 Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?
What Ash heard from the professor was that she didn't have to use the potion. Good. She didn't want to use it on a photo of anybody else either. Or anything at all. So she decided that continuing with the potion was okay.
She practiced the spell agitatum. Then she cast it on her potion. She added the snargaluff pods. She extinguished the flame. She had no problems with her spellwork (she had lots of problems, but magic wasn't one). Unlike Atlas, who had just pointed his wand at his own face and knocked himself over with a water blast. Having inconsistent magic was nothing to laugh at, but Ash thought Atlas was stuck-up and made too many moral judgements about her. He was very self-righteous. So. She didn't laugh, but she was in no hurry to help him up or sympathize.
As Ash let the potion sit, her mind wandered. It wandered to that day in potions class last year. She noted that Daniel was sitting in the same seat as Minjae had. And they were talking about memories. Unsettling. Her mind wandered again. Memories. A door slammed. A mirror shattered. A very little boy cried in a young girl's arms. There was the sound of being underwater. There was fire, and there was pain. A girl saved a boy from drowning. A forest was burning. A wand was at her throat. Her hair was being pulled. Every nerve was on fire. On her face, it spelled liar. Her nerves burned at she slumped to the floor unconscious. There was nothing, and she was in a dark place. She was huddled on the floor next to Claudine, talking about how she was going to have markers one day. Bread was being thrown at her. There was a healer, a healer who Ash could not trust. She punched through the mirrors in the house. Someone was hugging her. Someone was belittling her in CoMC. There was crying. She was in a professor's office, wondering about her future, but she couldn't tell which professor it was. She smashed the tech lounge. She blew up fake muggles. She rounded up the real muggles. She asked Theodore to be her boyfriend. She released dragons and she simulated burning a muggle house to the ground. A broom exploded. Someone looked at her worriedly... could have been anyone. She stayed up all night in the common room. She was staring into a mirror. She missed her birthday. She was hanging out with Quinn in the music room. She hung out with Sammy in the music room. Cambridge shoved her...
Ash snapped back to reality. It was never good to go too deep into memories, especially when more than half of the important ones were painful. Focus on the potion. Right. The potion. The cause of all this. Moving pictures... Ash never wanted one in her possession ever. She was still waiting for the potion to be finished. Sigh. |