There was a beat of stunned silence, in which I tried to reach for my wand —in my pocket, so impossibly far away, it seemed now— at the same time my body cringed on its own, anticipating the pain, maybe even trying to step away from Selwyn's line of sight.

But there was no time. It was like a slap to the face; just as shocking, just as unexpected. Except that rather than to my face, it was to my whole body. And rather than a slap, it was a spell that hit me like a freight train. I felt my legs go out from under me, at the same time an invisible force pushed me backwards. There was a moment of weightlessness, and then I hit the marble floor, unyielding and cold; the impact so strong that all the air left my lungs at once.

"SELWYN!"

That had been Farley's voice, a vague memory told me. But I was too busy to pay attention, too busy flailing on the floor as I tried my best to get my lungs back into working order, my whole back in pain.

"Oh, relax, Farley. She's fine. It was just a knock-back jinx."

The Prefect replied with something that I missed, because I finally managed to get my chest muscles to obey my orders again, inhaling a deep breath of precious air. Funny, how you never pay much attention to just how valuable air is until you find it outside your reach for whatever reason; and at that moment it becomes the top priority: the only one thing that matters in the entire universe. I heard myself groan.

"You didn't see any red flashes, did you?" Selwyn was saying. "But really, would it have been so bad, if I'd used the Cruciatus? It doesn't leave any lingering injuries if it's just for a handful of seconds."

I opened my eyes to discover I was laying flat on my back, staring at the arched ceiling. Slowly, I climbed to my knees, my head hurting —it must have hit the floor too when I went down.

"Do you want to get expelled? Or sent to Azkaban?!"

He chuckled. "As if you and your girlfriends don't try it on each other when you are behind closed doors. You know, I can hear the moa–"

"Not everyone here is a bloody maniac, Selwyn!"

Had he been fucking with my head? He'd said 'Crucio', yes, but the spell had taken long enough to hit me that it probably hadn't been the Unforgivable at all; just a separate spell he'd cast silently right after speaking.

A knock-back jinx? Yeah, possibly. It fit, except that I'd never experienced one quite this violent, quite this powerful. There had to have been a lot of magic pushed into the casting... and a lot of intention, too. Which said a lot about him, given our respective ages.

Odd, that I almost wished it had been the Cruciatus Curse, after all. A few moments of unbearable pain, yes, but after that all my problems would've been solved; or at least a single, big monster of a problem. With an Unforgivable thrown in the middle of the common room, I would've been able to go to Snape and have Selwyn removed at last. A knock-back jinx, if that's what it had been at all —because I had my doubts— wouldn't be quite enough.

I sat up, realising Selwyn wasn't looking at me anymore —his attention on the Prefect— and my hand went to the pocket with my wand in it almost as if it had a brain of its own. I had to focus and restrain the movement before I did something very, very stupid.

But the older girl came to my rescue, unwittingly, because she interrupted that particular train of thought by asking me: "Are you all right?"

I nodded, not feeling confident in my voice to speak aloud; wouldn't want to betray just how much it'd hurt, not in front of our entire house. But I didn't grab my wand. Instead I stood up on two wobbly legs, facing Selwyn by Farley's side —who still had her own wand out and aimed at the psychopath.

If he thought that I was going to cry or something... well, I wouldn't. I simply stood there, trying to appear relaxed; thinking of that statue, impervious to all he could do to me. But my clenched fists and gritted teeth betrayed the truth.

Selwyn's attention returned to me then, his head tilted to the side as if awaiting a reaction. I simply stood my ground, didn't say a word.

"We will wait until Beltane, then," he said to me eventually, ignoring a frustrated Prefect Farley. I could even notice how the boredom was returning to him, now that the confrontation was over, his interest on me diminishing by the second. He floated the ritual's parchment back to me and added in a lower voice: "But let's make it two vials, shall we?"

I snatched the paper from the air, gave him a stiff nod, and turned to leave; but he said: "Hold on... what was your name again?"

It took me a titanic effort to unstick my jaw enough to answer with a growling: "Sarramond."

"Ah yes... just remember this, Sarramond: If you fail again, it won't be a knock-back jinx next time. Do you understand me?"

I nodded once more, before being allowed to retreat.

But once the anger at being flung through the air like a rag-doll subsisted at last, and I felt like thinking rationally once more, I realised this had been a victory, all things considered. Because jinx or not, payment or not, I'd gotten exactly what I wanted: more time, a chance at doing the ritual later in the year. Time enough to work out how to cheat at it, if I eventually needed to.

Promising him some valuable payment had proved a useful way to redirect his... not anger, not exactly... more like his spite. And doing it in public had seen me lightly humiliated in front of everyone, yes, but not really that much; and I was sure it had protected me from something far worse, should I have approached him in private.

One point to me, I guessed.

I was happily relaxed the day after that, the sudden relief making it the most comfortable day at Hogwarts that I'd had in... weeks, possibly; beaming at everyone —even at McGonagall in Transfiguration, who seemed to suspect some kind of mischief on my part and didn't take her eyes off me during the entire lesson; something which only made my grin ampler.

Yeah, I'd won. My cunning had managed to outwit Selwyn... for the most part.

In retrospect, that very thought should have served me as a warning call; because Selwyn wasn't an idiot, and he probably was aware of how I had manipulated the situation in the first place by making sure Farley was there as my bodyguard of sorts. But the respite I felt —and the fact that we were just days away from winter break, and that I figured he would be away from Hogwarts before too long, with more than time enough to distract himself with something else over the vacations— meant I wasn't really expecting for the other shoe to drop just quite this soon.

I was returning from the Library after the last Read-Ahead club meeting of the year, which meant I was on my own as I descended the spiral staircase that lead to the dungeons corridors —I was carrying a couple of books on enchantments recommended by Hermione, and my plan was to leave them in my trunk and then meet up with Tracey to spend the hour before dinnertime doing... I didn't know what, doing something fun, I guessed. Something better than school work, at any rate. Some Professors —cough, Snape— had felt necessary to overload us with homework to keep us busy over winter break, but I wasn't feeling the urge to start working on it quite yet. There would be time for that, soon enough.

At any rate, I was distracted and foolishly confident I had dodged Selwyn's first deadline and its consequences, so I was utterly unprepared when a full body-bind curse hit my back as I traversed one of the narrow corridors in the dungeons, my muscles seizing as if on their own and my whole body becoming suddenly petrified. The books escaped my hands to hit the flagstone floor, loud as shots. I found myself leaning to the side like a plank, the wall itself preventing me from crashing all the way down to the floor.

I heard two sets of footsteps approaching from behind, but my eyes —the only part of my body I still had control over— fixated on the lone figure that had entered the corridor ahead of me, advancing with a wand in his hand.

I had a moment of hope, in which I thought it could be... I don't know, another Prefect, maybe; someone else who would rescue me. But then he passed in front of a lit scone and I recognised him as Burke. Burke, who had been sitting by Selwyn's right, the day before.

Yeah, I doubted he was here to help me.

I tried to fight the paralysis, tried to inch my fingers towards the pocket with my wand in it. I wasn't sure if my arm was moving at all, but it didn't matter in the end. Because soon enough another spell hit me, and my whole body began floating in mid-air, upside down. My own robes hung down to cover my face, and I felt and hear the contents of my pockets falling to the floor; including my wand.

"Oh... what's this here?" said a voice I didn't recognise; but it sounded older. Not Burke or Selwyn, but another of the teenage Slytherins, was my guess.

I didn't see it, but somehow I had the absolute certainty that one of them was holding my wand. I tried to protest, but no sound left me; tried to move, but to no avail. I tried to cast the counter-curse silently and wandlessly —it was possible, I knew that, you just had to focus your magic, to twist and manipulate the shape of it just so. But if one of those things alone was already beyond my skills as a first year —even one who practised ahead— the two combined proved impossible.

I noticed my body being moved, sort of like a hovering balloon. It wasn't far enough, but I guessed we weren't any longer in the middle of the corridor leading to the Slytherin common room. Possibly they'd taken me to just around the corner, or into an unused room or something; the dungeons of Hogwarts felt like a maze at times.

But we would be out of sight, in any case; which made the prospects of a daring rescuer finding me all the less likely.

"I was hoping this would be a little harder," said a second voice. "It feels underwhelming."

"She's just a stupid firstie," said the first voice. "She thinks she's better than she really is because bloody Parkinson was scared to duel her that one time."

"We'll have to show everyone the truth, then," remarked Burke, in a tone that sent shivers down my spine. "That she's nothing but an insect..."

"Are you thinking...?"

"Exactly. Entomorphis!"

I felt the spell, whatever it was, hit me; but I wasn't sure of its effects. Except that there was a strange pressure on the top of my head, growing stronger by the moment before stabilizing in a sensation of annoying contact.

With that, however, they seemed satisfied; and so they left. With my wand.

Shit! Shit!

I tried to scream, to move, but nothing... I couldn't even sigh in resignation.

The spell holding me upside down lasted for what I guessed were twenty minutes, give or take, because out of a sudden I crashed into the floor. It hurt like crazy, landing head-first into it, my whole body weight resting for a terrifying moment in my neck; but it had the welcome effect of uncovering my face again.

I saw the corridor's wall in front of me; except that my vision felt... segmented, split into a myriad of little hexagons, each somehow showing a slightly different mirrored view of the same wall. Like... like a bug's eyes.

Like an insect.

I started to panic, then; tried to move again, fought with all my might... all to get a single index finger to wiggle. I wondered if this was just the lingering effect of the bind, or if maybe I had received some sort of spinal damage when crashing into the floor. Was I paralysed for real? And if so: did Wizarding medicine have a remedy for that?

It probably took near a full hour before I got my answer, time in which I could hear people walk past in the distance, none seeing or noticing me at all. But eventually the binding spell lifted enough that I finally could push through it, breaking the curse at last. I looked down at my own body, the strange perspective filling me with dizzying vertigo at the sudden movement of my head; but other than that, my body looked intact.

Well, that... and the feelers that had grown out of my forehead, like two oversized antennas.

What the fuck.

That wasn't... that worrying, though. Well, it was worrying; but I was more worried at the absence of my wand. That, that was terrifying. That left me feeling utterly defenceless, powerless like I'd never felt in years.

Odd, that I hadn't had any magic wand until relatively recently, and yet I already felt like a part of my very body was missing the moment it was taken away from me.

But I had an inkling about where it could be, what they could've done with it, because I'd heard a very particular noise a couple of minutes after they'd left. One that had left me with a panicked heart beating like crazy when I heard it, and that now had me scared of what I would find. But I needed to know; so I went to climb to my feet–

—and I promptly collapsed down, back to the floor.

What the hell?

I tried it once more, with little to show for it. I was able to move my legs and arms just fine, but there was something that limited their range of movement; and it seemed like standing up somehow eluded me, like keeping my balance —something that I'd been doing for years— out of a sudden was beyond my reach.

A couple more frustrated tries afterwards, and I had the sinking realisation that if I wanted to walk at all, it would have to be on all fours.

I silently cursed my older housemates again, and started advancing forward: hand, leg, hand... it was slow —human bodies weren't made for this— and a tiring work, combined with the disorienting perspective of my segmented vision and the odd, confusing tactile sense coming from my feelers. But eventually I crept back to the main corridor, and advanced to the nearest intersection, where I turned right and approached a closed door. I opened it with some difficulty and found myself in an empty bathroom.

I was glad that my crawling form was too low to see myself reflected in the mirrors above the sinks; I didn't really want to see what I currently looked like. Instead I moved straight to the stalls, the apprehension in my chest growing with every step I took, the tiled floor cold to my hands' touch. I pushed open the first door and advanced up to the toilet's rim, edging to look above its lip: nothing.

I backed off, and moved to the next stall: again, nothing. I was starting to panic when the third one finally yielded results:

My wand was inside the toilet's bowl, stuck in its drain. Apparently they'd tried and failed to flush it down the pipe, then abandoned it there.

I closed my eyes in disgust, reached with my left hand into the toilet and extracted my wand, which was dripping in smelly waste water. I aimed it at myself and tried to cast the general counter-spell, but when I attempted to speak the invocation —'Finite'— I only managed to make a buzzing noise, in the rough approximation of the word.

I closed my eyes again, counted to ten, then tried once more with a silent casting; but I wasn't experienced enough with that either. And whatever this insect thing was, the magic was solid enough that it wouldn't budge at my half-focused attempts at dispelling it.

Fine. Just... fine. I'd need to go search for help, then. Wonderful.

I would have tried to clean my wand in the sink, but that required standing up, which was also outside the range of my current capabilities; so instead I simply placed it into my pocket, dirty and all.

I considered my options, but in the end I headed towards the Slytherin common room. Mostly because it was the closest and I didn't think I could make it to the Infirmary Wing like this without falling to exhaustion somewhere along the way. Besides, Tracey would be there, at least.

Of course, the other Slytherins would be there too. But if someone had to see me like this... well, I'd rather it be them than the students from the other houses. At least that way the rumour mill would be self-contained to the snakes, rather than spreading the tale of my humiliation across the entire school.

It was a hard process, getting to our common room —crawling down the remaining stairs was particularly intimidating: afraid I'd lose my footing with every tentative step, with my head lower than the rest of my body— and when I reached the camouflaged entry, I realised the folly in my plan: because there was just no way I could speak aloud the password.

I tried anyway, only managing to make some buzzing noises that the wall ignored. I paced —well, crawled— around it, looking for some other way to invoke the door that maybe I'd missed before, a switch or something. But after a few fruitless minutes I surrendered and decided to simply sit down and wait for one of my housemates to appear. The hope was that by staying quiet and out of the way, they wouldn't look at me too closely to realise just how fucked up I was.

My wish, though, wasn't granted:

"What in Morgana's name...?"

Because I guessed it was too much to ask for, the feelers and whatever my eyes currently looked like working together to betray me. I didn't even need to turn my head to see Terence Higgs looking down at me from my side, with curious surprise —even a hint of a smile— written in his face; benefits of my brand new bug senses, I guessed.

It was bloody humiliating, sure; but I also let a relieved breath out, because I knew Higgs was not in the hate-all-the-mudbloods camp. So I buzzed annoyed and gestured in the general direction of the wall.

"Do you want to...? Oh, I see! Legacy!"

The door opened, and I crawled into the common room right after the older boy. My aim was to try and be stealthy about it, somehow get Tracey's attention from the distance or something, try not to be noticed otherwise and using Higg's own arrival as cover. But of course it failed spectacularly, because the moment I set foot —well, hand— in the large lobby, Prefect Farley was quick to call everyone's attention to me:

"What in all the hells happened to you this time?!"

And sure enough, everyone in the room turned to look at me... and exploded into laughter.

Even the Prefect herself seemed to find my predicament funny, judging by her poorly disguised amusement as she approached me wand in hand to cast a 'Finite' on me. I felt the vice grip constraining my muscles relax at last, and was finally able to stand on my own two feet. But my vision still seemed fragmented.

"Uhm... stronger than it looked..." she muttered. "Care to explain what–"

"Shut the fuck up!" I buzzed at her, my distorted voice loud enough to be heard across the room, causing more chuckles to emerge.

I regretted my outburst immediately, realising it was just my anger, my frayed nerves speaking out; that she wasn't responsible, that she was the very one person helping me. But still, I couldn't take the words back now that I'd spoken them, and they'd been clear enough for her to understand them, buzz or not. I saw Farley's expression harden.

"Well," she said in a cold tone. "I don't know the specific counter-spell to... this, but it might wear down on its own over the night. Or you could go to the Infirmary; your choice."

She turned away to go back to her group, and I was left there... exposed, my feelers shuddering in anger on their own.

I eyed Selwyn's satisfied stance, the way he whispered something to Burke by his side while the two of them looked at me, and the suicidal thought from the day before re-emerged.

It would've been so lovely. I knew the incantation, of course —who didn't?— and I'd seen the wand movement inscribed in Potter's forehead. And as for intention... well, let's just say intention wouldn't have been a problem. Not after this. Not after Selwyn's patronising smile to me when he saw me staring at them; not after seeing the looks some of my other housemates were giving me. I didn't know which were worse: those who looked at me scornful —like the second year Carrow twins, or Parkinson and her punchable face, who looked like all her dreams had come true— seeing only a mudblood, an insect put in her place... or those who looked at me with something resembling pity.

No, scratch that. Pity. Pity was worse.

So I retreated fast, taking hold of whatever tatters of dignity I could find and walking towards the girls' bathroom. I very intentionally didn't look towards Tracey, didn't want to know what her own expression would be. I couldn't afford to break down here, in the middle of the common room.

Not that I had any reputation left to salvage, at any rate.

The bathroom's mirror showed me an aberration: a monster with two enormous, black segmented eyes like those of a mantis dominating its face; two arching feelers emerging out of the top of its forehead. I pretended to ignore it all while I washed and rinsed my wand in water, time and time again, then washing my hands two, three times. When that was done, I didn't give any time to my thoughts to catch up with me, instead rushing to our dorm and all but falling onto my bed. I was coherent enough to take a moment to close the four-poster's curtains; then I finally... finally allowed myself to fall apart.

Odd, that I... didn't. I was half expecting a breakdown, but there was nothing, not even a sob or a tear... or a buzz. It was like... it was all stuck inside me and it just wouldn't come out. So I simply stood there, hugging my pillow and still dressed in my now dirty robes, not making a noise. Pretending that I didn't exist, maybe, that I was merely another ghost.

At some point —maybe one, two hours later, because I'd missed dinner entirely— I heard noise outside, some of the other girls entering the room, opening their trunks. I heard whispered conversations I couldn't parse. In response I simply grabbed my wand, holding to it with the absolute resolve that, should any of them try to open my curtains, try to drag me out of my refuge, I would cast the nastiest curse I could remember straight to their faces. If they wanted my wand, this time they'd need to kill me first to get it.

But none of them tried to bother me, and eventually their noises ceased, and the dorm's lights went off as they all went to bed.

The worst of it was that I knew I was overreacting. Despite this, despite everything, I had still succeeded with my plan yesterday. It had worked out just as expected. And this... well, this was just...

It wasn't that bad, all things considered, now that Farley had cleared the worst of it. Not nearly as bad as a Cruciatus would have been, right? This was nothing, nothing at all like that. Like what I knew Hermione would suffer at Bellatrix's hands.

What I would allow her to suffer.

Hell, wasn't Malfoy of all people turned into a ferret or something at some point in the story? And this was the Wizarding World, after all... transfiguring people into weird things against their will was par for the course, it seemed like. Not that big a deal.

So why all this? Why couldn't I just... relax?

It was that sense of... vulnerability, I guessed. The humiliation of everyone seeing me like this. My wand, stolen from me. It had filled me with a sort of anger I'd never experienced before, not flashy and hot like with Mrs. Coverdale; but cold and deep, taking root somewhere under my skin and wrapping itself around my heart like a thorny vine.

Even though I was on my bed, I never went to bed, not really. The idea of changing into my pyjamas seemed as unsurmountable as that of climbing the Mount Everest. Instead I simply... waited there, my strange eyes open wide —because my eyelids seemed to have vanished— and my mind a whirlwind of unconnected thoughts, all of them flying loops around a single image: that of my wand inside the toilet bowl.

In the end I slept, if in fits and starts; a restless night punctuated by feverish dreams of buzzing noises, fragmented hexagonal images of wizards standing in a circle and chanting some mantra, talking snakes and clouds in the shape of skulls. And me in the middle of it all, trying to weave the wisps of half-remembered dreams all together under the strange impression that they were meaningful, somehow; that they held the secret to the future, some key that I was missing.

But in the end I was unsuccessful, and morning found me feeling only exhausted and frustrated.

I waited for all the girls to leave before I finally emerged from my four-poster hideout to go back to the bathroom to re-examine the damage. And I did let out a relieved breath when I was greeted with my normal looks, the last vestiges of insect-me having indeed finally dissipated over the night.

Not that I didn't look like shit warmed over, though. A half-arsed attempt to salvage somewhat the situation left me as decent as I could probably expect to: my robes were all wrinkled, my hair even more dishevelled than usual, my eyes sporting dark circles underneath from the lack of rest. But it was good enough to brave Hogwarts one more day, I guessed.

Except that when I found myself face to face with the Great Hall's doors I considered skipping breakfast altogether, or at least eating it at the kitchen with the house-elves. I was about to turn tail and run when I thought of the image that doing so would send to my housemates: that of the broken girl, someone weak and crumbling under a gush of wind.

So I put on a mask instead, like Daphne did. I didn't even try to be my usual self: I couldn't find an iota of snark that morning, my reserves utterly drained; but at least I could pretend to be someone who was... whole, someone who was strong enough to simply take things in stride, whatever they were. Yes, I imagined that other version of myself would say, hit me with your spells, with your humiliating curses; ambush me, laugh at me. Throw my body like a rag-doll or twist it into a parody of itself. And I will still be here tomorrow, and the day after.

Because you can't defeat me.

So with that mantra in my head, and my features schooled I entered the Great Hall and walked up to my usual seat next to Tracey. I ignored the looks, the muttered words, the malicious grins.

I'm the statue. They can't defeat me.

I ignored Burke too, the way his eyes flickered towards me for a moment, then returned to Selwyn who was talking to him.

Nobody. Not even them.

And I knew it, that ignoring bullies was useless. That just resisting was not enough, in the long run. But that was all I had energy for, that morning. It would need to do.

The first years were discussing something when I sat down, but they all hushed down at my arrival.

Me, I realised. They were discussing me. My absence, probably.

I didn't say anything, though, didn't acknowledge Parkinson's pleased expression, her mentions of there being flies in the Great Hall this morning, nor Tracey's concerned one. Instead I simply grabbed a pitcher of apple juice and a dish of toast, and went through the motions of breakfast. The taste of it felt... duller than usual, maybe; even accounting for how Plixiette's culinary prowess had pretty much ruined normal Hogwarts' breakfasts for me forevermore.

But I could do this, I could bite, swallow, drink. I could still function. My mask held fast to my face; and pretty soon my other housemates grew bored of staring at me expecting who knew what —a fit of hysterics or something, was my guess— and they returned to the normal morning conversations: homework, vacations, stupid shit the Gryffindors did... the works.

My success at breakfast carried me for the rest of the day, even if I defaulted to monosyllables when replying to Tracey. It was a day packed full with long and meditative silences —which replaced my usual banter— and an almost obsessive deliberateness to every motion, every step I took, every word I uttered. All in the hopes of looking... not normal... only strong.

And the next two, three days it became easier, somehow. My sleep was still brittle, with entire hours where I simply laid awake on my bed; but at least the mask was settling down, as it were, adjusting as if on its own to iron out the kinks —the biting of my lip when in the presence of our older housemates, the subtle jerk whenever someone cast a spell in my general direction that I wasn't expecting. I was handling it well, I thought, and by the start of winter break maybe the mask would have fused entirely...

Maybe... I wouldn't have had to pretend anymore; and I could instead simply be that unbreakable Sylvia.