Убивали во мне этого бога, чё по сути был поводырь.
”Here, carved from sadness, my enemies sharpened their axe with every beating pulse.”
- Minor

“Occlumency is the practice of shutting off your mind from forceful intrusions such as legilimency, and can even help you resist against the effects of Veritaserum. Can someone recall what Veritaserum does to a human?” Professor Ivanov strides up and down on the pedestal at the very front of the classroom, hands crossed behind his back, with his lips pursed scrutinizing.

All students, including Alana, raise their hands, except for one girl in the very back, whose name Alana doesn’t know. The professor ends up picking her, and furrows his bushy brows to a point that his eyes threaten to disappear beneath them, when she’s unable to answer his question. “Too bad. You passed your owl’s test, yes?” he reassures himself, without waiting for an answer, and continues to answer his own question, “It’s a truth serum. The receiver of such potion is forced to tell what they believe to be the truth, and only very few, and very strong wizards and witches can resist its force.”

Professor Ivanov turns to write something onto the blackboard, the dark curls of his hair bobbing with every vigorous stroke he makes, his free hand remaining pressed against his back in proper stance. The Dark Arts professor is fixated on the success of his students, on their excellence, and despises nothing more than ignorance and laziness. A great teacher, as long as you don’t anger him, because his rage could be quite horrifying - more horrifying than the subject he teaches.

“Now, who’s done their homework and can tell me what the first stage of Occlumency is?” Significantly fewer hands rise into the air, which the professor acknowledges with a thin-lipped smile, before picking Leonid to answer the question, though not without commenting with somewhat of a genuine chuckle on the fading bruises on his face.

The rest of the lesson goes by rather quickly, and Alana ends up being one of only three students to master the first stage in the same lesson. It’s not much more than emptying the mind of all emotions and thoughts, which sounds easy in theory, yet requires a large amount of concentration and strength to reach and keep up. Viktor, on the other hand, failed miserably the first few attempts, and only in the end managed to hold it up for a few seconds before Professor Ivanov mercilessly broke through it and remarked that he should try and hide his cigarettes somewhere else.

“It’s really hard, almost painful,” Viktor complains on the way to the next lesson, bringing one hand up to run over the buzzcut atop his head, grimacing. “Gonna give me a headache.”

Alana laughs, patting his back in consolation. “You’ll live. I’m sure.”

He shoots her a dirty look out of the corner of his eyes, like it’s her fault the headache is coming. “Easy for you to say, you’re basically an icicle.”

“Because you’re so emotional?” she retorts, lips curling. “You?”

The man huffs. “I didn’t say that. I’m, like, a brick, or something.”

She stares at him from the side, lightly patting him on the arm at the proclamation. “Totally.”

If there’s one thing she knows with absolute certainty about Viktor Krum, then it is that he’s neither stupid, nor emotionally dull - though he’s certainly not one to serenade his feelings from the castle’s rooftops - no matter what the media tries to make him out to be. Because as a star quidditch player, you’re apparently not allowed to be smart, or human, especially not when you’re also built like you weightlift every minute of your free time and shovel protein bars like a NBA player in his bulking phase. But he’s not always looked like that. He’s that guy whose body got big quick, quick and late, and didn’t quite offer a timely window for him to play catch up with. He left the fourth year a boy at least a foot shorter than everyone else with a ribcage you could count each bone up like a xylophone, and came back after the summer looking like he lived off of steroids for the entirety of those eight weeks, with a voice that has finally gotten the memo and left the pubescent voice break behind to fill out his figure. It was more like muscles that became muscles so fast they left him with painful stretch marks and a sense of whiplash, and suddenly the girls were all over him, and suddenly he wasn’t the smart kid anymore, he was the hot guy, the school’s dreamboat, which is even more isolating, especially when your brain still seems to work on an entirely different plane than everyone else around you. Maybe that’s the reason he and Alana work together so well, and stuck even when all the praise and flattery ultimately went straight to his head and he turned into a jock for two weeks. Their brains think alike, for the most part at least, functioning on the same wavelength.

They have Arithmancy next, the only elective alongside Rituals and Curses that they’ve taken together, and they make it into the classroom just mere seconds before Professor Bosch hurries inside, his leather coat waving behind him like his personal flagship, and greeting the class with a series of numbers he conjures into the air with the flick of his wand.

The library is near silent, only filled with the occasional scraping of quill against parchment as students sit dotted around desks or slumped into the corners of sitting booths trying to get in some studying or homework before curfew hits. Alana sits next to Einar on one of the sofas, legs squared across his lap, and Living with Legilimency shoved into her face, a book that the class is due to read the first few chapters of until the next lesson. Einar has his head tilted back, eyes shut behind half closed lids, like one of those nursery dolls that give the illusion of blinking when you rock them back and forth, book fallen shut with his thumb still stuck between the pages. **The braids along his head have started to come apart, small strands falling out to the side where the hair is shaved down to a buzz. She softly nudges him with her knee, inquiring if he’s still awake, which he confirms with a low, questioning hum.

“Are you done reading?” Alana asks, propping her head up to get a better look at the guy.

Einar shakes his head, shifting to get more comfortable, and pushing the book off his legs entirely. It’s not that he’s lazy, factually speaking he’s far from it, and seeing him doze off like this is about as rare an occasion as the alignment of six planets in the sky. He is what other students would describe as a freak, nature’s anomaly in the system, like his atoms hadn’t been assembled right at birth and now he had to bear the consequences. He possesses a gift that is called Volva’s touch, though he would probably argue that it is much rather a curse than it is a gift, the very thing that causes his left eye to appear as if permanently bloodshot where the right one is the usual white, the intensity of the blue cranked up to resemble that of a polished turquoise. It makes him see things that haven’t actually happened yet, removing the threshold of what the human mind should be capable of perceiving altogether to indulge him in seemingly random visions, continuous voices in his head to pelt down on him. They keep him up at night, making sleep wholly impossible at times. He says it drives him into insanity.

Sometimes, as administered by the school’s head nurse, Einar takes a potion known as the Somnia Somno Elixir, known to induce a deep, dreamless slumber, which can become dangerous once you start depending on it. Right now he’s not on it, so sleep’s in high demand.

When looking at him, it’s easy to imagine him as a boy sometimes, confused by what he was seeing, or hearing, though wholly oblivious to just how great extents this would trouble him later in life. Above the fireplace at his place hangs a picture of twelve year old Einar together with his mother and father, at the port in Oslo from where the Durmstrang Galleon departed, a happy Halvar looking over to a happy Caecilia, hand placed on the shoulder of happy Einar with his bag in hand, wearing the uniform for the first time. The image had been taken perhaps a few minutes before the boy departed on the galleon, yet its ghost is accurately preserved behind the glass of the frame. With that jocular, boyish smile, there was no way he could’ve known that in such a short time from then on, from that blinding camera flash, he would be met with the harsh closemindedness of reality, an innocence taken from him just as fast as the image was captured. Twelve year old Einar is oblivious to everything that has happened in that living room from then on, smiling indifferently.

“Want me to tell you what happens?” she offers, to spare him the hassle of plaguing himself through the pages, and drops the opened book down onto her chest, done reading.

“Gefðu mér eina mínútu^*1,” he retorts, in Old Norse, before immediately switching to Russian in the next sentence. “It’s nicely quiet right now.”

They sit in silence for a little while longer, until a group of young students gets up rather tumultuously, throwing an empty candlestick to the ground with a clang, one that is received with annoyed shushes and more laugher from all around, and drives Einar to sit back up straight, eyes opening. “Alright, enlighten me.”

The light of a flickering candle bounces off the side of his face, tinting it a pale orange, the collar buttons of his linen shirt undone to reveal the edge of a tattoo there, the compass-like vegvisir he got done last summer, traditionally, with a serrated bone comb made from the tusk of a giant boar. He promised Alana to take her there next summer, under the condition that he would choose the design she’d get, swearing on his ice cream to not pick something absurd.

She summarizes the chapters for him, explaining the works of common forms of Legilimency versus instinctive Legilimency, before drifting off and changing the subject to complain about the amount of homework they’ve gotten from Professor Haraldsson on top of their thesis study this week. Einar merely laughs, nudging her leg. “It’s not much like you to complain about school.”

“Sue me, it’s been a long day and I’m tired.” She rubs the bridge between one eye and the other with thumb and pointer, sounding out a heavy sigh. “And there’s a halfway finished toxicology essay laying on the table right there waiting for me to finish it.”

“Get on it then.” He nudges her legs, prompting Alana to get up, to which she obliges disgruntled, shooting him a dirty look from the corner of her eyes. She settles at the desk nearest to Einar, picking up where she left off yesterday, which has not much to do with Toxicology itself but more with the life story of one Estrid Illrvölva, a powerful seeress and witch from the early middle ages who poisoned and subsequently murdered an entire village. Professor Sammul announced that they would take a deep-dive on her methods throughout the next few lessons, as well as examine the exact toxins she used, so a thorough background on the seeress as a person is a minimum requirement. It’s interesting enough, but not at nearly 11pm after a long school day and at least a thousand other things on her mind.

“Do you not have any homework to finish?” she inquires, pointedly, when she feels him stare at her from the rear.

“I already finished it.” He’s smiling something complacent, and she doesn’t need to look at him to know, it’s in his voice.

It’s silent for a while, save for the scraping of her quill against the parchment and the sound of the wind as it pulls on the window shutters. The library is a pious place, has always been, a place of ataraxies, and equilibriums of quiet countenance and repose. The area around the entrance is new, refurnished and reembellished to blend in better, for new times sake, whereas the further you wander down the dimly lit corridors, through passages enclosed by shelves as high as the ceiling itself, the rougher the wood feels to the touch, and the older it smells. There, scrolls piled into triangular dividers replace bound books, and the scent of pine resin mixed with incense hangs strongly in the air. Some non-magical scrolls date back to the 1500s, when a nearby monastery had been raided and monks attempted to rescue its inventory of all sacred and documentative scriptures to the nearby school, then still open for even muggles. Magical scrolls exist from as long back as the 1200s, when the school had first been founded, some of them so valuable that only teachers and very few students may handle them. There are areas are so dark and meandered that it doesn’t take much to get properly lost in them and wander through fully abandoned corridors covered in cobwebs, sheltered from all noise until you miraculously find the exit or another person to latch on to and hope they find the way back out.

Back in Year 1 and 2, Alana often liked to venture through the aisles, mostly for the thrill of it being forbidden for younger students, and try to decipher the oldest scrolls she could find, a habit which earned her lots of detention and a few painful punishments until she was finally old enough. On rare occasions she still does it, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore.

“You know,” Einar breaks the silence, entangling his limbs. “I had a strange dream recently. A scary one.”

Alana turns around to face him, surprised. It’s not often that Einar decides to share whatever he sees, he likes being the observer, watching as life unravels, unless it’s something dangerous. “One of those dreams?” she asks, putting the quill aside.

He nods. “T’was weird, everything hazy. I was at the bottom of a lake or an ocean, I’m not quite sure, but I wasn’t myself. A girl, I think, young. Black hair, braided, and wearing a nightgown. I couldn’t breathe.”

“You were drowning?”

“No. No, I was tied to a rock, someone put me there. It was night, I could see the moon break through the surface not far above me, and I was trying to scream.” He shrugs, his voice indifferent, like he’s talking about the results of the latest quidditch match and not about a possible murder. He’s got that boyish tone, almost a little too light for his age and statue, which does not pair very well with his serious, and often sinister way of thinking, and has led many students to believe that he’s gone mad. They hide it behind their name-calling and browbeating, but many are scared of him, not just because of his gift, but because of how angry Einar can get - and does on a frequent basis. He is not someone you’d want as your opponent in dueling class, with or without wand.

“So you think someone’s gonna die?” Alana surmises, in thoughts. “Don’t you think you should maybe tell someone? Professor Karkaroff, perhaps?”

Einar tilts his head, like the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind yet, shrugging somewhat inaptly. “I don’t even know what the dream means, or if I should take it literally. It’s... complicated.”

“Ask the seer?”

“Tomorrow, I will. Today, I will go to bed and sleep, hopefully,” he says upon hearing the baritone sound of the tower bell announcing the curfew, shifting his weight to stand up and stretch, and Alana follows his example. “So should you.”

The next day is a Friday, which means that they have the first two lessons off, and instead spend the time getting in some rather unproductive studying in the Year 6 common room, sitting on sofas or the ground huddled into heavy furs. The entire area is blanketed over with a layer of drowsiness, air smelling of freshly brewed coffee and the burnt wood from the fireplaces emitting dim light to the seats grouped around them. Most students have their eyes half closed, tired conversations dragging on in few places around the room, homework being done last minute or breakfast being eaten, slowly, like time passes differently once you walk through the door, like it’s more of a dimension to phase into and exist within.

Alana sits between Viktor and Hadia, one of her roommates, half asleep herself as she looks over Viktor’s shoulder to read a chapter for Charms class, still bleary-eyed and barely conscious. The sleep she got had been both, deep and restless, a conundrum, and there wasn’t much she could do to help it as she knows she won’t properly wake up until 10am. Viktor, on the other hand, had already gone for a run around the castle before breakfast, and is as awake and chatty as ever, sipping on his water whereas Alana is already on her second cup of freshly brewed coffee.

There’s a shift in atmosphere, like something darker is creeping through the floorboards, right before the large swingdoors are pushed open with such force that they repel off the walls, dust shedding down like snowfall, and two figures enter the common room. In the thunderstruck silence that spreads through the room, they recognize them as Professor Ivanov and Professor Randadóttir, the school’s Dark Arts teachers as well as the head teachers for all boys and girls Year 5 and up, respectively. In the few seconds of silence, they eye the student body before them gravely, like hangmen picking out their next victim, and Alana slowly sets her cup down, trying not to make a sound.

“Good morning, students. Has any of you seen Helen Orlova? She’s a first year student, presumably gone missing yesterday evening around curfew,” Professor Ivanov says, smoothing out the wrinkles in his white dress shirt with slender fingers, adorned by a blackened metal ring around the index finger.

Collective mumbling arises, No’s given as answers, followed by more questions thrown at the two professors. Alana catches Einar’s look from half across the room, an unreadable expression on his face, suddenly feeling a little sick in her stomach. And for a split second, she’s mad at Einar. Mad at him for telling her about the dream, making her an accessory and burdening her with the knowledge that maybe she could’ve stopped it, had she spoken to a teacher or gone looking for the girl herself.

Professor Randadóttir calms the room down, adding, “We will be conducting a search for the girl, which means that you, as well as students from Year 7, will look in and around the school’s lands. That does mean that you are permitted to leave school grounds, if needed. I ask you to report anything back to one of us, and not go off to investigate on your own. Any questions?”

It’s like someone has drained all the tiredness from the room at once. Someone asks, “Does this mean classes are cancelled today?”

Professor Ivanov sighs. “Yes, that means classes are cancelled until Ms. Orlova has been found.” A few students laugh aloud at the outlook of a free day, not thinking much of the lost girl. If found, some might even ask her to hide a little longer to get the afternoon off. It’s how it goes. Alana feels like throwing up.

^*1 "give me a minute"