"Helga, Helga, look what I found!" Carrie exclaimed, bouncing up to Helga with an expression of rapt excitement.
"Stop bouncing," Helga scolded gently, but smiled at her younger sister. With difficultly, the little girl kept still, and opened her hand to show Helga what she'd found.
A tiny caterpillar was in the palm of her hand, a wriggling yellow and black mass. Carrie looked utterly aglow with pride. "Isn't he cute?" She beamed.
"He is positively adorable," Helga assured Carrie.
"Can I keep him, Helga, please?"
Helga sighed, and tried to look stern, but it was difficult to look into Carrie's brilliant green eyes and not be swayed by their childlike innocence and happiness. She crouched down to Carrie's height, and looked solemnly into her sparkling eyes. "We should let him go, Carrie. He probably misses his family," she explained.
Carrie pouted. "But I don't want to. I already named him. His name is Albert. And he's so cute…"
"And so are you, but you wouldn't want people taking you from your house for no reason. Even if he is adorable, he should go back to his home." Helga smiled, encouraging Carrie as she carefully picked up the caterpillar and put him on a nearby tree.
"Bye-bye, Albert," she said sadly, watching the little yellow and black creature wriggle away. Helga felt her own strange pang of sadness as Carrie turned back to her, but it passed just as quickly as it had appeared.
Helga easily swung Carrie's tiny frame into her arms and settled her youngest sister on her hip. "Now, let's go see about those berries mother wanted us to pick."
Carrie's eye widened as she smiled, having already forgotten Albert. "We're making jam?"
Helga smiled again, and nodded, much to Carrie's delight. "We get jam, we get jam," she chanted in a sing-song voice all the way to the house, where their mother and the rest of their siblings were waiting with buckets in hand.
"Remember, Helga. Raspberries," Elisa said with a solemn nod of her head.
"Raspberries!" the rest of the children exclaimed in unison, as if it were the most exciting time of their lives to go picking berries with their oldest sister.
Elisa laughed, and gently pushed her children towards Helga. "Now, be careful. And make sure you pick me lots of raspberries!"
She leaned against the door frame, and watched as her kids filed out, chanting about raspberries and jam. There was Helga, her oldest, almost 17, in the lead; Richard, who was 13, towing the troublesome twins Carrie and Joseph, both now 7, behind him; and lastly, Faith, the solemn 10 year old.
She sighed, and watched them disappear around the bend in the road.
The Hufflepuffs lived in an large valley at the edge of a small village, with distant mountains, and miles of untouched forest stretching off toward the jagged horizon. Several other families lived in the same valley, and they coexisted peacefully with the Hufflepuffs. It was a quiet way of life, but they made do, and all were happy.
Elisa smiled again as a hand touched her waist, and she unconsciously leaned back into her husband's chest, surveying their land with a sigh of content.
"They'll be fine, Elisa," Tristan rumbled slowly, kissing to top of his wife's head with a tenderness that belied his immense size.
"I know… I love you," she sighed happily, closing her eyes for the briefest of moments
Tristan smiled. "I love you too." He tilted her chin back, and kissed her forehead lovingly as the golden July sunshine smiled warmly down upon them.
- - - - - -
Helga rested against an apple tree, and watched as her siblings frolicked among the raspberry bushes, laughing, their cheerful faces smeared with raspberries; in fact, more berries ended up on their faces and in their mouths than in their buckets. Helga's own bucket was filled, and she was just about to gather the kids when the tingling started.
It began at her feet, and worked its way up her legs with an uncomfortable heat. At first it was just a prickling sensation, but heat grew to unbearable pain, and it was all she could do not to scream out in agony. She looked down at her feet, surprised not to see flames writhing where there should be an inferno by now.
Something was terribly wrong.
She quickly gathered the children, and told them to stay in the orchard. "I'll be right back, I promise," she whispered, and gave them each a swift hug before running for the house.
They could only have been gone for a few hours in the orchard, but the valley, then peaceful and drowsy, was now bustling with people. Smoke choked the air and stained the perfectly blue, cloudless sky, and people were jeering, laughing, and swinging pitchforks and torches in the air.
Above it all was the rising screams and shrieks, piercingly loud and filled with an unspeakable agony, the same agony that twisted through her own limbs and clouded her mind.
Her heart dropped to her feet with a sickening lurch as it dawned on her what was happening. Someone was being burned at the stake, but who, and why did it feel like she was in the inferno with them? She ruthlessly suppressed the feeling of dread and bile rising in her throat as she shoved herself through the crowd, not caring that she was throwing herself into an angry mob.
Helga's scream caught in her throat as she reached the front of the mob. There, both tied to stakes surrounded by an inferno of twisting, angry flames, were her mother and father. The sickeningly sweet smell of burning flesh filled her lungs, and choked back another scream. Her heart dropped to her feet.
She ran for them, crying and screaming, not knowing what to do, only knowing that she had to do something, anything.
The mob, realizing that Helga had broken through, pulled her back from the pyres and battered her back into the crowd. "Let the witches burn! Cleanse them of their devilry!" a soot-stained, leering man shouted at her. He jabbed his pitchfork at the pillars of flame in emphasis. He was smiling, but it was an evil smile, a smile filled with the pleasure of watching two innocents burn for a crime they had not committed.
"They're not witches!" she screamed through her tears. "They're my parents!" She twisted away from grabbing hands, trying to reach her parents again. Where was the knife she always carried in her pocket?
"Burn the witch-child! Burn the witch-child!" The voices of the mob rang out again, and this time they directed their jeers at Helga.
"I'm not a witch!" she shrieked again, trying to escape the hands that groped for her.
"Burn her!" others chanted. She looked up into the face of a handsome young man with curly brown hair, a few years older than herself at most, whose chanting was the loudest. "Burn her!"
Helga ran from the burning bodies of he parents, now trying to save her own life. She sobbed, knowing she was leaving her parents to die. But she couldn't do anything. Terror drove her legs faster and faster as she sprinted away from the sickening sight.
The mob followed, while the screams of her parents reached their piercing climax and died off abruptly. Only the sick jeers of the mob and the crackling of flames remained as Helga ran for her life.
A/N: Ironic, I know. The one interesting chapter I have, and it's super short. But at last, we are out of the boring chapters and into much more interesting territory. :)
-General Pajama Pants
Disclaimer: the Harry Potter Universe and all recognizable names, places, ideas, etc belong to J. K. Rowling. I am merely borrowing their awesomeness for the purpose of this story.