Paper Confines

xvi. Postmortem Luminescence

PAPER CONFINES.
16. / Postmortem Luminescence

✶

       Divinity and Damnation was soulless, convoluted, and about eight-hundred pages too long. It read at a snail's pace, so purple in prose Amoret felt like she'd been bruised by it. It made sense that Tom was the one to recommend it, considering how unbearably self-aggrandizing Valerian Krowe seemed. The old wizard had an entire fifty pages (Amoret checked because of how ridiculous it was) dedicated to the arrogant and very pureblood notion that some witches and wizards were more deserving than others, and well within their rights to take what he believed belonged to them. Immortality. Godhood. Unquestioned devotion. In his own words: "Divinity is the right of man, and damnation is the blind cry of cattle in protest of his knife."

Amoret could think of plenty of cattle who were more deserving of eternal glory than any pureblood supremacist bathing in their own vanity. Still, she studied Krowe's word every night as of late, as day thirteen passed into day twenty-one, curled in Nadya's blanket while the fireplace sputtered green flames. She had no idea where Tom spent his nights, but happily departed from him each afternoon without asking questions. He did linger in the library, even as the door to the Room of Requirement reverted to stone again, and Amoret wondered if he turned it into a bedroom whenever she left. Considering the power he had here, he could have turned it into anything.

Three mornings later, Amoret reread, and tabbed the notable chapters with thin strips of parchment, torn from an empty notebook left discarded in the public library. She sat stirring a bowl of tomato soup, which was somehow the most appetising thing she could find, and traced her finger over the words.

In philosophy, Plato argues in favour of immortality. The muggle man, whose Phaedo represents Socrates as he converses at last with his disciples, moments before drinking the hemlock, not only endorses the ratification of immortality as a miraculous truth, but argues for it in neutrality. That immortality, in reincarnation, imperishable energy, or resurrection, is no mere religious comfort. It is our reality, plain as anything else that exists.

Socrates decrees the law of cycles and opposites. As in, a routine pattern: a thing that was once asleep is now awake, a thing that was once hot is now cold, but a thing that is awake will sleep again, and a thing that is cold will be hot again. The cycle of opposites is eternal, as is the cycle of life and death. Of course, what is the opposite of a butterfly? A cocoon? A caterpillar? If so, the butterfly can never return, and so the law of cycles and opposites is broken. This is only theory, proposed by muggle philosophy which had scarcely seen a blink of the universe. It has been argued for and against since its inception.

What I wonder, in my fleeting lulls of lucidity when I cannot write and bore myself with this unfinished proposal, is that place where Socrates lands when the hemlock floods his heart. He is so confident of an after that he does not wonder what it looks like. I do. I imagine the fluid crib of a mother, the nothingness that cradles, the soft pouch of embryo... but I am uncertain. I cannot think of the true opposite of a butterfly, and I would like to know the true opposite of life.

"You're reading it."

Amoret spun where his voice echoed in the empty great hall. Tom's hands rested in his pockets, and his shoes tracked mud soles behind him.

"It's almost unreadable," she said, closing it. "And you're making a mess."

He waved a hand, and there it went: those dust-clouds of light swallowing his footprints.

"Is that why you're marking so many pages? Because it's unreadable?"

Amoret stared at the table with a pinched expression before pushing out of the bench, the book (yes, riddled with notes) under her arm. Her soup had gone cold anyway.