 astronomizzle ♧ gryffinDORK | & the rest is drag ♣ #badluckDerf
The strawberry blonde had barely noticed the time slipping by, her quill moving fluidly over her notebook as she deciphered another phrase from the ancient tome. It wasn’t until she heard the soft murmur of her classmates and a brief flicker of attention from Professor Khanna - who, Iris noted, was directing a look her way - that she realized the lesson had begun. The soft rustling of tree stumps and the clearing of throats around her pulled her out of her thoughts. Realizing then just how much she had been distracted, she straightened a little, still holding her translation notes in her lap. She quickly scanned the whiteboard, a slight furrow appearing on her brow as she processed the question about the Lethifold - and yet she still did not find herself focusing on the question right away.
Iris tapped her quill against the corner of her notebook, gaze flickering to the question on the board before trailing back down to the word rolling around in her mind. Lethifold. The name had a certain weight to it - something eerie, something insidious. And seeing as she was fresh from her latest translation work, Iris couldn’t resist the temptation to pick it apart was simply too strong. Words had secrets, after all, and she loved uncovering them. The first half (Lethi-) was almost certainly tied to Letum, Latin for 'death' or 'ruin'. Fitting, considering what a Lethifold left in its wake: not a struggle, not a trace - just absence. A smothering fate in the dead of night. There was also the river, Lethe. One of the five rivers of the Underworld, its waters promised forgetfulness, oblivion, erasure. A perfect parallel to the Lethifold’s silent and seamless kills. Victims didn’t leave bodies rather they simply ceased to be, as if memory itself had swallowed them whole. The '-fold' part was obvious - a cloak, a sheet, something that draped ... like the funeral shrouds that covered the dead, or the peplos of the Moirai - the Fates who wove and cut the threads of life. A Cloak of Death. A Shroud of Oblivion. What a horrifyingly poetic name, you really had to admire it.
Right. The question. She supposed it would be inappropriate to answer the obvious one: anything but the Patronus Charm. But there had to be more to it than that, didn’t there? After all, there were so many spells one might instinctively reach for in the heat of the moment - spells that would seem effective, but would only make things worse. Or, in her case, anything one might try in desperation, since the actual solution was far beyond her current level of magic. A quick flash of Stupefy might feel satisfying, but it wouldn’t do a thing to a creature like a Lethifold. A shield charm would be another go-to, reflexes from Dueling Club, but it wouldn’t stop it from slipping around the edges. Iris chewed on the end of her quill, her gaze drifting between the board and her notes. Was there a deeper connection between the spells we choose and our understanding of the creatures we face? The question seemed simple at first, but now it felt like there was a layer beneath it all. Something to do with why certain spells fail in the face of dark magic. The more she thought, the more she wondered if the answer wasn’t just about which spells wouldn’t work - but why the Lethifold was immune to them.
"Well, seeing as it is a spell designed to lift objects and the Lethifold isn’t a solid or physical entity that can be manipulated like a book or a broom but more a presence, a creature that slides through the air rather than being something you can pick up, Wingardium Leviosa certainly wouldn't work against them."
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