Funny, that they ended up releasing Luna from the Hospital Wing not too long after lunch, while I was forced to stay behind. I mean: she was the one who'd been possessed by a literal dark wizard, while I was there merely to get something to ease the pain of the stupid burn on my ankle. I couldn't help but resent the injustice of it all, as I saw her depart with unsteady steps towards the exit. Her skin didn't look as pallid anymore, after drinking whatever concoctions Madam Pomfrey had seen fit to pour down her throat, and I knew in a few hours she'd be as good as new.
Myself on the other hand... well, jury was still out on that one.
I didn't know if Dumbledore had told the Lovegoods anything of what had truly transpired the night before, but Luna shot me a curious look as she passed by my bed. I wasn't feeling too charitable, so I averted my gaze towards the tall window beside me, pretending to be suddenly interested in the cloudy skies visible beyond the Gryffindor tower. When I turned to look back a couple of minutes later, she was already gone.
And I was left alone, the only patient in the entire ward —which I was starting to realise was pretty oversized for the actual needs of the school. You had to wonder what exactly must have happened in the past, that someone had decided an infirmary the size of a field hospital was actually warranted.
I sighed, turned in my bed, and gazed at the window once more. Nothing much to do, other than wait. For a moment I considered pulling out my wand, performing some of our exercises from Charms or Defence, but I couldn't find the energy for that —even for something as simple as practising wand movements, which didn't actually required me to cast any magic. It seemed like all that tight panic from before had somehow sapped away my willpower.
Earlier, the Headmaster had been quick to correct my preconceptions, perhaps noticing my short of breath, my tense muscles and clenched jaw. It turned out that Duskhaven last year might have slightly overstated the effects of dark curses —to the surprise of literally no-one. It wasn't that none of them ever healed, but rather that some of them didn't fully heal, or that they could leave permanent scars that magic might not be able to fix.
There was a world of difference, a world of hope in those clarifications, and I held to it despairingly. A scar wouldn't be pretty, obviously, but that was something I could live with. Even if the thought that I may have already managed to permanently mar my body, at only twelve years old and entirely because of my own mistakes and lack of caution, it rankled.
The relief lasted for all of two hours, give or take, during which Madam Pomfrey cast a wide array of spells on my leg, coming and going back to her office to retrieve books and parchments, and at one point an odd-looking brass contraption with many sharp needles. Its appearance almost had me running to the hills, but she only used it to examine my wound, measuring its size with the needles. She was silent during all of this, and I opted not to open my mouth either, if only out of a sense of self-preservation: it looked like whatever she was doing was occupying her full attention, and I didn't want to distract her only to end up with one fewer leg.
Dumbledore meanwhile had ambled up to the Lovegoods —to interrogate Luna about the book, I guessed, though I couldn't hear their conversation. But when he finally returned, the matron took him aside, a few steps away from my bed, and they talked in hushed voices. I evened my breath to listen, trying to catch whatever words drifted my way:
"...just don't understand," she was saying, her tone tense and worried. "...to contain the spread... but the diagnostics charm is still..."
"...of residual magic, perhaps?" asked the headmaster.
She shook her head "If there is... it be visible as well?"
He remained silent for a long beat, giving me a look out of the corner of his eye, then said something else. I didn't catch the full gist of it, but I did hear very clearly the last two words he said, right before he turned and left the Hospital Wing at a fair clip.
He had said 'St. Mungo's.'
"Uhm. Is there anything wrong?" I asked Madam Pomfrey when she returned to the side of my bed, a few moments later.
"Oh, don't you worry, dear," she replied, distractedly. "Now, how is your leg feeling now? Does it still hurt?"
I frowned at her dismissiveness, then gave her a shrug. "A little? Less than it did before."
"That's good, that's very good," she said, nodding to herself. "It means the Alleviato charm is working as expected."
"So it's that it, then? Is it... fixed now?"
I already knew what the answer would be to that. I had heard it in Dumbledore's parting words; I could see it written across the witch's face. And still, I was enough of an idiot to allow a tiny, thin sliver of hope to trickle into my voice.
"Ah... no. Sorry, girl. The charm is only meant for reducing pain, but we still must treat the curse itself."
"Right. Of course," I muttered, quietly crushing whatever incipient optimism I could be harbouring inside.
She eyed me for a moment, and her voice took on a false cheer: "Now, now... let's keep our spirits up! If you are feeling less pain, you should try to rest and catch some sleep now. Meanwhile, there are some notes I need to look up, before we continue treating your injury."
Yeah, I wasn't going to go to sleep —too wired up for that— but I didn't want to fight her on it either, so I simply gave her a weak nod and pretended to lie back, my eyes closed. I opened them again a while later, once I heard her steps across the stone floor, receding towards her office.
That was about when the Lovegoods departed too. And over the next hour, two hours... the pain subsided, but only for the void it left behind to be replaced by worry. Worry about the curse, about what would happen now that Dumbledore had the book, about my fight with Tracey, about what the headmaster would find out when he started digging into my past, about losing my stupid leg... It was all a big, thorny ball of worry. One that Pomfrey's painkilling charm had not eased at all.
Perhaps that had an unintentional benefit, though: that of wearing down my mind, of saturating it; to the point that it all became a little bit too much. Keeping that stressful state going on and on a little bit too effortful for my tired body. Fatigue, then, replaced the fears. A sense of exhaustion, of not having anymore shits to give. An understanding that it was all out of my hands now; that whatever would happen —with either the book, my friends or my leg— it would happen regardless, and I'd need to learn to adapt to it, roll with the punches.
And with that realisation, I had finally fallen asleep.
Not for long, though. Pomfrey woke me up at some point to run more diagnostics, asking me to raise or lower my leg, lean this and that way... and then —already well in the afternoon— Dumbledore returned once more, this time followed by someone else.
"Miss Sarramond," he said, gesturing towards the man by his side. "Allow me to introduce you to Healer Cross, a distinguished alumnus of our very school. He presently works at St. Mungo's, and he shall be helping us with your treatment."
The man was in his late fifties, carrying a brown leather doctor's bag. He sported a dark beard that contrasted with his green robes, and had slit-like, squinty eyes. Except that one of them was covered by the thick lens of a monocle, making it look disproportionately large, and fixing his expression into an odd perplexment of sorts. He nodded distractedly at me and said in a raspy voice: "Conrad Cross, expert on curses and hexes."
"Uhm. Are you taking me to the hospital, then?" I asked. But he pretty much ignored me, focusing instead on my exposed leg. He produced his wand —a white, twisted twig— and tapped the monocle with it, causing its glass to shine and shift hues one or two times.
"Oh, I see, I see..." he muttered. "Yes... fascinating stuff, dark spells..."
I frowned, and gazed back at Dumbledore and Madam Pomfrey, a question in my eyes. The witch seemed to share my own misgivings, judging by her own sceptical expression, but the headmaster smiled relaxed, as if this all was an everyday occurrence.
Healer Cross seemed unaware of it all. He cast a couple of spells —one of which made my skin tingle; but I recognised it from before, with Madam Pomfrey— and continued observing my burn through what I figured was some sort of enchanted lens, tapping it now and then and making comments only to himself.
"Ravenclaw?" I asked to the headmaster in a low voice, after a couple minutes of that.
"Indeed! How did you know?"
I shrugged. "Just a hunch."
"Stay still," muttered Healer Cross. Then he belatedly added: "... please."
I sighed, but refrained from any further movement and resigned myself to my fate, that of being examined and prodded like I was a piece of meat at a grocery. After a while of that, the man straightened up, removed his monocle and actually looked at me for the first time.
"A question, Miss..."
"Sarramond," I provided.
"Yes, well... Could you describe the spell? The invocation... the wand movements?"
"Kind of..." I said, before retelling whatever details of the previous night's fight I could remember; for the third time that day. The Healer didn't interrupt, he simply nodded and took notes on a little pocket-sized notebook he just summoned into existence.
"A dark hex... certainly..." he said at last, distractedly. "I can see that, yes... And that's the odd thing, isn't it?"
I frowned at him. "What is?"
"Oh... that it's still spreading, of course."
Those words caused the cold shiver, the constricted throat, the tension to return all at once; like it had never gone away and had been just biding its time, hiding in ambush and waiting to pounce on me again. I sat up on the bed and stared at my ankle. I could see the reddish blob of the burn on my skin; it was certainly larger than the handprint from the night before, but I hadn't put any importance to that. Now, though, I wasn't sure if it had been this size already when I woke up in the morning, or if it was even bigger now.
"What... what do you mean, spreading?" I hated how frail, how afraid I sounded.
"Ah... it means growing," he replied, as if I was a four year old who hadn't understood the meaning of the word itself. Then he turned to the other adults: "It should have dispelled by now. But somehow it hasn't. A hex that acts as a curse... now, that is intriguing!"
"But how is it possible?" asked Madam Pomfrey. "I saw some lingering traces of dark magic, but not nearly enough to explain this."
The healer clapped his hands, looking animated for the first time. In fact, he was smiling like he was one of the Weasley twins and the infirmary was that Zonko's shop: "Exactly! What a puzzle! That is what makes this case so delightful!"
Delightful wouldn't be my own choice of words, and I felt my fear turning to anger with every passing second the healer ignored me; treated me like just a... a thing. A curious object to peruse. A puzzle. I was about to say something impolite, when Dumbledore —who must have noticed my agitation— pre-empted me:
"As interesting as the academic implications of this injury no doubt are," he mused aloud, "might we, perhaps, first address the matter of halting its further spread?"
"No, no..." he said, raising a finger to the headmaster in a gesture no sane wizard would have ever considered. "Can't treat what you don't understand, can you? But I have a..." he opened his doctor's bag, pushed his entire arm deep into it, "... a theory. Bollocks... where is this thing...?"
He rummaged in his bag for a few moments, going so far as to stick his whole head into it, then extracted a little vial of liquid and handed it to me. I examined the substance, which shone in a soft yellow glimmer.
"Drink it," he commanded after a beat.
"What is it?" I asked, scrunching my brow and ignoring Madam Pomfrey's subtle sigh.
"An aura colourizer, of course."
"Which is...?"
He didn't even look at me, replying in an impatient tone: "Something that you need to drink, girl!"
My anger, my stressful exhaustion mixed with an increasing fury must have shown in my face, because when he glanced back at me —after a few seconds of me not drinking the potion— the healer blinked and paused for a moment. Then he tapped his monocle and said: "It will simply make your own magic easier for me to see... to distinguish it from the ambient magic at Hogwarts. Don't worry... it's perfectly safe."
"Right," I muttered, but I uncorked the little vial and took a long gulp. Despite its yellow colour, it didn't taste as much like piss as I was imagining, just like bread that had gone a little stale.
Healer Cross rubbed his hands and eagerly resumed his examination of my ankle. It was longer, this time around, as he cast strange spells and took loads of notes. After a few minutes of that, Dumbledore ambled away —taking a quill and writing down something on a notebook that from the distance looked a lot like it was Riddle's— but Madam Pomfrey remained by my side, watching like a hawk after every movement the healer made.
I hoped she'd stop him before he could step across a line, do something permanent or dangerous to my limbs, but judging by the speed at which the man was weaving magic around I wasn't sure the older witch would have much time to react; or any more idea than myself of what the man was actually doing.
"Ah hah!" he exclaimed at last, an eternity later.
"Did you–?" started Pomfrey, but before she could finish the question, healer Cross was already talking to me:
"Tell me now, Miss...?"
"Sarramond."
"Yes... Are you any good at Charms, girl?"
The question came so out of the left field that I had to repeat the words to myself to make sure I hadn't hallucinated it or something. Madam Pomfrey looked similarly flat-footed.
"Uhm. Yes?" I hazarded.
"Of course!" he nodded enthusiastically. Then said to the older witch: "It's her magic!"
"My... magic?"
"Yes. Any wizard's –or witch's– body will always circulate and diffuse low amounts of ambient magic... even if they're not actively casting any spells. It's... part of why we age slower than Muggles, of course. But in your case... well, see for yourselves!" he twirled his wand, and a veritable mess of colourful ribbons materialized all around my body.
I didn't understand what any of that meant, but apparently Madam Pomfrey did, because her eyes widened and she asked: "But that... is that normal?"
Across the room, I saw Dumbledore slowly approaching back again, perhaps having noticed that the healer had finally figured out something.
Healer Cross wiggled his wand back and forth. "Saw this only once before, but I have read about it. Of course every person has a different magical profile... but these wilder differences only occur in the case of half-"
"But is it dangerous?" I interrupted, right before he could reveal one more secret of mine, strip one more of my weakened defences. I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, hoping Dumbledore had been too far away to hear his words.
The healer looked at me funny, but then he either seemed to understand my actual concern, or simply moved on. He said: "No... not as such. It simply means your body takes on more ambient magic than most, and it also imprints on it more easily. It has benefits, when casting charms or other spells. But it also will make you more sensitive to dark magic."
"Such as causing a dark hex to act as a curse, perhaps?" asked the headmaster, now within hearing range.
The healer nodded. "Yes! But that's good: it's her body doing it, pushing more and more ambient magic into the curse. So we just need to..."
He rummaged once more in his bag and produced the same large quill he'd been using before; but rather than using it to note something down, he approached my leg with it in hand. He muttered a "May I?" but he didn't wait for my consent, proceeding instead to draw an inky circle on my skin around the burn. Then he scrawled a few runes and arithmantic symbols around its edge.
Wait... was he going to enchant my leg?
"Uh..." I muttered.
Before I could protest, I felt the prickly, uneasy sensation of his own magic running over my skin, flooding the circle. The floating ribbons still visible around me were suddenly pushed away from the burn, as if repelled by an invisible bubble.
"The diffusion circle will keep her body from making the problem worse," he explained, dropping his quill back into the bag without even looking where it fell, then standing up as if to leave. "It will need daily reapplication... to prevent the ink from fading away. Of course, since it's merely a hex, a permanent tattoo is not necessary; it shouldn't take longer than three weeks until the hex dissipates on its own. But... as it is dark magic after all, it might leave behind a... a scar or skin discolouration. Also, Miss..."
"Sarramond," I grumbled.
"Yes. It would be good if you learned to perform this circle on your own. Being a h– I mean... having your particular magical profile, it might become necessary again in the future... in case you are targeted again by dark magic."
"Let us hope for this to be a one time occurrence," said Dumbledore. "But I do agree, Sylvia, that it is always wiser to be prepared."
"She should also pay me a visit at St. Mungo's a few months from now. Just for a... a more thorough examination... so that we can be sure all traces of the hex are gone."
"Indeed, Healer Cross," said the headmaster, escorting him towards the room's doors. "We do appreciate your swift assistance with this matter in such short notice. And it is evident that your intellect remains as keen as it was in your younger years. Now, may I inquire after your dear Anna..."
They walked away, and I stood up from the bed, judging that now that the issue was finally solved I'd be able to resume my normal day, or what was left of it. I waved my hand through the floating ribbons of magic to dispel them, and crouched to gather my shoes.
Madam Pomfrey was quick to put a stop to all of that. She raised a single eyebrow and asked: "Where do you think you're going, girl?"
I gazed at her face for a beat —her stern, no nonsense expression had returned apparently, now that things were once again firmly under her control— and groaned. I didn't even fight her, too spent for even a token protest. Instead I simply sat down on the bed, then let my body collapse across it.
"Now, don't be childish," she said. "You'll only need to remain in observation for tonight, until we can be sure the treatment is indeed working. It will also do you good, resting for a day after... after what you went through."
She blinked a couple of times after that, then quickly spun around to walk towards her office, muttering something about some potion or another as she left me on my own.
I could have made an attempt at legging it, now that the crisis was over and all the adults had left, but I doubted it would've worked. Pomfrey would certainly raise the alarm whenever she returned to find my empty bed, and then I'd be summarily escorted back to the Hospital Wing by one of the professors. It would only serve to make me look like an unruly child.
Instead my eyes went to the circle encompassing my ankle, to the shape of the symbols around it. The burn itself didn't hurt much now, thanks to the witch's charm, and if I focused I could sense the almost electrical tingle of magic circling around it; like water flowing around a stone.
I turned on my bed to look out the window once more. Outside, the daylight was already dying, and the grey skies had turned to rain at last. I heard the soft drumming of it against the glass. It was oddly comforting.
Truth be told... I could do with some more resting. All that worrying about, all that tension had left me tired and wrung out. It didn't help that last night hadn't been exactly peaceful, either, the pain making sleep hard to come by.
And... well, as long as I remained in the infirmary, I wouldn't need to face my friends again, right? Find out where we stood now.
Yeah, there was that, too.
Joke was on me, though, because a while later —it must've been sometime after dinner, give or take— I received a visit.
Greengrass and Perks stood by the open door to the infirmary, hesitating for a moment before they apparently gathered enough courage to enter the room fully. They approached my bed, Perks carrying a dish of some sort in her hands. As they got closer, I saw that it was full to the brim with an assortment of sweets: cauldron cakes and chocoballs and jelly slugs, sugar quills and pumpkin pasties... It was so excessive that I knew without doubt it must have been sourced from one of the house-elves.
"The headmaster gave you all the points," commented Perks the moment they reached me, sitting on the edge of my bed.
I blinked at her. "Uh?"
"Fifty points," clarified Greengrass, taking her seat on the opposite edge —after quickly straightening out the bedsheets with her hand. "He said it was for 'coming to the help of a fellow student in need, and doing the right thing'. He didn't specify they were for you, but it was obvious, of course. Who else in Slytherin could he be referring to?"
I shrugged, "I dunno, Goyle?"
She let out a polite laugh at that, then her eyes landed on my leg —exposed to the air, as I didn't want the bedsheets to accidentally rub the circle's ink away. She bit her lower lip for a moment, then asked: "Are you... well, Sylvia?"
"Never better," I deadpanned. Then I noticed the badly hidden worry in the girls' expressions, and tried to cut down on the snark: "It was a dark spell," I explained, causing the two girls to give me identical looks of bewilderment, "but it's under control now. They brought a healer from St. Mungo's."
There was a pause after that, while both of them eyed my leg and the circle drawn on it with naked curiosity, digesting the news. Then Perks said: "The headmaster, he said that the whole business with the Heir was already solved. That they'd found the culprit, but... he didn't say who it was."
I considered my words for a moment, then said: "It was a cursed book, actually. Luna Lovegood —the first year from Ravenclaw— had it and brought it into the school. But I don't think it was truly her fault; the book was possessing her, apparently."
They nodded at that. It was more than I'd given them before —more than I'd planned to ever give— but still an incomplete version of the truth. And they both knew that, I could see it written on her faces, on her downcast eyes. The secrets —my secrets— had an almost physical presence, as if they too were sitting right there on the bed, between the three of us.
"We won't press you," declared Daphne at last. Her gaze was on her hands, where she was twirling with the sleeves of her robe. "Earlier this year, you didn't press me about why I arrived... about my family. So I won't press you about this, either."
I nodded, not trusting my voice, not sure what to say to that.
Perks shrugged: "Tracey, though..."
"She is conflicted," said Daphne. "She feels like you don't trust her."
"It wasn't about trust. I just didn't want her, or any of you to get hurt, like..." like last year, I thought. But instead I pointed to my ankle. "Like this!"
But the words tasted wrong in my lips; because they weren't fully truthful. It was about trust, wasn't it? That was the rub of it. Yeah, I didn't want them to get hurt. But more than anything, I didn't want to have to explain to them how I knew the things I knew. I didn't want them to see me like what I knew I was: something other, somebody that shouldn't be here, in this school, in this world. Somebody that shouldn't even exist; not anymore.
Daphne nodded, like the perfect picture of reason that she was, always contrasting to my and Tracey's tempers. She said: "She is angry, Tracey, but we talked to her. I believe she also understands that; and she still cares for you."
"Well," I grumbled, "I don't see her here. If she cared that much, she would've come visit, no?"
The princess leaned in to grab the dish of sweets from the other girl, then placed it on the bed, carefully repositioning its contents for a better presentation. "She was the one who told us how to get to the kitchens," she explained. "She also insisted we get the chocoballs... said you like those."
"Uhm," I said, remaining silent for a beat. Then I smirked: "If she knew me that well, she'd have asked Plixiette to cook me a crêpe."
"Now you're being unreasonable."
I crossed my arms in mock anger. "I'm allowed to, I'm the patient!"
Greengrass gave me one of her subtle smiles, but it was Perk's loud laugh that attracted Madam Pomfrey out of her lair. Her eyes landed on the dish almost as if magnetically attracted by the convergence of too many sweet substances.
"Absolutely not!" she screeched, rushing towards us and picking up the plate off the bed like it was another cursed object itself. "You are under observation, girl! You can't eat anything until tomorrow morning, at the very soonest! And is that an Ice Mice? That's magical food!"
"But–"
"No buts! I can't believe you would be so reckless, not after–" she cut herself, gave me a strange look, shook her head and remained silent for four, five seconds. Then she said, in an even, conciliatory tone: "Look... I will put these in my office, under an Impervius charm so that they keep fresh. And tomorrow, if everything is still good with your injury, you can have them for breakfast. Does that sound good?"
I sighed, shrugged and gave her a tired nod. And with that the only good thing that this bloody day had brought me disappeared into the depths of Madam Pomfrey's office.
"This day sucks," I muttered, to the girls' wholehearted agreement.
"Perhaps I can make it better still," said Daphne, looking uncharacteristically abashed. "I was planning to tell this to all of you whenever we were together at the common room, but... well, this year my family is staying in Britain for the holidays, and we will host a Yule Ball at our estate. The three of you are of course invited to attend... if you don't have any prior engagements, that is."
There was a moment of silence, before Perks beamed at her and said "That's brilliant, Daphne! Of course I'll be there!"
"Uhm..." I said, "I'll need to consult with my personal assistant first... my schedule those days is always quite busy, with all the staying put at Hogwarts. But yeah, I think I'll be able to make it... Thanks, Daphne."
She gave us a small, relieved smile; almost as if she hadn't been sure her invitations wouldn't be turned down. Which was odd, for someone who always looked like the perfect socialite, swimming with the grace of a siren in the murky waters of interpersonal relationships.
And if I were to hazard a guess —and why not— it would be that this was a step forward of sorts, for our circle. One that would bring our alliance —or friendship, if you will— outside of the confines of Hogwarts for the first time ever. I didn't have a full, perfect grasp of Wizarding customs, but I had eyes and was observant; enough to notice how the friend groups that emerged from Hogwarts tended to last, well into adulthood.
So yeah. Perhaps this was Daphne deciding to invest into us girls for good. Maybe long term.
Maybe for life.
And that gave me a faint sense of vertigo. Because I was mostly focused on the year-by-year. On surviving, finding the best ways to beat destiny, to dodge what I knew was barrelling towards us on a collision course; and also on learning, on getting better at magic, one spell at a time. But Greengrass here, she was playing an entirely different sort of game, one that I simply wasn't used to think about.
I hadn't ever considered life beyond Hogwarts, not seriously. Not beyond vague ideas of finding a way to earn riches at a minimum of effort. But to do... what, exactly? A witch's life expectancy was over 130 years... and that was a lot of time.
If I made it out alive... once I'd made it out alive, what would I do with all that time?
Hell, the very concept itself had a ring of the absurd. The books, my fore-memories on the Wizarding world only went on for seven years. Seven. Beyond that, there was nothing. It might as well not exist at all. And here she was, little Daphne Greengrass weaving her own plans for our lives, our futures together.
Yeah. Vertigo.
But maybe I was reading too much into a simple sleepover offer. That was the thing with Slytherin, wasn't it? It made you paranoid.
The conversation drifted after that into less charged topics, as the girls told me of what had transpired during the day at the different classes. Sprout had continued her teachings on how to grow leaping toadstools —which were not as bad as other plants, not having leaves or branches, but still sort of annoying when they decided to suddenly bounce across the table— and Snape had berated Potter for all of ten minutes and threatened detention over some spilled spoonful of liquid or something.
Much later, when the girls had returned to the Slytherin common room, I found myself awake at night, alone in the entire Hospital Wing —Madam Pomfrey sleeping in her adjacent quarters. The large ward was in penumbra, bathed only in the soft glimmer of a lit sconce by its entrance, and the occasional burst of lightning coming through the windows, followed a few seconds later by distant thunder. The rain was a continuous murmur against the panes of glass.
I pulled the sheets back slowly, and stood up barefoot on the cold stone floor. I tested my weight carefully, but my ankle didn't send any overt signs of pain. Either Pomfrey's painkilling charms were stellar, or the diffusion circle was indeed working. Whatever the case though, one quiet and measured step after another I ninja-walked up to the door leading to the matron's office.
The unlocking charm turned out to be insufficient —no wonder, since this was where the witch stored all of her potions— so I took out the skeleton key hanging off my necklace and inserted it smoothly into the lock. One turn, and the door opened.
I slipped inside the office, lighting my way with a soft 'Lumos' and leaving the door ajar behind me. The dish of sweets was on top of Pomfrey's ancient desk, which was otherwise covered in a surprisingly ordered assortment of parchments, herbs, potions and infusions. I approached it gingerly, and took a chocoball with my free hand.
But then something odd happened.
Instead of biting into it —as was my plan— I simply stood there, observing the piece of desert in my hand as if it held the answers to all my doubts, all my problems and questions. And I discovered... that I didn't feel like eating it, for some insane reason. Not now, not like this.
I remained there for a while longer, trying to sort out my feelings with no luck. Until eventually I sighed and put the chocoball back on the disk, still intact.
"Shit," I muttered under my breath. "I must be growing up."