the seven devils [completed]

chapter fifty-one

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Silence.

The first warning of danger had always been silence. The lull before the hurricane, the sand that settled before a tornado, the ocean that retracted before a tsunami. Tactunity of nature and being was unnatural in a cosmos ruled by entropy, where the primal state of everything was chaos. Nothing ever defied the laws of the universe, and balance was a human-made fantasy to preserve sanity.

Hogwarts was silent.

Almost robotic in motions, students clambered through shelves of books, and the dust of the library began to clear as the final exams of the year started. Quills scratched feverously against jaundiced-looking parchments, and the ink dried of many words that would be memorized for a few days before they faded into the nothingness of subconsciousness.

The Knights of Walpurgis stood at one table in the far corner, a silencing charm cast around them, and to anyone who might have passed by, they appeared as extraordinary students that had already started learning for their O.W.L.s.

To some extent, that was true, as Elladora Selwyn charmed her pen to write down every note she whispered between cardinal lips, braiding parts of her hair with jittery hands. Her parents, world-renown lecturers in the wizarding world, had been very clear on their expectations of the young girl. After losing the prefect position to Ivy Trouche, as well as an invitation to the Slug Club, the Selwyn heir had been on the rocks with her family.

Another person who was ever-so-stressed was Icarus Lestrange— a man many lauded for his fierceness in battle, yet none looked up to on the intellectual plane. He was far from being a lousy student, yet his star of knowledge never shone quite as vivaciously as the rest of the knights, so he had surrounded himself with multiple textbooks. And he marked, he jotted, he scribbled, and he teared up when it all became too much.

Nicholas Avery, despite his impish appearance, happened to be one of the most brilliant students to walk around Hogwarts. He, unlike most academics, was a homogenous solution of brain and street-smart, so he had uncovered his own studying methods long ago— focus on the most demanding tasks, those that seem to rattle every student, and only ever worry about the easier ones when the time comes. He had priorities.