Thankyou Ash! [if you don't mind me calling you that] Seriously, you guys make my day whenever I read your comments

So, yes! Finally, another chapter, after what - a month? I'm sorry for the lateness, you know, what with school and tests and an exam soon, I wasn't really in a writing mood, but enough excuses. I just hope this chapter is good enough to be forgiven

Beware of the gloomy gloomgloom in this chapter - well, at the end. Next chapter will be really nice and bubbly happy though, most of the time

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Chapter 9 - Detention

The first week passed like a slow breeze of wind. It stretched out longer than Amara would have liked it to, but when the morning of Saturday the twenty-fourth came, she wasn’t sure if it had passed at all.

Her first thought when she woke up was the reminder that she had detention that day. Drawing the bed curtains aside as she sat up, Amara saw the now-familiar gray sky through the window. Droplets of rain still hung onto the glass from the night before, racing each other to the window frame. The dormitory was quiet, the only sound the scurrying of a mouse underneath a bed or in a corner, so Amara sat still for a moment, savouring the few minutes of silence before the castle woke up. The clock on her bedside read twenty to seven.

Something made a loud splat against the windowpane and Amara jerked out of her daze suddenly. What looked like a mass of brown feathers was beating against the glass.

Crossing the dormitory in a quiet sprint, Amara reached the window and opened it cautiously, trying not to let too much wind and cold inside so the others wouldn’t wake up. The owl swooped in clumsily, landed on Mina Shishmanova’s bed, and within a few seconds seemed fast asleep. Amara dashed to it and picked it up cautiously, not wanting to imagine the fuss Mina would do if she woke up to find an owl sharing a bed with her.

This particular Mina was in fact possibly the most irritating roommate anyone could have. She complained about everything and anything, blamed everyone for every missing sock and quill, snored in tremendous exaggeration, fought to shower first in the morning, confused her bed with the others’, and had even attempted to jinx Fizzy once when she found a few black hairs on her pillow (which turned out to be her own).

Frowning as she remembered, Amara plopped back onto her bed and, with the owl chirping sleepily next to her, she untied the letter from its legs and unfolded it:

Hey Amara,

How’s it going there? I’m sorry I haven’t written a lot lately but I’ve been really busy with school stuff. I even got detention yesterday, just because I forgot my Transfiguration essay! Well, OK, for the second time running, but still... I had to clean the floor of Greenhouse 3 this morning, and believe me, that isn’t really anyone’s ideal morning...

By the way, this is Faye. She’s a cute little owl, isn’t she? But she likes to sleep a lot and doesn’t like travelling much. DON’T wake her up if she’s asleep, she gets real angry when I do that. I had to have someone else write notes for me last week because my hand was full of pinch-marks.

I’m really missing you here, but I’m sure it’s great at Durmstrang too! Write soon.

Dita

Amara sat staring at the letter for a while, then she reached under her bed for her trunk, took parchment and quill and wrote a reply, about what a good time she was having at Durmstrang and how she didn’t miss Hogwarts anymore; it was great here too. It was quite convincing, she thought, as she read her reply and put it under her pillow for later. She got up, tucked up Faye in her quilt, changed and went to the common room to finish some homework.

The common room was almost empty; a few older students were in a corner talking amongst themselves, a few others were playing Exploding Snap or Wizards’ Chess, and some, like Amara, sat down and buried their noses in books and parchment.

The clock read a quarter past seven when Karina finally came down, yawning and rubbing her eyes and still in her pyjamas. She flopped down next to Amara, her hair ruffled and sticking out, still yawning like a sleep-deprived lion.

‘God Morgen,’ she said, leaning on her elbow on the table and watching Amara write.

‘Morning,’ Amara replied, still trying to decipher the meaning of a hard sentence in A Guide to Practical Use of Hexes and Jinxes. She stared at it for a while, reading it repeatedly and not taking in a word, then finally gave it up as a bad job, and turned to her Potions essay.

‘I’m bored,’ Karina said suddenly. ‘There’s still about half an hour for breakfast, and I don’t feel like doing my homework either... there’s nothing to do outside, my pack of Exploding Snap burnt up a while ago, and I’m not that good at Chess either—’

She was cut off as a girl with chalk-white skin and equally white hair came in and went up to them. She was wearing her uniform, despite it being the weekend, and she had a badge pinned to her robes, with a large, blood-red ‘P’ on it.

‘Are you Amarantha Burke?’ she asked Amara, who nodded. She gave her a reproving look. ‘Professor Kysely would like to speak to you, now.’

Karina looked cautiously at Amara, who didn’t meet her gaze. They’d avoided talking about detention the whole week, even though Karina had said she had no idea what it was exactly, because students were forbidden to say anything except that it was horrible. Apparently in the past years, a few daredevils had even got themselves into detention on purpose, just to find out.

‘And you,’ the pale girl said, turning onto Karina. ‘Fix your hair, and don’t sit around doing nothing.’

Karina gave her a dour look as she ran her fingers through her hair, trying to flatten it out, and Amara followed the Prefect out of the common room, an ominous feeling in her chest. The Prefect girl walked in a quick pace, so Amara almost had to jog to catch up. Down stairs and past corridor after corridor, but they didn’t go sideways to a teacher’s office as they came in the entrance hall, but went straight up to the front door, where Kysely was waiting, looking as curt as ever.

He nodded at the Prefect and she left rather hastily, as if she didn’t want anything to do with Amara.

‘So,’ he said coldly, turning to Amara. ‘Your wand?’

He held out his hand, and Amara noticed how long and skeletal his fingers were.

‘I left it in the dormitory. Sir,’ she added hurriedly.

‘Good. Follow me now.’

Wondering how many times she was going to follow people around the castle, Amara did so and to her surprise, they didn’t cross the hall to one of the corridors or the stairs, but he opened the door and motioned her outside. The icy air met her like a thousand knives and, wishing she had worn something thicker, she followed the Professor as they walked a long way in the wind and the freezing silence, until she could see the whole outline of the castle when she looked back, her jumper pulled up to her neck and her hands wrapped around her shoulders.

Professor Kysely stopped suddenly, and Amara peered around nervously.

A trapdoor, in the snow.

‘In,’ he indicated, as he pointed his wand and opened the trapdoor. ‘I will lock you in, and don’t even bother looking for a way out. I will come back in a few hours.’

At first Amara did nothing, and stared at the dark hole in the ground.

‘Now,’ Kysely said quietly, his voice a threat.

‘No.’

‘How you dare—’ he hissed, pointing his wand at her. Amara took a step back, but he grabbed her arm and forced her into the hovel as she fought to no avail. The hole was a few feet deep, just enough for her to stand up straight.

‘You’ve earned yourself a few more hours in that pit,’ the Professor laughed nastily, as he shut the door in her face. Amara fumed with anger, but knew better than to retaliate. She waited until she was sure he had gone away, then sat down on the ground and hugged her knees, wondering if she would freeze to death there after all.

It was colder and more humid down here. From the crack of morning light slitting in, Amara could see moss growing on rough, carved-in walls. Words in Runes and languages she didn’t understand.

Her heart stopped beating for a fraction of a second. She felt her arms freeze around her legs, her mind growing heavy and numb, and suddenly she wasn’t there anymore.

A woman with unkempt black hair was standing next to her, a glint of insanity in her large eyes. Amara looked down at the floor, where a girl no older than five lay, sobbing and holding her wounded hands over her head. Three other people lay a few feet apart: a middle-aged man and woman, and a boy who looked in his teens, dead. Amara was screaming, but the woman waved her wand and Amara went on screaming, mutely.

‘Shut up,’ the woman snarled. ‘Filthy Muggles, they deserve this.’

In another place and time she was running, her short legs not fast enough, her heart pounding and pulsating with fear so strong she couldn’t breathe properly. Claws tore at her shoulder, before the werewolf was thrown backwards in a burst of light from a wand.

And in another fraction, a face so distorted and burnt and inhuman surfaced into her memories, grinning nastily down at her.

Amara gasped as she came to, her hands shaking, breathing in the cold air as the temperature suddenly went very clammy and fever-warm.

There was something at the end of the pit, shrugging off a shroud of moss as it formed out of it. She’d seen one of them, in one of her spellbooks. A dementor.

She shivered and backed away to the far end, but the dementor didn’t follow. Maybe it hadn’t fully formed yet, maybe there wasn’t enough moss for it to born. Amara pressed herself against the jagged corner, willing herself to be smaller, to disappear. Those weird memories she couldn’t even recall, they kept forming, and as she stared warily across, she realised it would be a long time before the trapdoor opened again to let her out.

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Hope that wasn't too much sadfaceangst. Well as long as you guys like it it's ok with me