Light and Dark

"It means 'light.'"

That was her mother's explanation. Simple, vague, a response like any other. Her mother had been in the midst of one of the several dissertations she produced during those final years, each one more brilliant than the last. Her tone had been clipped and brief, too distracted was she by her own latest foray into the close and delicate ties between the primitive Muggle and the advancing wizard brands of medicine.

Her temper was even shorter those days than it had been when her daughter was a mere child, so Helena left Rowena alone. Clearly, the name was derived from Greek, from Helen of Troy--the beautiful woman whose face alone had sent thousands to death. Nonetheless, it was a topic that seemed too trivial for research, and to ask her father could perhaps be construed as an insult.

After all, it seemed contradictory. Rowena Ravenclaw gave birth to the child of the greatest Dark Wizard of that age--or any--and she chose to bestow a name that meant light.

Helena had not known her mother to be given to superstition, but it almost seemed like a charm, a feeble protection against her father's alleged evil. Rowena was a woman of pure reason, cold and hard fact. But there were moments such as this when Helena could not help but wonder if her mother's upbringing in such a paranoid and archaeic culture, one so steeped in fable and mythology, had affected her in a deeper manner than was initially apparent.

The unhappiness in their makeshift, unmarried family, after all, was palpable.

Helena had overheard it not once but four times, hushed voices, whispers stolen in the corridors between her parents, or the sharp conversations that always seemed to accompany her father's visits to the Ravenclaw quarters.

"You tricked me. I never wanted a child."

"Not trickery. I told you. Our daughter--our Helena--she is your intelligence and my skill, combined. You knew I wanted this. And you knew me better than to think I would not do everything within my power to achieve it."

"Perhaps you deserve your reputation, then, Salazar."

"You speak like Irina."

Irina. Her father's wife, whom Helena had met only twice. The woman was always perfectly cordial to her, but whenever Salazar returned from the manor, he would invariably find his way to Rowena's rooms, clutching silken handkerchiefs to a bleeding arm, pressing ice to a bruised and swollen cheek.

After all that he had allegedly done, the torture and murder of all those Muggle women and children, he never lifted a hand to defend himself against his own wife.

Rowena, decisive and helplessly correct as always, had coldly pronounced Irina to be mad.

Salazar, after that, had not spoken to her for a week.

It had been he, during this prolonged silence, who had introduced Helena to the Baron.

Ealdred was charismatic, the most handsome man Helena had ever seen. Wealthy--independently so, having compounded his already large family fortune hundredfold through his shrewd business dealings. He was precisely the sort of person her father would appreciate--pale-skinned, with inky hair that seemed almost violet in candlelight, eyes that seemed to have impenetrable depths. He could trace his line, Salazar informed her, to the earliest wizards of Wallachia, in Romania.

He would not have been a terrible match, were it not for the simple fact that Helena was not prone to appreciating any sort of manipulation with her personal life on the part of her father.

Ealdred had pursued her with all the delicacy and nobility of his class, courting her without excessive presumption--sexually, at least, for Helena nevertheless always suspected that he would sooner kill her himself than see her in the arms of another man.

She resisted him.

Rowena, Helena thought, approved of this move. Helena was not blind--she could see as well as anyone that Salazar loved her mother with a fierce and sometimes violent passion, in a manner that he had certainly never displayed regarding his wife, or anyone other than his own self.

Rowena seemed indifferent to his emotion, or perhaps simply determined to force herself into oblivion where he was concerned. Love, as she told her daughter, was a wonderful thing--but it could all too easily overcome your reason, make you susceptible to manipulation and attack.

Perhaps, Helena thought, her mother had loved Salazar, once. Before his thirst for power had led to the birth of a daughter, and Rowena's harsh scorn.

And yet she let him return, every Friday at the least, into her heart and into her bed...with soft looks and softer kisses in the morning.

Ealdred was identical to Salazar in almost every way, and it was his intense and sweltering passion that Helena feared.

Passion such as this destroyed nations, ripped hearts asunder, and the light hair of Helen of Troy had alone brought the "civilized" world to its knees.

Light hair. Light woman. Light child.

Helena was not a child of light, or Dark, or anything of that quality. Nor was she the combination of power and brilliance that her father had craved.

She was a daughter of fire and heat and sex. Of hatred, anger, betrayal, abandonment, a stolen affair. The solid memory that would torture Rowena for years after Salazar left, until the pain became illness and slowly wasted her away.

She was not the light innocence that Ealdred sought, or the light beauty of her namesake, or even light of spirit.

She was Helena, proud, eighteen years old, beautiful, strong, clever--and she was determined to prove it no matter the cost.

The equal--no, the better of both her parents--she would throw away their legacy like a cloak. Her mother's fame and her father's infamy would hold no sway over her life.

But even so, she could not resist.

The diadem. The seemingly inheritable habit of abandonment. In defying her heritage, Helena embraced it.

And the price would be the same.