THE FURIES ▸ Draco Malfoy

Chapter Two: HECATE

◤ ❝Love slowly transforms into the bitter question of how much you are willing to give up for the ones you love. Our instinct to flee when we know we cannot win is the reason why it's so hard for us to love others. We know that if we get too close, our lives are in danger. That is the true test. If you find someone that you are willing to die for, then you have found someone you would die without. It is only the beginning to a very tragic end.❞ ― Celicia Erebus ◢

  ▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂▂

CHAPTER TWO: HECATE

August 21, 1996

The Dark Arts were a fragile form of magic. Not because it was, by any means, a practice for the weak, but because of how much caution one should take when preforming the illegal acts. Ironic, as well, given that most witches and wizards involved in the Dark Arts were anything but fragile. Possibly wicked, but not—by definition—delicate. The Arts were not just. Not right. Build for the inevitably damned and sought out by the incredibly insane, their best attribute was exposed in the very name: darkness. A chapter in the Wizarding History so petrifying that classes were taught in defense against it.

It was also one of the most alluring parts of having magic. All forms of magic could be stretched with practice and patience, but some craved more than that. The thrill to be better than all others. A need to have more than what the lesser society with magic had. To some, the Dark Arts were pure. Pure, and fragile, and dark, and everything that eventually came to represent the Dark Lord's side of the war.

Andromeda always had an interest in the Dark Arts. Even with the assumptions that the interest came because she was a Slytherin or because her father was a Death Eater, she knew that she would have eventually found her way back to the practice. Ravenclaw, Huffepuff, Gryffindor, muggleborn—she was too invested in the Dark Arts to pretend that there was a larger influence involved. Her love of history may have had something to do with it. Seeing as the only thing that saved her education at Hogwarts for so long was her love for reading, tracing that love back to dozens of books she'd read about the Dark Arts was not too far off target. Multiple nights reading about the Unforgivable curses caused her excitement to swell when Barty Crouch Jr. taught them their fourth year. Paragraphs and paragraphs about Horcruxes made her look at the Dark Lord in a different way that she had before. The captivation of seeing just how much the Art affected its users was undeniably obsessing.

After her father died, her peculiar interest twisted into something malevolent. Before, it was always nothing more than a hobby of hers when she wasn't busy with classwork. She was sure that no one else even knew of her intrigue. Not even her mother was aware of the enchantment she placed on the books of jinxes, hexes, and curses to hide them. As far as anyone was aware, she was a young witch who knew when to speak and when to keep her mouth shut. Then, the war began. No longer did she see Avada Kedavra as two meaningless words. No, they became all too real to her after that. Imperio was no longer a meaningless game of playing a puppeteer to an unknowing victim. It was a means of control. Dominance. It was also the only reason why her father's name was written as innocent in the mess of the war.

The Cruciatus Curse was a different kind of malevolence for Andromeda after losing her father. It was about more than just killing and more than just playing. It was maddening. The perfect act of vengeance. Once upon a time, she never would have thought of using a curse on another witch or wizard. Yes, she did feel an invigorating high when she saw it acted upon another, but never did she think she had the heart to hurt another person in an excruciating manner—a word that molded appropriately for the torture... then, Bellatrix Lestrange pointed her wand Mia's way and told her to deflect. No matter how stellar one may be a magic, the Dark Arts were created to harm someone. Even the most brilliant struggle to block themselves when the passion is strong enough. In which case, Bellatrix had enough reason to take her anger out on the only child of whom she saw to be a traitor to her Lord.