Old Souls & Heavy Hearts {Snape x OC}

Fated Beginnings

I was born nearly six thousand years ago — Symphonia of Sparta. The name tastes like ash and salt when I say it now, heavy with the weight of everything I was.

In those days, magic was a river and we drank from its source. We did not wave sticks and recite tidy charms. We reached into the bones of the world and called thunder from the ribs of the sky. They called me a demi-god, a descendant of Hercules himself. The kings of Sparta wore my power like a blade: I split their enemies' ships with lightning, I laid bare the thoughts of diplomats like exposed throats. I obeyed. They cheered. I learned, slowly, how empty their praise sounded.

Some whispered the gods had cursed me. Others said they had blessed me. I learned the truth over centuries of watching: immortality is not mercy. It is a weight that grinds the edges from you until you can barely remember what hunger feels like, what hope tastes like, what it means to fear an ending. I watched generations of warriors sharpen and dull beneath my feet. I watched cities burn and rise anew from their ashes. I watched the red banners of Sparta fade into rumor and myth.

I stayed. Always, I stayed.

One last battle at sea decided everything. The Athenians brought a champion of their own — another god-blooded creature, ancient and terrible as I was. They boarded my ship as dusk bled across the water. The world went cold. They wrapped me in a spell of ice, hard as iron, unbreakable as death. The last thing I saw was the darkening sky before they threw me into the depths.

The sea closed over my face.

I slept. I dreamed in the salt and the silence for an age that swallowed ages.

My first memory after the ice is this: lanterns cutting through dark water. Cold hands dragging at my limbs. Voices speaking words I did not recognize, though I understood their tone — wonder, greed, calculation.

The year was 1738.

Nicholas Flamel and his team found me pressed into the rocky floor of the Mediterranean, not far from where the great Colossus had once stood. They hauled me up, spoke incantations that cracked the ice from my body, and muttered with more fascination than compassion. I woke confused, my tongue shaping words in ancient Greek that meant nothing to them, my mind grasping at fragments of a world that no longer existed.

Nicholas was different from the others. Patient. Curious, yes, but kind in his way. He took me to his home, gave me time to remember how to be a person again. He taught me French first, then English, the languages of this new age. He gave me a new name to match a new life: Sophia. We spent months together — perhaps a year — and in that time, I began to understand what the world had become in my absence. Wands. Ministries. A magic small and careful, nothing like the wild river I remembered.

But I could not stay. Nicholas had his own secrets, his own Stone, his own reasons for hiding. And I — I was a puzzle other wizards would not stop trying to solve.

So I crossed the ocean to the New World, to a place vast and wild enough to disappear into. I buried myself among trees and people who did not write our kind into dusty tomes. I learned the languages of the natives slowly, painfully. I learned healing — which is only another form of prayer — and tended wounds with poultices and hands that still remembered the old ways. I walked the edge of their wars. Sometimes I fought at their side. They fed me when I starved. They taught me to read the land instead of the stars.

For three hundred years, I hid beneath that name and that practice, under bark and prayer and the endless American wilderness.

It held — until the twentieth century, when a darker hunger rose in Europe.

A wizard of terrible malice sent agents across the ocean with maps and cold orders. They were looking for power, for weapons, for anything that might tip the balance of a war I wanted no part of.