THE FURIES ▸ Draco Malfoy

Prologue: EREBUS

◤ ❝I'm going to tell you a story because the history you grew up learning is not always clear. Your parents shield you from the bad parts. They've given you a hero without the whole truth. As young witches and wizards, you will face many temptations in the future. Not all of them will be the urge to cheat on your exams or to go after the one you love. Obligations will be set about what you are supposed to do. Decisions will be put into your hands that you will have to make a choice on. You are so eager to learn about the History of Magic, but you must see that the history has not always been kind. I once knew a girl whom your parents would have shielded you from. She was a bad part, a piece in history that many people might see better off erased. But without her, you only get a fraction of the truth. She is the rest of the story.❞◢

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PROLOGUE:     BEFORE THE END

July 8, 1996

               𝐀𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐚 𝐄𝐫𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐬 sat silently at the long table, brown eyes stoic to kept herself composed in the room of darkness. Her hands were flat on her thighs, a black robe covering up the fact that the woman next to her was digging her sharp nails into the exposed skin between her skirt and her socks. The idea of giving a woman such as Bellatrix Lestrange the satisfaction of seeing her cower was more painful than the pool of blood that was seeping into her clothing, and because of that, Andromeda refused to move. 

She knew what the witch was trying to do. She wanted to see her break, to prove that introducing a sixteen-year-old into an organization that was less than suitable for children had been a terrible idea—that, no matter who her father might have been, his daughter would not live up to his legacy. It also didn't help that she shared a name with the sister who went off and disgraced their family by marrying a muggle-born. She wasn't sure if Bellatrix could smell the blood—if any of them could smell the blood—but she wasn't going to take the chance of turning her head to see how many others were looking in her direction.  

Even though the number of people sitting at the dining table decreased greatly, where thirteen people were now missing from their chairs and only a handful of the inner circle remained, that didn't change the atmosphere that thickened the longer they sat. Andromeda knew what she had entered, what she would be standing up for, and who she was fighting with, but the tightness in her lungs couldn't help but bring doubts. Doubts, as her father had told her often, were what got people killed. A solidified position was stronger than one that's core was rotten. That was why she quickly dismissed her thoughts and instructed herself to take longer inhales. Her father was the reason why the pain slowly cascading down her leg did nothing but trigger a growing distaste for the Lestrange woman, her jaw tightening and eyes flaring in anger. He was also the reason why she was even in the current situation in the first place.

She had to give condolences to the boy in front of her, who caught on that she would not be redirecting her attention away from him the moment that they sat down across from one another nearly twenty minutes prior. Andromeda would be lying if she said she hadn't chosen the spot on purpose, finding a tsunami of comfort staring into the grey eyes of Draco Malfoy. He was the only thing positively familiar to her, and quite frankly, the only person in the damn room that would feel anything if they spontaneously decided she was of no use and killed her. She would never admit that, though. 

Just as she would never admit that she could see the fear in the grey color as easily as he could see it inside of her brown. Spending nearly sixteen years together would give anyone the ability to see through their counterpart, and with two Slytherins that could assess and deflect emotions better than anyone else in their school, it was also toxic. Draco and Andromeda knew that their open sight of one another would have them dead before it had them praised. Knowing each other's fear was no less than a weakness and a way to get them both obliterated by everyone around them.