Splendour Falls

Splendour Falls

by Ashura

Chapter Three

'There's a boy leaning against a wall of rain calling 'come on thunder, come on thunder'

The boy is hit, lit up against the sky like a sign, like a neon sign

then he crumples, falls into the gutter, heart strained, legs twitching

the blood soils his clothes and delivers him on, delivers him on

Sometimes when I look into your eyes I can see your soul'

--James, 'Sometimes'

There were still nights, nights Ginny never told anyone about, that she dreamt of Tom Riddle. When she was younger they were vague, misty, just beyond her comprehension, but she understood them more as she grew older. She knew, of course, that Tom was Lord Voldemort really, but somewhere in her heart, she still had trouble reconciling the Dark Wizard with the understanding boy who had been her confidante.

She stood in the damp in the Chamber of Secrets in her kilt and jumper and mud-spattered shoes, reflected in the water that covered the floor as he faded from the shadows.

Years ago, she had been afraid. She was not afraid now. "Hello, Tom," she said, and her voice did not shake.

"Ginny," he whispered, floating toward her. He moved his legs as if it were habit to walk, but his footsteps did not disturb the water. "I'm glad you came," he said sadly, and he sounded lost, forlorn. "You're the only one who remembers."

A laugh broke from her lips, bitter and harsh. "No, Tom. I'm not."

"But you are," he protested, inchoate fingers ghosting through her hair. "You're the only one who remembers me like this...." And there was a chill on her face, like a cold wind, when he leaned close to kiss her.

Harry liked best the nights when he didn't dream at all. When he wasn't dreaming about Voldemort and destruction and the end of the world, he dreamt too often about his family-not his parents, even, where he might grasp upon waking at the evaporating moments to add to a faded collection of memories that may or may not have existed. No, he dreamt about his childhood with the Dursleys, as if even after graduation, after ensconcing himself completely in the wizarding world, he would never be able to escape them.

He was hit by lightning once, when he was nine. The clouds hung heavy over the Number Four Privet Drive, and the thunder made the shutters rattle and the pictures on the wall tremble in their frames. Harry went outside to watch the lightning, to see what it looked like up close. His scar made him feel bonded to it. He stood outside in the back garden with his arms outstretched and his face turned up, and the rain plastered his hair to his forehead, raced down his cheeks, clung to his nose. The lightning broke across the sky, crackled, and for the briefest of seconds, the world was bright.

He might have called to it. The light swallowed him, arced into him, and for a moment he hovered above the ground with blue fire sparking from his fingers. It was the one time something Harry did ever evoked maternal instincts in Petunia Dursley, he remembered hearing her scream, the pounding of her feet on the path and the slam of the back door. She wrapped her arms around him, held him still, and he singed her skin where she touched him. She bundled him in a blanket and carried him inside, and breathed into his mouth, and he heard her whispering I'm sorry, Lily, I'm sorry, I won't let him die. She held him against her breast and rocked him, and snapped at Dudley when he came to poke Harry's burnt, bony arm.

Every thunderstorm after, Vernon made sure all the doors were locked, and Harry could only hear it, and feel it rumble in the ground beneath the house. Sometimes he thought the magic in his blood was stretching toward the sky, reaching, calling the lightning into him, but it never came.

Ron's dreams were full of cheerful things like flying, and Quidditch. Sometimes his robes were Gryffindor red, sometimes the striking orange of his Chudley Cannons. He was Keeper, he flew double-eights effortlessly and kept various brightly-coloured opponents from scoring. Sometimes he dreamt of his family, of picnics and backyard Quidditch games and gnomes in the garden, or of late night adventures at Hogwarts under the invisibility cloak. Or he dreamt of kissing Hermione, between the bookshelves or on the platform at King's Cross Station or at breakfast.

He had dreamt of kissing Harry, once. It was not a particularly erotic dream--Harry was simply not a sensual creature--but he remembered the unexpected softness of lips and the scent of rain and daffodils. The part of the dream that led up to the kiss had long since faded, and all that remained now was that momentary memory of something that had never existed. When Ron woke up he had not known what to make of it, so he set it aside. Some things did not need to be made deeper than they were.

Hermione dreamt of books. Even in her sleep she searched desperately, eagerly for answers, always hoping she would find just the right formula, the perfect breakthrough, and that somehow she would still remember it when she awoke. She had found a chapter once, in a book on aboriginal magic, that talked about lucid dreamers, dreamwalkers it had called them, who could send their spirits travelling while they slept. She wanted to be one.

Sometimes she, too, would dream of flying. Not on a broomstick, the way Ron and Harry did, not even in the sky, but through a long twisted universe of swirling blue mist and faded snatches of music. It surrounded her, infused her, and she always felt as though if she just stretched out her arms, she would be able to grasp some secret hidden truths.

Somehow, though, she never reached for them.

Vince dreamt about childhood things, crystalline images of memory from more peaceful times. This time he recalled his sixth birthday party. Greg was the first to arrive, was always first there, they had played together since before they understood what playing was. There was dirt on their hems and their hands, they had gone out to the back garden to try to catch dragonflies. They heard the insects buzzing in their ears, but their pudgy arms were too slow. It was the other boy who did catch one, the thin blond boy in the smart black robe, the one they hadn't seen arrive. He held his fingers just loose enough to be a cage, the dragonfly vibrating against his skin, until they found a jar they could keep it in.

"Nice catch," Vince said admiringly.

"You should be a Seeker when you get big," said Greg. His uncle had just been teaching him about Quidditch, and he was mad about it even though he didn't really understand the rules.

"Mm," said Draco, lowering a blade of grass through a hole in the jar lid so the dragonfly would have something to look at. "Maybe I will."

Draco tried not to dream at all. Sometimes it meant he went to bed drunk, or stayed awake for days until exhaustion finally claimed him. But the dreams took him anyway, and left him tangled and sweaty in his blankets when he woke. He would dream of his father, and nearly always, one of them would die.

Sometimes his mother would be with them. She would be dancing while Draco and Lucius fought, and Draco would call out to her, but she could never hear him.

Worst were the nights he dreamt of Professor Snape. These were quiet dreams, without blood or death or fighting, but there was a quiet despair mingled with the soft pride in his former mentor's eyes that left him emptier than ever when he finally awoke.

Greg's dreams were harsh, violent, steeped in flashes of crimson, blood against white skin. He dreamt of red water trickling over the edge of white porcelain and pooling on the floor, of whorls and dark spirals of floating silky hair.

He dreamt he was a small child, huddling in the hallway outside his parents' bedroom, listening to his mother cry. It wasn't right, he'd realise once he woke, that hadn't been till years later, when he was tall and broad and she had stopped calling him her little man because she had to look up at him.

He dreamt up different ways of killing his father.

****

It was nearly six o'clock by the time the train pulled into Tenby. It was raining on the platform, and drops thudded hollowly against the train's metal roof. Hermione tucked A Magical History of the British Isles, vol. 3 back into her handbag. There were only a few people left on board; a group of tourists had disembarked at Pembroke Dock and left the car almost entirely empty. The platform was equally deserted; a boy with blond curly hair leaned against one wall munching on a chocolate bar, an old man in a battered Sou'wester paced back and forth. Neither of them looked like wizards, and Hermione scanned the area searchingly, hopefully. Her stomach growled.

The baggage compartment door was stuck, and the porter was having difficulties getting it open. Hermione fished around in her pockets for spare change, she was hungry, and even the dented, half-empty vending machine attached to the wall was starting to look promising.

"Hermione Granger?" A lilting Welsh voice from behind her made her jump. It belonged to a girl, a tall weedy creature with dark hair in a heavy plait just past her shoulders and rain-spattered glasses. She was wearing ordinary jeans and a blue jumper, and a long jacket with the wet hood thrown back. "You are, right? I'm Ilar Thomas, from Caer Cysegr."

She thrust out her hand and Hermione shook it. The girl's fingers were stained with inkspots and the nails chewed ragged, and there was a sparkle in her eyes that Hermione rather liked. "We've all heard all about you," she said cheerfully. "I think you'll fit in just fine. Let's grab your things and get over to the island, you've got to be starving!"

The porter had finally gotten the baggage compartment door open, after a fair amount of grumbling and bracing himself against the side of the train and pulling very hard, and it took little time at all to empty it of the few trunks that were left inside. Hermione pointed hers out, tugging her father's big brown trunk with both hands, and Ilar cringed.

"That looks heavy. Here--" She gave it a good-natured kick, and muttered something under her breath, and it was a good deal lighter when Hermione heaved it up into her arms.

"Don't you need--you know--?" Hermione hissed, not wanting to come right out and say 'don't you need a wand' in the middle of a train station, however uncrowded. Ilar shook her head.

"Cheating. Temporary. On my shoe. Makes it easier to go out." She pulled up her hood, repeated the process with the smaller trunk and lifted it, then trotted off the platform toward the beach. "Besides, this is Wales. We're not as picky about being seen as they are in England, since people here are more used to magic anyway. Come on, there's a boat."

Hermione followed her along a rocky narrow path toward the beach. It was plainly not a trail that was used often or by many, and once they had crested the hill and the water was in sight, Ilar muttered another charm and the trunks began to float alongside of their own accord. "What I was saying, back there," she explained, "is that I put a charm on my shoe before I left, so that it would act sort of like a wand. I know it sounds like a silly thing, but it's actually really convenient. People look at you odd if you point at things, even just with your finger, but they don't pay much attention if you kick things. C'mon, the boat's just down here."

"Is it always this wet?" Hermione asked, wishing she'd thought to wear a jacket with a hood. But who expects rain in the middle of June? Ilar just nodded.

"Pretty much. The weather's crap here, sorry. Can't do anything about it. All right, here we are--" The trunks thumped onto the ground as they reached the shore, where a small hide-covered boat had been dragged up onto the beach and left. "It's stronger than it looks. Hop in."

They levitated the trunks into the coracle and settled in around them, Hermione in the bow and Ilar in the stern. There was really only enough room for their feet, and they had to sit on the trunks. Ilar pulled her hood over her head, and the shadows the slick oilskin left over her face made her look a bit eerie. The surface of the sea was choppy and grey, and the little boat rocked with the motion. Ilar was guiding it with muttered, incomprehensible instructions. Hermione huddled in the bow with her arms wrapped around her damp shirt.

Thick grey mist hung low over the water, and when Hermione looked to either side she could find no horizon, no visible line where sky separated from sea. It was like floating through fog, only a damp sploshy sort of fog that splashed against the sides of the boat.

"There it comes," said Ilar suddenly, motioning. "Have a look."

Vague grey shapes took form slowly in the mist, great dark shadows that morphed slowly into towers, and walls, and the hulking curve of land.

"Caldey Island," said Ilar, looking like Charon the ferryman in the mist and her hood. "There's a Benedictine monastery that we share the place with, and Muggle tourists come out to the island every so often. They can't see us, though--well, they can, but they think it's an old priory and no-one's allowed in." She grinned. "Of course, you probably knew all that."

"Of course I did," Hermione answered, laughing into the spray.

Ilar eased the coracle onto the shore, and it bumped on the rocky ground beneath them. The island was nearly as thick with fog as the sea, but the tall stone walls of Caer Cysegr stood dark and proud in the midst of it, the spire of the fortress' central tower spiking into the sky.

They levitated Hermione's luggage again, and the trunks floated along behind them. Ilar fished her wand out of one of the Sou'wester's enormous pockets and rapped sharply on the door.

"Gwybodaeth!" she said aloud, and Hermione repeated the word a few times in her head trying to get the sounds just right. The great wooden door opened, slid wide, and Ilar led Hermione and her floating trunks inside Caer Cysegr.

Torches burnt bright and cheerful in sconces along the stone walls, and thick woven rugs cushioned the floors. It smelled of old books and rain and apples, and Hermione felt at home immediately.

"Do you want to see your room first, get settled in," Ilar asked, shaking the rain off herself and hanging her coat from a hook near the door, "or would you rather get something to eat right away?"

"Does it matter?" Hermione wondered. "Have we missed supper?"

Ilar shook her head. "We're pretty loose about mealtimes here, it's not like school. Because at some point everyone's in the middle of a project they just don't want to put down, or you're just starving at some bizarre hour...." She waved her wand, and the trunks thumped to the floor. "Come on, I'll show you the dining room, the house elves can take care of those. Isadora eats at six sharp every evening, so if you want company, that's a good time. We've missed her already."

"Caer Cysegr has house elves?" Hermione repeated suspiciously. She'd given up trying to liberate the Hogwarts house elves some years before, as a lost cause and because when one was running around with Harry Potter trying to fight Voldemort, one had to set priorities. But it still made her uncomfortable, it smacked of classism and slavery and imperialism to her, all things she preferred to be allowed to believe the wizarding world was free of. Even if she knew it wasn't true.

Ilar blinked. "Of course. The place is more than a thousand years old. Well not this building, but the first Caer Cysegr, it was built in the sixth century...." Her voice trailed off.

"Do they--do they get paid at all?" Hermione asked tentatively.

Ilar snorted. "No, and I wouldn't suggest the idea to them, if I were you. They take it a bit personally," she said, already leading Hermione down the corridor. She started to open a green-panelled door in the right-hand wall, but paused with her hand around the knob. "Look, it's like--the house elves are part of the castle, understand? They've been here longer than any of us, and they feel like its theirs...almost like they have ownership of it. Paying them would be like negating their entire history...it'd reduce them to ordinary servants." A shrug, and she pushed the door open. "Think on it, anyway. Now come in and let's get some supper, I'm starving!"

The dining room was enormous, but screens and tapestries and bookshelves had been used to cordon off sections of it, to close in the walls and make the room more intimate. The tapestries were full of pictures but no coherent stories, a chaotic, haphazard mix of colours and images. The bookshelves were equally disuniform, all different heights, widths and thicknesses, and varying shades of wood or peeling paint. They were all stuffed full, and some were organised, others served simply as platforms for books to be strewn in no apparent order. A great long table stood in the centre of this visual cacaphony, surrounded by a collection of mismatched antique chairs. There was no chair at the head of the table, and only one person sitting at it: a slender young man with fine brown hair falling in his face, head bent over a bowl of some kind of stew.

"Ardán," Ilar said cheerfully, "meet Hermione."

He looked up, and Hermione found herself stammering an awkward hello. She had met any number of attractive men in her life, from people like Draco Malfoy (who had the audacity to grow from a pointy-faced boy with slicked hair into a graceful and elegant young man despite his acid personality), to Harry (who was attractive in that awkward, tousled, boy-next-door sort of way), to Ron (who was really too gangly and freckled but she thought he was lovely anyway because she cared about him so much). But this boy, with his silky brown hair and smooth skin, the fey angles of his face and his wide dark eyes, was almost too beautiful to be human.

"Hello, Hermione," he said in a soft voice with a thick Irish accent, and his cheeks flushed a little. "Welcome to Caer Cysegr." He lowered his head again over his bowl. "Hello, Ilar. Welcome back."

"That's about all we'll get out of him, Ilar whispered in Hermione's ear, pulling her through to the kitchen. "He's dreadfully shy."

"Oh," said Hermione, still flustered.

"Too bad, too." Ilar sighed, leaning back against the doorframe. "Hasn't he got a voice to kill for?"

"A face, too," said Hermione fervently, and Ilar grinned at her.

"That's true," she said brightly. "Come on, let's get some supper. The house elves have left a cauldron on for us."

***

It looked, from a distance, like a perfectly happy and ordinary procession: two boys, a girl, and a large black dog, strolling down the street together--out for an evening walk, perhaps, or coming back from some sightseeing or shopping. But they carried no packages, and on closer inspection the cheerfulness of their mood might have seemed forced.

They came to a tall brick building, guarded in front by two massive, ugly stone gargoyles. And because in this part of London these things were not unusual, the gargoyles greeted them.

"'Ullo, 'Arry!" said Munin brightly. "'Ullo, Ron!"

"Hi Munin," the boys chorused cheerlessly. "Hugin."

"Got company then?" Hunin wondered, furling his hideous wings and raising on his haunches to peer closer at Ginny. "She's a pretty one."

"She's my sister," said Ron pointedly.

"I can be pretty anyway," Ginny protested mildly, shooting him a half-hearted glare.

"An' what's that then?" Munin demanded sharply, bristling. He was glaring down toward the ground, where Sirius was glaring back. "Tha's not a dog, 'Arry, tha's a bloody Animagus!"

Time froze--all four wizards stared at the gargoyles, mouths open, and the gargoyles stared back.

"That's a secret," Harry finally hissed, his fingers clenched tight, his nails marking his palms with nervous crescents.

"Ah, well, you know what it is then?" Hugin said carefully in his deep gravelly voice, his huge stone teeth showing. "It's our job to guard the place, after all. Make sure we know who goes in, see, and who goes out."

"Yes, yes, we know him," Harry said hurriedly, his voice meaningfully low. "He's my godfather. But look, it really is a secret, all right? He's kind of...in hiding."

The two great stone heads turned inward, toward each other, and something barely detectable passed between them. Harry remembered watching The Neverending Story once in school, when he was eight or nine, and felt a stab of irrational fear as if he were Bastian before the Sphinx, and with a single wrong step he could disintegrate into powder on the grass.

"We will keep your secret," said Hugin suddenly, folding his wings and settling back on his haunches. Even Munin's jovial manner had faded, as if this statement were of the most profound importance and meaning.

"Thank you," said Harry, stammering, and the group passed through the guardians and into the building.

Ron's hand shook and he fumbled with the key in the lock. The flat was dingier, emptier than when they had left it only that afternoon, a faded hand-me-down version of home that suddenly appeared as though it could never begin to live up to the real thing. The boxes were stacked haphazardly where Harry had left them, the linens and pillows in a heap on the floor. Harry looked at it and his stomach hurt.

"I'll start dinner," said Ginny, when the silence had stretched too long and too thin to be meaningful, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

"Do you need any help?" asked Ron, more because he wasn't ready to start moving his and Harry's things into his room than because he genuinely wanted to be helpful.

"No," she called back, "there's really not enough room in here for two people anyway."

"All right," said Ron, and picked up a box of blankets.

Ron and Harry set up the bedrooms as best they could while Ginny made noise and got delicious smells of things emanating from the kitchen. There were only the two beds, and not enough linens to go around, and finally they settled on giving one bed to Ginny, a pile of old blankets for Sirius, and squeezing into the other bed together. ("But if you kick me," Ron warned, "I may have to strangle you.") They made a half-hearted attempt to decorate, but only succeeded in making their shared bedroom look like a poorer, pitiable version of their old dorm in Gryffindor Tower. The Chudley Cannons posters that had covered Ron's walls at the Burrow had not survived its destruction, and his row of Quidditch figures were a poor substitute for those ever-moving flashes of orange.

Ginny called them for supper, and they sat on the worn blue carpeting eating potatoes off what had been Mrs Weasley's third-best dishes and were now the only ones any of them had. Ron turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial looking for a proper wizard station, until Sirius stopped him on a Muggle one with an "Oh, this is a good song!" It cracked out of the tinny speakers that felt like a match to the peeling paint on the walls, and during the chorus, Harry could see Sirius mouthing along with the words.

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.

****

This way, this way, Miss Granger!" An enthusiastic house elf named Gwylyd (which was, so far, the oddest name for a house elf Hermione had ever heard, especially a female house elf) dragged her by the hand down the length of the main corridor. "Gwylyd will be showing Miss Granger her room now. It is a nice--aaugh!!"

The running commentary cut off with a squeal as Gwylyd threw herself to the floor. Hermione flattened herself against the wall as an overstuffed, violently green armchair came sailing down the corridor several feet off the floor.

The chair stopped abruptly when it reached Hermione, hovering. It was occupied by a wrinkled, wiry little witch with piercing blue eyes and flyaway white hair. A garish patchwork quilt was draped over her knees, dangling over each arm of the chair. One withered hand lifted to point at her.

"Miss Granger, I presume?" The old witch spoke with a crisp manner that put Hermione in mind of royalty, and she nodded.

"Your professors at Hogwarts had excellent things to say about you," the woman continued. Her eyes were very bright and clear, and Hermione tried not to squirm like a child under the penetrating gaze.

"Thank you, ma'am."

The old witch nodded brief approval. "I am Isadora Dent," she informed Hermione, who shifted awkwardly and wondered if she ought to do something archaic and poetic like curtsey. Isadora Dent stared hard at her for another long moment, then smiled at her benevolently.

"Welcome to Caer Cysegr, Miss Granger," she said, a touch of warmth in her voice at last that reminded Hermione of Professor McGonagall's rare softer moments. "If all I have heard about you is true, I think you will enjoy it here. I will let you get settled in now...you do know what you're going to be working on?"

Hermione nodded. "I'm to research anything that might help us fight You-Know-Who...a way to track him, ambush him--"

"It's Voldemort, missy!" Isadora interrupted her sharply, slamming her hand on the arm of her chair. "It's naming a thing what gives you power over it, we don't bother with that 'You-Know-Who' nonsense here! Voldemort is the name he gave himself, and he thinks it gives him some kind of power. Hmph!" Almost as soon as the tirade began, it had ended, and Isadora Dent smiled almost kindly. "Well, it'll come to you. Old habits die hard, as they say. You'll start in the library as soon as you like." And then the armchair went hurtling down the corridor, and Gwylyd picked herself up off the floor.

"Gwylyd is showing Miss Granger her room now," she said shakily, brushing herself off.

"Are you all right?" Hermione asked.

Gwylyd nodded, shooting a frustrated by tolerant look in the direction the flying chair had gone. "Isadora Dent is very great enchantress," she said, taking Hermione's hand again to lead her away. "And great wizards..all great wizards...they is getting a little strange."