The Black Forest or the Secret Diary of Prof. S. Quirrell

September 11

I woke this morning from bad dreams, hazy, unrememberable things that dissipate like an early morning fog.  Like any early morning fog but the one in which we’ve found ourselves entrenched.  No longer too high to avoid it and not too low either, we are now shrouded in the thick grayness for the better part of the day and the night.  The sun emerges for an hour or two at high noon, then slips back under its covers.

Sometimes the mist almost feels natural, at others, one hears things in it, the calls of beasts.  Forest creatures, light and dark.  Harpies, fairies, nogtails, even graphorn. 

It can be eerie.

Levin likes the secrecy of the fog; prefers it, in fact, relishes the way it turns everything into a game of hide and seek.  A game of prey and predator.  It is her environment and she can disappear into the haze for hours on end. 

Azrael prefers this arrangement as well.  There is an uneasy peace between them.  I don’t care why it exists, merely that it does. 

Sometimes I think Levin is afraid of Azrael.  Sometimes I think Azrael is afraid of Levin.

I’m afraid of neither of them, but sometimes I think I should be.

Levin called to me from the blankness and with a glance back to Azrael - to confirm her disapproving glare - I leapt down from the caravan and followed Levin's voice through the rocks.

She wasn't close, but not very far either, maybe some 2000 paces from our path. We might as well have been 200 kilometres from Azrael. By the feeling of it, we were utterly alone.

Almost. A sort of bellowing was coming from a shadowy copse of trees, as if some large animal was trapped among them.

"What is that?"

"A unicorn," Levin answered, appearing on my right. "Hurt, too. Bleeding. I have been tracking her but she will not let me near enough to understand what is wrong."

"She senses a male pre - "

"She senses I am not pure." Levin smirked at me and at my naiveté. "I am not a virgin."

"Oh. Right. Yes."

"But you are!" If she meant to ease my embarrassment by being forthcoming, she did a terrible job of it.
"I don't know why that matters."

"Yes, you do!" She looked at me incredulously, which was fair, I suppose. I was pretending lack of knowledge to something children in their cradles were told. Even non-magic children.
She continued, her eyes alight with one of her passionate ideas. "You can help her, Quirrell. Can you not heal her?"

"I'm not sure. Care of Magical Creatures was my worst course at school."

"What kind of marks did you make?"

"Well. Third...highest....in my class."

"Right. You will go to her then. Heal her after you have hurt." Levin rested her hand against her left thigh and I took her meaning.

If taming a half-tonne unicorn was to be my penance, I would accept it gracefully.

Once I had moved away from Levin and towards the animal, the unicorn calmed, ceasing its panicked cries. I found the path it traveled easily enough. Silvery drops of the creature's blood dotted the underbrush and shone brightly with what little light could penetrate the fog.

"My fair maiden!" I addressed the animal before I approached her, even before I could see, as I had been taught at Hogwarts."You have been hurt by something evil, a practitioner of the dark arts. I come to you as a representative of the light. Come forth to be healed and I will make you whole."

It was all very formal, but I was taught to be safe. A thousand pound unicorn could be deadly. Painfully deadly.

I heard the creatures hoof-steps, then saw the long, curling horn, parting the fog like a sword. An intelligent, purely white face followed, framed by a grayish mane softer than any human woman’s hair.

She came no further, but collapsed with a sigh. She was nearly spent.

My fair maiden!" Tears welled up unexpectedly in my eyes. I couldn't help myself. To witness such a magnificent creature suffering is more painful than experiencing actual suffering oneself.

She let me put my hands on her. While I explored her neck, they came away wet. It was beneath my hands where I found the bite marks — ragged punctures in the skin, as if a vampire had bitten down and then chewed.

"Fair maiden, you must sleep for me." I put my hand to her forehead and concentrated. "You must let the woman come to me so that I might save you."

The unicorn nickered softly, then closed her eyes in obedience to my request. The picture in her mind was of some far away green field, blanketed in lush grasses and four-leafed clovers, newly blooming. I almost desired to join her there, if only for a moment.

Instead I called for Levin and seconds later she was with me, as if she had been waiting nearby for the summons.

"Look at these bites. You know the woods better than I. What would you say made them?"

"They are very strange," Levin said, examining the wound. I had stopped the bleeding and set a cleaning spell on the wound so she could clearly view the marks.

"I thought vampires at first."

"But why would a vampire tear the flesh? Even Dracusor is not so cruel."

"Or greedy. Greedy for more blood."

"It is very strange."

"I can heal her, of course. She'll wake up disoriented and hungry, but very much alive."

"Do it then."

Levin watched as I formed the incantations, removing my wand only at the last moment. She smiled at me, proud, I think, or impressed.

Or something else.

When she saw the wounds dry up and disappear, she took my hand. "Thank you, Quirrell. Thank you for what you have done."

"It's alright —" I began, but she then pressed her lips against mine. The shock almost caused me to pull away, but another stronger (and weaker) instinct allowed me to continue.

With a snort, the unicorn jolted awake and finding the two of us in an embrace, bolted. No thank you, only blind fear.

Levin laughed and looked away. "Maybe she knows something I do not."

"Perhaps." My face felt afire. "Or maybe she's afraid of the big bad wolf?"

The change in her was instantaneous. "Do not dare to speak of such things. That I am a wolf is true, but that a wolf - that I! - would kill a unicorn! What you say is like blasphemy."

"I'm sorry.  I didn’t know."  That was a little bit of a lie.  I know there are some vague bans on slaughtering the creatures, although I couldn’t quote the statute or the appropriate punishment. 

"Understand, Quirrell, that she is not some horse with a horn. To murder something so pure is to face a damnation worse than any Hell. Even the vampires will not do it - they will not even feed on one a little. The blood is cursed. It is too pure."

As an afterthought, she added. "Men are not pure. Not pure enough."

"Even when they try to be."

"Especially then."

A moment before we emerged from the fog and into our camp, Levin pressed my hand. She meant it as a gesture of comfort, as a signal of our tightening bond.  But such a touch is no consolation for what I may be losing.

And what I may have already lost.

At nightfall, as we sat around our fire, the chastising looks from Azrael were nearly enough to keep us silent. I wrote my account of the day as Levin kept glancing up at the sky, which honestly began to make me nervous.

"What is it?" I whispered while Jean-Baptiste distracted Azrael with some pointless question about Diagon Alley's relation to the West End on a withered 19th Century map of London.

"The moon."

"Yes?" Wolves and their moons!

"It's waning, Quirrell. We promised we would celebrate that every time."

I turned away. Her earnest appeal was unnerving. "Not tonight, we can't."

"Of course, not tonight," she sighed, disappointed. "Some things are better celebrated when there is no moon."

"Vate, swinehund!" Azrael shooed the vampire away, in her exasperated, but somehow loving manner. "Now, what are you two talking about?"

We said no more the rest of the evening and only good-night as we bedded down. Before sleep, I let my mind wander over the mountains, searching for my lost fair maiden. She is all right. But for how long?

Q

September 13

Azrael kept me in her chambers all evening — to talk, she said. And talk she did, in whispered English and in her natural voice.

I must admit that I have mixed feelings towards the witch and I am no longer sure how much of my inner life I should reveal to her. It's safest when we constrain ourselves to the past and it is there that we feel most comfortable with one another.

We always have Hogwarts.  It’s our common room and common ground.

"Your master Feste was always playing at games and pulling faces in class. Mobius would be droning on through the potions lesson, repeating it for the third or fourth time, and there would be Feste, imitating the old fool down to his very gestures. Falka loved it. She had a clown in her."

Azrael smoked from a small clay pipe when she drank — which she was doing in abundance tonight — and at these words, she breathed a bitter gray cloud into the air.

"It's a wonder you're one of Feste's, you know. So serious. So quiet. Still, better taught by Feste than by Mobius.  You would have been a complete failure if Mobius had been your master." She refilled her glass - her fifth - with some of the Wine Merchant's valuable, non-magic red.

I couldn't stomach the wine myself, not after Levin's last transformation. I drank milky tea instead.

"I never knew Professor Mobius," I told her. "I skipped my first two years of potions and took double Dark Arts with Feste. Professor Snape was firmly in his place by the time I'd taken a Potions class."

"You didn't miss a thing, professor." Azrael grew thoughtful - or, at least thoughtfully drunk. "As for Professor Snape, I know his family very well."

I nodded. All the Slytherin clans were intimately familiar with one another as they so often intermarried to preserve the purity of their blood. Most likely, they were relatives, Azrael and Severus Snape.

"Second cousins," she answered, as if she'd read my mind. And perhaps she had. "His father is my mother's cousin. He died believing Severus was his greatest accomplishment. I've heard of late that he'd be very disappointed in his son."

"Why?" I could think of several reasons myself, but not a one that might disturb the Pater Snape.

"I don't know." Her voice took on a sleepy quality. "That's only what I've heard."

With the same sleepwalker’s demeanor, she lifted her wine glass to the light and stared into the scarlet depths. Several minutes passed before a strange, otherworldly voice emerged from her throat. " I believe I shall die here. There is blood in the wine."

"It's a Bordeaux. They're all like that," I joked but the unseeing eyes didn't acknowledge my jest.

"I'm going to die."

"I'm sure not." I never stood by reading the future from food or drink. The only true predictions come from the untouchable, the stars. But the bizarre display frightened me a little.

"You will wish you were dead." Azrael, if I could call her that at that moment, turned to me, but it was not Azrael in the red lights of her eyes, grown unnaturally dark. "But you will not die."

She grinned sadistically at me. "Not yet."

I stood, angry, I think, and shocked and ready to deny her prognostication. But Azrael returned to me then, tired and more inebriated than she had been only moments before.

"I sink mebbe I go bed," she slurred, then laid her head down on the table and feel immediately asleep.

"What did she say?" Levin wanted to know the second I emerged from the caravan, but when she saw me, her inquiry changed. "Are you alright?"

"Fine," I lied. "I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I'm fine," I said firmly, sounding almost convincing.

Levin still didn't believe me, of course, but she pretended to, for my benefit. "Rest then. There is a place by the fire."

“As there always is.”

“As there always will be, Quirrell.”  She reached for my hand, but I moved away from her touch.  There was something in my mind and I wanted to remain pure, to hear whatever was to be said.  It twinkled there, like a word on the tip of the tongue, a thought that would become brilliantly clear if I only waited. 

So I waited and heard nothing.  Nothing materialized although the itch in my brain remained.

Levin waited with me, but soon grew impatient. 

“Why do you just stand there?  Go to bed.”

“There’s…something.  Out there.”

“There are many things out there.  And let me tell you a secret.” I would have expected her to lean in conspiratorially, whispering her secret.  Instead, she shouted it out to the woods and rocks and the vampires. “You want no part of any of them!”

Levin’s cry woke Azrael briefly.  From her cups, she bellowed, “Shut ‘uck ‘p, Wolf’n!”

She was loud enough to rouse Lederhosen, who had been foraging among the rocks for food.

“Is everything alright, mein herr?”

Levin raised an eyebrow at me as if to say “See what you’ve made me do?” 

“She’s very drunk.” I explained to both of them.  Lederhosen was unperturbed by this information and went back to chasing rodents.

“What did she say to you?” Levin asked quietly. 

I closed my eyes.  I could tell her.  It would hurt no one if I did.  After all, what Azrael said has nothing to do with the future.  They were drunken words.  They may not even be her words. 

They meant nothing. 

“She said she was going to die.  She said I was going to wish I was dead, but that I wouldn’t die.”

“Are her words true?”

“I don’t believe them.  She was reading wine.  And she had already been drinking.”

“So then why are you so afraid?”

I was honest with her.  “I don’t know.” 

This time, like a sister, Levin embraced me.  “Sleep, Quirrell.  You are confused and upset and there is nothing like dreams to make everything clear.  Sleep and you will see.”

I followed her to the fire and I confess, with a friendly arm slung around my shoulders, death and any possibility of it felt as far away as Hogwarts, a distant dream in a distant place.

Q