I rejoice that there are owls... They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.
— Thoreau.
Old warder of these buried bones,
And answering now my random stroke
With fruitful cloud and living smoke,
Dark yew that graspest at the stones.
— Tennyson.
taxus
1. yew‐tree
2. javelin
— Latin-English FreeDict Dictionary.
The idea of enslaving another human soul, without lifting a finger or making a gesture of force, of enslaving a soul simply by willing its slavery, is an idea which all healthy human societies would regard and did regard as hideous and detestable, if true.
— G.K. Chesterton.
A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of the heart the spirit is broken.
— Proverbs 15:13.
All of these songs were part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life—namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits.
— Tom Lehrer.
...out of heart, alwaies fearfull and trembling, in such sort as that he is afraid of every thing, yea and maketh himself a terrour unto himself, as the beast which looketh himself in a glasse; he would runne away and cannot goe, he goeth oftentimes sighing with an unseparable sadness, which oftentimes turneth into dispayre; he is alwaies disquieted both in bodie and spirit, he is subject to watchfulness, which doth consume him on the one side: for if he think to make truce with his passions by taking some rest, behold so soone as hee would shut his eyelids, hee is assayled with a thousand vaine visions, and hideous buggards, with fantasticall inventions, and dreadful dreames, he cannot live with companie. To conclude, hee is become a savadge creature haunting the shadowed places, suspicious, solitarie, enemie to the Sunne, and one whom nothing can please, but onely discontent, which forgeth unto itselfe a thousand false and vaine imaginations.
— Laurentius.
...home, the best word in the English language...
— Delos Fall.
We don't even know where home is; for us there is literally no direction home.
— Robert Bellah.
We must dispel with this notion that anyone has the slightest idea what they are doing.
— P. Krugman.
#
Westward Ho! (6: Riddle Me This).
Okay, thought the Tutor: Pear Flamel has just advanced the proposition that H.J. Potter has been set definitionally equal to the Dark Lord, got to come up with a response, something that Harry Potter would say —
{ What? } said Harry Potter.
— which was good, well, fair, certainly a word that came to mind, but it lacked a certain incoherence.
"Erm," said the Tutor. Good, good start, maybe insufficiently verbose, needs elaboration. "Not really following you?"
Nicolas Flamel called from the kitchen: "Pear, are we out of butterbeer?"
"Try the cellar!" she called back.
"Oh, right. —Incidentally," he added, sticking his head out of the doorway, "I promised the boy lunch but there's nothing in the fridge but love and those little pizza things. I thought I'd take him to Kirkus Square, the carts will be out soon...?" He waited for Pear to wave a hand in agreement and then said, "Harry, how do you feel about unidentifiable fried objects on sticks?"
{ Gack! } said Harry Potter.
"Love them!" said the Tutor.
"Splendid!"
Flamel disappeared again, and after a moment there was a draught and the creak of a door, followed by footsteps rattling downwards on bare wooden steps.
"Now, where were we?" said Pear Flamel. "Right, prophecies. They're occult. Has anyone explained that to you?"
"Occult as in occulting? No."
She got up off the arm of the couch and made a come-along gesture. "Then I'll give you a definition. And think about this question: why are you here?"
Which was another problematic prompt, because it was still the case that H.J. Potter probably wouldn't be, shouldn't be, ought to have put more thought into the excuse, do I never plan? Okay, judo time, make an asset of the liability.
"—Coincidences, to be honest," he said, getting up off the floor. "I mean, maybe I'm paying too much attention to things." Turn up the self-doubt, add a little disbelief, and: "It all started with a chocolate frog card..."
"Never ignore a coincidence," she said, and he frissoned with déja vu. "But don't jump to conclusions, either."
She led him out of the sitting room and through the living room into a room largely bare but for a couple of chairs with reading lamps attached. There was a window to the back yard, and at right angles to that a wall full of books. A gap in the collection marked the missing volume D of the Anglo-Atlantic Cyclopedia of Magic.
"Welcome to our library," she said. "It may not look like much, but—" she reached up and tugged a wall-mounted lamp mounted to the left of the bookcase — "I like to keep things tidy, and Nick likes old movies..."
The bookcase promptly slid to the right — silently because magically, and magically because the rear window was right there and there was no sign of a set of bookshelves rolling across the back yard, which was, in a way, disappointing — revealing another book-wall behind it.
"Magick Beyond Good & Evile?" he read off one of the grim, dark spines.
"Yes, well," she said, tugging the lamp again, sending the book wall sliding into the floor to reveal yet another wall of books. "Those books," she said, waving a slightly embarrassed hand in a downwards direction, "were...sent to Nicolas for safe-keeping. Removed from the Hogwarts library one way and another by Albus Dumbledore. He thought they were problematic, that they might lead people down dark paths. He believes in security through secrecy.
"In practice that didn't work out too well," she said, briefly eyeing the Scar before turning her attention back to the bookcase. It was full of binders, and she pulled one tagged Wizard Words (N-P).
"I wish I'd had one of those last August," he said, "it'd have made some of my textbooks easier to read."
"Mmm," she agreed, flipping through the three-hole-punched pages. "Minnieborn Welcome Wagon, that's what this country needs. Muggleborn."
{ What's a minnie? } asked Harry, and the Tutor repeated it.
"Short for magic-negative. What they say across the pond. They used to say something else...kromaggs? No.—Here we go." She turned the book over to him, and he followed her pointing finger down the page.
Dotted lines in construction diagrams were once called occult because they showed an intermediary or intercessory step as opposed to being part of the final result. The root of occult is kel*, meaning conceal; that which cannot be observed becomes indefinite and thus malleable by magic — as in Transfiguration, where the object-as-found is occulted so that it can be transformed into the object-as-desired. An occulting substance is not itself indefinite but confers ambiguity upon other materials, allowing them to be worked, or worked with, in a symbolic manner.
See also healer and negative capability.
While following the penciled asterisk after kel to a handwritten note in the margin that read Lestrange's Concordance says kel means to play or dance — hybrid derivation? look into this sometime, the Tutor found the phrase block transfer computation floating around in the top of his mind. He decided it was another of those useless loose fragments of his Mysterious Past and tamped it down again.
{ Oh, } said Harry, sounding disappointed. { So that's what he meant. }
Who?
{ Robin in Ravenclaw. From what I overheard it sounded like he was living in a town of talking Mini Coopers. }
Alas for treasured illusions. But you never know, maybe he actually does.
"Um," he said Pearward, "Healer?"
"Not the usual muggle word, a homonym with the same root," said Pear. "Transfiguring living bodies, it's a rather special knack.
"Not so rare as having an aptitude for prophecy," she added, "which is what we were talking about. The universe is full of hidden structures, the magical universe even more so.
"What was it you were saying about 'it started with a chocolate frog card'?"
He listed the same items he'd given her husband, but as though they were a connect-the-dots puzzle that in retrospect didn't actually create a picture of a penguin in a bow tie.
"So you're here on the basis of what some might call a total absence of solid facts."
"Um...yeah..."
"That's the danger of expectations. What you did — was impose a narrative on a bunch of data points on the basis of an inference, a suspicion. I'm a journalist, I'm all about that. I just wouldn't have made the leap you did, I would have held out for more and better, but I'm not a wizard."
She pulled the lamp again; the books slid into the ceiling, revealing still another set of books. "You're the master of your fate," she said, and brought back the previous set in order to return the binder to its place, "the captain of your soul, but the river of time is muddy — and there's a weird shape on the surface ahead. You can see there's a curl in the water, but is it a reef or just the wind? With years of observation you can develop into a really good guesser, but prophecy and divination are the closest things to magical sonar available. And interpreting the results — well, there's a reason Professor Dumbledore wasn't sure whether to tell you about that prophecy or not.
"You look at noise and infer a meaningful pattern because you expect one, you expect one because of a prophecy. Prophecies lead to narrative. But when wizards are involved, narratives have a bit more power. Which is indirectly how you got here, because Voldemort made a mistake.
"On rencontre sa destinée souvent par des chemins qu'on prend pour l'éviter. La Fontaine. Destiny is often met in the paths we take to avoid it."
Strange quiver from Potterward. He waited for a comment, got nothing, carried on: "So...when you say I'm his equal?"
"My notion," said Pear, "is that he had control of the narrative, right up until he marked you as his equal and eliminated himself. At that point the prophecy essentially rebooted. You now have the franchise, the deciding vote, you get to decide what it means."
"So what was Voldemort's mistake? I mean, other than blowing himself up. Which may not count for much, Professor Dumbledore said he was dead, but the castle's full of ghosts."
"In the context of a bad choice of narrative," said Pear, "remember what the prophecy said straight off: the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches."
"Yeah?"
Pear spread her hands. "He decided that he was the Dark Lord! Call me a muggle, because I am, maybe I misunderstand the nature of wizardry, but that was a terrible mistake. There's been magic for thousands of years, but the world's not ruled by Dark Lords. If Dark Lords could win, we wouldn't be here. Wisdom wins. The universe is biased against the Dark."
Call it the wizomorphic principle. Wizocentric? Both.
"He should have decided that you were the Dark Lord, and made a plan to find your nemesis to use against you. Instead he died in humiliating circumstances. And when I say humiliating — well, let me show you." She tugged the lamp and cycled the bookcase again.
"This," she said, indicating the new set of books, "is our collection of Harry Potter books."
"Your what?"
She brushed a hand across the narrow spines. "Penny-dreadfuls, if wizards used pennies. Wild speculation about what happened on a night in the lonesome October. Did the young Harry Potter leap from his crib and wrest the Dark Lord's own wand from his grasp and use it against him?"
{ Ack! }
"Seriously?" said the Tutor. "People think that?"
"With varying degrees of seriousness."
She pulled out one of the narrowest items and presented it to him. It was a comic book, a comic book titled Harry Hallowe'en!, and its cover was an animated woodcut of (lightning-headed) Harry Potter doing exactly as described — with a wand straight up the nose. A quick flip through the pages revealed an eighteen-month-old infant dispatching the Dark Lord in a series of increasingly appalling scenarios. Using Professor Snape to wax floors with was entry-level by comparison.
Blimey, he said. One to one odds this is in the Fred-and-George comics collection... Good grief, keeping his head in a cage as a pet? Feeding him on — what?!
{ Hey, go back! }
Certainly not! it's too disgusting, it oughtn't be allowed. I'll get you a copy for Christmas.
"They're not all so...enthusiastic," said Pear, tugging the comic out of his graspy fingers, "but it's easy to write about things when no one knows different." She returned it to the shelf and then switched out bookcases again. "Which is why having you right in front of me is so frustrating, because you could answer so many questions...if you hadn't been a year and a half old and probably incapable of remembering anything."
"Oh dear," said a voice from the sitting room. "My wife and Harry Potter have been kidnapped by Death Eaters out to resurrect the Dark Lord. Whatever shall I do? I shall have to drink all this butterbeer myself for a start, and then dial 999."
"In here, Nicolas," she called.
"Oh, praise Merlin you're alive, safe and unharmed!" said Nicolas Flamel, poking his head into the room. "Introducing Harry to the Dark Arts, are we?" He carried three bottles of butterbeer into the library. "No? Oh god, you're showing him my collection of Wulfraed Bloodwyrthe novels, that's worse. Or are you just pumping him for information?"
"I would if it would do any good. I did show him Harry Hallowe'en."
"What, the one where it goes up the nose and out the — how shockingly irresponsible of you," said Nicolas Flamel. He walked over and presented the Tutor with a wax-sealed bottle of butterbeer. "Mind you, Harry, it is a shame you can't set us all straight on what happened to that wand..."
"What, did it disappear?" asked the Tutor.
Nicolas Flamel made a pouf gesture with one hand. "Fft, gone." He started peeling the wax off his butterbeer bottle. "Some people think it was destroyed along with him. And maybe it was, because an awful lot of people want to find that wand but not a single scrying has so much as pinged it." He stuck the wax in his pocket and started untwisting the wire that held the cork in. "Now me, I put a stock homing spell on mine, because it was always getting lost down the couch crack — it snaps back to its holder if I get too far away from it. I expect Trevor Doom did the same thing...but where would it go if he simply vanished from the world?"
(Couch crack, thought the Tutor, and felt a reverie coming on, weird sort of trigger...)
"And some people think one of his followers nipped in and grabbed it," said Pear.
"But would you touch that wand without its owner's explicit permission?" said Flamel, backing towards the doorway to the living room, and for some reason eyeing the left-hand wall. "I wouldn't. I'd hate to be on the rod squad that has to docile that wand."
"Docile isn't a verb, dear," said Pear.
"Someone I greatly admire says otherwise," said Flamel, and made a sudden adjustment to the butterbeer bottle. Pop! went the cork, and ricocheted off wall and ceiling and into a wastebasket. "Oh! Two points. Don't ask how many years I wasted learning how to do that."
"Rod squad?" said the Tutor, crossing the threshold after him.
Pear said, "Like Danger UXB, only magic, and with a psychologist on board."
This time he went for it:
"—What?"
#
It turned out that Sensitive Wand Acquisition Teams had psychologists because wands had psychologies, and wands had psychologies because — as Mr Ollivander the wandmaker had said — wands choose, and it all just evolved from there.
"Well, usually wands choose," said Nicholas Flamel. He stepped over to the living room fireplace, and retrieved from its mantelpiece a long curvy pipe with a bowl that barely fit in his hand. "I personally just got lucky." He lit the pipe with lumos, not a match, and when he puffed on the mouthpiece, the bowl produced bubbles of glowing pink smoke. "Yew, which favours me. Light, resilient, flexible —"
"A tendency to split on the grain," injected Pear.
"I've never fled a hotel without a good reason," said Nicolas Flamel. "And it wasn't grain that was responsible, either, though it certainly wasn't a Bordeaux." He set the pipe back into its holder, where it continued burbling on its own. Pink bubbles drifted through the room, bursting into clouds of sparks and sweet incense whenever they struck up against something. "Yew's also symbolic of immortality, as it happens. Which is a nice coincidence. Or synchronicity."
So more Death versus Taxus really, thought the Tutor.
Half the voices in his head sighed heavily. Another two got in a quick "Can I get you a dictionary?" "No thank you, I'm trying to give them up" before Harry Potter managed to ask for an explanation.
While the Tutor was providing one, he started rolling the wax from his butterbeer bottle into a ball and then a snake because how could you not?
"I've got a holly wand," he said. "Professor Trelawney said something about holly users being able to force the future to their convenience...?"
"Forcing the future is what magic is about," said Nicolas Flamel, taking the blob of wax out of his pocket and rolling it between his palms.
Pear said "That's why people like Albus say forget divination and prophecy and just meet the future with your wand out. I understand that the Hall of Prophecies is thick with dust..." She sounded like she wanted to clean the place up, and possibly out. "But that's the immediate future. Long term, that's different. Holly, that's interesting, and certainly ties in to what I've been saying."
"What have you been saying?" asked Flamel, working the wax blob into the shape of a small four-legged animal. After Pear told him about the narrative he added "Fair enough — just don't get it confused with the kind you see on the telly, generally you need more than an episode to solve a problem. A miniseries at the least. —Does this look like a horse?" He set it down on his copy of The Fiery Lancet and stared at it.
Which seemed like a suitable prompt, so while making his wax snake into a tiny man the Tutor asked what Danger UXB was, because Harry wouldn't know it and probably ought to have asked, wake up in there Harry.
"World War II bomb disposal drama," said Pear. "ITV, 1979ish."
"So they want to make sure Trev— Voldemort's wand is destroyed?"
"Oh no, no no," said Pear. "It could answer more questions than you, that wand. Wands aren't infants, they remember what they do. Everything he did with that wand is still a part of it."
The Tutor said, "Wands have memories?"
(Something started gurgling around in his mind, and he set the tiny man down on Nicolas Flamel's horse. It felt a big and important gurgle, and so he focused on undoing the wire on the bottle because best not to force these things...)
"Yes, they do," she said. "Even ringless trees and grainless woods. They're just fussy."
(...like a bubble, he could feel it rising...)
"Pressed wood too?" he said. Oh, right, it turns counterclockwise, this wire...
"Explodes when you cast with it. All those tiny wands..."
(...and there it was:)
If something can be remembered, it can come back.
Pop!
#
One apology and several swigs of butterbeer later (and the butterbeer was exactly as good as he'd hoped, and quite highly hoped, too) he asked, "Mrs Flamel — what did you mean by security through secrecy not working out?"
"Oh, dear," said Nicolas Flamel, placing a toothpick under the arm of the wax man, "Are we spilling the beans? It'll spoil his appetite."
Pear, who was up on a stool looking behind the curtain valance for his whereabouts-unknown cork (he'd offered to accio it, but she'd reminded him about line of sight rules) said, "We might as well."
Nicolas Flamel looked the Tutor in the eye and said "I expect Dumbledore thinks he'll tell you when you're old enough, but frankly you were old enough at eighteen months..."
"—Found it!" announced Pear. She climbed down as her husband got up.
Flamel said, "If we're going to do it at all I suppose we should do it properly, with what little evidence we have in hand. —Come along, Harry, let me show you...my room."
"Oh god," said Pear, returning the Tutor's cork. He stuck it in the bottle.
"Now, now — I'm no more of a slob than Pierre Caiet," said Flamel, and it was clearly a line he'd used before. He started off stairward in a sprightly manner.
"Who's Pierre Caiet?" said the Tutor, getting up and following.
"A slob," said Pear, taking up the rear.
"Oh."
"No child is born bad, Harry," announced Nicolas Flamel, ascending the stairs, "we have that on the best authority, but there was a boy who went very, very wrong. He tried to rename himself Lord Voldemort, and nearly succeeded. You call him Trevor Doom, but his name was Tom Riddle."
"I meant to ask you about that," said the Tutor to the back of Flamel's head. "You used that name in the kitchen. It's on some things in the Trophy Room."
"What, are you polishing things for punishment already?" said Flamel. "It's only November!"
"Er," said the Tutor. "Maybe...?"
"'Trevor Doom'?" said Pear.
#
There were three doors off the top floor landing: the one to the right was open and led to a neatly organised and computer-equipped office decorated in Late Modern Filing Cabinet; the others were closed. Flamel pushed open the one on the left against a draught, and led them through it into...
...a mess. Quick scan: You'd never dare accio anything in here, even the panaǎea couldn't manage the paper cuts. U-shaped desk enclosing room: left hand side, at least two scroll-holders as seen on Dumbledore's desk; against far wall, silvery box with red lights and some form of cassette deck on the front, connected to a television set and keyboard; right hand side, large brown book with metal reinforcements on the corners and the yellow outline of a five-point star on the cover, with 500 Year Diary inscribed under the star, plus a stack of pages decorated with yellow sticky notes — an unbound book; the page on top read
Basic Magical Wound Repair
Eno Matthews, M.M.A.
and had "first pass" written at the top right.
Passim: various shelfy-cubby things up against all the walls that were doubtless organising devices but looked like holes allowing a sea of paper to spill in from Outside, and small brass lamps with lots of filigree that glowed sunnily without any obvious power source. Underside of desk dominated by white cardboard filing boxes. Three steel chairs of backless lab type in center of room. Above desk, all-cork walls thumbtacked with file cards in every colour of the rainbow and most of the others, plus one poster for the Edinburgh Pothealers quidditch team and another showing a train of the Norfolk & Western Railway.
Pear sighed.
"Chaos is terribly underappreciated, provided you get its flea-collar on," said Flamel. "It allows making connections that otherwise might not be obvious. Although Pear and I do have a joke. 'We'll give up this life...'"
"'...just as soon as your affairs are in order,'" completed Pear.
"You should have seen it before I packed everything up for our next great adventure," said Flamel, sounding rather pleased with himself.
"What, you're moving out?" said the Tutor, placing hands under armpits and clamping down against the urge to sort.
"I know, it seems improbable," said Flamel, clearing some papers off one of the lab chairs for the Tutor to sit on. "But we've been planning for some time, and come the first day of spring we're going into the west."
"The west?"
"New Jersey," said Flamel with relish. He looked for somewhere to put the papers that wasn't the floor. "It sounds jolly interesting." He set the papers on the floor. "Dial our ages down, get back that youthful brown." He scratched his head. "Or was it red? Reddish brown."
Pear tapped a finger on the marked-up manuscript. "Are you finished checking this through? Eno had her head in the fireplace while you were out."
"Mmm?" said Flamel. "Oh. Yes." He picked up the cover page of the stack of sticky-noted paper and showed it to the Tutor. "Keep an eye out, good beginner's reference, save some embarrassing trips to the school nurse with that. Should be out before spring." He gave the Tutor a thoughtful look while Pear collected the manuscript to carry away into her own office. "One tip from the next volume, given the number of walking knights in that school of yours — keep track of the pointy bits. Some wounds can be healed only by the weapon that caused them.
"—Now: where did I leave the Tom box?" He got down on hands and knees to examine the cardboard boxes under the desk. "Dumbledore called me in on the case in the late Seventies — me being the oldest living wizard, thought I might have something to contribute, spot something he'd missed. Obviously I didn't, but I may yet, who knows."
While Flamel was searching and Pear was out of the room, the Tutor turned his attention to the desktop.
The scroll nearer the door was only slightly older than Harry's homework:
shiny steel ingots before my ridiculous vehicle came to a stop, having temporarily run down or run out. I found myself in Tomah, Wisconsin, midway between Milwaukee and Minneapolis, whatever those may be, having a (shall we say) spirited discussion with a local wizard over how many conceptual steps it would take to Transfigure cranberries to glass, while simultaneously contemplating a map to decide whether to proceed, once the vehicle was restored, west toward La Crosse or north to Eau Claire. Having had this quandary posed to him in passing, the chap immediately declared 'Go west, young man,' which of course at my age made me think of you, and
The scroll farther from the door was angled out of line-of-sight, so he used the mystery box as an excuse to get a closer look at it.
"Is this a computer?" he asked, leaning over and craning the neck. This scroll was noticeably older than the other, and bore a faint Hogwarts crest watermark pattern like the one on the giant rolls in the supply cupboards in the common rooms, except that it rendered the name of the school as Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft:
nor dragon but the worst aspects of both, and so he went to it.
Sometimes I think that I would do things differently, if I had them over again. Other times I am quite sure it would make no difference even if I had done everything right — that the future was set long before I became involved, that the toad not taken leads to the same place. All I know of a certainty is that though I wish that there should have been another, better way, I believe it ends here.
I remain, &c., A.D.
"Hm?" said Nicolas Flamel, who had now completely disappeared under the table. "Oh, well, yes, I suppose. Maybe not by modern standards. I bought a huge box of...stuff at a blind auction in the 1980s. I'm not sure what it was intended to be — there were no instructions, most of it I made into a chair — but the logic-circuit bits made a jolly nice home-brew, once I found a match for the defective rectifiers. One does like to explore new interests over the centuries. I used to do the household accounts on it, and it's still good for the occasional game of colour Breakout. I like Breakout...
"Hmm, something's been making a bed in this one..."
There was a thump from outside as Pear closed her office door, and the Tutor hopped up on the stool just as she entered the room. She had a notepad and pen out, and the first thing she said was "Trevor Doom?" So he told her the story behind Trevor Doom, LL. D. while she took notes.
"I like it," she said. "It fills a gap. A complete barrister, you say?"
"That was Ron Weasley's, not mine," he corrected.
"Credit where credit is due," she said. "How many z's?"
"Found it!" said Nicolas Flamel, and pushed a box out from under the desk.
#
The label section on its side read "Tom", and the first thing he pulled out of it — after sweeping most of the contents of the desk to one side to make room for it — was a thin paperback book, which had a red and black cover consisting of the stylised design of a tree behind vertical bars, and the title Grindelwalden.
"The first history," said Nicolas Flamel. "Grindelwald was in prison fifteen years before it came out. We know Trevor Doom read it, he regurgitated bits of it to people who liked that sort of thing." He fanned its pages and stopped at an illustration of a grim-looking building; its front wall was scarred with a diagram, a triangle containing a bisected circle, that had been burnt into it. "This symbol — well, Grindelwald said it meant power and life in mystery, mystery probably in the same sense of concealment that Pear just gave you.
"And if you dial that up to infinity, you get the coherent form of wizard-superiority wankery. Burn away the brain-cloud and his idea was not that wizards are superior and should be obeyed, but that wizards are gods and should be worshipped." He closed the book and dropped it back into the box. "Omnipotent, immortal, and running the world behind the scenes. They don't want muggles getting under their toenails, or slaving away at tasks that can be done better, faster and cheaper by magic — they want muggles in temples, admiring them and making offerings to them and carving statues of them and so on. Telling tales of their awesome adventures...
"Come to think of it, what that type of wizard really wants is to be on the telly." He took the book back out of the box and looked around to find somewhere to put it, and finally set it atop a towering stack of other books (covering up My Wizard Memes, by Thor Ditcoff / Author of The Great Dog-Nap). "Although, obviously, one would obviously prefer a better standard of godly behavior.
"Strange chap, Grindelwald. Supposedly he was of a wizarding family, but I think he faked the paperwork to get into Durmstrang. The very notion that those people should be put in their place — that's the kind of thinking you find in muggledom, muggles blaming downwards because they want to get on top and are afraid of the people they want to join up there. —Ah." He pulled out a rubber-banded set of photographs, the non-wizard kind.
"Remember these?" he said, handing them over to Pear.
"How could I forget," she said, taking off the rubber band and shuffling through them.
They were a sequence of colour shots taken at a birthday party at a retirement home, and focused on a face he carefully didn't recognise.
"That's the head of the orphanage Tom Riddle lived at," said Pear, passing the pictures over to him. "Where he was born, in fact. We managed to track her down, and I said I was doing a story for the paper. Retrospective, memories of the war, that sort of thing. Which I was, although up until then I hadn't been."
Listen and learn, Harry! said the Tutor. Always tell the truth when you're lying, it saves a lot of bother.
{ Gotcha. }
"Did you learn much?" he said, shuffling through the pictures.
"A fair amount," said Pear. "At her age it was easier to remember what happened fifty years ago than yesterday. She managed a number of interesting reminiscences..."
Nicolas Flamel produced another set of pictures: muggle, again, but monochrome. He fanned them out like cards and showed them to the Tutor; they were aerial overhead shots of post-war London, and you could tell it was post-war because of the devastation that ranged across them. "And here's the orphanage," he said, and plucked one picture from the set and handed it to the Tutor in advance of the rest of the set. "Spot the oddity compared to the others."
The difference — was the presence of a neatly delineated disc, like an inverted crop circle: normality in the midst of ruin. At the center of the circle was a building with a path leading to its front door and a small building at its rear.
"That's a rather neat...circle, don't you think?" said Flamel. "Care to take a guess as to how it happened?"
"Well — magic, I expect," said the Tutor.
"Good. But what kind, is the underlying question," said Flamel. "Because no one gave that orphanage a thought. No one said, oh look, bombs, let's throw a Protego shield over dear old Wool's Orphanage."
"They didn't?"
"No. Strange, that. Tom didn't do it either — the Trace, you know, they'd have filed a charge of underage magic, even if they gave him a bye on it due to circumstances, or if they decided it was accidental."
Interesting. "So," said the Tutor, "if they didn't do it, and he didn't do it, who did it?"
"Excellent question." Flamel rummaged around in the box, and pulled out a document with a Hogwarts crest at the top. "This is a formal request to the Board of Governors of the school, asking to let T. Riddle stay over the summer with the caretaker instead of going back to the orphanage. Rejected. They sent him back every summer of World War II. He didn't want to go.
"Now — if it had occurred to him, he could have brought the roof down with nothing but carefully selected items from Zonko's Joke Shop. No one would have known the difference. But like the Protego shield, it was a thought that went unthought."
The Tutor waited. And then said "...Well, what else is there?"
Flamel regarded him levelly. "Albus Dumbledore was the first wizard Tom ever met. First contact, introduced him to the existence of wizardry. He has a...rather distinct memory of the boy wondering which of his parents was magical...
"...and deciding it couldn't have been his mother, because if a witch would have used her power, and not died after delivering him."
{ ... } said Harry Potter.
"However," said Flamel, "there's a different reading, which didn't occur to me until quite recently. Which is this:
"What if she did use her power?
"What if, in fact, she used it up?"
The Tutor said nothing, but made it a question.
Pear said, "It's called blood protection. Not involving actual blood, but the idea behind it. It involves giving up the self for the sake of another person." She paused, looking at...well, mostly the Scar. "Among other things it has a binding to the place you consider home. If it applied, it would have made that orphanage the safest place in London, though no one would have known it."
"Not consciously," amplified Flamel. "Though it would neatly explain why everyone's minds just skated off the notion of abandoning the place, or even packing all the kiddies into the subway while the bombs were falling, which was another idea they didn't have."
The Tutor looked down at the encircled orphanage and waited for a reaction.
{ ...she X'ed herself...? } said Harry Potter.
"Did you ever tell Dumbledore about this, Nick?" inquired Pear.
"No, I couldn't make up my mind whether to or not." Flamel redirected his gaze to the Tutor. "It seemed so conclusively over with, you see. Everyone knew he was gone the very moment it happened — it woke us from a sound sleep, it was like a long-standing drone that just stopped, the silence was like a shout.
"The last word I heard from Dumbledore was, it ends here. He has joined the dead past. Leave him to the historians and archaeologists. And I know how he earned all that white hair, so I don't want to poke him, because the problem with Dumbledore is...well, spells are only the second most powerful thing you can cast, you know."
"What's the first?" said the Tutor.
"Doubt," said Flamel. "He spent sufficient time in hand-wringing, I don't want to trigger a new round to no actual purpose."
There was a pause.
The Tutor put the picture of the aged Mrs Cole on top of the picture of the orphanage, and Pear spoke up. "She didn't expect him to survive. He was tiny. Hardly ever cried, and you don't get fed if you don't cry, there's so many to take care of. Runt, she said. And the other children treated him like it, but he never fought back — not until he was seven, when he started to 'sprout like a weed', and even then he never laid a hand on anyone."
"Magic," said Nicolas Flamel. "That, he started using." He went fishing in the box again and turned up a few bits of what looked like official paperwork. Only the words London and Metropolitan stood out, the rest of the text was a bit blurred. "Interesting thing: Mrs Cole took over in 1934. Prior to that the administrator of that orphanage was Mr Earl Hartfield Cole. Who simply fled one New Year's Eve and left nothing behind but a couple of police reports. The people who saw him before he disappeared suggested Delirium tremens, it says here, though he wasn't known to drink."
"The only thing Mrs Cole said about him was — good riddance," said Pear, and her tone suggested there might have been another word, "and that was very much the end of that interview."
"And what happened next?" said Flamel, looking in the box. "Not a lot documented. Dumbledore says, some students you could write a whole biography from the detention cards alone, but Tom Riddle — was very subtle. Played his cards so close to his chest you couldn't be sure he had a chest. The whole of Slytherin quieted down while he was there. He didn't want attention." He reached in and pulled out a picture — a conventional photocopy of the picture the Tutor and Harry had found in the disused classroom. "There he is. Only known picture of him, seventh year. And does anyone else in this picture remember him, other than the people he was directly involved with? Only vaguely."
"As far as the orphanage was concerned, he might as well not have been there," said Pear. "I showed that picture to Mrs Cole. She was surprised — she said oh, what happened? Because he used to be a rather handsome boy. I asked her what he was like in the summertime, and she didn't really remember. Never left his room."
"Or possibly distraction magic, possibly accidental," said Flamel. "Certainly he was just very private, didn't attend graduation, never picked up his award. —Now...oh, here it is." He produced a bit of scroll that bore a series of notes written in green ink.
"The Medal for Magical Merit," said the Tutor. "Was that it?"
"Um...he received a couple of prizes while at school, in fact, although he showed no interest in either of them." Flamel marked one of the green dot points with his finger. "Plaque for Services to the School, found by house elves in his dormitory waste-bin — along with various other discarded articles including a pair of worn-out socks. The socks, they recycled." He moved the finger to the next dot point. "The Magical Merit award — that's a pity. The faculty don't award it, the school does. It's a bit like the pen-and-ledger system that puts people down for Hogwarts." He looked into the box dubiously. "This is all bitsy-bobsy stuff, and if I didn't have some notable success in the happy accident department I probably wouldn't even have this much. Come to think of it, let's see what a bit of thumb-plumbing yields." He put a hand over his eyes and plunged his arm into the box.
He pulled out a yellowed Lancashire newspaper clipping, dated, in purple ink, June 1943, and took his hand away from his eyes. "Aha, you see? This is the sort of thing we have to deal with in the Tom Riddle department."
He passed it over to the Tutor, who blinked a few times and read it. According to the rather jocular reporter, someone had been seen standing atop Blackpool Tower, flying a kite during a night-time storm, only to be struck by lightning. The article concluded No old soldiers were found.
What it had to do with anything was as lost on the Tutor as on H. Potter.
"What does it mean?" he asked.
"Very little — nothing at all — everything: take your pick," said Flamel. "We didn't even collect it while investigating, it was something Pear stuck in a scrapbook in the Forties and then I said Hmm about it thirty-odd years later.
"If it means something, it's down to that prophecy of yours, plus an interesting detail about the Hufflepuff house ghost. Have you met him?"
"Brother Jacques?" said the Tutor.
"You have. Quite ebullient as the Hogwarts ghosts go, is he not?"
"He seems cheerful," said the Tutor, adding a dash of incomprehension.
"Well," said Nicolas Flamel, "according to a chap with whom I have occasional correspondence — former Potions teacher — up until June of 1943 the monk used to give the Slytherin chap with all the blood down his front a real run for his money in the sunshine and smiles department.
"The story goes, while the bloody man and all the others carry the weight of unhappy memories with them, on the inside, the monk's burden was tied up in his old cell key — blood-cursed under unspecified horrible circumstances and lost forever in the castle, with all the mythical implications of lost forever.
"And then — it turned up. House elves found it in the Hufflepuff common room fireplace one morning, as though it had fallen from a concealed hiding place in the chimney. And it was as close to shiny new as a rusty old key can be, which was odd because, as I say, it supposedly had a blood curse on it, permanently stained."
"Permanent, permanere," said Pear. "As in remain to the end. Fixed. Something you can trace forward into the future. Meaning useful in divinatory magic. You remember what I said about hidden structures, and divination as sonar? If you ping the future it responds, but the echoes are unpredictable. Chaotic. Try to perform a divination in New Zealand today and it's possible a related prophecy will emerge in Tibet last year. Or next Tuesday. But if there's a prophecy, there was probably a divination."
"And yours was a pretty impressive prophecy," said Flamel. "Which implies an impressive divination. So — wild guess, someone poked at a future related to you. Who might have done that but the chap who marked you as his equal?
"Which is why I attribute meaning to this clipping that it may not actually have.
"Anyway, the friar's been a positive pink balloon ever since. Clearly something changed. So put your mental finger on that spot and imagine it as the hypothetical transition point, where Tom Riddle stops and Trevor Doom begins.
"I used to teach; you occasionally get a child with a business plan when the others are still thinking about the match against cross-town.
"We know his grades, I've got them here if you want to see them. We know enough about him to arrive at the conclusion that he was on the make; we know after the fact that he was the type who would want to know exactly where he's going — and no footling about with tea leaves or consulting the centaurs, either. He wasn't interested in guesswork or opinion.
"So — he wants to see. He wants a forecast — illumination, and plenty of it. Interrogation, not observation. And being someone literally minded and fixated on power, he goes straight to —"
Flamel hesitated, and then transitioned into a halt by way of an "um" and several blinks at the ceiling. "Blanking on the name of the book, Pear," he said. "Codex Something Pompous."
Pear said, "Nexus Summanus."
"That's the bunny. One of the advanced books he checked out from the Hogwarts library...though that doesn't mean much because he checked out basically everything that wasn't in the restricted section. According to the house elves he had a sort of little tower made of books in his common room..."
(There was a quiver from Potterwards, which probably meant that the notion of the world's Darkest wizard possibly being Hermione Granger gone horribly wrong had crossed Harry's mind.)
"...very big on history," continued Flamel. "All the traditions in which he wasn't raised...
"—So! On the basis of a book about lightning divination, he devises a ritual, harnesses power beyond imagination — a great deal, anyway, and in a single brilliant arc he perceives — horror, we presume.
"Because at that point his only goal becomes to avoid whatever fate he glimpsed, choosing the path of power that need not yield, and whoops, he brings about his own destruction thirty-something years later.
"And yes," admitted Flamel, "this is extremely wifty-wafty. The whole scenario comes down to two things: one, wifty, the key — death-connected relic; magic ritual, for use in; side order of fetish object; sufficient portent there, tied to this clipping by the observation that while no mere spray of dragon's blood could clear a blood curse, clearly something can. And two, wafty, the symbolically shaped scar on your head. When I suggested lightning to remove a curse scar I wasn't entirely talking toot."
"Though it could be a rather angular snake," said Pear.
Bear it in mind. The Tutor said, "Okay, he brought about his own doom, but why am I still worried about him, then? Why's anyone still worried about him?"
"Encroaching doubt," said Flamel. "As I said, we all knew he was gone, it was such a relief, but it's sort of been seeping back of late. Absence of evidence, we've got it, concomitant uncertainty, we've got that too." He looked into the box and shook it from side to side. "What happened then?W hat next?" He pulled out a copy of a diploma. "Graduated, applied for a teaching job at Hogwarts — Defense Against the Dark Arts. Didn't get it, insufficient practical experience." He pulled out another sheet; a handbill headed AUCTION / Borgin & Burkes. "He worked in in collectibles and antiques for a while, with preternatural aptitude — a sixth sense for the genuine article, you might say.
"He didn't attend the ten-year reunion of his graduating class. A number of interesting people now in wizard pokey also didn't attend that reunion. They all didn't attend it together — in their own private party. According to some of them, he went off on a grand tour of all the worst magical areas of Europe at that point. Other than a few extremely oblique events, like the curator of the Nurmengard Archive being fired for no documented reason, we have no evidence of what he was up to over the course of ten years." He pulled out another bit of scroll with green-inked writing on.
"1965, he applied for the same teaching job at Hogwarts he'd tried for twenty years earlier, still didn't get it — excessive practical experience from the wrong angle for the new Headmaster's taste — got cranky, may have put a curse on the position, at least it's been a string of temps ever since.
"Modern times. The first of his followers' children start at Hogwarts. By 1975 there were rather a lot of them, though it wasn't immediately obvious even then what they were enticing people into. Though the school newspaper did cease publication at that point, apparently some Hufflepuffs were overly inquisitive.
"In the greater world there wasn't much warning about what anyone was enticing anyone else into, right up until people started finding their brooms flying them into walls at three hundred miles per hour and so forth."
"Which is where you start to enter the picture," said Pear. "According to that prophecy, your parents defied the Dark Lord three times — did Albus tell you what that meant?"
The Tutor shook his head no.
"If you were on the acquisition list," explained Nicolas Flamel, "the organisation made at most three passes.
"The first one was a simple invitation. Trevor Doom, you see, was a good man — in the criminal sense. He gave people what they wanted, they gave him what he wanted, the only drawback being that it was all at the expense of still other people. The morally untroubled would sign up freely.
"If that didn't work, and you were a strategic asset, you got a second visit from his specialists."
Pear said, "There's a thing called the Imperius curse. It is to hypnosis what an arc welder is to a birthday candle. You have to be very strong-willed to throw it off."
"And if you managed that," said Nicolas Flamel, "he'd take a...personal interest in you.
"He'd visit you in several senses of the word. Absolutely insidious. You'd be at the pub and turn around and there he'd be, and you wouldn't even know it was him. He could slip past all defenses, and not just the physical or magical kind. He could get inside you.
"He could look into a person's eyes and deliver the heart's darkest desire — and no one would know, no one would ever know, it was a secret, a completely intimate relationship.
"One taste of what he could offer and people you'd never expect to go at all went willingly: perfectly good people who until then wanted nothing to do with him. All he had to do was wait, eventually they'd seek him out.
"One poor boy said he was the best thing that ever happened to me..."
"That's what your parents defied," said Pear. "Not just him, but the worst part of themselves."
The Tutor was very, very silent.
"Then, of course," said Flamel, "came the prophecy, the panic, and — kapouf." He set the lid back on the box. "And that is the singular event.
"Hang on, let me close the door. Otherwise I feel sure Albus will be spitting out his tea without even knowing why. This is where I start telling you things I shouldn't."
He closed the door with the help of the draught and leaned back casually against it.
He ticked items off on his fingers. "We know he had it in his head that strength means not dying, as indeed we know the name of his organisation to be the Death Eaters. Suggestive. We know he had an identifiable fixation on totem objects — not just antiques; he had an interesting collection even when he was a child. We also know that he lost his looks. Even by the time of that picture the bloom was off, and when Dumbledore met him again years later he was remarkably far gone.
"All of which points, very faintly, towards something rather nasty.
"The narrative goes, Harry — and it's not necessarily correct, but it's pleasantly concise and the gist is there — that Tom Riddle reinvented, or perhaps reverse-engineered is a better term, a spell called..."
He made an over-to-you gesture at Pear, who said, "Hōraikhorós. Which means the seasons dance in a circle."
"And the gist of that in turn," said Flamel, "is that you bend time into a recirculating moment and capture some of yourself in it — a piece of your soul, stuck in the past. You can't strictly die in the present if you're dynamically alive in the past, you see. An instant in time, conceptually embedded into a physical object. In short, Harry, it's entirely possible that Tom's like Koschei."
"Who?" said the Tutor (mostly Harry).
"A historicomythical bad hat who became immortal by hiding his soul in a turducken," said Nicolas Flamel.
"Nicolas..." said Pear.
"Well it's close," said Flamel. "And close is about as much as you can hope for, with him." He leaned over and rattled the not-particularly-full box, not without irritation. "Dumbledore had a great many potentially problematically instructive books pulled from the library — on general principles, nothing to do with Tom. But there's always a bit left over — a footnote here, a sidebar there, the recollection of someone who did the reading while it was available." He waved a hand at Pear. "We've read the original texts, it was me they were left with for safekeeping. But if Tom had to make do with inferences from secondary sources, odds are he jumped to a grievous conclusion, because those generally refer to it as a necromantic ritual. Which doesn't necessarily mean what people think it does." He looked to Pear. "Speak it, word woman."
Pear moved her lips around the phrase word woman before continuing aloud. "You can trace necro back to the Sanskrit root nac," she said. "Which has a lot of forms with unpleasant implications, but can just as easily simply mean disappear. Meaning we're back to concealment in the magical sense."
"If wanting not to die is inherently evil, well, shame on me," said Nicolas Flamel. "But the thing is — binding part of your very self to a moment by way of an object, people do that all the time and no harm done." He held up his hand and indicated his wedding ring. "You just take it a step farther by magic. One complex, exotic and probably dangerous ritual later, you Vanish your wedding ring for safe-keeping and Bob's your uncle, you're immortal. Your wife might kill you, but it wouldn't stick."
"Don't be too sure, dear," said Pear.
"Make a copy for wearing first if you ever want to try it, Harry, but bear in mind the problem with securing your immortality that way: no panacæa. There's a reason Diagon Alley isn't full of ancient Greek wizards with lanterns looking for honest men."
"But...that's not even what he did," said the Tutor in a guessing tone.
"Probably not, no," said Flamel. "Those derivative sources assume the corpse from their reading of necro, but it's not involved in the actual ritual, so — what's it for? Decoration? You can't require a corpse and not use it at all.
"So, from a false premise, they rationalise: aha! the purpose of the corpse lies not in its presence, but in its creation — by killing someone, which according to the best authority tears the soul in two. And then you embed a resulting fragment of soul in some handy styrofoam soup cup or whatever.
"Which is a terrible idea — ripping off bits of your very self without multiplying yourself first." He wiggled his wedding ring again. "Which part do you leave behind, hmm? Think about it — if you look at your future and it's becoming a foul murtherer, the part of you that would want to stay behind is the part that would stop time by the only available means rather than move a moment further into that future.
"Meaning that in a sense you're committing not just murder, but fractional suicide as well.
"And so you carry on living with all your worst parts and go full Shakespeare — you start off like Hamlet, barely able to write a poison-pen letter, and end up like Macbeth, wringing blood out of your socks for half an hour come bedtime."
"Thank you for that image, Nicolas."
"It did go a bit far, didn't it?" said Flamel. "But you get the idea; and according to some, the effects are written in the face. The opposite of love being not hate but indifference, you start with a flattening of affect, a loss of expressiveness — a bit useful, actors use it as a trick, it allows people to see what they want to see — and end up looking like the hitherto unknown third mask of the theatre. Tragedy, Comedy, Apathy.
"Given the visible effects, presuming that he was performing hōraikhorós repeatedly, he was in essence killing himself on the installment plan, to the point where one might reasonably ask how he was even still alive."
Flamel paused, twiddling his ring.
"Did your History class cover a thing called evocatio?" he asked. "Or perhaps it was in Defense Against the Dark Arts."
{ —I know that one! Call on me! } said Harry excitedly. { I read about it in August! }
The Tutor recited after Harry: "Expulsion of a city's tutelary deities, resulting in its total destruction. The book said it was muggle mythology, though."
"It's a useful metaphor," said Nicolas Flamel, "and something similar may apply, except that he was performing it on himself.
"No child is born bad; but every time he emptied himself of his better nature, he became less and less recognizable to his mother's blood protection, even as it became the only thing holding him together.
"And in trying to kill you, the very sort of infant his mother set out to protect, he pushed it past its tolerances: it expired catastrophically — and he burst like a bubble."
The Tutor read Harry's combination of incredulity and acceptance and reflected it accurately, waited a decent interval, and said, "So — well — what? If it happened that way. I mean, he'd be a ghost, wouldn't he? Or would he?"
Pear said, "Ghosts are spirits who form new weakly interactive bodies, life with the contrast turned down. And no, he clearly hasn't done that — a lot of people including Nick have had the magical equivalent of a clipping service running, keeping tabs on news of anything even vague shaped like a ghostly Dark Lord, and there hasn't been so much as a mysterious voice to rally his followers."
"So if he exists," said Nicolas Flamel, "which is an interesting alternative to living and surviving, it's in a form too inessential to form a ghost.
"Which is also an interesting idea — a bare self, no mediation, no insulation, getting the universe direct, possibly an experience so intense as to be agonising." He leaned over to the table and wrote himself a note. "Regardless, he didn't come back, neither immediately nor on the arithmanthetically significant seventh anniversary of his fall, so we thought...we had every reason to believe...
"...oh, that's interesting, I never thought of that, that's unpleasant."
"What?" said the Tutor.
"You don't want to know, I'll tell you anyway, but not right now. What I do want to tell you is the particularly sad part, which is that even if he'd stuck with his bad and wrong idea he still could have had his cake and et it, too."
{ Hah? } said Harry, and the Tutor echoed it.
"Oh, Nicolas," sighed Pear.
"I can't help it, I'm a philosopher, I think about things," said Flamel. "I used to think, well, we have it on authority that sin is in the intent, not the act. And people have urges. People have urges constantly. Mostly the world is still intact, because something intervenes between idea and reality, prevents fancy from becoming act, whether it's just a random distraction or the knowledge that someone is watching, even if it's only oneself, and so we avoid the consequences of our desires by never making them real. Nonetheless, under that assumption, Tom Riddle could have done his deed without ever actually murdering anyone. The first time he ever wanted to kill someone, he was two and not one."
The Tutor said, mostly to himself, I wonder where that leaves Argus Filch?
Flamel continued: "It didn't take me long to realise that once he performed the actual ritual, he'd likely have taken up actual murdering as a result of degrading his character, so it's a wash — but my curiosity was piqued, and one day when I had a lot of ceiling to stare at, I worked it out: all you really need is one true friend and a Time Turner."
Pear sighed heavily.
"You see, Harry," said Flamel earnestly, "what you do is, you murder your friend and use hōraikhorós to ensoul the Time Turner, and then turn yourself back through time half an hour — at which point you penitentially allow your friend to murder you, and your friend in turn ensouls the same Time Turner half an hour earlier.
"Which means that your friend didn't really die in the future, and you didn't really die in the past, and when the Time Turner unwinds to the present, you and your friend are both alive because immortal, morally undamaged because retroactively neither of you really followed through on killing anyone...and the Time Turner itself, by virtue of being protected by two half-souls, quite possibly becomes impervious to moth, rust and magic."
The Tutor waited for Harry to understand what all that meant and then said "That is really Slytherin thinking."
"If it is," said Nicolas Flamel, "Tom Riddle wasn't Sorted properly, because he didn't think of it.
"I'd happily have told him — if he'd come to me, or been brought to me, or even been put in touch pen-pal. I could have done something.
"You may think this is indulgent towards a perfectly horrible man who ruined your life, and so very many others, but I try to reserve my anger to conditions rather than persons.
"I would have said, you want to live forever, who am I to say no? But make an informed choice. Look at Epimenedes — lived to the age of 359, and found it so dull he once took a nap for fifty-seven years.
"Living forever means committing to living a long time. If you find that the seas shall waste, the skies in smoke decay, rocks fall to dust and mountains melt away, well, clearly that's something to take into account, isn't it? Have you ever tried singing 'Infinite bottles of beer on the wall'? Give it a year or so, see how you like it. Maybe you should start with indefinite life, work your way up, that's what I'd have told him.
"Maybe I could have saved everyone a lot of needless unhappiness.
Nicolas Flamel paused, and rubbed at his neat little beard a little while.
"Once upon a time," he said, "I saw a small child, about seven, blast a bush to shreds —using for a wand a branch torn from the same plant. Utterly destroyed it. The child wasn't angry at the bush, or taking frustrations out upon it, or even acting out of curiosity — the child was simply doing. Very young children simply do things. They're still learning how to work their very selves. Such a child might as easily stick a knife into its own brain, and, feeling nothing, do it again and again. Much later that child told me, tell the adults: if you ask why I did something and I say I don't know, it's because I don't know."
He stared down at his wedding ring and rotated it around his finger.
"In France we used to live next to a monastic community where no one was considered an adult until the age of thirty. I think they were too generous. So many adults walking around who used to have such...small faces. To treat them badly, even though they may seem to deserve it, is unconscionably cruel.
"He was a child, and he killed himself, and I could have done something.
"Hate the man if you wish, Harry, if you ever find any of him, but I will pity the child forever."
In my tribe, a witch-woman grieves on behalf of us all.
— Leela of the Sevateem.
For in no other spot this treasure's found
Save where the thunderbolt has struck the ground:
Hence named Ceraunias by the Grecians all,
For what we lightning they Ceraunus call.
— Marbodus.
We hear it said that the idea of the philosopher's stone was an error; but all our views have been developed from errors...
— Justus von Liebig.
The words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.
— Gaston Bachelard.
I'm mostly sad because you're not sad.
