Toll This Bell

Toll This Bell

1. curse-breaker

The desert, at night, gives up her dead, and they come walking.

They cast long shadows against the moonlit sands, pale dead things, the relics of some long-forgotten curse closing in relentlessly. Fire, he thinks, raising his wand, feeling as though he is directing himself from a hundred miles and a hundred years away. Fire, somehow, is a return to primal things, to instincts underlying consciousness, because the creeping things feared it, on primeval nights; it is a weapon. The beasts back down before it, as do the dead. Fire, and his hand rises; light and heat flare into the night.

The next age is a confused, swirling, hurried blur of white and black and orange and smoke, but in the end, when the dead fall away into the night, he thinks that he had not expected them to have human faces; he had not expected them to be quite so real.

-

He returns to the city of Damascus the way he left, through the eastern gate, and pauses for a moment merely to look, remembering scratched and faded lines in books long-forgotten; slim volumes of poetry, often-scorned. Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing.

The morning flushes into rose and gold, dawn stretching and curling across the sky like great golden fingers, grasping, clawing, reaching. In the evening he will return to England, where it is harsh December, unkind and grey and cold, but this morning, in bright Damascus, is his and his alone. The Persian Dawn with new desires may net the flushing mountain spires.

He stands in the middle of the market, thronging and bustling with goods and spice, and is content to simply look, and breathe; the scent of it is like an insolent streak of orange burning itself across his mind (he does not talk about it, but somehow the strongest sensations, the sounds and the smells, sear themselves into his thoughts as colour). Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, the poet says, the ill-omened door of fear. But he has passed beneath it twice, and he has survived.

2. journalist

Sirius has learnt a lot about war.

In these days, he finds, it is really all about blood and fires, shaping themselves into fresh horrors every night, but with that sameness of purpose underneath. Blood, and fires, and dust, and ashes. And blood.

The words, he knows, are easy. Sirius has never had a problem with words; under his quill, they do his bidding. The words are not the problem; the people are. He writes carefully about the murder, the fires and the dust and the blood; he writes about war, mostly, and about destruction. His letters to newspapers are returned, unopened, the corners of neatly folded parchment smooth and crisp; occasionally, a note. We apologise, but at the present time -

But still the murders go on, so the words must as well; owled to Europe by night, slipping past hidden watchers, letters to tell the world just how broken and diseased this place really is. Fire, fire - fire and torture, he writes, and he knows that in more senses than one this war is about blood.

3. owner of a bookshop

In wartime, there is something oddly comforting about the smell and look and feel of row upon row of old leather-covered books, tilting a little to the right in a papery act of balance the way books on too-large shelves tend to do. He thinks, Remus is rubbing off on me, then, because Remus was always the one who loved books.

The door creaks and scrapes as it is pushed open, sending a piece of parchment wedged in the edges fluttering to the floor. And he looks, and thinks at any other time I might have enjoyed this, pretty girls walking in.

"Ho, McKinnon," he says, quietly, because even though the shop is empty listeners always exist. "Back room, past the W row, and left."

He carefully twists the sign in his window and follows, grinning (as he always does) at Wilde ensconced next to Woolf at the very edge of the last row ('a mere consequence of alphabetisation', he claims, when James and Remus look sternly at him in that way they tend to do). He opens the door, quietly slips inside. The grin fades, because this is wartime. And there is work to be done.

4. auror

The night is black and raining, and he is bitterly, tiredly unsurprised when he sees the killings, the green skull-and-snake high in the sky, because this is what Voldemort does - he creates fear, and tonight is the perfect night for it, dark and howling, creeping and prowling in black menace. There is a sense of the night encroaching, in the darkest hours before the dawn, that is lost when he tries to put it into words; it seems to be waiting, watching, circling like a shark, menacing against still black water.

The house is a burnt ruin, smoke trailing in languid misery from the blackened shell. An hour ago, he knows, a young family lived here; John Quirke, who had been a Ravenclaw in his year at school, and his pretty Muggle-born wife, and their little girl Janie, just starting to toddle and lisp a few words. They found John spread-eagled near the empty door-frame with a wand in his hand, glasses broken and askew. He fixes them and pushes them carefully back on, feeling that it is the very least he can do; above them, the mark's snake-tongued mouth is open, in what is surely a soundless laugh.

He hopes against hope that Mrs. Quirke and the little girl escaped, but it is a fool's hope; when he sees the way they died, horror screaming Bellatrix to his mind, hears behind him a mutter of 'They used the Reductor, then', he kneels over onto the blackened, cracked cobblestones and vomits.

5. layabout

Young men with small fortunes in the bank rarely need to do anything at all. He spends his hours with James and Lily, talking and laughing and turning his back stubbornly on the rest of the world, and by mutual agreement pretending not to notice that James is tired and hollow-eyed and Remus is distant and Peter is afraid, carefully blotting out traces of portents and prophecies where they seep, insidious, into conversation.

He spends his hours alone in his room, head in his hands, listening to the sound of the city outside, and on calm nights he can hear the streets echoing back; the end, the end is soon. And, stumbling, blind in the groping dark, he waits for the end, and for the world to shatter, and he thinks that if they cut him open they will find the war written in fire across his heart.

end

The 'Wilde/Woolf' joke is entirely the fault of the local bookstore. Who asked them to alphabetise in that particular way?
Poetry in the first section quotes 'The Gates of Damascus', by James Elroy Flecker, which is a lovely poem, filled with plotbunnies that bite if you aren't careful.