Black Cobalt

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BLACK COBALT

It's his eyes that are the most different. In my mind, they are always blue. A dusky, brooding, mysterious blue. The blue of the sky at midnight and the sea during a storm. A blue so dark it was almost black.

The eyes that are calmly and venomously gazing at me now are nothing like the eyes I knew. The eyes in front of me now are red and narrowed, with gash like slits where the pupils should be. I know I'm cornered; I know there is nowhere I can run; I know that barring some miracle, I am going to die here. My life will end in the middle of this forest, in the middle of this war.

He doesn't know who I am. I am just a little girl standing in his way, another obstruction on his course. Who am I but one person in the thousands left dead by his reign of terror, his paths of blood. He doesn't know that I knew the former him. That I once spent hours each day spilling my heart to a memory of his sixteen year old self. That that same memory controlled me into following out its evil objectives. That I once thought myself to love that memory of a person.

I never had anyone to truly talk to until I found Tom Riddle's diary. Being the youngest child of seven -and the only girl- makes it near impossible to find anyone to talk to. Of course, my mother always claimed to be ready to talk, but something was always keeping her busy, be it Charlie falling off his broomstick somewhere, or Fred and George turning Percy's quill into a fish. And what brother would want to make the time to talk, really talk to, his little sister? Even at Hogwarts, the place where I always expected to find so many friends and companions, I was lacking someone to confide in. Imagine my surprise when the first time I wrote in my diary, it wrote back.

How could I have guessed that in confessing my secrets I would bring forth so much pain? I thought that speaking the truth was supposed to obliterate wrongs, not to create them. For the longest time, I thought that I was luckiest girl on earth, having a charming, receptive friend to carry around in my pocket all the time.

I never suspected a thing. I was so naive at the time. In the 5 years since I first wrote in that diary, I have seen many things I would not have ever thought possible. Death, destruction, and loss have all become parts of my daily life. I am wholly changed from the person I was when I put quill to paper in that little book. The person I am now would never have trusted the words spreading on the page from a hidden source. The person I am now would have caught on that something was amiss before anyone had been harmed. However, I am the person I am now because I did not distrust the secret words, and because I could not stop or understand what was happening to me. I became distrustful and guarded after the events in the Chamber of Secrets; I appeared the same on the outside, but I had learned never to share my soul ever again. Eve those you thought you loved can hurt you in way that are unimaginable.

And now I am standing before the person who did that to me. Well, not quite that person; the person I knew, the Tom I confided in, the person I loved, the thing that controlled me, was only a memory. But the man in front of me now created that memory.

I wait for the words I know are coming. All I can do now is wait the handful of seconds it will be until my life is extinguished. I think one last time of all those minutes spent channeling myself through ink into that diary. I think one last time of the dark cobalt eyes turned crimson by years of ambition, power, and hatred. I close my eyes and I wait.

"Avada Kedavra"

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