Hello, this is a warning. this chapter includes torture.
A man stepped into the light. He wasn't handsome or playful. He was a nightmare in human skin, his face pockmarked and his eyes glinting with a frantic, starved cruelty. In one hand, he held a long, thin silver needle; in the other, a pair of heavy pliers.
"You were smiling in your sleep," he whispered, leaning in so close she could smell the rot on his breath. "That Theo seems like a charming guy." His smile gave her a horrific feeling.
She tried lifting her arms, but found them bound to the chair. And so was her legs. "Let me go, I haven't done anything!" she said, and felt tears forming behind her eyes.
The man clicked his young multiple times. He put the long silver needle on her lips to make her quiet.
"That's right, you haven't done anything. But the problem is what you could do." He brushed the needle on the side of her face. "A shame to ruin such a beautiful face. But its all for the dark lord." He said with a sickly smile that still made her want to turn away from him.
But it was useless, she couldn't move.
The needle was cold, a biting contrast to the feverish heat of Ophelia's skin. The man traced the line of her jaw with the silver tip, pressing just hard enough to leave a thin, white welt that slowly filled with a beaded line of crimson.
"The Dark Lord is a man of vision, Ophelia," the man murmured, his eyes scanning her face with a clinical, detached hunger. "He sees the ripples before the stone even hits the water. And you? You are quite the heavy stone."
He set the needle down on the small, blood-stained table and picked up the pliers again. The heavy iron groaned as he squeezed the handles together.
"Let's start with those hands," he whispered. "The hands that hold the Black Walnut wand. The hands that reached for that boy in your dreams."
He grabbed her left hand, pinning her wrist against the wooden armrest. Ophelia's breath hitched, a sob catching in her raw throat as the metal jaws clamped down on the nail of her middle finger. She tried to pull away, her body straining against the leather straps until they cut into her thighs and shoulders, but she was trapped.
"Don't look away," he urged, his voice dropping into a mockery of a lullaby. "This is where the dream ends."
With a sudden, brutal jerk, he wrenched the pliers back. The sound was a wet, sickening tear, the sound of keratin being forcibly separated from live, screaming nerves. Ophelia's head slammed back against the chair, a high, thin shriek piercing the damp air of the cellar until her voice gave out, leaving her with nothing but a silent, shaking gasp.
"AHHH…" Fila screamed, her eyes tearing up fully now.
The man didn't flinch at the scream; he seemed to drink it in, his chest expanding as if the sound of her agony was more restorative than the air in the room. He leaned over her hand, watching with fascination as the blood welled up from the raw, exposed bed of her finger, dripping steadily onto the cold stone.
"Music," he whispered, his eyes wide and glazed with a terrifying fervor. "Better than anything you'd hear at a pureblood gala, wouldn't you say?"
He didn't give her a moment to recover. He moved the pliers to her index finger, the iron jaws slick with the gore of the first. He clamped down, the metal biting into the sides of the nail, and she could feel the cold pressure crushing the bone underneath.
"Please," Fila wheezed, her head lolling against the back of the chair. Her vision was blurring, the green light stretching into long, sickly streaks. "Please, stop..."
"Stop?" The man let out a jagged, barking laugh. "Ophelia, we've barely cleared the threshold. We haven't even talked about your grandfather yet. Or the secrets tucked away in that pretty little head of yours."
He wrenched the second nail back with a slow, grinding twist. The agony was a white-hot lightning strike that surged up her arm and exploded in her brain. Fila's body convulsed, her heels drumming a frantic, hollow rhythm against the legs of the chair. The skin on her wrists began to tear as she fought the iron bindings, blood slicking the wood.
He tossed the second scrap of keratin toward the shadows, where it landed with a soft, wet thud.
"AHHH… PLEASE. PLEASE STOP." Her pleads went unheard as he pulled out another nail.
The sound of the third nail being torn away was a dull, wet thud compared to the jagged screech of the first two, but the pain was cumulative, a mounting wall of fire that threatened to swallow her consciousness whole. Fila's body went limp, then rigid, her back arching so violently that the heavy wooden chair groaned and shifted an inch across the blood-slicked stone.
"You're losing your voice, Ophelia," the man observed, his tone almost disappointed. He leaned over her hand again, his fingers tracing the three raw, weeping craters where her nails had been. He pressed a thumb into the center of one, and Fila let out a broken, wheezing sob that barely carried across the room.
"That's better," he crooned. "I'd hate for you to go quiet before we get to the toes. Or the teeth."
He dropped the pliers onto the table with a loud, metallic clatter that made her flinch. He reached instead for a small, leather-bound kit. When he opened it, dozens of thin, glass vials glinted in the sickly green light, alongside a set of long, hollow needles.
"The Cruciatus is a fine tool," he mused, selecting a vial filled with a shimmering, viscous purple liquid. "But it's so... impersonal. It attacks the whole body at once. This, however, this is a concentrated nerve-agent I developed myself. It mimics the sensation of being flayed alive, but only in the area where it's injected. It keeps the mind sharp. It keeps the victim awake."
He filled the syringe, the liquid bubbling slightly as it entered the glass chamber. He stepped around the chair, grabbing Fila's chin and forcing her head back to look at him. Her eyes were wide, blown out with terror and blown-out pupils, swimming in a sea of broken capillaries and tears.
"Now," he whispered, bringing the needle toward her neck, right where her pulse was thrumming like a trapped bird. "Let's see if we can't find where you've hidden those Grindelwald memories. I want to see them as they burn out of your brain."
The needle pierced the skin, and Fila felt a cold, oily sensation slide into her veins. A heartbeat later, the cold turned into a thousand shards of white-hot glass exploding through her nervous system. She couldn't even scream; her lungs locked, her jaw clamped shut with such force a tooth cracked, and the world became nothing but a blinding, screaming void of purple fire.
The pain, worse than anything she had ever felt before tore through her. The one thing she hoped to never fell again now roared inside her.
The man leaned in, his face so close that Fila could see the broken veins in his yellowed eyes. He watched the way her muscles spasmed beneath her skin, the purple liquid tracing a glowing, agonizing map through her veins.
"There," he breathed, his voice a reverent shiver. "Do you feel that, Ophelia? That's the sound of your legacy rotting."
He didn't wait for the seizure-like tremors to stop. He reached back for the pliers, their iron teeth now coated in a thick, tacky layer of her blood. This time, he didn't go for the fingers. He moved lower, his shadow stretching long and monstrous against the cellar wall as he knelt by her feet.
"You like to run, don't you? Dancing around Theo in the grass, dancing through the halls of Malfoy Manor..."
He clamped the tool onto the nail of her big toe. Fila's eyes rolled back, showing only the whites as a fresh wave of agony collided with the chemical fire already screaming through her blood. She tried to pull her leg back, but the iron shackles held her bone in place.
With a slow, deliberate rotate of his wrist, he began to peel the nail back. It didn't come off clean. The serrated edges of the pliers caught on the underlying tissue, dragging strips of raw flesh and a sliver of the toe bone with it. The wet, rhythmic drip-drip-drip of blood hitting the floor was the only clock left in her world.
"Please..." she mouthed, though no sound came out. Her throat was a desert of salt and iron.
The man suddenly turned and exited the room, the door slammed against its frame.
But Fila didn't get to enjoy the moment of being alone, the pain of everything still raged on inside her. The frantic movements of trying to wiggle out of the chair had stopped as the pain made her unable to barley move at all.
She tried using her ancient magic. But nothing happened.
After what felt like forever in constant pain and tears. The door swung open and the man stepped inside.
"Do you like the little surprise I left for you, or inside you?" he pointed at an empty syringe she hadn't seen before. "That is a creation meant to confused the mind, making you unable to focus enough to even cast a simple lumos. Wonderful creation is it not?" he smile in that sickly way again.
Fila could only stare, her vision shimmering with the oily residue of the nerve agent. Every blink felt like sandpaper grinding against her corneas. The news that her magic was suppressed didn't just break her spirit; it felt like a physical amputation. That internal hum, the "Grindelwald steel" that had always made her feel superior to her enemies, was silent. For the first time in her life, she was truly, fundamentally alone in her own body.
The man walked back to the tray, his boots squelching in the darkening puddles of her blood. He picked up a jagged, triangular blade, a scalpel designed for deep tissue work.
"You see, Ophelia, the Dark Lord doesn't just want you broken. He wants you transparent," he whispered, returning to her side. He grabbed her flayed arm, his fingers digging into the exposed muscle with a casual, terrifying strength. "If you can't focus your magic, you can't hide your memories. The walls you built are coming down, brick by bloody brick."
He positioned the blade at the crook of her elbow.
"Let's see how deep the rot goes."
With a slow, sawing motion, he began to carve. The blade didn't just cut; it grated against the bone. Fila's body arched, her mouth opening in a silent, wide-eyed scream that produced nothing but a spray of pinkish foam. The chemical agent magnified the sensation, making it feel as though the blade was miles long, dragging through every fiber of her being.
"I can see it in your eyes," the man crooned, leaning in so close his pockmarked skin blurred. "The library is burning, isn't it? Theo is screaming. The golden hour is turning to ash."
He reached into the fresh incision with a pair of silver tweezers, pulling at a shimmering white tendon until it stretched to the breaking point. Fila's hand curled into a claw, the iron spike through her palm groaning against the wood as her muscles fired involuntarily.
"There," he hissed, his eyes wide and manic. "That's the look. That's the moment the queen realizes her throne is made of nothing but meat and bone."
She finally passed out from the overload on her nerves.
The man looked at her slumped body in defeat. "Well no matter, we still have plenty of time." he said as he began fixing the wound he just created.
From this point of the cellar became the living embodiment of Ophelia's life. Day in and day out she sat in that blood drenched chair, being filled with chemicals and potions to restore blood. just to be sure she didn't die from blood loss.
Fila's mind went in and out though the man's constant torture. He pulled out her nails, cut her open, put needles though her hands to make her even more stuck to this god forsaken chair.
The cellar had become a timeless void where the only landmarks were varying degrees of agony. Every time Fila drifted toward the mercy of unconsciousness, a splash of freezing water or a searing regenerative potion would wrench her back. Her body was no longer a vessel for magic; it was a ruined map of the man's curiosity.
The iron spikes through her palms had rusted slightly, the metal fused with her own drying blood and the wood of the chair. Her fingernails, once elegant and capable of tracing complex runes, were gone, replaced by blackened, weeping scabs that he would occasionally pick open just to hear her gasp.
One evening, or perhaps it was morning; the green light never changed, the man approached her with a heavy, ceramic jar. He didn't have his usual frantic energy; he was slow, methodical, almost reverent.
She glared up at him, her eyes slightly covered by the dirt and bloody hair that now hung messily. The white she had liked so much wasn't even there, as she did that in her so called dream. It all confused her, but she didn't think about it. or anything anymore. With her days being filled with nothing but agony and pain, it had become increasingly had to even think as a normal human anymore.
"those eyes, as deep as the ocean." He said. "Shame we have to remove them," he said a she pulled out a knife.
"Plea… Ple…" she tried saying please, but all that came out were whispers of pleads.
The knife edge caught the sickly green light as he turned it, admiring the reflection. The man reached out with a thumb and forefinger, prying her left eyelid wide. The salt and grime from his skin stung the exposed surface of her eye, but she couldn't even blink to clear it.
"Don't worry, Ophelia," he whispered, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, intimate warmth. "You won't need to see the dark anymore. Once these are gone, the only thing left will be the images I carve into your mind."
He pressed the point of the blade into the corner of her socket. Fila's body didn't even have the strength to thrash; she merely let out a long, shuddering exhale that sounded like a dying bellows. The first slice was a wet, sliding sound. The agony was sharp and cold, a localized explosion that made the rest of her mangled body feel numb by comparison.
"Plea... ple..."
"Hush now," he crooned, his breath hot against her cheek. "The Dark Lord wants to know what you saw in those dreams of your. He wants to know the color of the memories you're hiding behind these blue veils."
With a sickening, rhythmic sawing motion, he began to sever the muscles holding the orb in place. Fila felt the pressure building, a horrific internal tugging that felt like her very soul was being pulled through a needle's eye. A fresh, hot torrent of blood and vitreous fluid flooded down her face, drenching her already stained robes.
He gave one final, brutal wrench. The world on her left side didn't go dark, it vanished. It simply ceased to exist.
Her screams of pain came out as nothing more than air as he vocals had been ruined long ago.
The man held the dripping, blue-flecked orb up to the light, laughing softly as he watched the nerves at the back twitch in the cold air. "Look at that. Even in pieces, you're a work of art."
He tossed the eye into a jar of brine on the table and turned back to her, the knife poised for the right. Fila sat in the chair, her head lolling to the side, a hollowed-out ruin of a girl. The "Grindelwald steel" was gone. The library was ash. There was nothing left but the rhythm of the dripping blood and the encroaching, absolute shadow.
After having her world destroyed, and her vision removed. She sat limply in that chair. Her mind broken, nothing else left in her mind but the constant pain of chemicals and cuts.
He had tied a white cloth over her eyes as he said it was disgusting to look at her hallowed out eyes he himself had inflicted.
The white fabric over her face quickly bloomed with twin Rorschach blots of crimson, the linen soaking up the warmth of the fluid she could no longer see. To Fila, the world was no longer a place of light or color; it was a sensory landscape of textures and temperatures. The bite of the iron shackles, the wet stickiness of the floor beneath her bare, mangled feet, and the rhythmic, metallic tink-tink-tink of the man's tools.
She heard the chair creak as he leaned in, his voice now nothing more than a vibration in the air near her ear.
"You're so much quieter now, Ophelia," he murmured, his tone almost affectionate, like a sculptor admiring a finished piece. "No more defiance. No more 'Sir Carter.' Just a vessel waiting to be filled."
He reached out and grabbed her jaw, his thumb pressing into the hollow of her cheek where the skin was paper-thin. He forced a vial of bitter, restorative potion down her throat, making her swallow through the instinctual gag reflex. He needed her heart to keep pumping, even if the soul inside had already withered.
But he let go, and soon she heard the door close.
He had left her. But she knew he would be back.
A unusual long time passed as the man didn't return, and for the first time on however long she had been down her, she finally felt that some of the wounds started to heal. But it would only be a matter of time.
Time still passed. It felt like days.
But one day the door opened. "Ah sorry about that little one, had to go on a meeting." The familiar voice said.
But it wasn't meet with the usual horrified look that the girl would give him when he entered. She felt, calm.
"You are chia seeds for breakfast." She said harshly, her voice barley coming out as more than a whisper.
The mans eyes widened. "shit." He body crashed into the wall with a sickening crush as most of his ribs broke on impact.
because of the mans time away, he hadn't given her any injection. Meaning she felt her power now. And her ancient magic was screaming to be used for brining the end upon this man.
Fila sat still, bound to her chair. She didn't even look towards the man, she knew where he was. But now she couldn't see, only feel.
"Let me go this instant! Guard!" he screamed.
As the man screamed it became obvious that the same fate had been brought upon the people around them, fila didn't know where they were but she knew that she had ten people pinned to walls and floors with her magic.
"You made a mistake, never eat seeds." Fila whispered over the shouting of the wizards stuck.
The man on the wall suddenly puked, and more and more. "Stop this now!" he didn't get to say more, as the chia seeds in his stomach grew into his blood streams.
"AHH…" the man scream cut, as the chia seeds now filled his body, cutting of his brain. And soon the plant grew out of his mouth, ears, nose and even out of his skin.
The plant grew into the walls, and seeking the others who were stuck as he was, crawling into their bodies and ending their lives.
The screaming in the cellar reached a fever pitch, a frantic, wet chorus of agony that Fila absorbed with a cold, hollow satisfaction. She didn't need eyes to see the carnage; she could feel the vibration of the roots cracking through bone, the frantic pulse of the wizards' hearts as the greenery replaced their blood.
The man who had carved her into a masterpiece was now nothing more than a trellis. The chia seeds, fueled by her ancient, vengeful magic, had turned his internal organs into fertilizer, erupting through his pockmarked skin in a violent burst of leaves and stems.
A smile formed on her lips for the first time since being brought into this place.
The bodies of the people had grown stuck to the walls and floors now, different flowers now bloomed out of their eyes and mouths. She made sure they went through as much pain as possible before ending them fully.
But her body was still weak. She wouldn't be able to get out if this chair.
She had hoped someone would come help her, but she didn't even know where she were. So with the final bit of magic still in her body, she made her plants grow outwards. Trying to get attention of someone.
Outside a small cottage could be seen, it wasn't very far from a town. But the roof of the cottage suddenly burst open with a loud crash. And a tree shot upwards. The leaves of the tress were blue, to get someone to find it.
With all her magic consumed she slumped into her chair.
Alone.
from the corridor looking into the room sat a girl, black messy hair, a white cloth piece covering her eyes, and dress in a ones white dress that by now were soaked in dried blood and other fluids. The lights shined down on her making her look like some ghost left behind as she sat in her wooden chair with chains around her ankles and wrists.
The blue tree pulsed with a rhythmic, bioluminescent glow, a lighthouse of ancient sorrow rising from the wreckage of the cottage. It towered over the quiet landscape, its branches weeping azure leaves that shimmered like the eyes she had lost.
She doesn't know how long she waited, could've been days, weeks. Her mind so broken and twisted that she didn't even know when the last time she ate had been.
The cold air blowing into the cellar bit against her exposed skin, the wounds on her ankles and where the chains had eaten away at her skin tingled against the wind.
"Omg, who did this." she suddenly heard a voice say, the voice came from a young French girl.
She could hear footsteps. But they soon halted as the most likely reached the staircase leading down into the basement. If they walked down into it they would see her. And they did walk down the stairs, slowly.
The footsteps were soft, hesitant, and accompanied by the sharp, terrified intake of breath. As the French girl descended, the sickly green light of the cellar—now filtered through the twisting, blooming vines, cast long, dancing shadows across the carnage.
The girl reached the bottom step, her hand flying to her mouth to stifle a sob. She wasn't seeing just a room; she was seeing a nightmare made manifest. The walls were weeping thick, blue sap, and the husks of men had been hollowed out to serve as planters for flowers that smelled of honey and rot.
And in the center of it all sat the ghost.
Fila didn't turn her head. She couldn't see the girl's horrified expression or the way her wand hand trembled. She only felt the displacement of air, the warmth of a living body entering her tomb. Underneath the blood-stained white cloth, her empty sockets throbbed with a phantom ache.
The little girls footsteps could be heard running up the stairs. And soon leaving the cottage.
But it didn't take long for more steps to come close. This time heavy steps.
Fila felt the vibration of the wood beneath her before she heard the voice. The steps descended, one, two, three and before stopping halfway down. The person was breathing hard, the sound ragged and uneven.
"Merlin's beard," a man's voice whispered, thick with a shock that bordered on nausea.
Fila didn't move. She couldn't. The chains around her wrists and ankles were no longer tight, but her body had forgotten how to exist without them. She sat there, the white cloth over her eyes now a stark, blood-crusted mask in the dim light. To her, the man was just a series of sounds: the rustle of a heavy cloak, the clink of a wand being gripped too tight, and the smell of the outdoors, rain, pine, and fresh air, that felt like a physical blow to her senses.
"Is... is there anyone alive?" another voice called from the top, more distant, sharp and professional. An Auror, perhaps.
The man on the stairs didn't answer immediately. He took the final steps down into the carnage. He moved past the husks of the guards, past the blossoms growing from the pockmarked man's throat, until he was standing directly in front of the chair.
"Ophelia Rosier?" one of them asked hesitantly.
She slowly raised her head towards the direction where the question had come from.
They didn't need more than that. "Call doctors and the Rosier family head!"
The men and women in the room suddenly turned frenzied as they began shuffling to get more people here. but they didn't touch her, they were maybe to afraid to do so after seeing the state the girl was in.
She could feel a man crushing down in front of her. "you are safe now, Ophelia. I'm sorry we took so long to find you." he said with a heavy heart as he looked at the girl.
From above a new set of steps came in to the cottage and rushed down the stairs. But they also paused as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
"My little flower…" Vinda said with her hand before her mouth and tears streaking down her face.
Evan also shocked, but moved closer and carefully put his hand on her shoulder. "Ophelia, we are here now."
The touch on her shoulder was hesitant, a ghost of a sensation against skin that had forgotten the meaning of a gentle hand. Fila didn't flinch, she was far past the capacity for a physical startle, but her head tilted slightly toward Evan's voice, the movement slow and mechanical, like a rusted hinge.
Vinda stood paralyzed at the base of the stairs, her elegant robes a jarring contrast to the filth and the creeping, vengeful flora of the room.
Evan careful looked her over, but soon find himself looking under the cloth covering her eyes. And when he did he bit his tounge, and looked away as he slowly let the cloth settle into where it had been.
"Im… sorry Ophelia." He said as he walked slowly away into one of the corners of the room.
Vinda finally stepped closer and carefully pulled her into a very gentle hug.
Vinda's touch was weightless, a fragile attempt at comfort that seemed to barely exist in a room defined by such heavy, visceral cruelty. She didn't care about the blood soaking into her expensive robes or the sickly sweet smell of the rotting garden that had claimed the cellar. She only cared about the hollowed-out shell of the girl in her arms.
Fila's head rested against Vinda's shoulder, her body feeling as thin and brittle as autumn glass. She didn't return the hug; her arms remained limply at her sides, the fingers curled into stiff, useless claws.
"We're going to take you to the manor," Vinda whispered, her voice cracking as she pressed a kiss to the top of Fila's matted, dark hair. "We'll bring the best healers from Paris, from the mountains... we'll fix what we can, Ophelia. I promise."
Fila didn't respond to the promise of healing. To her, "fixing" was a word for clocks and chairs. She was a garden now, rooted in the dark, and the world of light and manors felt like a story she had heard a very long time ago.
"The... man," Fila rasped, her voice barely a vibration against Vinda's neck. "Is he... still on the wall?"
Vinda pulled back just enough to look at the blood-stained cloth over Fila's face. She looked toward the pockmarked corpse, now completely overtaken by the blue-leaved tree, its mouth stuffed with azure blossoms.
Vinda also tried looking under the cloth covering her eyes, but was saved by Evan who held her hand and telling her not to look. She understood what that meant, and sorrow and anger both filled her. Tears streaked down her face.
The people started taking of her chains and pulling out the needles still stuck in her skin.
The metal groaned as the Aurors worked, the sound of iron sliding against bone echoing through the silent, plant-choked cellar. Each needle removed was a fresh flare of white-hot agony, but Fila didn't cry out. She simply existed in the center of the pain, her head lolling against Vinda's shoulder like a broken doll.
As the heavy iron spikes were finally wrenched from the wood of the chair—freeing her mangled hands, the ancient magic in the room seemed to sigh. The blue leaves of the tree above shivered, a soft, bioluminescent dust falling like snow over the scene of the massacre.
"Careful with her legs," Vinda snapped, her voice regaining a sliver of its lethal edge as the healers prepared to lift Fila onto a floating stretcher. "If you hurt her more than they already have, I will personally ensure you find out what's at the root of that tree."
The healers nodded frantically, their movements becoming even more precise.
Fila felt the sensation of being lifted, the loss of the hard, grounding wood of the chair. For a moment, she felt a flash of panic; the chair had been her world, her island in the sea of pain. Without it, she felt adrift in a vast, terrifying emptiness.
She felt herself being loaded on a carriage after being carefully brought up through the winding staircase.
Vinda had been beside her the whole time, even sitting next to her in the medical carriage. She didn't speak, her mind had been so occupied with finding her for three weeks now. And now that she finally had her, she found her in the most broken state she had ever seen a human. The pain and suffering, only because she had a name to a man who sat looked inside a tower.
The carriage swayed gently, the enchanted springs working to minimize the jarring of the road, but for Fila, every movement was a localized earthquake in her nervous system. The air inside smelled of sterile herbs and Vinda's expensive, floral perfume, a scent that used to mean safety, but now only felt like a thin veil over the copper stench of the cellar that clung to her skin.
Vinda's hand remained locked onto Fila's, her grip a mixture of desperate possessiveness and a grandmother's grief. She watched the girl's chest rise and fall in shallow, stuttering hitches.
The carriage eventually slowed, the crunch of gravel indicating they had reached the manor. The gates groaned open, a sound Fila remembered from a dream of tea and popcorn, a dream that now felt like a cruel joke.
When the door finally opened, the cool evening air rushed in. Evan was there, his face ashen, his usual composure completely eroded.
Her room which had ones been a very nice and decorated room and now been turned into a hospital room more of less, with nurses being on watch at all times.
Vinda stood at the side of the bed as Ophelia finally felt herself being laid down into the soft mattress of the bed.
The transition from the wooden chair of her nightmare to the silk sheets of her reality was too much for Fila's body to process. The mattress was so soft it felt like she was falling again, sinking into a bottomless white void.
The nurses moved around her in silence, their wands tracing glowing paths over her shattered form. They worked to debride the necrotic tissue from her flayed arms and to magically stitch the jagged craters where her nails had once been. But every time their magic touched her, Fila's fingers twitched with a phantom reach for a wand that wasn't there.
They couldn't do much more than give her some potions, which fila rejected automatically after being forced down potion after potion down in the hell hole she had just left.
But Fila wasn't actually awake to see or feel any of this. because she was sitting in a field of grass and flowers, looking over at the sun set which had been going on for a very long time now. And beside her sat a perfect copy of her.
"So, you are me. Or my magic?" Fila asked while looking out over the field of green.
"Yes, im your magic." It answered simply. "But im created by you, even if you didn't intend it."
The sun casted its warm ray on them as the sat there, a gentle breeze could be felt from time to time.
"That dream you dreamt, was actually something you created when being panicked while they chased you through the forest." The other Fila said.
As she told her the things she remembered parts of it, it her dream she had gotten away by hiding. But in reality she had been hit with the cruciatus curse from behind. That god forsaken curse really found her no matter how.
The other Fila nodded, her eyes reflecting the same violet and gold of the eternal sunset. "The mind is a storyteller, Ophelia. When the pain became too loud, it wrote a version of the world where you weren't screaming. It wrote a world of fun and laughter. And even some feeling you haven't felt before."
Fila did at some point In her so called dream realize she actually was in a dream. She knew Theo wouldn't be that fast with her, displaying such obvious affection directly. He was still even with that Wampus girl he met in school.
"While you were building your mansion in your head, they were dismantling yours from the outside." The other Fila said, she knew what Fila thought and what she would say at all time.
Fila sighed. "Why didn't you warn me than?"
Fila shrugged. "I couldn't, or you couldn't. it a complex thing this whole thing. But you didn't want to be warned, you knew that ones that dream ended you would be in pain. Even if you didn't know it."
"Fair point," Fila muttered, looking down at her dream-hands. They were porcelain-smooth, free of the raw, weeping craters and the blackened scabs of the real world. "I suppose I was a coward. Hiding in a library with popcorn while my skin was being turned into a canvas."
The other Fila didn't look sympathetic. Her gaze remained as sharp and unwavering as a blade. "Cowardice is for people who have a choice. You were a survivor, Ophelia. You used me to build a fortress because the alternative was letting your soul leak out onto that stone floor."
The sunset flared, the golden light turning a deeper, bruised shade of orange that felt like a premonition.
"Will my eyes heal?" Fila asked.
Fila shrugged. "I actually don't know, but if you find a way to better use your magic I don't see why not. I mean you already learnt how to see thing with the help of our flowers." She said.
Fila looked out at the flowers. Right now she could see normally. In this dream, but on the outside she would have to use her flowers. Learning to see with flowers didn't prove to hard to master since she could already listen with them, just another sense to use.
They both sat down in the grass.
"I hate this world." They both said in unison as the sun went dark.