#riddlestarter

Life as a ministry clerk has never been exciting. Actually having a job has given Lucretia a small modicum of freedom from the stifling expectations of her parents, but there’s only so much fulfilment to be found in parchmentwork, pots of ink and stacks of letters. Even during the dullest, dreariest days though, she’d never have wished something like today to have happened. The war is barely behind them, with all its terror and uncertainty, and Lucretia has no desire to return to those dark days again. 

Julian had been released from the ministry just a few minutes prior, he surveyed the smoking remains of the foremost shopping street in Wizarding Britain with thinly veiled disgust. He could admire the beauty of destruction but this was pathetic, the losers rising up to save face after the conflict was already over. 

A pitiful sort of sound emanated from near the entrance for Knockturn, the thick wooden struts of the building adjacent jutted out crudely into the street like broken ribs and a pool of cobble debris had rained down beneath. It wasn’t something he’d usually concern himself with and he swept dark eyes across Diagon for someone, anyone else, to intervene. 

With a sigh he rolled the sleeves of his robes up, displaying the thick roping cords of his forearms and the tattoos that lived there. It was a slow process even with his wand and the strange bawling sound increased in volume the closer he got. Scarred hands hefted the final chunk of crumbling stone, revealing a pathetic looking cat trapped beneath a beam. 

The cat started hissing with a vengeance and his respect for the thing rose rather abruptly. Even though it wasn’t his natural vein of magic, due to his proclivity for violence he was no stranger to healing spells. Episkey, Reparifors, Ferula. Julian couldn’t tell if there was any damage internally though, even if the scratches and breaks seemed to be fixed. 

The thing started to try and drag itself away but Julian, against his better judgment, scooped it up and clamped it to his chest even as the claws shredded at him. His grip was firm but the hold gentle, looking at him, he seemed near impervious to the pain as if it were merely brushing him lightly with his tail. 

Something crunches under Miranda’s boot as she walks, almost certainly glass from one of the boarded up shop fronts nearby. It’s the first time she’s visited Diagon Alley since news of the attack hit, and where she’d expected efforts to repair the damage caused to be almost complete, she instead finds lingering devastation. The little apothecary shop where she’s been working part-time had been caught up in the madness, but Miranda hadn’t realised things were quite this bad. 

They’d smelt it first. 

Like any natural predator, smell was a primary sense — acrid notes of smoke and clouded dust, the electric hum of magic in the air that tickled at the back of the nostrils like an impending sneeze and overlying it all, the thick and savoury iron-rich notes of blood that hit the back of their palette like a secondary explosion, warm and acidic yet already beginning to spoil, seeping into cobblestones and the thirsty earth beneath them. London was a bloodthirsty city at the best of times. Aether worried at the razor edge of their teeth with their tongue, nose wrinkling faintly at a particularly pungent waft of smoke. 

Diagon would smell like blood for weeks.

Sound was a secondary experience, the rumble of broken stone and disturbed earth, the screams and the groans and the moans. It collided in a frenetic way, jarring and irritating against heightened senses as Aether strolled aimlessly through spilled rubble and drying blood, kicking at chunks of stone as good samaritans did their bit and the injured and trapped awaited help, the dead shrouded in whatever could be spared. As was often the case, Aether skirted around the edges of the roiling tragedy of humanity, but with a tip of their hat back out of their view they paused before the shattered store-front window of Flourish & Blotts, the crunch of glittering glass beneath their feet and stopped to inspect the inscription seared into the canopy above.

For the greater good. 

It’s strange being back at Hogwarts; stranger still to be mingling with people in one of her former professor’s offices. It’s been years since she last walked the corridors herself, but despite the time that’s passed, there’s a familiarity about being inside the castle that makes it feel as if it were only yesterday. 

Getting enough money together for the ticket to attend tonight had been a struggle, but Miranda had just about managed to scrape together the last of her spare funds to do it. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, a way for her to help the reparation efforts after the attack in some way; but standing at the edge of the festivities in one of her mother’s old dresses, alone... now she’s not so sure.

Lucretia is no stranger to formalwear or lavish events. Walking into the dungeons this evening, with all the extravagant spellwork and charmed decorations, it feels almost like coming home. Her mother had all but insisted on her attendance tonight. No doubt keen to keep up appearances that Lucretia is ever the dutiful daughter and not trying to escape that gilded cage, even just a little, through her dreary job at the ministry. 

What do you think you're doing up there!?