The Raven and The Snake

The atmosphere in their little flat didn't improve throughout the end of the summer. Ariadne spent hours holed up in her room, reading her books and practicing minor spells on her little origami animals that cantered around her desk. Almost every night, Grandpa Chester had to tell her to go to sleep so she wouldn't stay awake into the night with her books.

Ariadne found that it was harder and harder to sleep as the date for her departure crept closer. Not only was her excitement building, but she was experiencing nightmares on a regular basis now.

The pyrotechnics from the play about the witch trials had suffered an unexpected failure, she couldn't hear the exact moment the chaos began as the audiobook was at top volume in her ears, playing what was, in her opinion, the saddest part of the book. The boy in the book, Harry Potter, had just looked into the pensive to view the last thoughts of a man he'd hated only to find the man, though sour, had been a brave soldier. He had loved one woman his entire life, well after she'd stopped being his friend, gotten married, and died. He loved her so dearly that even his dislike of her child with another man didn't stop him from protecting said child. He even felt heartbreak when he realized it was the child's destiny to die. Harry had been walking to accept his fate when she realized there was big problem and the building around her exploded. Before she could properly get her bearings and run for it, the ceiling had already collapsed where she was standing. Pain.

Pain exploded it every nerve of her body. Why didn't she go into shock? Harry Potter was dying at the hands of the villain...

She could feel her ribs crunching and her breathing came in sharp gasps, a little wet from the blood pooling in her throat. Voldemort, the great evil, was gloating over his great victory over a barely legal child.... Flames heated the concrete, making her body feel like it was being cooked in an oven. Harry started his final fight and won....

Her eyes were gone, she couldn't move or see now, but she could hear and feel. Why could she still feel? Why wasn't she dead yet? The epilogue stated that the characters had all gotten their happy ending with beautiful families of their own... A noise above her sounded, distracting her from the cheery end of the book. The weight intensified and she no longer had a body. She was finally free of the pain.

Ariadne found herself breathing hard on the floor again. Her body wracked with tremors and sweat, felt as though she'd run for miles in her sleep. She rolled to her side, curling in on herself. Today she was leaving for Hogwarts.

Hogwarts was the school from the books. The books she'd read and loved. The books from her previous life. Her life where she hadn't been magic and couldn't protect herself from a painful death of fire, completely unlike the people in her History of Magic Book she'd packed up the night before. The book series about the school life of a boy called Harry Potter had been had been a cultural phenomenon that she'd read many times. Could she be in that world? Was this world just a story, made up in the dying mind of someone who was trying to escape the pain of death?

She tried to remember all that she could of the books and her previous life, but the harder she tried, the more it faded. She could remember names, descriptions, perhaps some plot points? No... it was fading more. She sat up shakily, clutching at her locket.

Last night she'd taken a piece of paper her mother had left her and folded it into the locket. The paper had the names of every relation she could remember from the wizarding world. She'd explained to Ariadne that squibs and muggles were considered lower class citizens and it was important to know who her wizard family was. The Black family had been very prominent and would get her a fair amount of recognition. The fact that she was a bastard to underaged wizards was a blemish, but could probably be overlooked if she showed off the locket. The locket had been a small keepsake of Regulus that he'd personally had inscribed with the Black family crest and motto, "Toujours Pur".

Purity of wizard blood was evidently very important to wizards. Professor McGonagall hadn't said anything about it, but from what her mother had described, she could easily be thrown out if she couldn't prove her origins. Her mother, after all, was a pureblood that came from a prominent family as well, but was discarded by her mother when she was proved to be a squib. She couldn't remember much of her own family and had to ask Regulus a little about it in order to piece together the family tree. His own, he'd been very proud to detail.

Ariadne carefully pulled out the paper, she'd folded it so the crudely drawn crest from her mother's memory could be presented first. The motto was curled around the crest, "corvus oculum corvi non eruit". It belonged to the house of Lestrange, choosing her mother's house over her supposed fathers'. Ariadne's grandparents had been divorced.

Ariadne murmured the words to herself and looked over the names. On her mother's side was only two names, that of her grandmother's Cersei Lestrange and Cersei's brother Rodolphus. Cersei was connected to a blacked out name and a question mark. The man that Cersei had married had not been her mother's father. She'd heard the rumors as a child, but she hadn't known until Ariadne's birth. Ariadne had been born with a certain strangeness and talent that was unconnected to either of her parents. Her mother had known who Ariadne's grandfather was, but refused to write the name into the family tree.

She gazed at her mother's name connected to that of Regulus Black. Leticia Avery. Her surname came from that of Cersei's ex husband, a man that hadn't been at all interested in being a father.

Something niggled at the back of her mind. Something was wrong. She tried hard to piece it together, staring at the names. Regulus' branch of the family was connected all over with multiple names. His own father's first cousin had 3 daughters who'd all married by the time of Ariadne's birth, adding the names Malfoy and Tonks. Even connecting the names of Rodolphus with Regulus's cousin Bellatrix. Regulus only had one older brother named Sirius who hadn't married or had children to anyone's knowledge.

Looking between the names of the two brothers, she realized the problem. Regulus wasn't supposed to have a child. Not according to the vague memories in her head of the books. Regulus who had died at 15, never revealed that he'd conceived a child and the child never appeared once in the books.

A slight hope perked up in her chest. Maybe that meant things were different than those stories. Maybe this meant that's all that they were... stories.

Another thought bit back against that hope... maybe this meant she was destined to disappear or die.

She shook her head and replaced the paper. She hurried to get ready, she was already a little late. Her grandparents hadn't made a move to wake her. Perhaps a last ditch effort to keep her from going?

They were both at the kitchen table when she dragged her school bag to the front door. Grandpa Lawrence forced her to eat breakfast, insisting she would regret it if she didn't get some food in her stomach. It was to be a long train ride to Scotland.