Shadow of a Grave ✧ Sebastian Sallow

chapter twenty-eight ✧ the price of magic

Sebastian Sallow stared at the torn page of the poem as if it would disappear if he took his eyes off it. Carefully reading over each word and testing his own memory trying to find a change. 

It was early the next morning and everyone sat around the breakfast table. No one had eaten much and was too busy attempting to figure out the meaning of the poem at the center of the table. His coffee went untouched and his throat dry as he looked at the returned page trying to puzzle everything together that had happened in the months earlier.

His memories were hazy at best and trying to figure out the meaning of the poem's arrival felt like something that he should have known. It should have had a message of some kind.

"Are you sure that word was unlined like that before?" Poppy asked, overlooking the page.

"It's always been like that!" Bella confirmed and Sebastian nodded along.

That page had been burned into his mind and even if the little girl didn't know it word by word, the image had stuck in her head too. There had been nothing new on the torn page to tell them anything.

"This has to be a sign of something, right?" Ominis asked the group.

"Agreed," Sebastian mumbled back, "I just don't know what to make of it."

"Maybe a ghost sent it?" Bella asked.

"Ghosts can't send letters!" Bash corrected her from across the table, "That would be silly!"

"You don't know that!" She protested back.

The argument between children about what ghosts were and were not capable of was lost on the adults. This was clearly not the work of a ghost, but rather a human, someone alive who had known the importance of the page and the person that it represented to them.

Amelia's name had been well known months ago when it had been printed in the paper through her case. There were plenty of witches and wizards that would know of her. 

But only those gathered around the table knew the importance of that page from that book. Only they had known about the missing page or of its sudden return.

"Sebastian, you knew her better than any of us. What do you think?"

"I don't know," He confessed, "I wish I knew."

His leg bounced anxiously under the table, eyes still locked on the text sitting on the table. Someone else must have known how important that page was, someone other than the few souls sitting there now.

Sebastian's mind raced with all the possibilities. Marvolo Gaunt wasn't a stupid man. He had been in her life long enough to have figured out that the little girl's name had been after that poem for a reason. Originally the group had even assumed it had been him that tore the page from the book. The rest of her library had been ripped apart and it made sense that he would have done the same to that book.

But he was still locked behind the cold bars of an Azkabam cell. An owl wouldn't have ever come from him, let alone Bella's little owl.

There were the other Gaunts too. Robert had found the book and brought it back before he died, but perhaps he had told his brother about it or even showed him. Edward didn't want to believe them originally, but maybe he had changed his mind finally. Sending the letter off as a sign of acceptance or regret for taking it. Bella had sent letters to her older brother in the past months and all had gone unanswered. The boy would have known her owl at least.

If he returned the page, then why didn't he say anything? Sebastian thought it still didn't add up well enough.

Violet had come across the poem in the school's library and asked him about it weeks before the classes ended. The story of how the little girl got her name had been news to her. The teenage girl would have definitely included a letter if she found the page, she always wrote letters to Bella.