Oh Hubris, my dreaded enemy
The dining hall buzzed with conversation. Sigrid traced a crack in the table with her fork. Couldn't McGonagall announce the Hogwarts Delegation while they ate? She hadn't had breakfast that morning and impatience was gnawing at her stomach lining.
Another minute passed. Surely there was food in the kitchens. Would it be quicker to sneak in and steal a roll, or should she wait out the announcement?
McGonagall stood and walked to the podium. Well, there went her decision. McGonagall had assigned her a new room. A broom closet converted to fit a bed, a desk, and her trunk, and that was it. The room was just down the hall from the old bag's office. There was no way she could leave without McGonagall noticing.
The Headmistress didn't need to hush the crowd—they all went quiet, watching her with bated breath. Sigrid tapped the side of her plate a little too hard. The sound echoed loud enough that McGonagall's hat twitched in her direction. She bit back a sigh.
"Well, I am sure you are all eager to know of the compiled lists." She raised a piece of parchment in her hand and watched with a smile as the whole student body leaned forward to see if they could get an early glance.
She lowered the paper. "The council has decided on the delegates that will represent our school for the tournament at Ilvermorny. The decisions were difficult. Many candidates were indeed promising, but I am afraid that only 20 may qualify."
She paused dramatically and the whole hall seemed to exhale and then inhale as one as her mouth dropped open again. "To make things fair, we have chosen five delegates from each house. I will begin with Gryffindor."
She listed names, all of which garnered some applause, at least from their own houses. Sigrid only noted the ones she recognized. She grimaced as Liam Poole's name was called for Gryffindor, Victor Hulmen for Ravenclaw, and Rita Bluehorn—her old roommate—for Slytherin. The rest were students she was vaguely aware of as notably capable.
She clenched her fork hard enough that it bent. A month-and-a-half ago, if Cass had asked her to come to Ilvermorny to help with a dragon, she would've packed her shit, no questions asked. But the letter that arrived on her way back from class...The gesture was a little too late. And impersonal, at that.
Cass's letter was too vague, and their friendship destroyed—so why was the fact that she wasn't a part of the delegation bothering her? Why was she even considering going to Ilvermorny—the delegation be damned?
She was so distracted that she startled when food appeared on the tables. Luckily no one noticed, too ramped up about the announcement. The chosen Slytherins showboated and talking too loud at the other end of the table. Rita flicked her long hair over her shoulder and when she caught Sigrid's eye, she flipped her off.
She couldn't contain her eyeroll at the Ravenclaw table with Victor Hulmen and his captive audience. There were at least ten girls sitting around him, with a line of ten more waiting to congratulate him and shoot their shots.
Sigrid scooped food on her plate and cut it into small portions that she chewed until they were paste. The mandrake leaf magically stuck to the bottom of her tongue made her eat slowly. She stared into the middle distance.
The hidden message in the letter had been five words, like a fucking telegram. I need your help dragon. No punctuation, no greetings. Just a request having to do with a fucking dragon. But Sigrid hadn't been chosen for the delegation, so what did that matter? Why was she still thinking about it, mulling it around in her mind like no wasn't her immediate answer?
Dinner ended and she walked as slow as she had eaten to her room. When she entered within, an answer—her decision to Cass's request—settled heavy on her shoulders. Though if she was honest with herself, the weight of her decision had drooped from her neck the moment she read the letter.
She hadn't made the delegation—but that didn't mean she wouldn't be going.
Cass had asked for her for a reason. She knew Sigrid had experience with dragons, even if the last time she had interacted with one had led to her expulsion from Ilvermorny. But before then, her parents had exposed her to dragons through their work. And if Cass needed help, she would give it. While holding a grudge was a very Mourning thing to do, Cass was her best friend and if this was her shot to mend their friendship, then by Isolte, she'd be going to Ilvermorny.
She packed her trunk with her things and pulled out a long scroll. She'd have to plan her escape now. The delegation would leave on Friday so that they could arrive at Ilvermorny on Sunday. She had two days to find a way to America.
Biting her lip, she wrote the names of the other delegates, trying to encourage a plan to take root.
How long would it take for this dragon situation to be resolved? Even in the best-case scenario, she wouldn't get back to Hogwarts before Monday and her teachers would definitely notice.
What if she stole a spot on the delegation? Twenty names had to be entered by every school. If Hogwarts was suddenly short a person and Sigrid just so happened to be there—she shook her head. There was no way that would work. McGonagall would see straight through her shit and expel her. And while that wasn't a huge deal—afterall she wouldn't be living long anyway—she'd rather not be ostracized from the wizarding community for the rest of her life.
S S-M
The two days were up and Sigrid woke four hours before the delegates were due to leave, just to be safe. An axe blade of pain cut through her numbing potion, making her guzzle the last of her batch. Her parents had delivered some—courtesy of her mother's brewing, but they weren't as effective as Sigrid's. She'd had years to perfect the potion—her mother had delegated the responsibility to her when she was just eight years old.
Sneaking through the castle was simple—all the hall monitors had gone to bed already, the morning too early for students to be sneaking about. She'd stowed her things in a secret compartment she had prepared the day before when the Hogwarts Express train had arrived.
There was nowhere to hide on the train, so she had made herself a place.
Nestled beneath the train in a rectangular gap the size of a trapdoor was a camouflaged suitcase. And in that suitcase was a room she had enchanted to fit inside. She'd stowed all the bare necessities like food, water, and a bedroll, as well as her possessions.
The only thing left to do was transport her brewing pain potion, still in the cauldron. It had to sit for another two days—she was cutting it close to the wire this time.
Hefting the large kettle up, she frogmarched the cauldron in the dead of night, long after the hall monitors had gone to bed. She'd have preferred a hovering charm, but she didn't dare mixing spell magic with brewed magic. The potion was sensitive to all changes, and so she had to carry the two-gallons of pain potion—that would eventually reduce down to only three cups—to her stowaway spot on the train.
Despite no clouds in the sky, only stars provided darkness. Twisting to look at the sky, she shuddered as the place where the moon belonged remained empty. She scraped the mandrake leaf stuck to the bottom of her tongue against her teeth. This was cutting it close.
Maybe she should have waited for the Full Moon to come around again instead of starting the Animagus process on the New Moon. She exhaled quietly. No one had done what she'd done before. Hopefully it worked, or the results weren't too dreadful.
She snuck to the train, treading in shadows to remain invisible.
The day before, when she'd snuck onto the train, she'd noticed that the car her hiding spot was under was locked. A powerful alohomora hadn't opened the door—that had told her someone significant had made sure the car wouldn't be broken into.
But what was inside? She shook her head. It didn't matter. Just so long as people didn't linger too long near it, she would be fine.
She reached the hidden hatch she had attached to her room and pushed the cauldron up and through the door that had dropped open. She dragged herself inside, closing the door behind her.
A lumos illuminated her sparse room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all dressed in dark cloth—the interior of her suitcase that she had enlarged. In the corner was a barrel of water, a bag of food, and her bedroll as she'd left it. Her other trunk sat in the corner, half-unpacked.
She brought the cauldron over and cast a tempuscharm, checking the time. She added another ingredient and did a three-quarter stir before laying on her bedroll and staring at the ceiling.
Would her parents de-ostracize her if she was successful with her plan? She shook her head. What did it matter? If being part of the family hinged on undying obedience, she'd forfeit the Sant-Mourning name gladly.
S S-M
Eighteen hours after takeoff, Sigrid rethought her isolation. The room got stuffy, and she had to open the hatch to usher oxygen in three times a day. Staring down as the sea glittered below made her motion sick. She promptly closed the hatch.
There wasn't anything to do, and it made her claw at her walls. She ripped down the side of one to expose the leather underneath and paced her room. A particle of her worried that her stomping would break her spell and send her tumbling down into the depths. She shook her head. Her magic would hold. It had to.
Memories plagued her when she stopped moving. Cass invaded her mind with every idle motion—it made her movements frantic and another wall bore her wrath. It was unhealthy to be so obsessed with their meeting.
But who could blame her? She hadn't seen, let alone hugged, her best friend in over a year and a half. They'd known each other for a decade; it made sense that she would ache to hold her blonde best friend in her arms.
She unrolled the message and read it again. Luckily, it tempered her excitement. There had been no sentiment in Cass's words—all Sigrid could see was derision. She was Icarus in the poem. Did Cass see herself as his mourning father, Daedalus? Or perhaps the clouds—ambivalent as they watched her fall.
Cass's parents had always stared warily at her when she came to visit. She had known that they worried she was a bad influence. The separation between their lives had always been apparent, especially when Sigrid spent summers in Cass's doublewide, making fun in the forest surrounding—only their cheap imaginations entertaining them.
Sigrid paced around the room in a circuit, running her hand along the wall and ripping the fabric further.
All it had taken was a couple thousand miles and their friendship had died. A year-and-a-half! How pitiable that they couldn't last that long.
If only they had phones! But Cass had always eschewed the modern conveniences, so Sigrid hadn't bothered getting one.
If they'd called and texting each other, would that have been enough to bridge the divide?
She did another lap and ripped the cloth completely off one wall and then scored the leather with a blade. Fuck!
S S-M
Her dinner was a stale bread roll and a carrot. The air in the room was musty. With her wand in hand, she opened the hatch. A crash of thunder shook the air. She jerked back with a untamed gasp, a spit of rain following after her.
Heart racing as thunder boomed again, her head whipped to the corner of her room where her trunk sat. In the bottom was the readied potion.
This is cutting it close.
Another boom and she crawled in the darkness, pulling the phial out, her fingers trembling. She'd stored the potion when she arrived early in the morning. She'd only said the special incantation twice: at sunrise and sunset of that same day.
Heart throbbing in her chest, she crawled to the hatch, standing on her knees as the train swayed, potion and wand in either hand. She needed to be among the storm during the transformation, but where would she—
A boom of thunder and metal and the train whipped to the side. Her knee slipped.
She fell, gasping.
Her arm slapped on the inside of her room, but the entrance was slick with rain.
She slid.
That first moment, there was no noise. Her hair rippled in front of her eyes, obscuring a fading train.
A crack of lightning lit the sky for only a moment, illuminating everything. A slash of wind shoved hair from her face.
The train was a paper kite in the sky and the clouds were bigger than a mountain.
A screamed spell she couldn't hear stopped her momentum—her head whipped backwards and her stomach jolted into her throat.
The thunder and lightning were simultaneous. The train was a dust mote now, too far gone.
There was no broom for her to summon to catch the flying train. Sigrid grit her teeth and pointed her wand at the sky—all of this happening in a few moments. Her ascendiowas a drill sergeant's order—the skies parted for her and she ripped through the clouds toward that metal worm in the sky.
She squinted as rain soaked her like a firehose and flew through water that felt like walls. The caboose appeared—she didn't stop.
Her crash with the metal coincided with a boom of thunder. Her hearing went out and she clutched the metal railing hard enough that her finger indents were sure to be there the next day.
Another flash—she saw the ocean. A roiling storm, a mirror only in that it reflected the color of the sky.
A cloud floated out of way of the moon, revealing the thinnest, white smile—a mouth without eyes. It disappeared soon after, taunting and running.
Her brain rattled an idea to the forefront of her brain. She lifted her hands. In one, her wand, the other her potion.
She muttered the incantation and swallowed the potion.
Thunder boomed, and nothing happened. Rain plastered her clothes to her like a second skin. She didn't bother pushing her hair out of her eyes.
She glanced down and lightning flashed. The ocean was wrought. It thrashed. How could anything live in there?
She grasped a railing. Could she make it back to her room?
The thought struck simultaneously with a lightning flash. A surge shot through her, activating all her muscles. The smell of ozone and burning assaulted her and then the tail of the train whipped up. She toppled over the rail.
Wind whipped through her, and her skin burned. Spikes stabbed through her dermis, her eyes ached, and the bones in her feet twisted. She didn't see the ocean. She couldn't feel her wand in her hand, but she screamed for salvation.
Water thrashed her skin and her eyes shot open—looking to the sky for a god's hand to catch her.
Something did.
Power surged through her. It yanked her too hard, and she shot upward. Her brain begged for safety, her body still aching with pain. The underside of the train appeared. She could only see her hatch. She broke through and crashed against the ceiling of her room.
Her voice was wrong.
She was gasping and hacking the water she'd choked on, and she sounded off.
Trembling to her hands and knees, her gasp was more of a squawk. What the fuck!
Her hands were not her own—she could feel it. She scrambled backwards against her torn wall and gasped a lumos, but nothing happened. No!
She tried again, but there was no magic in her. No! Fuck! Please no!
She crawled to her trunk and dug for a lantern and matches. It took too long—she could feel that her body was wrong. Her hatch blew closed with a gust of wind, muting the storm. She lit a lantern, the match strike echoing in her mind.
When she saw her skin, her eyes bulged.
Slow hands reached out to pet the material. She flinched at the touch. They were feathers. Small, smooth, black feathers that covered her arms. They had ripped her clothes when they'd sprouted. Some stuck through, longer than the ones on the back of her hands.
The buttons on her shirt went scattering as she wrenched it off, exposing the spread. They were everywhere. On her shoulders, down her chest. They stopped at a V below her ribs, an inverse V on her back. Feathers continued down her sides. She scrambled out of her pants.
The black feathers wrapped around her thighs and stopped mid calf. But that wasn't the worst of it. Her feet. She stopped breathing. Like a dinosaur's—scaly, black, clawed.
She reached out and touched, exhaling sharply when she felt her own hand. Those were her feet. "Fuck." The word was a whisper. She dug a hand in her hair and froze. It felt much the same, but her fingers caught on something. When she plucked it from her skull and brought it to her eyes, she saw a feather. It was curled slightly, like one of her locks of hair, and was the same color.
She ran her hands through her hair faster, plucking as she went. Hair and feathers came back—mixed like a half-human, half-bird thing.
The weight of what happened squashed her like a falling building. It hadn't worked. The researcher, Herrant M. had known what he was talking about. The New Moon had left her half-turned.
She scoffed and the sound came out wrong. A caw—a bird's call. She hadn't packed a mirror, so the sword she'd traded with the merpeople would have to do.
She pressed the flat to her raised knees and held the lantern above her face. It looked much the same if she ignored her eyes. Merlin, she wanted to! But they were stark. She had no sclera. The black of her pupils and iris had spread to cover the whole surface. And when she blinked, a white hood beneath her human lids flashed over her eyes.
She clawed at her face and pushed the sword aside. The sharp edge sliced her palm, and she hissed.
She threw her head back against the wall, and tried not to blink but she felt the bird lids sliding over her wide eyes.
"How," she croaked. She had been sure she would succeed. The New Moon had been an oversight—she'd discovered something no one else had before! That's what she'd thought.
She banged her head. "You fucking idiot."
She'd failed. A sob pressed against her throat—she couldn't swallow it.
Uniform walls stared back at her, and Herrant's words seeped from the shadows.
His experiments hadn't been ethical—he had other people test out the variations on the Animagus process.
Fuck! Why hadn't she listened? Why hadn't stories of wizards' magic diminishing with a failed transformation warned her?
"Lumos," she commanded, her wand gripped in beastly hands.
The lantern was the only light in the chamber.
She tossed her wand aside and stared into the flame. Some of the failed test subjects in Herrant's writing had turned back from a half-shift. She stared into the flame and concentrated.
Thousands of needles retracted into her skin. Her eyes burned and the pain in her feet had her kicking out—but she kept her eyes on her skin. When the last feather faded, familial torture kicked in.
She spasmed. A fiery lance ripped through her, splitting her from crown to heel. Her teeth clenched together—she'd crack another tooth from the force. A weak wail escaped her closed mouth—fuck!
It was punishing her. She'd taken her potion that morning, and her blood was punishing her not a day later.
She twisted on the ground, smacking her head against the leather. A distraction. She needed a distraction. Almost blind, her eyes flashed to the brewing cauldron. A cure to the torture was a day out. She didn't have that time.
The pain switched up on her—this torturer was creative. All her muscles clenched. Curled in a fetal position, her dull nails still cut into her palms. She rolled. Heat licked her side, glass broke on her skin. More torture.
But when she opened her eyes, she saw her clothes alight. She screamed and tried to roll away. Instead, she buried the glass shards of the lantern deeper into her skin. A distraction. The cut, the hot blood that seeped out, was almost a balm compared to the torture's heavy hand.
Her mind latched onto one thing, one escape.
Thoughts thrashed out of control. She could only act.
Thousands of needles broke through her skin. This time she watched as her feet twisted, as toes separated, ripping the skin of her feet and forming giant talons. Scales sprouted like a rash and when she curled her toes, the claws cut into the leather floor.
The pain stopped, and the fire on her clothes went out. Her skin was sore—the torturer was gone. She rolled off her back and a twinge of pain brought back blood on her hands.
Her mind remained quiet as she cleaned the wound. Glass was removed and a bandage was applied. She slumped against the wall in the dark.
The feathers were soft under her fingers. She gripped the root and tugged. She clenched her jaw.
Her skin ached and bled from her plucking like a thanksgiving turkey. Her shaking hands struck a match. She had broken the glass and squished the candle of the lantern, but it provided her only light.
Through the night, maybe the day too, she tore the feathers from her skin.
Her naked body shook when she finished. Her hands trembled as she wiped away blood, fingers aching from pinching and pulling. The heels of her feet were bandaged—tears streaked her face from her final mutilation.
Like a raven's feet, she had talons, with toes on her heels that stuck out behind her. She couldn't very well wear shoes with them, so she'd...removed them. Her sword had cut through bone, a cauterization spell stopping the bleeding. She hadn't tried walking yet.
She pulled a small feather from the back of her hand—there were only stragglers now.
In the glint of her blade, she looked almost human. Only her eyes marked her as half when she decked herself in concealing clothes.
She had ruined herself, but this was better than her real body.
The torture that came with her shift back to herself was personal. A punishment for trying to escape the curse. The pain had come too swiftly, even when she'd drunk her last pain potion that morning.
The elixir she was brewing had finished and she'd stored the precious liquid, but she didn't drink it. Hours had passed and the pain hadn't come.
Have I finally escaped it?
She tilted her head down to take a measure of herself and pinched aching fingers around one last feather.
She'd wanted an escape, and she'd found one.