Worse - The Sequel

EIGHT

Dumbledore picked one out slowly, eyeing it like he had seen it many times before. Again, he said nothing and Sebastian rolled his eyes as the elderly wizard walked over to a point in his office where a rather simple-looking stone basin sat with liquid in it that looked anything but simple.

Sebastian watched carefully, hands in his pockets as Dumbledore uncapped the first vial of white, glassy memory and poured it slowly into the water. It was quite viscous and slowly pooled into a blackness as soon as it broke the surface of the water, looking less like a memory  and more like a sickness.

"This is where Elladora met Remus for the first time." Dumbledore explained and Sebastian protectively crossed his arms, he remembered Remus talking about how much he loved Elladora - it kicked some kind of brotherly instinct. "Please, Sebastian...it's not what you think."

Narrowing his eyes at the man before him, Sebastian poked his own cheek with his tongue and came to stand cautiously in front of the stone basin, looking down at the blackness spreading. He put his hands on the basin, the cool stone underneath his even colder palm. And just before he submerged his head, he took a large breath in.

And then he was falling.

Through an abyss of white, clouds of purity, until he landed and a scene materialised before him. A place that Sebastian had been before, but not frequently.

There was steel railings and he was on top of a circular tower, somehow surrounded by models of planets and telescopes that the Astronomy students used in their studies. For some reason, he was stood on the top of Hogwart's Astronomy Tower and the breeze from being so high was slapping his hair back away from his face, his wintry skin turning icy with the seconds.

It was late at night, the stars in the sky creating patterns and constellations that his ancestors and relatives had all been named after, decorating the sky like a destiny he couldn't get rid of. Always there, always watching everything from above - when Elladora and Sebastian's grandmother had died, she had told them to look for her in the stars. Elladora had taken the thought on board without hesitation, though Sebastian knew that he would never look at the sky and search for that old hag.

An old hag that used to sing a lullaby, a dark and miserable lullaby she thought would comfort a young girl. The tune was so familiar and so harshly carved into his brain that Sebastian could almost hear it as he stood atop of the tower, confused about the situation he had been submerged head first into.

"Hush little baby, don't you cry, grandma's going to be there when you die..."

The voice inside of his head was soft, feminine and not one he had heard before, but one that sounded the slightest bit familiar. And it didn't take long for Sebastian to realise that this sickening tune was not in his head at all, but being sung by somebody within the memory, on the other side of the large steel planet he was stood behind.

A feeling more dreadful than the one he had when falling into the abyss of the memory washed over him as his feet slowly began to traipse around to where the tune was coming from. There were only three people who had ever lived to hear that song. One of them was dead, one of them was him and the other...was a girl who had died too soon.

"Whether it's when you're big or small," The voice echoed across the astronomy tower like it was a siren from a mermaid within the bottom of the Black Lake, luring him softly around the edge of the tower until the wind hit him with more force. "Just one move will end it all..."

If his life was an opera, the crescendo would've swelled to a peak as Sebastian stepped around the large steel planet and lay his eyes upon the purpose of the memory that Dumbledore had sent him into. Upon the steel railing of the Astronomy Tower, cowering between two large pillars, stood a girl, her feet perched lightly upon the metal bar meant to protect people from falling off of the edge.