the seven devils [completed]

chapter thirty-two

Varya walked into the Dungeons eagerly, embracing the sweet sensation of home, and her eyes adjusted to the emerald glow of the salon. While away, it was easy to forget that she belonged to the Slytherin house, but now, as she walked wearing her forest and silver uniform, she felt more proud than ever.

Her mind went to one boy— the heir of Salazar Slytherin, the epitome of the House's essence. Cunning beyond remorse, perseverent, charismatic with just a hint of darkness that edged over the surface — good boy, Tom Riddle—on his way to becoming Head Boy, and yet with no simple definition of his future, always fueled by an unholy thirst for power. Yes— little serpent slithering through the cracks, undetected, and killing the innocent mouse in its own home.

Tom Riddle always had his own little game, did he not? His apocalyptic nature could have had him pass off as nothing but a maddened individual, and yet he had designed himself a faux personality, a mask to cover the empty vessel that he was.

Her room was just as she had left it, and she could see the ruffled pillows from where she had last slept. Her blanket was halfway off the mattress— she had hurried to avoid her roommates and had not even bothered making her bed. Varya kneeled before the frame and pulled out a box she had been fervid to open.

She let the contents spill on her bed, a bunch of old pictures, a few bracelets that she had outgrown, her first fallen tooth, and a small bag that had seen better days. Her hand stopped over one of the pictures, and she thought back to the odd memory— it was her eleventh birthday, and one of her classmates from school had insisted on taking a picture of the girl as she studied in one of the book-rooms of Scholomance.

The light was dim, and she could barely make out her figure as it stood at a wooden desk. Varya remembered that bench. She had craved her initials with her first knife on one of its legs, a sort of ritual for new apprentices. Her hair was shorter than now, barely hanging over her shoulder, and she looked pestered by the boy that was taking the picture.

Another picture, another year. It was taken in the catacombs as the students stood over the corpse of a strigoi, almost like an anatomy lab. The Dark Priest had explained how the beasts functioned, how they siphoned magic from the blood of their victims. Varya turned the picture and smiled at the small note that one of her peers had made— Do you think he is a strigoi too? Bloodsucking prick. It was not signed, and the statement was so vague it could have belonged to anyone.

There had been good memories.

It was the last picture that caught her attention, though, because it was taken before the Dark Priest had brought her to Scholomance. However, as she looked at it, she noticed something odd. Varya Petrov's eight-year-old self was still in the frame, standing in the backyard of what she had always assumed to be Magdalena's house, and yet where the woman's body was supposed to be, there was nothing.

A knock sounded at the door, and Varya scurried to place everything back in the box and stuff it under her bed. The wooden mass swung open, and Ivy Trouche walked in, followed by Della Beauchamp. They both squealed as they saw Varya, and ran to the girl at full speed, knocking her back into the ground.

"Ah! Get off, you pestering witches," she giggled, although she did not mean her words, and they knew it too as they shared a nimble look before embracing their Slytherin friend once again.

"It feels as if years have passed since I last saw you," sighed Ivy dramatically, getting up from the floor and dusting her dress off. It was of fine silk, a deep marine color, and the patterns of golden and silver threads that spun from the back to the front made it painfully elegant. Ivy looked the same, but her spirit had made fair use of the break, and she seemed to no longer carry the weight that it once had, and Varya wondered what this meant in regards to her plan to destroy Riddle.