Narcissa Malfoy [HARRY POTTER AFTERLIFE FANFICTION]

Chapter 11

"Welcome, my children!" Professor Trelawney greeted with her usual trembling voice. "I was predicting one of you would not come to class today!" She announced while searching the room. A few seconds later, a boy's head peeked inside through the door.

"Sorry." He apologized shyly and sat down on a free cushion. 

"...Would not come on time, I meant to say." Trelawney corrected herself and brushed some bushy strands of hair from her face, tucking them behind her ear. The professor walked over to a sizzling cauldron in the middle of the room. "Today, my dears, we are seeing the timeline of your life through the fog! Oh, bless you, Mr. Barnes." Trelawney stopped to say. There was a pause and then Nicholas Barnes sneezed. He blushed, the eyes of the entire class on top of him. 

Professor Trelawney's gaze turned back to the classroom. She grabbed a small leather bag from her desk and held it out for everyone to see. "Now with the ingredients that I asked you to bring in last week, I want you to crush them with your mortar and produce a very fine dust. You will then add a teaspoon of this special Gloom powder that I have here and stir until you begin to see the fog! Oh, any liquid ingredients can simply be poured into the cauldron. And, as I told you, the ingredients that you brought must have some connection to your past. The stronger your feelings and nostalgia are to these ingredients, the more powerful your visions will be. Everyone got it? Then lets begin!" 

Issa went to grab the special ingredient from Trelawney and then from her bag she produced three more ingredients. The first one she held was a lily of the valley. She dried up the flower with spell and then placed it in her mortar. As she crushed it, the smell of her yard outside her house filled her nostrils. Issa remembered laying on the grass with her mother on the first days of spring. Lilies of the valley tickling their bare feet. They grew wild outside her house. One time, her father Draco came outside to meet them -dressed in all black like he usually did- and sat between them. Her mom rested her head on his lap and Issa pretended to sleep on him as well. They stayed like that for what felt like hours. It was the most time she had ever spent that close to her father. 

Once the flower had been crushed, Issa inserted the second ingredient, a bezoar stone. Its acid smell reminded her of her parent's bedroom. Even before Issa had been born, her mother had already been weak and sick. A medicine concocted mainly with the bezoar stone was something that was always brewing in her house. At night, her father was normally upstairs, tending to the cauldron. Her parents had never told her or Scorpius what her mother was really sick of growing up, not until they were both in Hogwarts. Her mother had blood malediction. A curse that had been put on her ancestors and that had been carried on through the Greengrass family. Her mother had to drink a bezoar potion every few nights in order to prevent her from turning into a snake, but the ingredients made her body extremely fragile. Now that she was older, Issa was not afraid for her mother, she wasn't in any more risk of dying than anyone else. The curse and the potion only made her very feeble. But growing up and seeing her mother like that caused a lot of hard moments in Issa's life and worry. 

Then, Issa poured the last ingredient into the cauldron. It was a teaspoon of jet-black ink. Not any kind of ink though, it was a special one that her brother used to buy from Zonko's called the Rewritten Ink. Not so long before Issa's first year at Hogwarts, her brother Scorpius used to call her to his room. He would tell her about Hogwarts and what it was like, and then he would give her his books for her to learn from. In order to prepare her for school, Scorpius would make her do his homework with the special ink so that her handwriting would morph to look like his. She did this every Christmas and summer holiday, late at night while her brother watched over her. During the day, Scorpius would give her book after book to read. 

When the ink had settled into the cauldron, Issa scraped in the Gloom powder in with the rest of the liquids. She turned the mix 11 times and slowly a purple vapor began to consume her surroundings. It's scent began to seep into her brain. Then, though the fog, she began to relive her childhood.