BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE - REMUS LUPIN

𝑜𝑛𝑒 ℎ𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑦 𝑠𝑖𝑥.

Living in a huge manor where others were easily avoidable had its perks and downsides. One of the perks, however, is that sound didn't travel throughout the whole manor unless it was at a booming volume. Which had happened many times before with things inflicted upon Hollis, but that's beside the point.

It was easy to get lost in enough pain to just sleep all day and do nothing. So people dealt with loneliness and sadness by facing their fears and getting over them to the best of their abilities.

Because of the quietness of Hollis's footsteps and the vast expansion of the manor, it had become a habit for her to wander all of the places that she had been hurt. 

At first, looking at the floor where a steady drip of her own blood had once been a horrific, head dizzying sensation. It had taken everything in Hollis to sit in the foyer for five minutes straight without hearing her own scream in her head, but after a week or so of longs days and nights of trying, Hollis had done it. 

Within these wandering, in between rooms, Hollis would sometimes spend time in old rooms that hadn't even been bothered to be clean because of their lack of use. 

One day, when Hollis was coming back from the library, she had entered such a room.

Per usual in Rosier Manor, the floors were a dark marble. Instead of shiny in this room, though, the entire ground was covered in a thin layer of light grey dust. The thick, heavy black drapes blocked out any sort of light that could be coming from the tall glass windows, making the whole room barely visible. After her eyes adjusted to the dark, though, Hollis could make out large white shapes in the midst of the dark room. 

All of them were oddly structured, and as Hollis got closer she realized that large cream sheets had been thrown over pieces of furniture deemed useless by the Rosiers. Gripping one hand on the dusty fabric, Hollis yanked the heavy sheet off.

An enormous cloud of dust arose, and Hollis covered her mouth with her elbow and coughed to get out the grey particles that she had inhaled. As the dust settled, Hollis turned back around to see what she had unveiled.

It was a piano.

The thing was old and chipped in some places, but upon closer examination, all the keys still seemed to be intact. Hollis pressed one of them gently with her pointer finger, expecting either a high or low note.

To her confusion, though, nothing but an empty clunk rang in the air. Furrowing her eyebrows, Hollis tried all of the keys, to no avail. Hollis narrowed her eyes and knelt down by the keys at eye level, only to realize that they weren't even in the black sealed wood all the way at all.

It was a fake.

Running her fingers along the wood in front of the piano, Hollis squinted her eyes even further to read the golden lettering. 

Noggin + Bounce

This piano was from the shop in Moribund, Hollis realized, standing back up. Which means that it's probably having to do with Dark Magic. Or just powerful magic in general.

Hollis looked at the lid of the piano carefully, trying to find any hidden hinges or seams. After a few moments, she noticed a divot just behind the golden hinges of the lid. Hollis had to reach over the whole thing to get her arm to reach it, but she managed to pry her fingers underneath the lid. 

Taking a deep breath in, Hollis removed the layer of dark wood.

Usually, if you opened a piano like this, then a sea of brass and copper mechanisms would be revealed, a display of how the piano itself works.