One problem Liz hadn't considered about the changes at Hogwarts, was that the greater number of students and staff in the castle made it harder to sneak around. Of course, she didn't spend a lot of time sneaking around, so it made sense that she hadn't thought of it at first. And as soon as she did think about it, she realised she could just use her invisibility cloak again, so the 'problem' immediately disappeared five seconds after she noticed it in the first place.
Though there was something odd about this cloak. Liz hadn't thought much of it at first, since it wasn't like she'd known anything about invisibility cloaks in the first place — she'd only seen the one, so why shouldn't she assume it was a perfectly ordinary example? Since then she'd looked into it a little, out of curiosity, and it turns out, yeah, this cloak wasn't perfectly ordinary. Clothing which attempted to make the wearer invisible had been around for some time, and there were a whole bunch of different ways to go about it, but most of them in the modern day used one of two strategies. The more common type — and the older one, dating back to ancient bloody Greece — was to weave disillusionment spells into the fabric. Long ago this would have been done through a somewhat involved ritual, weaving the whole cloak under the moonlight, but now could be done just by stitching in a certain set of runes with metal thread. The other was simply to make the cloth out of demiguise fur, which had natural disillusioning properties — demiguises were from the forests of sub-Saharan Africa, so this technique had only cropped up after Arab traders stumbled across them exploring the eastern coast, back in the Middle Ages.
Now, disillusionment spells were good for most purposes people wanted invisibility cloaks for, but they weren't perfect. If you looked closely there was a sort of shimmer, light playing off the fabric oddly, there was a slight delay as the wearer moved, the spells not reacting quite quickly enough. They were fine when sneaking around in low-light conditions, for old thieves breaking in places or slipping into military encampments to assassinate enemy commanders — those were probably the most important things invisibility cloaks were used for throughout history — but if you got too close to someone, or were somewhere with too much light, anyone even halfway paying attention would notice you. Also, demiguise fur gradually lost power after being separated from the animal — cloaks made from it would last a decade, at most. Enchantment-based cloaks also had a natural lifespan, due to the power channelled through the wire slowly scorching the cloth around the runes; the old style woven through ritual didn't have that problem, but they still faded slowly over time, and every known example had broken with the death of the crafter. Ritual magic could be funny like that, sometimes.
Early on in her reading about invisibility cloaks, that was the first problem Liz had noticed: her cloak was old. She didn't know how old exactly, but Dumbledore had borrowed it from James before his death — meaning he'd had it for longer than a decade, so it couldn't be the demiguise-fur kind. If James had used it when he was in school, that meant it was probably old enough to start showing signs of wear if it was the enchantment-based kind, and if it were the ritual kind, whoever had made it had probably been a Potter, and therefore dead by now. Out of curiosity, Liz had asked Nilanse if she knew how long it'd been in the family, not really expecting an answer — it was certainly older than Nilanse, and the Potters had a lot of shite, she didn't expect the elves to know everything about all of it. So she'd been a little surprised when Nilanse had immediately answered, and a lot surprised at the answer she'd gotten.
The cloak had belonged to Violante Peverell, wife of Hardwin Potter — Hardwin and Violante were literally the first Lord and Lady Potter, raised to the Wizengamot back in the 13th Century. Meaning the cloak was at least seven centuries old. And, according to family legend, it was an old Peverell relic that had been in Violante's family for generations, left to her as the last living heir of the family — the Potters had gotten some of their original wealth from inventing potions, yes, but Violante's inheritance was a huge boost, and probably had something to do with them getting onto the Wizengamot in the first place — meaning that, if the story was true, it must be centuries older than that. It could easily be well over a thousand years old.
That was, quite simply, impossible. No invisibility cloak lasted that long.
Hell, no cloak lasted that long — without the use of pretty serious preservation spells, normal wear and decay would see any cloth falling apart long before that. And even with preservation spells, it should be in pretty shitty condition by now. But the cloth was still perfectly smooth, without any visible defects whatsoever.
And that was another problem: this thing didn't look like an invisibility cloak. Normally they were, you know, invisible? Poking around while Hermione had been getting fitted for new uniforms, Liz had stumbled across a small selection of invisibility cloaks, just by chance — in the bright lights of the shop, you could definitely tell something was there, not perfectly blending into the background, but they were, well. The way Liz's cloak would be visible — the cloth pale and smooth and silvery, like moonlight — until it was properly worn, only then blinking out, that was not normal. She suspected it was theoretically possible to enchant such a thing, and would probably cut down on wear around the runes, but would require much more complex enchanting, making the things even more expensive than they were already. Malkin had been asking for sixty to seventy-five galleons, depending on the style, which was, what, seventeen thousand pounds? Seriously, ridiculous...
The invisibility cloaks at Malkin's had felt like, you know, cloth, faintly rough to the touch, slight bumps here and there where the runes had been stitched in. Liz's cloak, on the other hand felt...well, not like cloth. Smooth and cool and...almost damp — kind of like what she imagined passing her hand through a morning mist would be like if it were much, much more dense. She didn't really notice while wearing it, but just running her hand over the cloth, it was very odd, the magic woven into it sending a chill down her spine.
Whatever this was, it was not natural. Liz was hardly an expert, but even she could tell that much.
In fact, she had an odd suspicion she knew exactly what this thing was, stumbling across the idea entirely by chance. All the talk about babies and whatever, what they should send for gifts, someone had mentioned fairy tales mages grew up with, that it might be a nice idea to send books of them to the muggle parents. Explaining what the stories were like to the muggleborns in the group, one had caught Liz's attention, so, on one of the slow days in the first week of classes she'd looked it up. After reading the story, she'd tracked down a book on Artefacts — that is, objects mages believed were literally created by actual gods.
And so Liz learned about the Deathly Hallows, a trio of objects said to have been crafted by a god of death. (Sources disagreed on which one exactly, but they were mostly interchangeable, so it didn't really matter.) There were multiple stories about where they'd come from and how long they'd been around, but it was generally agreed that all three had been collected by the Peverells before the 10th Century. They'd lost the Elder Wand first, and Liz had actually heard of that one before — supposedly the wand of Emeric the Evil, an English Dark Lord of the 12th Century, had passed from wizard to wizard (mostly through murder) all the way through to Loxias, a vampire rebel in 18th Century Italy. Liz had always thought the claim that these men had a super special wand or whatever was just silly posturing, maybe a metaphor for inheriting Emeric's legacy or whatever, but the book on Artefacts certainly claimed the thing had special properties. The Resurrection Stone, which could supposedly be used to summon the spirits of the dead — just to talk, get advise from wise ancestors or whatever — had been lost as the family died out; rumours of its continued existence cropped up here and there, particularly associated with the Gaunts (once close allies of the Peverells), but had never been confirmed. After a few famous uses of the Cloak of Invisibility by Peverells, it vanished from the public eye by the 11th Century, and was never seen or heard of again.
Perhaps, brought by the last Peverell into the House of Potter, and quietly passed down father to son ever since.
That odd design, on the pin that held the thing closed at the collar — a wolf, shaded under the wings of a bird, with a swastika in its mouth? Well, Liz had asked Tamsyn at one point, out of curiosity, and apparently the swastika (or something that looked very similar) had once been used by the Norse to represent life, or the world, you know, big universal stuff. She'd checked one of the big old rune dictionaries in the library, and yeah, it was in there — not used in modern enchanting, since they stuck with a more regular alphabetic system, but. (According to Tamsyn, in the early 20th Century the swastika had been commonly used as a good-luck charm in Europe — picked up through imperial conquests in India, where it was a religious symbol — the Nazis adopting it to exploit the good vibes around it for themselves. Which, news to Liz, good to know.) So, the swastika was in the wolf's mouth, almost like it was eating it — the wolf was a symbol of death in some cultures, so that tracked. Also, the wings? She would guess that was supposed to be a raven, or a crow or whatever, which was another symbol of death. So. Yeah.
It seemed pretty likely that her father's invisibility cloak wasn't just any ordinary old thing, but actually a legendary artefact supposedly constructed by literal Death.
Liz was still sceptical that gods or whatever existed, of course — but the books she'd read and people she'd talked to seemed very certain that Artefacts existed, as a matter of historical record. Where exactly the things came from, well, that was more debatable. Lisa argued there was no reason they couldn't have been made by people, with techniques that had simply been lost; Draco had said they were probably made through rituals, conducted by dozens of priests, and if you got enough mages working on the same thing all kinds of weird shite could happen. (The laws of magic tended to bend when enough power was thrown at something.) Some of Liz's friends, Daphne and Susan in particular, were very certain that Artefacts really were created by some higher power, though it was very possible that people had misinterpreted or forgotten what exactly that higher power was — Susan used the example of the Deathly Hallows specifically, saying that the Stone sounded like something Death might have made, but that the Wand and the Cloak would make more sense if they came from somewhere else.
Like, the Wand tended to pass through murder, yes, but that could just be because people wanted the thing, there was no reason it couldn't have been made by, say, a god of magic or something, which would make more thematic sense. And the Cloak, well, there were invisibility cloaks in Celtic myths, and they were associated with trickster figures, so. Susan thought the Cloak was actually an Artefact of a god called Lleu in Cambrian or Lugh in Gaelic, who was the king of their pantheon, patron of poets and enchanters, but was also a tricky son of a bitch, patron of thieves and con artists — the Romans directly compared the Gaulish version to Hermes — and in legends he did have an invisibility cloak, so. (The king of their pantheon also being a trickster type might seem weird, but Daphne's explanation was that Lugh was the god of everything someone needed to know to be a good king, and sometimes kings needed to be tricky sons of bitches.) The Peverells had been death cultists, you see, it's likely their own stories of where they came from had overtaken whatever previous history there might have been, these things could be complicated.
Talking about the Cloak, Susan had glanced at Liz, an odd sly flicker in her head — Liz suspected that Susan had a pretty good idea where at least one of the supposedly lost Deathly Hallows had ended up.
And she had to admit, Liz's uncertainty about the explanation for where they came from aside, this cloak was seriously odd. The way the invisibility worked, sure, and the fact that it still worked, but more than that, it was... She'd walked through Pince's trip ward in the Restricted Section, and it'd just ignored her. Normal invisibility cloaks didn't hide you from wards. That one time, Pince had cast a human-presence revealing charm, and the magic had crawled through the room...and straight through Liz, as though she weren't even there — and those spells worked by detecting the impression of the human soul on ambient magic, they were absolutely impossible to fool. That shouldn't have happened, by all rights Liz should have been caught.
She was still sceptical that gods existed. But it'd only taken a week of intermittent research, between the minimal homework at the beginning of term, before Liz had managed to convince herself that this was definitely the legendary Cloak of Invisibility.
(Liz had been tempted to write Sirius and ask if he knew what the cloak was, since she'd heard stories about him and James playing around with it back in their school days, but had decided against it — talking to her friends, she'd noticed how weirdly superstitious purebloods could be about this stuff, not worth the bother.)
(...Maybe she should ask Severus about it, since his reaction to the note that Christmas proved he'd known about it too, but that sounded even more uncomfortable.)
So, the chances of her being caught sneaking around the castle after dark were pretty much zero, was the point.
Liz waited until everyone had gone to bed — or everyone she'd been hanging out with, anyway, some of the older students were probably still up. She pulled her school robes back on, mostly for the warmth — it was only halfway through September, but it could get pretty chilly in the Valley at night, especially with the wind — the invisibility cloak flung over her shoulders. It took a bit to find where the pin was supposed to go, as smooth and featureless as the cloth was, but eventually she got it, pulled the hood over her head and left her room. After curfew, the lights in the dorms had been dimmed, still enough to see everything in the circle their rooms were in, but the hallways leading off were very dark, pits of blackness in which she could see only an impression of the shape of the walls. It was pretty damn quiet too — there was a faint hissing of distant voices, but far off, aside from that nothing.
She didn't head for the hallway back up toward the common room — there were probably still people in there, and they'd see the front door opening — instead turning toward the fifth-year girls' rooms. As pitch-black as the hallway was, illuminated only by the entrance behind her and the exit metres ahead, Liz kept close to one wall, her fingers occasionally brushing against it, her breath thick and harsh in her ears. (She did not like feeling trapped.) Since she was touching the wall, she noticed immediately when another hallway branched off, she turned that way, walked a short distance until she came to an intersection. There were lights on in here, not as bright as outside their rooms, but enough to paint the surfaces of the intersection in a thin, moody light. She knew there was an exit out... Well, the ouroboros over that door meant it lead to the common room, so she thought it was this one. After a couple uncomfortable minutes walking through darkness, she reached another intersection, one hall marked as leading to the boys' side (a delta, the fourth-years' rooms), and there were voices echoing down from another hall, but no ouroboros, probably the library or the baths or something, two more exits going off who knew where — Liz actually recognised this intersection, she wanted to turn this way...
After a rather longer stretch of silent darkness, Liz reached a dead end. There should be a latch somewhere, it'd be safe to cast a light charm and search for it, but it was far easier to just hiss «open» — there was a tiny click, the wall opening just a crack at the corner, faint light peeking through. Liz pushed it open, stepping out into the hallway beyond, pushed the entirely featureless wall closed behind her. (One of the stones making up the wall had a tiny little snake wrapped around a flower, but it was very worn, Liz had found the exit long before ever noticing it — it would open to parseltongue, despite Emily Scrimgeour's claim back in first year that they only worked as exits, but it was just too hard to find to be worth using it as an entrance.) She was exactly where she'd expected, on the third floor to the west of the Grand Staircase, nearby windows looking out over the Lake below. Behind the tapestry over here was a hidden staircase that would bring her right down to the ground floor, and from there it was a short walk behind the Grand Staircase to a door leading straight to the greenhouses, which was much easier to slip out through than the main doors. Dorea had used the same exit to meet with Sirius, apparently, which was kind of funny...
Supposedly the secret passages and stuff were hard for other people to find, but Liz had never had any problem — she'd never been fooled by things like fake doors or trick stairs or anything either. But then, being a mind mage and Seer was cheating: most of them were covered by illusions, and those didn't tend to work very well on people like her.
On the ground floor, she passed by one of the junior professors out on a walk — Liz wasn't sure who, she didn't have him — but reached the door to the greenhouses without being detected. The space between the rows of greenhouses was a bit overgrown, clearly Sprout didn't bother stopping shite from growing out here, but it wasn't too difficult to pick through. And at the opposite end of the rows, she was only a short walk away from where the forest started. She picked her way down the rocky hill — the road was on the shallowest incline up the cliff the castle stood on, descending in any other direction could be a bit of a pain — before too long vanishing under the trees.
She hadn't forgotten Severus's warning not to go poking about in the Forbidden Forest — she didn't think it was likely anyone would know she was out here, thanks to the invisibility cloak, but she still thought it was better to follow the rules anyway. After all, it wasn't like she wanted to get eaten by a giant talking spider. The Forbidden part of the Forest was mostly on the opposite side of the Lake, Liz picked deeper into the trees, almost-but-not-quite parallelling the path toward the village, angled further away from the acromantulae. Supposedly there were wilderfolk up in the hills in this direction, but they weren't treaty lands, part of the Hogwarts grounds. They would have Care of Magical Creatures lessons out here sometimes, the occasional trek through the woods for Herbology class. (Mostly in the spring, third-years were supposed to have a couple of those but Sprout had cancelled them on account of the dementors.) Remembering Moody's lecture, Liz went rather deeper into the trees than she might have bothered with, the branches overhead creaking and rustling in the breeze, the occasional hoot of an owl or scrabbling of one animal or another.
Finally, Liz came to a stop. She was positive she was still under the wards, but she couldn't even see the castle or the village anymore, just trees trees trees. This should do.
It'd been long enough that Liz had needed to re-learn the spell to draw animals to herself, that she'd found to do her blood subsumption ritual and only actually used once before Severus had insisted she do it inside instead. The dementors weren't a problem anymore, but he was still ordering her a rabbit once a month, just did it last weekend — Liz wasn't complaining, since doing it indoors was just easier than having to go all the way out into the forest in the middle of the night, so whatever. It was a kind of paling, technically, placing an effect over an area that drew animals toward it — not literally any living thing, just ones that had a mind, even if was an extremely primitive one, which included most mammals and birds. Theoretically, it should affect humans too, but the compulsion was weak enough a person probably wouldn't notice. There was no visible sign the spell was in effect, but Liz could feel it, a faint tingle on the air around her, smooth and calm.
The first sign that she was getting anything was a rustling in the brush, the source invisible through the plants and shadows, but Liz could feel the faint sparks of simple minds — rats, presumably, or some other kind of small rodent. And up in the trees, a skittering of squirrels, a few birds flittering around. Gradually larger animals started to show up, the first a big bloody owl up a tree, glowing eyes staring down at Liz's tiny little clearing, polecats (or weasels or minks or whatever, she didn't fucking know) slinking around — and not chasing after the rats, the paling prevented them from hurting each other, similar to a pacification charm — some rabbits. She saw a couple deer in the near distance, but they didn't approach very close, like the owl keeping their distance. Liz had noticed this last time too, things like deer and the larger birds were affected by the spell, but they were intelligent enough to partially resist the—
Liz caught sight of odd glittery multicoloured lights flitting between the trees, orange and blue and green, dancing around — too quickly to be a person with their wand lit, too static and curving in random directions to be spellglows. She squinted, tried to see through the trees, her hand tightening around her wand as they got closer, was there something out here that—
Oh, they were fairies! The tiny little winged kind, she meant, obviously. As they danced through the air toward her, bouncing to and fro and giggling to each other — the sound bright and tinkling, like tiny bells — they finally got close enough to make them out, humanoid little figures flying around on big glittery butterfly wings, glowing in various colours, little sparks of magic drifting toward the ground released with every flap. Liz had seen fairies in person before, but just in the pet shop on Diagon Alley, never in the wild. Though, as much as the things had been around for basically forever, this wasn't technically their natural environment — fairies, pixies, and doxies had all been brought over from the otherworld, but, unlike goblins and forest elves (the original people the goblins had enslaved, their descendants becoming today's house-elves), their move here had been accidental, eggs hidden in supplies being brought over and hatching on this side, and quickly escaping.
For whatever reason, the otherworld had a lot of human-shaped things. There were the beings, like the Avalonians and goblins and elves, and a ton of other kinds too — earth just had the one species, which had split off into all the other different beings they had now (mostly through ritual magic), but for whatever reason the otherworld had a lot of different kinds who'd all evolved alongside each other — but a lot of their animals were human-shaped too. They had an equivalent to monkeys, you know, close relatives to the great fairies (English annoyingly used the same word both for the people and the little things) that hadn't evolved intelligence, but also other things too, for some inexplicable reason. The little fairies and pixies and doxies obviously weren't close relatives to the great fairies — they had insectile wings and strange eyes, and hatched from eggs — but had ended up with a very similar body plan...somehow?
(Liz had no idea, the otherworld sounded so bloody strange sometimes.)
Or, that they'd been brought to earth accidentally wasn't entirely accurate — pixies had, yes, and doxies had originally, but toward the end the great fairies had started keeping them around on purpose. For whatever reason, doxies could just eat the pollution that would make the great fairies ill...which wasn't really a surprise, doxies ate fucking everything. And fairies had sometimes been kept as pets, especially for children, so the original population might have been brought here intentionally. Regardless, enough of them had managed to escape to establish a breeding population outside of the control of the great fairies, and now they were invasive species pretty much everywhere all around the world. And that had been a problem for a time — fairies and pixies hunted bugs, there'd literally been a few famines thousands of years ago caused by crashes in pollinator populations — but it'd eventually balanced out as native birds and squirrels and the like learned to hunt them in turn, humans more aggressively exterminating nests when they found them. These days, pixies and doxies were just pests, gotten rid of when they were found but too stubborn to get rid of entirely, and fairies were raised for potions ingredients and as pets. (The little sparks of magic they let off flying around supposedly helped plants grow better, and they ate bugs, so they were often kept in gardens and greenhouses as well.) The wings in particular had some decent uses, though Liz had also read of fairy eyes and hair and more rarely blood being used too.
You could get fairy hair and wings without killing the fairy — the wings would just grow back, you could get a fresh pair from the same fairy every few weeks — but obviously getting eyes usually required slaughtering the things. Which had struck Liz as a bit sketchy at first, to say the least, but for all that they looked human(-ish), fairies did not have being-level intelligence. Feeling their minds now, they were definitely more complex than Liz would guess based only on their size, but on the level of, like, a cat, or something like that. Still kind of creepy, seeing jars of glittery little fairy eyeballs on a shelf, but it wasn't a big deal.
The fairies flew in little dizzying circles around Liz's clearing, the air filled with their little tinkling giggles, the lights bright enough to be dazzling against the darkness. Curious, Liz threw off her hood, pushed the cloak back off her shoulders — the fairies reacted to her sudden appearance, more than the other animals (though the deer did visibly tense), freezing in their dance, chittering and clicking meaninglessly. But the paling was still in effect, the pacification element gradually wore away at their fright, before long once again flying around. Two were having some kind of play fight, chasing each other around, one occasionally tackling the other, the pair spinning as they fell toward the ground, before splitting up and zooming off again. Liz noticed one teasing a polecat with a twig, poking at it, the polecat batting back, the fairy dancing away each time, giggling to itself.
One fairy came right up and landed on Liz's shoulder, suddenly enough Liz jumped. From up close, it was a tiny little thing — the glow made them look bigger than they really were — from toe to head maybe the length of her middle finger, its skin a pale white — not white people 'white', but white white — faintly tinted lavender-ish, its long hair a similar pale colour she couldn't quite make out under the blue-ish glowing. The wings were shaped like a butterfly's, but translucent and in vivid neon colours, red and green and orange and gold, refracting the light from itself and the other fairies around like glass. Its eyes also looked odd, without any identifiable iris or pupil or anything, but a solid blueish colour, shiny and glassy, almost like little gemstones.
Which Liz knew they were, technically — ones made with a biological process, obviously, but. The high-magic environment in the otherworld led to some weird bloody things happening, like the eyes of fairies, pixies, and doxies technically being a kind of biological reservoir stone. Fairies saw magic, their eyes absorbing the energy radiated from one thing or another, their brains then interpreting that information in much the same way an enchantment or ward system would. This was more useful in the otherworld, where everything was magical, but was more iffy on earth, though not useless — literally every living thing radiated magic, if only in very low intensities, and ambient magic gave them a background glow, at least enough to avoid the black-spots of inorganic materials. Supposedly, comparisons of modern fairy and pixie eyes to old ones, preserved from thousands of years ago, suggested they'd adapted to the low-'light' environment of Earth, had much more sensitive vision than the ones that'd originally come over from their homeworld, which was neat.
Reading about fairy eyes, Liz had wondered whether the same mechanism was exploitable to make extremely sensitive automated analysis tools (so you didn't need to use spells and do all the arithmancy every time), and maybe even magic-seeing glasses, which would be so cool. She wasn't nearly advanced enough in enchanting yet to even say whether or not it was possible, though.
Also, the fairy was completely naked, because of course it was — making clothes required a level of intelligence fairies simply didn't have. It was pretty common for humans to make clothes for fairies, which they would sometimes tolerate (they could be picky about colours and fabrics), but it wasn't something they did themselves, no different than how some weird people put jumpers on their dogs or whatever. The fairy on Liz's shoulder was female, she was pretty sure, the glow blurred out the finer details. It definitely didn't have tits — but then, it wouldn't, fairies hatched from eggs and the adults fed them chewed-up bugs, like birds — and she couldn't make out anything obviously female between its legs from this angle, but she didn't see any sign of a prick or anything, so she was assuming. Could be wrong, the fairies in the pet shop had been put in little beaded shifts, and the drawings in books she'd seen were normally censored for innocent young eyes, she really had no idea what the visual difference between male and female fairies was anyway? Whatever, not important.
It was a funny-looking thing, but kind of pretty, she guessed. Especially with the glowing and the glittering and all. She could see why people liked them. "Hello, there."
The fairy chittered at her for a second — the noises weren't completely meaningless, like how different kinds of birdsong meant different things, but it wasn't really language — reached up to poke at her earring with its tiny little fingers. (Fairies did like shiny things.) And then it plonked down on its bum, dragged a bit of Liz's hair over its shoulder, and started running its hands through it, making little clicky noises to itself.
...Okay, then.
Right, so, Liz was doing something out here. Putting the fairy on her shoulder out of mind — Liz couldn't feel the tugging on her hair at all, the fairy light enough she could hardly feel it sitting there either, and the clicking wasn't that distracting — she picked out one of the polecats poking around the little clearing. Liz had immediately decided she wouldn't bother with the Imperius — it could probably smash through shields and occlumency better than Liz could on her own, but mind magic was much more versatile, there was really no point. The Cruciatus, though, had its uses. Not for actually torturing people, of course, especially since there were pain hexes that wouldn't get her killed by dementors for her trouble. No, the Cruciatus was a very effective shieldbreaker — would work against pretty much any shield charm in existence, when cast with enough power behind it, even ones completely resistant to proper shield-breaking charms. Arithmantic, dark, light, didn't matter. She could imagine being attacked by someone more powerful and experienced than her, and needing to get something she could hit him with, having the Cruciatus on hand might be good for that.
Only if she didn't plan on anyone seeing it, obviously. She wasn't entirely confident on how the law worked, but she was pretty sure using an Unforgivable in self-defence was still illegal. Probably less illegal, but she suspected a single day in Azkaban would kill her, so the distinction hardly mattered. So, only for use in extreme emergencies, and if she couldn't finish the person off with something lethal (to make sure no one would find out) she'd probably have to flee the country — as much as she did like her new house, abandoning it was better than literally dying.
Now, Liz had known about the three Unforgivable curses before, of course, but the books that described them didn't give enough detail to actually cast them — she was pretty sure that was on purpose. Moody, on the other hand, had. She thought this was on purpose too, making the point that they really weren't that hard to do, all this mythology about them only being for super-powerful super-scary dark mages a bunch of nonsense. It was possible he'd even expected them to experiment with them — casting them was perfectly legal, even on animals, so long as they never used them on a person. (Well, on a human, using them on wilderfolk, nymphs, or vampires was perfectly fine, because British law continued to be terrible.) His whole point had been that the only way they could protect themselves from this shite was to know about it, and obviously you were going to understand a curse better if you'd actually seen it cast. Moody hadn't actually demonstrated the things for them — Liz assumed the Board wouldn't have gone along with that — but giving them enough information to try them out for themselves was just as good.
She thought so, anyway. Moody was very odd and intense, his occlumency as cold and solid as steel, so, just guessing.
As far as the power requirement went, she didn't think she'd have any trouble with that — Moody had said any adult mage could cast them, and Liz was powerful for her age, so that should be fine? The Green Death was the more powerful of the two, that one might be a stretch, at least without hurting herself. The part Liz did expect to have trouble with was the intent...more for the Cruciatus, honestly. She could probably summon enough hatred and anger, the will to hurt something, to get at least something out, but Moody had said that, while that would work, it wasn't quite casting it right — in order to cast the Cruciatus exactly as intended, you needed to enjoy the suffering you were about to cause.
Honestly, Liz didn't think she had that in her. She had hurt people of course, but... It'd taken a while for the Dursleys to accept the new way of things at the house, they'd try shite now and then, and she would sometimes do little things to them — she'd never done anything to them just because she could, but as retaliation for something they did first, to reinforce that it wasn't going to work. And the things she'd done to them had never really been as bad what they'd done to her, either...except for the threats to literally kill Vernon, she guessed...but just enough for them to get the point, you know. The thought that she could do whatever she wanted to them had occurred to her, obviously, but she'd never seriously considered it.
(She'd just wanted them to leave her alone.)
And there was the incident with Lavender and Parvati, and putting snakes in Draco and Pansy and Millie and Theo's beds, and...that was it, really, everything she thought should count. She hadn't really thought about the snake thing that much, from the how much is this going to hurt angle — she'd just wanted to scare them off of fucking with her, and hey, it'd worked, good job past Liz. It'd been an easily-accessible means to retaliate that she'd had, due to being a parselmouth — and Draco, Theo, and even Pansy would have thrashed her in a duel at the time (without cheating with mind magic), thanks to lessons they'd all gotten before Hogwarts — the only consideration she'd made past that confirming that none of the snakes were so venomous that there'd be serious medical consequences. She hadn't wanted to seriously hurt them, just scare them. How she'd felt about it, well, mostly just satisfied that it'd worked, she guessed? Pansy being a bloody baby about it had been kind of amusing, but besides that.
She'd been angry at Lavender and Parvati, and beating up on them had been kind of fun, sure, in the same way that winning was always fun — and also very satisfying, but just because she'd been very angry. She had held Lavender under a pain curse for a little bit, but... She'd been angry, yes — she'd always disliked Lavender (and Parvati, somewhat less so), but her treatment of Hermione had abruptly made her one of Liz's absolute least favourite people — and Lavender's screaming and whimpering had just been...funny? Like, in a dark, mean way, sure, but. And the sheer disdain she had for Lavender had been kind of stifling, honestly (Liz's mind really was very loud), which was related. Liz had been hit with that same pain hex, it did not hurt that badly, fucking baby...and then going on about whining to her grandfather afterward, honestly...
None of that really said anything great about Liz's character, of course — not that that really mattered, she was fully aware of what she was already — but there hadn't been any of the "pure, sadistic enjoyment" Moody had said was needed to motivate a proper Cruciatus. Honestly, Liz didn't like being around people in pain? Which was really pretty obvious when you thought about for two seconds: she was a bloody mind mage, when someone nearby was hurting she felt it too. Not the exact same as they felt it, of course, but it still wasn't pleasant. It could get really distracting sometimes, in fact — not so bad she couldn't hold a pain hex on Lavender, for example, but talking to someone who had a twisted ankle from tripping up the stairs or a bruise from bumping into something or was just ill or whatever was a real pain sometimes. If they were successfully ignoring it, then it wasn't a big deal, but if they were preoccupied with it, then she was preoccupied too.
(Being in the same room as Dorea at any point around her seizures or during her migraines could be fucking miserable — and she had been around the latter plenty, since it was normally Liz who would check on her when she was holed up in her room, bring her homework or food or whatever. Looking back on it, with what she knew now about how little Dorea thought of her, Liz kind of wished she hadn't bothered. That's what she got for trying to be nice, she guessed...)
Yeah, she'd checked the memory in her pensieve, and Liz had been pretty angry,, the most obvious thing besides that how pathetic she thought Lavender (and Parvati, less so) was, the disdain so thick in the air it was almost suffocating. A dark sort of satisfaction that she'd easily kicked both their arses, and gotten Hermione her things back, but not anything even close to the "pure, sadistic enjoyment" Moody had referred to. She suspected that just wasn't in her.
Being around people in pain wasn't overwhelmingly terrible, really, but it was still unpleasant enough that she couldn't imagine enjoying it. Maybe just the theoretical thought that the person she hated was going to be hurt, and she didn't have to be around for it, but she didn't think that counted? So. Yeah, she could probably cast an imperfect Cruciatus, but she kind of doubted she'd ever manage a proper one. Not that it mattered so much, she was pretty sure an imperfect one would shatter shield charms anyway, if she put enough power into it.
But she might as well try for a proper one, as long as she was at it. The thought of hurting the Dursleys was, just, nothing — all she wanted was to never have to see them again, and she'd already accomplished that — and Pansy and Lavender she mostly just found pathetic. Ron Weasley might work...but, honestly, doing something to him would just make him more annoying, and trying to imagine doing it, she couldn't ignore that well enough. (Besides, she just wanted him to leave her alone.) Um, she guessed there were a few, like, writers for the Prophet and Witch Weekly she hated, and people on the Wizengamot or in the Ministry, but they were just names (if even that much), she didn't know any of them in person, so it was kind of hard to imagine—
Oh oh! Selwyn! Ceinwen Selwyn, the horrendous petty bitch, she might work. She was one of the most outwardly racist people in Slytherin, alongside Rowle probably the most stubborn about the Girl Who Lived not being welcome in the house. Which, at least since she'd started doing well in quidditch, Selwyn and the few remaining hold-outs were absurdly out-voted...even more than they'd already been in the minority in the first place — as noisy as the handful of bastards could be, most of Slytherin had never really given a damn about all that. Really, the only reaction most upper-year Slytherins had had for the Girl Who Lived being in their house now was teasing the Gryffindors about it, and nobody really cared at all anymore, so.
(It'd been slowly sinking in lately, with how some of the older students talked to her, how she'd occasionally catch second- and first-years especially watching her — as much as she still didn't have many actual friends, and it wasn't like people would just come up and talk to her for no reason, or at least not very often — but she was weirdly popular in Slytherin. Or, the rest of the house had a decently high opinion of her, at least. She didn't know how she felt about that.)
Anyway, she found Selwyn the most annoying of the racist idiots, for what were...probably not great reasons. For one thing, Selwyn was a bitch more often to Liz, personally, than the others tended to be — most of them ignored her, for the most part, but Selwyn would make snide, petty comments about one thing or another when Liz was in earshot, seemingly just in an effort to make Liz miserable. (They were generally on her appearance, and Liz already knew she looked like shite, so it was mostly ineffective.) Lately, there'd been a new genre of comments to do with Severus, which were weird, she hadn't really gotten what Selwyn was going for at first. Liz actually hadn't figured it out for herself, instead picking up from someone's head that Selwyn was implying she and Severus were having sex — specifically, that Liz had seduced him (what, as a bloody first-year?) as part of some kind of plot, to get away from Dumbledore, maybe, which was just a fucking weird thing to think, what the fuck — Liz had nearly drawn her wand and thrown a curse at Selwyn's stupid face just to make her shut the fuck up. She'd needed to hole up in her room for a few hours to properly calm down, had even missed a few classes, when she was asked about it claimed she was having a bad brain day. Which, she kind of had been after that, she guessed...
Thankfully, by the next time she was alone with Severus it hadn't been on her mind anymore. That was not something she wanted to be worrying about every time she saw him.
So, yeah, she kind of already wanted to curse the shite out of Selwyn just for putting that thought in her head — if she was going to get anywhere close to the right intent for a Cruciatus, Selwyn was probably the best target she could think of.
Just, start off imagining what it would be like, she guessed...except she wasn't really sure what it would be like. She'd never seen the curse cast, after all. Probably like that time with Lavender, just, more? Except Lavender was a fucking baby, so it might actually look pretty similar to that, when she thought about — the noise from her mind would be louder, but other than that. A lot of screaming and writhing, mindlessly trying to throw herself away from...
Even in her imagination, the screaming was annoying.
Liz sighed, the motion making the fairy still on her shoulder chitter at her — this wasn't going to work. The thought of Selwyn in pain was mostly, just...nothing. Vaguely satisfying, she guessed, but. And, actually imagining it meant thinking about how loud and unpleasant it would be, not just physically but also mentally. If Liz actually did cast the Cruciatus on Selwyn, she'd probably cringe at the agony taking over her mind, and stop immediately — even in her imagination, Liz couldn't ignore the fact that that's definitely what would happen, and trying to work up an intent of "pure, sadistic enjoyment" was kind of hard to do when she was fully aware that she would not enjoy it, at all. Maybe if she were better at controlling her own mind, she'd be able to just not think about that, enough to isolate the proper feeling long enough to put it into the curse, but no, this just wasn't going to work.
Oh well. She could try an imperfect version, at least. It wasn't difficult to work up anger at Selwyn, focussing on how much Liz very much hated that girl until her throat tightened and her stomach burned, that only took a few seconds. Her breath hot and thick, she yanked at the spot deep down in her mind where magic came from, hard, a wave of sharp, prickly tingles running over her head to toe as it came, magic flooding into her all... Well, channelling magic did feel pleasant, obviously — it was kind of a rush, like tipping into a dive on her broom, or that instant before Daphne kissed her, and in general felt good, warm and tingly and pleasant. Which was kind of funny, because she was aware the magic she channelled was dark by default, but whatever. Her magic being dark probably had something to do with the fairy letting out an odd sharp squeak and leaping off her shoulder, fluttering off to go chitter with the other fairies, but it felt nice to Liz, anyway.
Pushing the magic she was channelling through her hatred for Selwyn, like light focussed through a lens, Liz picked out one of the polecats poking around her little clearing. Her wand hand twitching just a little (from the anger or the magic or both), forcing the magic down her arm, she hissed, "Crucio."
The magic crystallised, suddenly sharp and cold and jagged, and then leapt from her wand — the spellglow was a bright orange, which meant she definitely hadn't cast it properly, it was supposed to be invisible. (Not that she'd expected to cast it properly, of course.) It zipped across the couple metres from here to there in a blink, and the polecat thing was immediately flailing against the ground, letting out a high ear-piercing screeching, most of the animals she'd drawn to her fleeing in fright. Liz grit her teeth against the noise, scrambled to keep the spell going — and it was still going, it was a sustained spell after all, a constant current of magic drawn up and through her and out, thick and hot, and...
Well, it felt kind of good, honestly, but that wasn't anything particular to this curse, channelling a lot of magic just always felt good. But that was kind of distracting, Liz let up on the curse after probably a few seconds, the sharp lurch of the power suddenly cutting off yanking a gasp out of her. She took a few shaky breaths, rubbing at the vague, dull warmth in her chest, little numb prickles along her arm — she'd probably put more power into it than completely necessary, but she hadn't done too much damage to herself, she knew from experience that this would go away in a couple hours at most. The screeching had also cut off immediately, the polecat left shivering in the mouldering twigs and old fallen leaves and whatever the fuck that covered the forest floor. It didn't immediately flee, as she'd kind of expected...but, watching it try to move, the after-effects of the curse were probably making it too clumsy to walk properly. That'd probably wear off before too long — after seizures, sometimes Dorea would have a limb that inexplicably stopped working for a little bit, Liz assumed it was a similar idea — though, as small as the thing was, and how much power she'd put into the curse, there was really no telling how much permanent damage she'd already done to it.
Not that it mattered — she was going to kill it when she was done anyway. That...kind of seemed like the more merciful thing to do, somehow? She didn't know...
She took a long, deep breath, reaching for her hatred and her magic for a second time. "Crucio." Again, she only held the spell for a few seconds, a bone-deep shiver running through her as the intense magic dispersed. That was a little faster, but working up the feeling necessary always made polarised spells take longer to cast — it took a second or two, sometimes, which was part of the calculation that went into using them in a duel. You know, polarised spells were more difficult to block, but they were also more difficult to cast — and could be more disorienting for the caster, depending on the emotion necessary and whether the charm and your magic got along — so, there was a bit of give and take there. And this curse in particular was powerful enough that it was...a bit much. Useable, sure, if she could get a couple seconds to form it properly, which might not be available to her in an emergency. And that lurch when she cut the spell off might be a problem.
It definitely worked, though, which was the point.
The polecat was letting out little high whimpering noises, just, shivering in its spot in the now empty and silent clearing. That second casting definitely hadn't been good for it — its mind was a bit...scattered, unfocused. It'd probably recover, maybe, it was hard to say for sure. Not that it mattered, it was just some random animal. It wouldn't really affect anyone if it didn't exist anymore, if it'd never existed in the first place. One polecat more or less in the world made no difference, Liz could just wipe this one out of existence. And probably should, really — who knew if it'd ever recover, and also the Cruciatus left signs that could be detected with analysis charms, so it was also evidence. She wanted it gone.
"Animam expedi." The magic tore out of her, harsher than she'd expected, yanking her stumbling forward a couple steps. The spellglow was a bright green, surprisingly bright — but, in the way of a lot of magical light, didn't actually hurt her eyes at all, despite the darkness around. It was oddly stretched, long and jagged — which, assuming it was as dense as any spellglow, would explain why it took so much power — the border uneven and wavering, rippling as the spell rapidly crawled through the air with an odd, zig-zagging, surging motion, until it struck the polecat, and abruptly blinked out of existence.
And the polecat went still and silent, the presence of its mind abruptly gone.
Liz took a second to gather herself, her breath thin, her fingers shaking just a little. She kind of had a headache, the dull, hot pulsing at the base of her skull that often came up when she pushed herself too hard — normally it only came with mind magic, which was slightly weird. The vague, tingly burning all through her chest and down her wand arm was not weird, though, that was pretty normal, you've cast too much magic stuff. Normally it took several powerful spells to get to this point, but both the Cruciatus and the Green Death were pretty serious curses, so. Not really surprised. Once she was more or less fine, she walked closer to the polecat, crouched down over the thing.
The air felt cooler, here, in a little bubble close to it. Liz hadn't noticed immediately, it was a pretty subtle difference, probably only a couple degrees — the feel of the magic, of the polecat's body, was more noticeable. To Liz, at least, it might be a Seer thing. An odd, tingly chill not so much against her skin as inside, reminding her very much of the cemetery at Godric's Hollow. Not as strong as that, more unfocused, but similar. That cemetery was supposedly haunted — there were rumours of lingering spirits, though no confirmed sightings of specific ones — and Moody had described the Green Death creating a kind of chill around it, the hand of Death leaving an echo on the mortal world, or whatever. It wasn't a big surprise that it'd feel similar to a haunted place to Liz, since that's basically what ghosts were, when you think about it.
The weird thing was, all the warmth and energy that came with a living body was, just, gone. Normally, when something died, the magic of its body took a while to fade away — after all, most of the cells in a body were still alive even after the major organs stopped working, it took some time for them all to gradually die off. According to Severus's advanced potions books, it often took hours. (Some ingredients from animals were useless for some potions if the tissues were fully dead, so they had to be harvested and put under preservation spells before the process finished.) Since a living body made a kind of magic of its own, Liz could feel the difference. Reaching out toward it with her mind, the polecat felt less like a recently killed animal...and more like one of her rabbits, after doing her subsumption ritual, all the energy of its life already stripped away.
That was...interesting. She wondered how the hell that worked.
Oh well, it didn't really matter, and Liz was hardly likely to answer the question sitting out here anyway. She stood up with a sigh, vanished the polecat's remains, and looked around her little clearing. Her animal-attracting paling was still in effect, she could feel it, but it was too quiet, her immediate surroundings absent of the bright sparks of their simple minds. The chill the Green Death left behind, maybe animals could feel that too, and were repelled by it enough to overpower the paling. That wouldn't be entirely unreasonable, you didn't need to have any magic to feel magic, so — animals were too stupid to identify what the feeling was, but if they were scared off by it, that wasn't really a surprise.
So Liz dispelled the paling, and started walking, in the direction of the school. She stopped after a minute or two, when she started to hear the normal noise of the forest around her, the eerie silence in her little clearing broken, and cast her paling again. It took a little longer for animals to start turning up this time, but they did soon enough. Liz picked a random rat, or whatever the hell that little thing was. Once again, it wasn't difficult to summon the wish that the thing be wiped out of existence — it was only a rat, for all practical purposes it already didn't exist. "Animam expedi."
Liz grit her teeth at the harsh burn of the magic surging through her — right, that was the last one for tonight. As before, the rat abruptly went limp the instant the odd-looking spellglow touched it, the other animals around fleeing with a squawking and the rustling of leaves and cracking of twigs. She crouched down over the thing, rubbing at her aching shoulder with a grimace, and once again there was an odd chill around the rat, the energy of its life completely gone.
Well. That curse was unexpectedly easy. It took a lot of power — her head and her shoulder were both burning, the joints in her wrist stinging, she was definitely done casting magic for the night. (Taking one of her healing potions before bed would probably be a good idea.) But then, Moody had said they weren't particularly difficult. The Killing Curse was the most powerful of the three, though not so bad the average adult mage couldn't manage it — Liz was powerful for her age, but she was still barely fourteen — and none of them were really complicated to do. But still, she was surprised by just how easy that had been. She hadn't cast the Cruciatus quite properly, but...
It seemed like they should be harder. Though, Moody had said there'd be no point in banning magic practically nobody could do anyway, which did make sense...
And there was something...weirdly familiar about the green of the Killing Curse. She couldn't say what else that particular shade of green looked like, it didn't remind her of anything specific, but she couldn't help the creeping, niggling feeling that she'd seen it before. But, when she thought about it, she had seen it before, at least twice — the first on Lily, and the second on herself. Of course, she didn't consciously remember that — she'd only been, what, fifteen months old at the time — but maybe that was enough for this vague sense of familiarity. She could imagine it would have been pretty traumatic, you know, so she wasn't surprised if it'd stuck with her.
...Now that she was thinking about it, she did remember, back when she'd been really little, having nightmares involving green lights, that would end with her waking up in a cold sweat (and usually crying), before Vernon nightmares had become a thing and they'd gradually gone away. Since she'd always been told her parents had died and she'd gotten her scars in a car crash, she'd assumed the green was, like, a traffic signal, or something...though that never had quite felt right, she just hadn't had a better explanation...
Generally, the fact that she'd witnessed her mother murdered right in front of her as a bloody toddler wasn't something she liked thinking about. She hadn't known until that first Hallowe'en at Hogwarts — the tenth-anniversary articles about it had included the detail of Lily's body being found in the nursery, right at the foot of Liz's cot, at the epicentre of the blast. Supposedly, her clothes had been a little scorched, but she'd been close enough to the cot that her body had been mostly untouched by whatever spell effect had destroyed the rest of the room — intact enough her parents had had an open-casket wake — which had been a very odd thing for Liz to read in the newspaper. She couldn't say how she'd felt about it exactly, but definitely something.
Liz didn't know how she felt about the knowledge that she'd witnessed her mother's murder — a death she'd faced knowingly, a ritual sacrifice to protect Liz — just in general? Like. Definitely something, she just didn't know what.
It'd occurred to her before that she could go back to that night, through her spirit-walking thing. Since she didn't have a clear memory of it to use as a focus — and the house had been destroyed by now, so she couldn't just go there — she'd need something that'd been in the room at the time. But Daedelus had had everything packed away, in case she ever decided she wanted it, so that shouldn't be difficult. That dog plushie she'd found in the nursery, that would probably work. It'd be pretty easy, the thought had occurred to her, but she'd never seriously considered doing it.
Even if she didn't remember it, she'd already seen it once — that seemed like more than enough already.
So. She'd successfully cast the two of the three that were of any potential use to her, that's all she'd wanted to do out here. A couple flicks of her wand dispelled the paling and vanished the rat. Liz shrugged the cloak back over her shoulders, pulled the hood over her head, and started back toward the castle. The further she got from where she'd cast the curses, the normal noise of the forest gradually started up around her, animals rustling around in the brush, the occasional hoot of an owl. And Liz plodded on through the trees, now and then casting a wandless light to make sure she didn't trip over anything — not really thinking about anything in particular, just, running through homework nonsense to distract herself from the Green Death and Lily, the ache left behind from channelling too much magic.
But that didn't trouble her too much for long, the quiet of the night seeping in, leaving her oddly calm, the magic of her cloak smooth and cool and comfortable against her skin.
[Violante Peverell] — "Iolanthe", the canon name, is modern, probably a back-formation from "Yolanda". A mistaken one, since that's not where Yolanda comes from. Yolanda does date back to the right time period, but this is the original Latin spelling, which stuck-up purebloods are more likely to have used, especially at the time. (In case you couldn't tell from the Founders, JKR didn't give any thought to historical appropriateness when choosing names for background characters.)
[apparently the swastika (or something that looked very similar) had once been used by the Norse to represent life, or the world, you know, big universal stuff] — One of those interesting things about world cultures is that that same symbol was independently invented multiple times, all over the world, and even given similar meanings. Early northern Germanic peoples really did use it, and of course it's used in India, where it's used by all the major Dharmic religions (except Sikhism, I think?) with different but similar meanings — this is where modern Europeans got it from, its use was common in Europe before that but eventually died out — and was even used by several groups in America before contact with the West. The dominant theory I've heard is that it was inspired by the way the night sky turns overhead, which would make sense with the sort of meanings the symbol commonly has, so a similar idea to all the spirals you see in old stuff, but simplified with straight edges, easier to carve into stone or press into clay.
Which I think is neat! Shame the Nazis ruined it. Fucking fascists just to have to make everything terrible...
And yes, Liz knows exactly what the cloak is already — because unlike Harry, she has an ounce of academic curiosity, and bothered looking into it when she had nothing better to do.
Anyway yeah, that's this one done. Took longer than it might have, due to kittens being evil and not letting me sleep — there were a couple days where I didn't get much done at all, because I was just too tired. Of course, this is a 10k word update in the space of a week, but that's only low writing output by my standards xD
Right, checking in on Tamsyn next, see you all then.