The Tree of Blacks (English version)

Somnia Videns

Late December, 1976. Grimmauld Place.

Alya opened wide her grey eyes plunged into darkness. It took her a while before she focused on the familiar contours of her bedroom.

For a moment she had the impression that she was still in the Forbidden Forest. Her body was shivering and he was drenched in cold sweat. She was breathing hard, her breath ragged, as if, instead of having slept, she had been running all night. And fought. With a werewolf.

On impulse, Alya reached out a hand towards her leg (the same one James Potter had injured in the dream) and felt with terror the spot where she thought she would find a bleeding gash. Nothing. The limb was intact, unharmed. Alya sighed deeply.

A timid dawn barely illuminated the window panes of her room, a soft, almost bluish light reassured Alya, who had nothing to fear. She was safe, at home, in Grimmauld Place, miles and miles away from Hogwarts, the Shrieking Shack and, above all, hungry werewolves.

Alya couldn't remember ever feeling such terror in her entire life. Perhaps only once, when she had dreamt of Merope as a child, before she had even befriended her, considering her to be a strange ghost.

The girl breathed in deeply, inhaling as much oxygen as possible into her lungs, trying to calm her heartbeat; her heart sounded like a crazed drum. Even her mind slowly began to quieten, her thoughts became less confused.

Alya tried, as far as possible, to piece together what she had just seen, with logical sense.

Had it really been a dream? Only a dream?

Alya's mind was working fast, but she was unable to give herself any answers.

With an impulsive gesture, the young Black grabbed the singing postcard James Potter had sent her a few hours earlier. She opened it and read the contents of the card once more. By now she knew the few words written on it by heart, but Alya still looked at them with painstaking attention, as if they concealed the long-sought answer to her questions.

The terrible images of what she had dreamt had seemed so ruthlessly real to her: the smell of blood, the unmistakable and horrible perception of pierced and lacerated flesh, the pain, the inevitable awareness of imminent death... the profound terror. The protagonist of all those terrible sensations had undoubtedly been James Potter. Yet, Alya had felt them as her own, on her skin... how was that possible?

Perhaps, the girl told herself, it had been a simple stress suggestion. After all, Alya was still deeply shaken by what had happened with Sirius; she had watched him flee without being able to do anything, had witnessed the extirpation ritual. She had wallowed in worry about her brother's fate. And, then, Potter had sent her that strange note. Surely, after all the tension she had endured, her mind must have been playing tricks on her.

And yet... no matter how hard Alya tried to find such an explanation plausible, deep in her soul she knew something wasn't right.

She remembered the last image of the dream all too clearly and could not rest: James Potter had turned into a stag before surrendering himself to death's embrace.

What had shocked Alya was not so much discovering that Potter was an Animagus (although she found it mind-boggling that a wizard of her age possessed such an ability), nor the reasons that had led the Gryffindor to change appearance.

What haunted young Black was the certainty that she had already seen that stag. In reality. A few weeks earlier.

It was - and Alya was sure of this, so sure that she would bet her pure blood on it - the same stag she had cared for and rescued in the Forbidden Forest on that December full-moon night.