The Witch and The Messiah
“Paul.” She whispered into the quiet. It’s dark, there’s a heavy fog pressing in on all sides, and she’s lost him in the void.
Sound does not echo here. She is afraid. She doesn’t know why, but it’s the fear that settles in after a terrible thing has already happened. She cannot find him.
The fog presses ever closer and just as she catches a glimpse of his lean back, just as she opens her mouth to call out once more, it comes rushing in. It floods her mouth, slips down her throat, fills her lungs and rids her of all breath. She tries to fight it, coughing pitifully, and gasping weakly in the wake of its terrible force, but she cannot manage the strength.
She’s reaching out to him, trying to bridge the gap between, and as it seems that he’s finally taken notice of her presence and begins to turn back to face her she is torn away and with a jolt-
-Harry sits up in her bed gasping. With a quick glance around, she is assured that she remains, ever the prisoner, in her baleful little room in No. 4 Private Drive.
Laying back down, she takes the time to pick apart her dream. It’s nothing particularly new, just one of the dozens she’s been having of the same achingly beautiful man since the beginning of her summer after fifth year.
This was, however, the first time her dreams had taken such an edge. She can feel her heart racing with the memory of it, the same fear turning her insides to jelly.
It was also the first time she was able to assign a name to the face she’d been obsessing over for weeks now. Carefully, and quietly, Harry crept out of her bed and across her room to the loose floorboards that contained her dream journal.
She never used to have one but, when this all began, she found herself desperate to grasp the faint tendrils of thought and image before they had the chance to escape her for good. That same flash of guilt reared it’s worn and dreary head once more with the thought that she was focusing on the wrong man, that she should be spending her time remembering Cedric rather than creating a veritable holy text for a man who only lived in her mind.
Harry, as always, grabs the beast by the throat and strangles it with great brutality. She cannot let it win. She will not survive it. And this, her dreams and now the one named ‘Paul’, are the only thing that seem to keep her going anymore.
The bitter ache of souring trust floods her tongue with rancid betrayal. Once more, she will not let it win. Her relationships with those she considered her friends, those same people who now ignore her in her worst hour, would not survive it. So, as she pulls her journal from the gaping hole in the floor and flips to the illustrated page of the man in her dreams, she gulps it down until it settles in her stomach, drowning in the pit of acid waiting there, waiting to dissolve into her blood and make her sick in a far more insidious way if it’s not delt with soon.
As she flips through the pages, Harry sees flashes of her art depicting the various people and places she’s seen in her dreams. Harry didn’t consider herself a great talent, her lines are too sharp and her hand a touch too hesitant for it, but she’s a daft hand nonetheless and as she turns that final page, she’s met with the piercing eyes of her harsh but accurate rendition of Paul.
He’d not yet been given a name in the journal and it’s with great relish that she adds one now. With careful consideration for the lack of light and Harry’s messy handwriting, she slowly labels the picture with her latest discovery.
“Paul Atreides, Heir to House Atreides.”
Her fingers linger across the name, stroking the page with a tender curiosity. Harry does not know much about the world she lives in, but she somehow knows that if she were to go looking for this name, she would not find it here. The knowledge is inherent, something she doesn’t give much thought beyond simple trust.
Gently, she returns the journal to its resting place, judging from the gradual brightening of the sky outside that the rest of the house will begin waking up in the next couple hours or so. Replacing the floorboards, Harry eventually makes her way back to her small cot and settles back down to gaze up at the ceiling until Aunt Petunia comes knocking with a list of her chores for the day.