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forty-two

Three weeks passed. He felt that something was wrong. His family was sitting by a lake close to the manor, and his girlfriend was showing their daughter her second home for the first time. He swore that he had never been happier before. Nevertheless, the taste of war lingered on his tongue. Opening his diary by using a drop of his blood, he read the pages about the objects that kept the man he loathed immortal. Blocking out the sound of his girlfriend's laughter and his daughter's soft groans, he began doubting if he would get the chance to stay with them for long, telling himself that as long as they were alright, he could take all the pain in the world.

A month passed. The mother had been out in the sea again. She had dived her head under the water, the sea knowing something that no human did, and she had heard one of its many voices speak to her. There was pain. A lot of pain. The father of the child was a brave soldier, you should know that. He did not have to sacrifice himself. Yet he did. When she came home that night, horror crushed her heart. The door to her home had been kicked down. She found her family slaughtered, on display, and the bodies of her baby and boyfriend nowhere.

Seventeen years passed. Every member of the family had a grave now. Behind the manor lay those who were mercilessly killed on the early July day together under the dirt.

Marina should have laid there with them - with the rest of her family. But she had her own grave far away from them.

The moonlight shone on every inch of Little Hangleton graveyard. The graveyard was overgrown; many of the graves had become covered by ivy and moss; some of the names written on them had become faded; others had tilted and sunken into the ground. Beside the graveyard was the grounds of the vast Riddle estate and the Riddle House. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the most opulent of the graves in the graveyard belonged to the Riddle family.

The Riddle grave was marked by a large marble headstone that bore the names of Thomas Riddle, Mary Riddle, and Tom Riddle Senior. A large stone statue of the Angel of Death watched over the grave. Three years before, Tom had made Marina duel Harry in the graveyard. Now, she had her own grave under the spot where she had tortured him.

She was not a Riddle. She had never been a Riddle. Still, Tom had put her final resting place next to the members of his family. He had been kind enough to let those who had raised her visit her one spring day, and Narcissa had planted daisies over her grave so that when the seeds bloomed, she could hold her one last time.

Little did she know that Marina's grave was empty.

It was dark. Marina compared it to a deep state of sleep without dreams, and the moment just before the sun rises on a winter night. The type of darkness which makes you feel lost and alone. For an eternity, her soul danced, cried, and screamed along with the ghost of her body. Then, she saw sunrise. Opening her eyes, she was blinded by her soul collapsing with the weight of her body. She was wrapped in silk; that was the first thing she discovered. A silk bed sheet laid partly over her body, the rest of it over it dipped in a puddle of water beside her. Resting on a hard surface, she looked around to discover that she was in some sort of cave. Was this the afterlife?

Feeling no discomfort, she sat up straight and bowed over the puddle of water. Her reflection in the water looked right back at her. Her hair had grown much longer; it reached her elbows now. And strange as it was, it had turned white. She looked like a Malfoy.

Scrunching her nose, she leaned closer to the water to get a better look at her face. Brown eyes and pink lips - she looked the same as she always had. There was just one difference: starting by the corner of her right eye and reaching to her ear, a scar that took the shape of the hand movement to the Killing Curse had been marked on her.