles can."

"Godric," Helga sighs reprovingly.

"You'd think that after Chernobyl she'd have learned that Wixen can be worse than Muggles!" Godric nearly shouts in frustration. "Or has she just forgotten what they tried to do to her, never mind what they tried to do to innocent children?"

"Lavinia is not used to living in suspicion of others like we are," Helga tells him. "It is not that she has forgotten, it is that she has chosen to believe that there is no one else like the Hunters."

"So she is willfully ignorant." Godric replies in disgust, and Sal snorts; she is certainly willfully ignorant of the hostility which Godric directs at her whenever the misfortune of time spent in her company befalls them.

Helga flounders for a moment, and so Sal steps in to help. "Precisely," he tells Godric, ignoring the nasty look Helga sends him. She may not have been planning on giving Godric confirmation, but Sal likes Lavinia about as much as Godric, and he has no desire to listen to Helga offer weak defenses in her favor.

"Children, please," comes Rowena's exasperated voice. "If we could return to the matter at hand?"

"If Radomir is truly making his way here," Sal says, "there is little we can do to stop him. Lavinia will not let us ward Hogsmeade, though we can offer. What we should focus on is preparing for his attack; we cannot bring the children with us when we go to fight him, after all."

"Leave them with Analisa in her chamber," Godric suggests, "and once the battle is over, we will return to collect them."

On the day Radomir finally attacks, months later, Helga accompanies Sal as they escort the children into the chamber. Analisa - with her huge mass of impenetrable skin - coils protectively around them.

"Do not leave this room until Godric, Rowena, Helga, or myself comes to collect you," Sal warns them. He turns a gimlet eye upon Tatum and Gabriel. "If I find either one of you has left, you will assist me in harvesting organs from the creatures in the forest."

He smiles in satisfaction at the faces they make. "Stay safe," he says, addressing them all; he sees Bremya at the fore, her sword drawn and raised, her face set with determination. There are Turais and Lyra, shielding the youngest children with their bodies. Delphine stands shoulder to shoulder with Helena and Mykol, every inch the eldest sister that Rowena and Enoch have given her a chance to be. Merlin and Ianthe stand at Bremya's shoulders, their faces glowing with the protective magic they have begun to cast. Sebatan stands in their shadows, his magic almost sinister as it wraps around them all.

Sal stands in front of Adaire. He removes the locket from his neck and loops it around the boy's neck. "Just in case," he tells him.

Sal and Helga walk away, leaving behind a sword and a shield, leaving behind students and a snake, leaving behind children with magic flowing through their veins, leaving behind Muggle-borns and Half-bloods and Pure-bloods, and Sal wonders why it is that distinction which matters when even the youngest of them breathes out magic.

They Apparate into Hogsmeade to find that the chaos has already begun. There are houses on fire, and some of the shops have been turned to rubble. The gray stone of the streets is stained red. He and the others were expecting an attack, but they still manage to walk into a massacre, and Sal wonders why this is always the way things go.

He is pulled from his thoughts when one of the Reapers sneaks up on him. Then, all that he experiences is the brilliantly colored flashes of spell-fire, and the instinct to jump or dodge or dive. No matter how many Reapers he puts down, more keep coming, until he is fighting two and three and five at once, until he is tired, and his magic is depleted, and his focus is split.

Before him are the Reapers he is fighting - they are dark-robed, faceless figures, and elegant spell-work without unnecessary flourishes, and inexhaustible efficiency, and clinical viciousness. There is the frantic feeling of being overwhelmed, and it costs him, and there is a dull, burning pain in his side, and it washes over him, calming. Everything seems to slow down.

He is suddenly able to counter the spells coming at him with deadly accuracy, and one after another the Reapers fall.

He is able to pick faces out of the crowd. There is Godric, with his Goblin-gifted sword in one hand and a wand in the other, and he is using his blade to lay blows upon his enemies, who are as multitudinous as the ones Sal faces, and he casts spells at them simultaneously, and they are deadly, dangerous things, which tear people apart, or drag them into the Earth and choke them on the dirt. Godric is disappearing, is Apparating in and out of battle, is Apparating in front of and behind his enemies and running them through, and the silver of his blade is stained with a red that glitters like the rubies set within its hilt.

He finds Rowena, in her eagle form, diving down with a ball of sun-bright fire surrounding her, and she blinds the men and women who send spells at her, and she tears at them with her talons and her beak, and she burns them, slow and painful, because these Wixen are not the dry, rotting corpses who she set alight so easily the first time they met.

Enoch is nearly in front of him, and he calls the flora to his aid. The flowers dip into the ground and leap out in the forms of their namesakes, and the trees reach out searchingly for victims to stab and strangle and bury themselves within.

Further away, Héctor is standing alone, is standing still, and his would-be enemies have turned on each other, have begun burrowing into the heads of their allies, and so up crop shoddy Illusions that twist and warp and do not do enough to shield their victims from the reality of the situation.

The Reapers are losing; they cannot hope to defeat Godric or Rowena or Enoch or Héctor. They cannot best Christopher, who has called all the beings of the forest to his aid, who has given the trees human form and sent them into battle. They cannot beat Helga, who stands surrounded by wraith-like creatures whose presence burns Sal with the full force of his fear; they cannot reach her through the silvery shield that accompanies her badger, who attacks the soul-sucking monsters while she sends spell after spell in the direction of her enemies, while she injures them and Heals them in quick succession, until she has brought them all to their knees from the pain, and then killed them with it.

They are winning, they are conquering the Reapers, they are protecting their children so that they do not have to protect themselves.

Another hit to the side brings the world back at full speed, and Sal staggers. They are winning, but he is losing this fight. He thinks of the children, of Rowena and Enoch and the others, and he grits his teeth against the pain.

Salazar Slytherin is an Alchemist, and so he focuses on the Wixen before him, focuses hard enough that he can feel them and everything that makes them up. He extends his exhausted magic, and he picks at them, all at once, and he just keeps picking. He is patient about it, even in the midst of the heat and fervor of the battle, and he picks at the very beings of the people before him, and he unravels them, and - between one breath and the next - their forms change. One moment, they are solid and human, with bones and muscles and organs, with complex networks of veins and arteries and nerves. The next, they are nothing more than water spilling over the gray stones of the streets, washing away the blood-stains, and warm air rising so high into the sky that he can't even feel their remains.

"Well done, little brother," comes Radomir's voice. "I didn't think you had it in you to really use your power."

Sal turns and sneers at him. "You seem to have a bad habit of underestimating me."

"Then," Radomir replies, "we have something in common after all." He lunges forward, his arm extended, and Sal… underestimates him.

There is white-hot pain that starts in his chest. It is like he has been set on fire from the inside out, and it creeps up and down his body in waves. Sal feels as though he could exhale flames from between his lips.

His life does not flash before his eyes. He does not remember -

(He looks up at this castle that he has made, looks at the clean stone lines of it, feels the life in every wall and corner of its unfinished skeleton, and thinks that this - this place that he has created to house his family and strangers, this place that is meant to be a safe haven for children of magic, this place that Rowena has dreamed of, this place that was prophesied, this place that he has created, that he has poured himself into - is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, and it is not that it is more impressive than the pyramids, though it is, in a way. It is that he - Salazar Slytherin, the boy who lost everything, and lost it again, and found it - has created something strong and fierce and lasting. He has given the world a permanent version of himself that will stand for centuries, a version that will grow stronger and more beautiful with age.)

(His mother tells him the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, tells him the story of a man on a mission, of a man called Nobody who blinded a monster, of a man who incurred the wrath of the seas for his betrayal.)

(There is a body caging him up against a wall, the night sky on one side, the form of another on the other. A temporary space is made between two trees that cannot hold themselves apart for long.)

- his life in flashes, does not remember his regrets, does not see the things he has seen before and loved and hated in equal measure.

All Sal sees - all he feels - is Radomir's furious face above him, the biting wave of pain that starts with the contusion on his chest and aches deeper, ebbing and flowing between his ribs and tearing into the edges of his heart like an unstoppable riptide, or a flood, or a hurricane, hotter than fire, and the solid ground beneath his knees.

He can't help the laugh that escapes him. "How uncouth," he says mockingly, tasting metal on his tongue. "I never pegged you for the type to kill a man through Muggle means." He grins, and he is sure that it is a bloody red that outlines his teeth.

"I thought I'd send you back the way you came," Radomir says viciously.

"And what way is that?" Sal coughs out around a mouthful of ichor.

"Mud and pain," he replies, and fire flickers behind his eyes.

"Killing me does not bring them back. Death cannot bring the dead to life."

Radomir ignores his words, choosing instead to watch him bleed. "Do you remember," he asks Sal abruptly, "when you asked me whether I knew you loved me or not?"

"I do," Sal replies. "You as good as told me that you didn't."

Radomir looks away, as though he is ashamed of his next question. "Do you still love me?"

Sal waits for Radomir to look at him before giving his answer. "I do."

Radomir swallows. "Why?"

"You are my brother. How could I not love you? If things had been different, I would have given my life for you." He does not say what they both know: things are not different, and Radomir has taken his life from him, has taken it like Sal owes it to him, and Sal loves Radomir, but he hates him for that.

"Thank you for your life, brother," Radomir whispers, his voice almost impossible to hear over the blood rushing in Sal's ears and the sounds of the fading battle behind them. Before his eyes, his brother's form ripples, the golden lustre of his hair darkening to gleaming coal-black curls, his blue eyes looking greener by the second. Even the curves and angles and plains of his face shift, pulling apart and fusing back together painfully, and before he knows it, Sal is staring into his own face as the edges of his vision turn dark and fuzzy, swallowing him slowly. Radomir's twisted, bitter smile looks wrong on Sal's face, but he can do nothing but stare. "Don't worry, Salazar. I'll take good care of it for you."

The darkness snatches Sal's bloody reply from his lips, strangling the words before they can make a sound, dragging Sal into its suffocating embrace, and all he can do is let it.