The End of Everything

The End of Everything.

Drip, drip, drip. On and on. The sun may rise, and it may set, but we do not see that here. We see the cold, hard stone of the surrounding architecture, crude and horrible. We see many others just like us huddled together in corners, sprawled on the ground coughing up their lungs, or hunched over themselves, defeated and waiting. And we see our captors, cloaked and masked, appearing to drag one more of us away. Through it all the drips keep coming. The only constant, the one sound that can always be heard.

Well, the drips and the screaming.

The terrible, heart-wrenching screaming of someone just like me. But somehow worse than the screaming is that split second just after the screaming stops, and all you can hear through the heavy silence are the drips, and then all of a sudden comes the rushing realisation of exactly why the screaming has stopped. Those are the moments when my blood runs cold. Those moments something breaks in me; something breaks in all of us, and we panic. We become animals.

Sometime in here I wonder if this is what it is like being cattle, waiting in the yards outside the slaughterhouse. Can they comprehend, as we can, the fate that waits for them outside their pen? If they could cry, would their time be spent, as ours is, weeping bitter, hopeless tears until there are none left in them to cry? Do they ever rush against the walls of their prison, beating themselves black and blue, clawing, biting, and bleeding in an effort to pierce those impenetrable walls?

Do they understand that they are doomed?

At least humans don't understand the cries of the cattle they kill. Unlike our captors. Behind those hideous masks they listen, and they understand every word of our angry screaming, our overwhelming fear, and our desperate pleadings for our lives. The corners of their mouths slowly upturn into grins that we can't see, as they stroke our hair, and drag us away to rape us of our dignity. And the memories of the dead haunt the living.

So many, so many have gone before me. Friends, strangers, enemies, we are all united here, in the Mudblood prison. Here, where we are constantly dying because of our heritage, persecuted because of the blood that runs through our veins. This cell is nearly half as full as it was, and it is only one of many. Every hour, minute, every second of every day our bodies pile up, our ghosts haunt the streets that are ruled over by a wreck of an excuse for humanity.

Lord Voldemort.

Sometime in the dead of night we scream to him, scream until our voices go hoarse. Why us? What did we ever do? Why is it that every day we suffer because of choices that were not ours? I hate him. I hate him for making me become this bitter, twisted being trapped in a stone cell, and filling me so full of rage, and anger, and hate for wizard kind that I could explode.

And now, now it is my time. My captors have come for me. I am the chosen prey, and those murderous beings unlock my chains, and wrench me up from the floor. They drag me kicking, and screaming towards the door. Around me the rest of the muggle-borns rage, they caw, and scream, and scratch, and they sob for me, for another of their kind being led away to be slaughtered. They sob for the cruelty of the world, for the horror of their situation.

They sob because they may be the one our captors come for when I am finished screaming.

The corridor I am dragged through is made of the same bleak stone, and we turn corners until any sense of direction I had is lost. I fight them, I struggle, but they are so strong, and there would be nowhere for me to run even if I did shake them off. At last, we come face to face with a magnificent door. I don't know what await me on the other side, but I do know whom. And still, all I can hear is the far off cries of my kind, and that one constant sound.

Drip, drip, drip.