Canto II
"Find peace," she said, pausing to adjust her sandal.
He saw her in that moment like Hermes, for the buoyancy of her step and the grace of her demeanor made him feel as abashed as a man caught naked by a message-bearing god. Did her beatific presence portend good or evil, however?
"And if I try and find that peace does not exist?" he asked, by habit of being contrary and ornery.
"If you really intend to try, you will find it. Unless you are plagued by blue frunklings instead."
She was ministering to a dead bird, perhaps one of the beautiful, magical nightingales that swept through the darkness of the Forbidden Forest. "Poor thing," she whispered, "it didn't know what side it was on when, shaken from its home in the brush, it entered this battlefield. It was alone in its last, frightful flight."
Kneeling in the pooling moonlight, Luna Lovegood embodied her name, tracing shapes with her wand that Severus recognized to be diagnostic healing spells. A cry of delight came from her lips, as sudden and natural as a drop of dew landing on the petal of a violet, and she peered more closely at her frail patient.
"Never mind," she said with a blossoming whimsey, "it's only been hit by a stunner."
So saying, she freed the incapacitated creature from its paralysis. It struggled for a moment, weary and hesitant on its feet, but mere moments passed and it leaped into the air, as vibrant and strong as Pegasus.
Such true and natural gentleness is rare in human beings, Severus thought to himself, and no sooner did the idea manifest in his mind than she turned towards him to smile. But the greater the good side, the greater the shadow side. What evil lurks in her heart that she tries to atone for?
He remained silent, moved but unmoving, having nothing to say and less to do. The Ravenclaw was not thus afflicted; she breezily called forth her patronous (a hare) and sent it skipping away with the instructions to lead the body-collecting party to their place.
When she had finished, she looked to her former Professor with the lucid eyes of the somewhat mad and suggested, "Should we find a place to be for awhile? I think I'd like to read some Virgil."