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CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
the archer
THERE WAS A slight murmur in the Great Hall as the sixth years bunched together. Red, green, yellow and blue was mostly starkly contrasting in homogenous groups, but a few people managed to break through the tension to visit a friend. The early afternoon light was white as it streamed into the Great Hall. A strand of grey clouds threatened to block out the meager sun, but were distant thoughts as they lurked in the horizon. The dust twinkled in the new nearly spring light at it fell, capturing the attentions of the quiet students. Anticipation cut through the air, hushing the voices as feet shuffled and the ends of cloaks were twisted around fingers.
All eyes were on the raised wooden platform in the center of the room. In a rectangular shape, painted in a deep navy blue that seemed to go on endlessly after the wood it was painted on—as if it was cavernous—and decorated with a glimmering gold trim and in grand silver strokes, the phases of the moon. The full moon sat in the middle of the rectangle as it eventually faded into nothing as the stage extended.
Some almost expected blue velvet curtains and a top hat with a pigeon in it—the glamorous stage being something of the magic that the muggleborns had once believed in.
Out from the door that would usually be behind the professor's table, Professor Birdsall's robes swept out. A similar midnight blue, they billowed behind him as he made his way silently towards the students—whose attentions were now singularly on him.
"Sixth years," false cheer invaded his voice, "we will be reviewing offensive spells from previous years and possibly learn some new ones in the dueling format, as advertised." He was met with silence and beady eyes.
The tension in the air thickened as eyes slide over to the Slytherins discreetly. Murmurs of "why teach them" filled the Hall quietly as a few clad in green shifted uncomfortably, but most stayed stoic.
The little toy soldiers were being lined up—uniforms and cracked smiles painted on in a careful slap dash—enough to make them almost human, but enough to leave them soulless. They were contorted into place by old, wizened hands—much more wise than them, having barely lived at all, but when has wisdom ever won wars, if not for the nameless, faceless bodies it directs without a second thought?
Betty looked around, in thought about the very subject. Because not everyone was like her and her family. Some would run and some would try and kill her. How odd it was that they were all standing in the same hall and eating the same food and stressing over the same tests and yet, in a couple of years, they'd damn each other as green shots of light went flying as humanity crumbled through their fingers with the dust of fallen castles and broken hopes for the future. As their wooden swords clatter to the ground, their arms ripped—identical wood splitting—and the heart's ink oozing out as the paint of the eyes smear, almost looking like a single tear.
