Elle N'avait Pas De La Chance

~~~~~~

Viviane Devereaux crawled out of her hiding place and gazed around at the decimated rubble that was once her school. Aquitaine, once a stately Val de Loire chateau was now in ruins, thanks to the efforts of some of Voldemort´s Death Eaters, those whose cruel faces were and always would be imprinted on her mind´s eye in vivid Technicolor.

Viviane wiped the salt from her eyes; she had been weeping silently at the destruction of her most cherished place in the world. She had seen their faces alight with sadistic joy. She would hunt down every single last one someday. However, Viviane was painfully aware that, at the moment, she was a lone teenage girl surrounded by the bodies of her friends and mentors and had no way of getting anywhere. All she had were some of the more arcane, obscure, or valuable books that her erstwhile professors had stowed away with her, the clothes on her back, and her wand.

There was one near-comfort for Viviane while she sifted through the rubble. She knew help would come for her soon. The sickly green Dark Mark floating in the sky was a rather conspicuous distress beacon.

~*~

The French wizarding authorities did indeed show up a few hours later. They were surprised at the level of destruction that had befallen the prestigious academy, and even more surprised that someone had survived the brutal attack. The collective astonishment heightened when they saw that the lone refugee was none other than the Devereaux heiress.

"Mademoiselle Devereaux?" asked one.

"Yes?" she replied coolly, as if she were a princess on a throne, not a bedraggled girl sitting on a ruined wall. Her aristocratic mien had been hard-wired into her and was not easy to break. It was shattered, however, by bad news of the worst kind.

"I am deeply sorry, but it has been discovered that you family´s manse has been attacked," the same man said, bowing his head.

"And my family?" asked Viviane in a strangled voice.

"They are dead, Mademoiselle."

Viviane nodded shortly and gathered up the books bequeathed to her. "Take me to my house, please."

~*~

The Devereaux chateau was not as completely destroyed as Aquitaine; there was still the odd tapestry hanging on the wall and the furniture was mostly unspoiled, but all the important books had been taken from her father´s study. This didn´t matter to Viviane, as she knew where Philippe Devereaux had kept the things she was after.

She bade the officers to return at dawn and set off to salvage from her house and formulate a plan of where to go from where she was. She found the ominous-looking stairway down to the dungeon and tapped on the correct stone on the left wall to reveal a passage that only she and her father and his relatives knew about. Only a person with Devereaux blood in their veins could go down there, so her mother had not ever known about it. This was where she had learned to fight with a sword. While she vehemently detested her father´s impassioned rants about familial honor and obligation, she had always felt that much more confident and self-assured with a good weapon in her hand.

She found the sparring chamber and selected the ancestral blade of her family. With the feel of a cool sword, she felt better already and prepared to consider her predicament. She was a half-educated, orphaned witch who was wanted by rather evil people. On top of that, she had a famous name and some `gift´ that her father had given her and she had never been told what that gift was or how it worked. Her school, her last refuge, was gone, and she had no intention of being a ward of the state.

To her advantage, her face looked more like a proud raptor´s than one of a nubile teenager, so she could easily pass for an older witch if she went to a place where people didn´t know her.

"Now all I must worry about," Viviane said to herself, "is being gone before daybreak." With that, Viviane sheathed her sword and buckled the belt around her woebegone robes. She wasted no time in filling a trunk with the remaining robes that she wanted to take, all of the Devereaux jewelry she could carry, and some money. There was one last thing she wanted.

She perused the numerous secret compartments of her father´s desk until she found what she was looking for, the Devereaux ring, with its serpents and emeralds. She exited the castle to see if the broomshed was still standing in the servant´s yard, dragging the trunk behind her and jumping at small noises. The servants were all gone, but the Death Eaters had not paid much attention to the servant quarters and outbuildings. They probably didn´t know that one of the shacks was full of valuable brooms. Her eyes darted back and forth before settling on a reliable model that could take her all the way to Moscow if she wished.

"Reducio!" she said, shrinking the trunk to a manageable size for broom travel.

Before she left, Viviane paused. It would not do to try and disappear but continue to call herself a Devereaux. She realized that she needed the shelter of anonymity, an alias. She toyed with the thought of going only by her first name or using her mother´s maiden surname, but dismissed them both. Unbidden, a name she remembered from her genealogy records resurfaced in her mind; the Chances were a little known and nearly extinct branch of the Devereaux clan.

At first it struck her a painfully ironic to choose a name meaning `luck´, as luck had deserted her completely, but Viviane figured that good luck would doubtless come her way soon, and a name couldn´t hurt in expediting that. Viviane mounted the broom, playing the name in her mind a few times, then out loud.

"Viviane Chance," she proclaimed defiantly to the wind. A new name meant a new start for her, new goals, new ambitions. Viviane smiled slightly as she flew, a breeze whipping her dirty, tangled dark hair around. This new girl, no, woman, this Viviane Chance had one predominating goal; Vengeance.