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"I think I understand. Slaves, but forced to enjoy their servitude, and with the knowledge it will last their entire life."
"Yes."
"And the teachers want us to fraternise with those Houses?" Asked rhetorically Alexandra. "There's a better chance of..." Then she had a horrible thought enter her mind, as she remembered some of the insults the members of Slytherin House threw around each time there met girls or boys having a non-magical ancestry when a teacher wasn't present. "Wait a second. Malfoy and his goons think those who are not Pure-Bloods should be treated like that?"
"They say so."
Okay. The Dark Houses advocated genocide and slavery of those they thought inferior to them like they treated their House Elves. Quite lovely.
"Some of the Dark houses are not as repulsive as you make it sound, daughter." Gently scolded Lady Isobel MacDougal, who had arrived behind the two girls, making them jump on their feet. "But I admit the Notts behaviour towards their elves is abhorrent.
Now, Morag. Why don't you tell me what has happened at Hogwarts this last week?"
Morag's mother walked around the couch where Morag and Alexandra were lying, to sit in the couch in front of them. Without the cape and the winter cloak, Lady Isobel was now wearing only a conservative black robe, that didn't stress much her forms but still indicated she did regular exercise to keep shape. Her hairs were a dark blond almost brown, and her eyes were the same piercing blue as Morag's, though maybe a touch darker. She was tall for a woman, and exhibited a grace which was fluid and elegant. And she was powerful. Since the adult witch had greeted her daughter and Alexandra at King's Cross, the black-haired girl had been able to discern a decent magical aura surrounding Lady Isobel. Weaker than the one around Professor Flitwick or Snape definitely, but more powerful than what she had been able to see around the great majority of the Hogwarts staff.
"There has been another attack, Mother." Said Morag in an angered voice. "And Longbottom has once again been found at the scene of the crime."
"I see." The face of the Lady was still warm, but her eyes were as warm as a blizzard. "In that case I think you are due a lot of training sessions for these holidays, young ladies."
And her voice made clear they were not going to stay reading and discussing theory.
Despite what the high officials of the Ministry of the Magic chose to believe in their paranoid minds, Yule celebration rituals were in general very tame. It was well-known that the night of the Winter solstice was the moment of the year where the powers of the Night and the Darkness were at their strongest; for those families and clans who still worshipped the Old Ways in this age, provoking these mysterious and powerful forces was out of the question. Samhain rituals were already potentially dangerous; the celebrations happening at a time when the veil between the dimensions of the living and the dead thinned considerably, and more than one wizard or witch had painfully discovered it wasn't wise to blasphemy his ancestors or the diverse divinities empowered on this particular day. Yule rituals had a far more sinister history than the former; between the tenth and the seventeenth century the list of wand-wielders having suffered a deathly magical backlash was enough to fill several volumes. Massive volumes.
Since the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Light and Neutral Houses had thus progressively decreased in potency or outright stopped their practises at Yule. In the last decades, the process had accelerated, with the Ministry bans and the rise of Christmas, but on average the Houses following the ancestral traditions made very simple rituals on that night. Silence, meditation, lighting of candles and cold meals were the main events. Yule was the longest night, and these witches and wizards remembering their origins treated it as a time of calm and veneration, carrying long black robes without any ornament or jewels. Clothes and appearance had to be austere. Make-up and polishing your nails was obviously discouraged. In some fashion, it wasn't very different from the practises of certain monks thorough the Middle Ages and after.
Nevertheless, at a moment the Light Houses stopped practising the Old Ways and tried their best to erase all knowledge of such activities, in a century where the Neutral Houses began to trust only their closest families and allies for such important matters, the Dark Houses celebrations had developed towards horrifying paths. Blood Magic. Cross-breeding experimentations, and not of the good kind. Curses so dark some Dark Wizards refused to dabble in them or even consider reading the books they were written on. Necromancy. Black Magic. Lethal diseases able to provoke pandemics on the world stage. The Grindelwald War fought on the continent had showed how far wizardkind was able to sink when greed, madness and bigotry were in play. The British Isles had been spared this wave of darkness thankfully, but the far more recent civil war had seen some of these barbaric innovations appear, as the Dark Lord Voldemort was perfectly content breaking the limits of morality and decency if it allowed him an advantage in his quest for domination and power.
Following a fight between Aurors and Death Eaters on December 21 1979 which had involved Inferius, werewolves, vampires and an awful version of blood sacrifices, Minister of Magic Millicent Bagnold had passed Edict 1553-C with the full consent of the Wizengamot. All Yule and Old Way rituals were now totally forbidden, no matter how benign they were, and the new penalty being death by Dementor's Kiss for those caught in the act. One battle fought on the same date in 1980 had done nothing but aggravate the situation and reinforce the sanctions. The Ministry by the end of the civil war had consequently put in place new restrictions and powerful Dark Detectors all over the British Isles, to make sure no one continued these perversions of magic.
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