Elizabeth Kane and the Deathly Hallows

Chapter 21

𝕴 𝖘𝖙𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖜𝖎𝖙𝖍 my feet in the sea, looking out at the storm. March had slowly melted in April and April showers bring May flowers so the wind bustled around me, blowing my dress out in front of me. Remus was not asleep, though he was quiet in my arms, looking at the storm with me. 

Trang was not with me for once, staying up at the house. She said I was crazy for coming out here at this time, but I couldn't stay inside. I knew dad was coming tonight, to tell everyone that his son had been born. 

That my brother had been born. 

It was weird, that this boy who I would not meet until his father was dead, would be the brother I got to recognize first, before my blood one. 

I was to melancholy to stay with them. So I stayed outside, telling Remus a story. 

In the depths there is a man lost in time. 

He has opened the wrong doors. Chosen the wrong paths. 

Wandered farther than he should have. 

He is looking for someone. Something. Someone. He does not remember who the someone is, doe snot have the ability, here in the depths where time is fragile, to grasp the thoughts and memories and hold on to them, to sort through them to recall more than glimpses. 

Sometimes he stops and in the stopping the memory grows clear enough for him to see her face, or pieces of it. But the clarity motivates him to continue and then the pieces fall apart again and he walks on not knowing for whom or what it is he walks. 

He only knows he has not reached it yet. 

Reached her yet. 

Who? He looks toward the sky that is hidden from him by rock and earth and stories. No one answers his question. There is a dripping he mistakes for water, but no other sound. Then the question is forgotten again. 

He walks down crumbling stairs and trips over tangled roots. He has long since passed by the last of the rooms with their doors and their locks, the places where the stories are content to remain on their shelves. 

He has untangled himself from vines blossoming with story-filled flowers. He has traversed piles of abandoned teacups with text baked into their crackled glaze. He has walked through puddles of ink and left footprints that formed stories in his wake that he did not turn around to read. 

Now he travels through tunnels with no light at their ends, feeling his way along unseen walls until he finds himself someplace somewhere sometime else. 

He passes over broken bridges and under crumbling towers. 

He walks over bones he mistakes for dust and nothingness he mistakes for bones. 

His once-fine shoes are worn. He abandoned his coat some time ago. 

He does not remember the coat with its multitude of buttons. The coat, if coats could remember such things, would remember him but by the time they are reunited the coat will belong to someone else. 

On clear days memories focus in his mind in scattered words and images. His name. The night sky. A room with red velvet drapery. A door. His father. Books, hundreds and thousands of books. A single book in her hand. Her eyes. Her hair. The tips of her fingers. 

But most of the memories are stories. Pieces of them. Blind wanderers and star-crossed lovers, grand adventures and hidden treasures. Mad kings and cryptic witches. 

The things he has seen and heard with his own eyes and ears mix with tales he has read or heard with his own eyes and ears. They are inseparable down here.