Thank you for reading! I don't own any of Harry Potter! Please let me know if you enjoy! Updates every Saturday!
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Severus listened quietly to the words from Ingrid's song as the shapes of magical light danced over Harriet while his ancestor held hands with his wife.
Her music continued while Severus slipped into a deep trance.
He failed to notice his magically-induced state, though as he stayed within it, Ingrid spoke clearly to him over the sound of her own singing:
"Many years ago, before anything that is today, I began. I do not remember how, or why, or to whom….I only remember being kept in the worst room of a fine palace, shackled, and bound. The pain was constant and the blazing sun made my agony harder to bear."
Severus squinted his eyes as the magical lights displayed the shape of a magnificent palace that sat amongst rolling sand dunes.
He frowned as he glanced over at Ingrid only to see that she mirrored his somber expression.
"It is to be, son of my son." Ingrid said slowly as she glanced down at the continuous flood of viscous black ink that flowed from Harriet's arm.
"My wife carries curses within her?" Severus asked.
"No, your wife bears their scars." Ingrid corrected him, "Their weight, their burden, nothing really ever leaves this world, son of my son, bodies rot, trees decay…..only to become something else. A pleasant bit of magic can fortify someone…..An unpleasant bit can move through the flesh like a silent disease, unnoticed but foul."
Severus's dark eyes flickered over to Harriet as she jerked suddenly in her enchanted state of slumber.
"She will move again before it is over." Ingrid said calmly, "I will try to be quick, though I believe if you take my hand while I speak, the process will speed all the more."
Severus frowned as he hesitantly reached towards Ingrid's hand.
He intended to aid in Harriet's healing, to calmly listen to his ancestor's song and enjoy the little show of lights that danced across his wife's bed.
Severus underestimated his own power as a Legilimens and the exact strength of a bloodline.
Still unknowingly deep within his trance, as soon as he touched Ingrid's hand, his eyes widened while he found himself transported on a journey through the memories expressed by the lights and in her song…..
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"You are nothing." A man with tan skin and dark hair hissed, "You will always be nothing and that will never change! Do you understand?" He asked as he spoke to the group of quivering, young girls he faced.
The girls all looked similar, with dark hair, dark eyes, dirty, bare bodies and heavy chains of black iron cruelly wrapped around their wrists and ankles.
Hurriedly, the girls all nodded.
"Go on, then! It's nearly time to serve the royal family their dinner!" The man barked as he warningly touched the whip held on his belt, "One second behind schedule will earn you each three lashes, hurry up!"
Before the memory faded, Severus watched closely as the tallest of the chained girls scrambled away to tend her duties.
His eyes flickered from that pattern of dancing lights up to Ingrid as a scowl formed on his face.
While his ancestor continued to hold him in a trance with her song, he understood that the tall girl in chains was in fact, Ingrid herself.
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As the magical lights glowed again, Ingrid continued to hold Harriet's hand and slowly coax the cursed matter from her body.
Severus squinted his eyes as he watched a new scene begin to play.
He and Ingrid dropped hands, but that didn't matter, the ancient magic was well underway.
In that same grand palace, Ingrid cowered with the other chained girls while they watched from their tall window as buildings burned and screams echoed from the sandy village outside the formidable building's heavy walls.
The screams drew closer as the girls exchanged nervous glances.
Across the sand dunes, on the far edge of what Severus thought appeared to be a body of water, a river or an ocean, proud ships sat with their wide sails bearing the emblem of an axe.
Loud, woeful screams of terror sounded from outside of the room in which the girls had been locked.
As the doors to that room flew open, a massive young man strode inside, clad in heavy leather and layers of thick fur.
While the magical lights focused on detailing the image of the invader, Severus had the intuitive feeling as he stared at the blue-eyed, blonde-haired man that he held a great significance.
Severus glanced up at Ingrid as the image of the man hovered in the lights that flickered in front of Harriet.
"I had nothing and no one, not even a name." Ingrid explained as the lights moved again to show the man charging head first into the room filled with armed guards and frightened girls.
Severus frowned as he watched the man pull a large, etched axe from somewhere deep inside the many layers of clothing on his body to slaughter each and every enemy soldier in his path.
"I did not know the names of my captors." Ingrid frowned, "I only knew them as pain, as fear, as misery……Until the day that his people came to our land……..When I first saw him, I thought that he must have been a great king…..In a single moment, pain, fear, and misery fell under his axe like fragile waifs in the wind………"
Severus watched the memory and squinted his eyes as the last guard's lifeless body crashed into the stone floor.
Screaming and desperate to escape a similar fate, the other chained girls scampered past the man and out of the room, but Ingrid knelt down before him and raised her hands.
"It was then…..." She said with a solemn frown Severus failed to notice, "That this man became a god to me. I knew that he would set me free and that is why I offered myself to him, hoping he would dispatch me from this world by ending my suffering."
Severus watched the conqueror stare down at his ancestor coldly.
His dark eyes widened as he watched the man raise his axe.
Instead of hitting Ingrid, the blonde man chose to snap her chains in two, separating her hands and feet from their restrictive binds in one skillful motion.
"At last…." Ingrid smiled wryly, "For the first time in my life, I was my own person."
Severus's dark eyes flickered from his great-grandmother to the magical lights as they moved again and showed an image of warfare so intense that his pale face twisted in disgust.
There, in the heaviest part of the battle, the man who had freed Ingrid continued to swing his axe valiantly, as if his imminent defeat had not already been assured by the sheer number of forces against him.
"I watched from the window after the god and his men left my prison." Ingrid nodded.
Severus scowled.
"Free to use my fingers at last, I fled from there as well and went to return the favor to a friend…….It was unwise of my people to chain us both, that only gave us a mutual goal." She chuckled darkly.
"...A friend?" Severus questioned.
In the thick of the battle, around the man and his fellow soldiers, a sudden, intense barrage of swirling flames exploded to engulf his enemies.
Men fell to the ground screaming as their bodies burned away while their souls fought to escape their fleshy confines.
The docks themselves roared with the energy of the fire in the memory as the magical lights on the bed slowly arranged themselves to show the sky in the scene.
Severus blinked as he watched Ingrid stare down at her rescuer and his men while she sat atop a huge dragon's back, who flapped its impressive wings while it idled in the sky.
Ingrid smiled at Severus as he glanced over at her, but she nodded quickly back to the memory.
Severus watched the dragon land on the burned remains of its victims before Ingrid dismounted the animal while the conqueror and his men calmly boarded their ships.
As Ingrid stood on the docks, the man who had set her free threw out a wooden board to her.
"Walking onto that ship was my first decision….I left that horrible place to seek a new life….with him." Ingrid explained as Severus watched her board the invader's ship in the memory.
Harriet whimpered as the magical lights ceased and faded into blackness for a moment.
Severus cradled his young son at his wife's breast as he turned to look at his ancestor again.
"I won't bore you with the entirety of my story, only the last part that you must understand." She said with a dismissive wave of her hand.
"...The man with the ship became your husband?" Severus asked, "You grew to love him?"
"My husband, yes…...But my heart belonged to him the moment his axe severed my chains, son of my son." Ingrid frowned.
Severus mirrored her expression as she nodded and went on, "My love for him was too great. As the king of his people, he needed a child…..A child I could not bear…..I sought aid from the wrong place and into this world came two curses, the next father of your mother and mother of your mother, son of my son."
As Ingrid spoke, Harriet writhed while a particularly thick ball of viscous, black curse material purged itself from her body at the mere mention of Ingrid's unwise decision.
"See the results for yourself and understand why your lineage has been miserable since my foolishness." Ingrid commanded as she used her free hand to snap her fingers.
The magical lights arranged themselves to show one last scene from the past………
Ingrid staggered through a battlefield with scarlet-stained grass as the bodies of the dead lay scattered across the ground.
Severus watched the gaping wounds across her flesh drip scarlet as she held a single hand over her bleeding, ruined eye socket.
He bristled as he listened to her gasp while she stumbled into a tent close to the edge of the forest as the sound of a baby's wails permeated the memory.
Ingrid placed the crying baby in a basket before she assumed her Animagus form, slipped through the basket's straps and carried the baby on her back, away from the battlefield as the conquering army cackled behind her while they chanted victoriously.
As Ingrid hopped along as best she could, Severus frowned as he saw the body of her husband, his great-grandfather, next to a young woman and young man, a little older than Harriet, both equal reflections of their parents, albeit both nearly physically flawless, even in death.
"Your son and daughter?" Severus frowned.
"Curses, not children." Ingrid replied sullenly, "They were never meant to be mine."
"...And the babe?" Severus asked.
"The son of my son." Ingrid answered with grim resignation.
The scene changed again to show Ingrid, with her infant grandson in her arms, as she approached a refugee post built to shelter women and children from the horrors of the war.e…to find...food and clothing." Ingrid spoke in broken English to the man who stood watch at the post's entrance.
The dark-haired, dark-eyed baby boy in her grasp blinked as Ingrid frowned, both of their faces covered in dirt and blood.
The man sniffed coldly as he stared at Ingrid over his spectacles and asked, "Is your husband among the dead?"
"Yes." Ingrid numbly replied.
"...Your names?" The man asked.
"I…..am Ingrid." Ingrid nodded.
"...And the boy?" The man pressed.
Ingrid frowned as tears filled her last remaining eye.
She raised her free hand to her face and choked on a horrible sob that erupted from her chest as the man asked her again, "What's the lad's name?"
"My son was a great prince!" Ingrid wailed.
The man frowned at her for a moment before he used his quill to scribble a note in his ledger, "Very well, then, I'll notate him as 'William'. Strapping name…….William and Ingrid Prince. Step through the gate…..and you and the child will be given what you need."
The memory vanished as Ingrid walked past the man.
Severus blinked up at her in silent horror as Ingrid shrugged and said, "The Prince family is a cursed line, an invented lineage that holds its true power hidden away from fear……….This was never my intention, son of my son, but it was my fault. Your poor wife shoulders part of our burden now."
Severus frowned down at Harriet as another cloud of odious black curse material removed itself from her body while she held Ingrid's hand.
"Be comforted," Ingrid reassured Severus as she glanced down at Harriet, then looked up to meet his gaze, "Her suffering is coming to an end…….The cleansing is going well."
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Seized by utmost woe, as Severus blinked his dark eyes, he realized the odd trance Ingrid had placed him in had finally ended.
It seemed bizarre to him that he remembered the things he had seen, her song, and their conversations so clearly.
Although he still carefully cradled his son at his wife's breast, he had the subtle comforting sensation as if he had just woken from an hours-long deep sleep.
Severus quickly looked over and started as he beheld the towering pile of viscous, bubbling, black curse material, foul-smelling and rotten, that had left Harriet to accumulate in the room like a heap of molten, angry rubbish.
Worriedly, his eyes moved to his wife, but it was then that Ingrid let go of Harriet's hand and snapped her fingers.
At Ingrid's command, the mountainous heap of filth disappeared to nothing.
Once the lingering remnants of those curse scars had gone, Harriet breathed a sigh of relief in her sleep while a soft, pleasant smile curved her lips.
"It is done, now." Ingrid declared as she stood to her feet, "The wife of my son's son is well again….All the better for the child I protect."